Rex Stout - Alphabet Hicks

“I know you have.” Hicks smiled at him. “You see, you’re handicapped. Not only do I know more than you think I do, but Dundee and the district attorney do too. When I went to that spot on Crescent Road and found it unoccupied, I was fairly certain that you had all made a beeline for Mrs. Dundee, because I had told Mrs. Gladd to go to her if anything went wrong, and I knew that both you and Ross would go along — though for different reasons. So I came here and had a little talk with Dundee and the district attorney. In passing, I wish to pay a deserved tribute to my old friend Manny Beck. With his usual thoroughness and foresight, he had kept men stationed in this building after he was summoned here to investigate the killing of Cooper. True, he had no idea what it was the men were guarding—”

“Go to hell,” Manny Beck snarled.

“But their presence made it impossible for the murderer to return and remove a vital piece of evidence.” Hicks, propped against the desk, kept his eyes on Vail, whose chair was between Ross Dundee’s and Herman Brager’s. “It will be valuable evidence in a courtroom, but it is even more valuable for the effect it will have on you here and now. First, though, I ought to ask you, are you sure you know what an accessory is? An accessory after the fact?”

Vail made a contemptuous noise.

“I guess you do.” Hicks smiled. “You began, there at Mrs. Dundee’s apartment, by saying that you didn’t intend to expose yourself to the danger of being arrested as an accessory to a murder.” Suddenly, unexpectedly, Hicks’s eyes darted to the man at Vail’s right. “You see, Brager, that was your worst miscalculation. You figured that Vail would stand for anything, even murder, to prevent disclosure of his own dirty work, but you might have realized that there was one risk he wouldn’t—”

“What is this?” Brager’s eyes were popping with indignation. “Dirty work? I am aware you are paid by Dundee—”

“Wrong again,” Hicks cut him off. “You’re about the wrongest guy I’ve ever run up against. Your alibis were absolutely childish. Take Thursday afternoon. I came in here — will you help me out with this, Dundee?”

Dundee got up and disappeared through the door into the laboratory, closing the door after him. Hicks went on:

“I came in here and found Miss Gladd here at her desk, tears running down her face, typing like mad, with a man’s voice filling the room — Miss Gladd, will you please switch on that loud-speaker?”

Heather looked at him blankly.

“Turn it on. Not the machine, the loud-speaker from the laboratory.”

Heather reached to a switch at the end of her desk and flipped it, and instantly a man’s voice, Brager’s voice, came from the grill in the wall:

“Twelve minutes at five one oh, nine minutes at six three five! Vat two at three-ten, less tendency to streak and more uniform hardening! Shrinkage point oh three millimeters...”

Hicks, moving to the end of the desk, turned it off.

“Foolishness!” Brager blurted. “That is merely—”

“It is merely,” Hicks snapped, “a demonstration of the method by which you got in on a three-way alibi with Miss Gladd and me at the time Martha Cooper was being killed. It’s a new twist on an old gag. Because your voice wasn’t supposed to be coming to us directly, but over a loud-speaker system, and therefore it worked. All you had to do was start a bunch of records on that machine you have in there, connected with the mike, with the proper intervals of silence, and you could go out the back way and take whatever time you needed for your errand. And you had to hurry up about it, since Ross Dundee had gone to the house, and Miss Gladd had just learned on the telephone that her sister was there, and Dundee himself was expected—”

“Foolishness!” Brager repeated. His eyes went to Corbett. “This is an insult you permit—”

A shot rang out, shattering the air.

Brager started from his chair, then sank back into it. Heather was on her feet, rigid, staring at the window. Judith Dundee and her son were both halfway across the room toward the door to the laboratory, but they were intercepted by policemen in their path and by Hicks’s sharp command:

“Ross! Okay! Hold it!”

They turned, staring at Hicks.

“My husband,” Judith said determinedly.

“What was that?” Brager demanded hoarsely.

The door to the laboratory opened and R. I. Dundee was there. Ross backed up. Judith dropped onto the chair her husband had formerly occupied, and he stood beside her.

“That,” Hicks said grimly, “was the shot that killed George Cooper. You ought to recognize it by this time, Brager, since you fired it and also reproduced it.”

“I—” Brager gulped. “I will say nothing. Nothing! But you will see! These tricks! They will be paid for!”

“They sure will,” Hicks agreed. “You’ve used the right word for it. Foolishness. You’ve insisted all along that everyone but you is a fool, and you’ve certainly proceeded on that theory. I admit you were right up to a point, but you carried it too far. Don’t you think so? Now?”

“I will say nothing!”

“Do you mean,” Judith Dundee demanded, “that he did it all? That sonotel record—”

“It started long before that,” Hicks asserted. “Whenever it was that he began selling Dundee formulas to Vail. That was a good trick, nothing foolish about that. He got big money from your husband for discovering the formulas in this laboratory, and then he collected from Vail for them too.”

“He actually — did that?”

“He actually did. Of course I can’t prove it, but that’s where Vail will be a help. Yes, you will, Vail, don’t think you won’t! This, Mrs. Dundee, is my final report on the job you hired me to do. I’ll leave off the embroidery — for instance, I suspect that the police will find upon investigation that the coin Brager was raking in was being used for Nazi propaganda in this country, but we’ll leave that to them. Anyhow, he was getting it coming and going. But it began to get a little complicated. First, Dundee naturally got wise to the fact that he was being diddled by someone, and Brager had to watch his step. Second, Brager got captivated by your charm. Being emotionally a mixture of an ape and a sentimental ass, as Germans of a certain type always are, that led first to his abasing himself, and then to a boundless and barbarous fury when he found that his affection wasn’t returned. I make a guess. Didn’t you humiliate him by rejecting his advances?”

Judith shivered. “Yes,” she said succinctly.

Hicks nodded. “So he hated you. Plenty. And he had a miraculous bit of luck. Through a sonotel that he had installed in the house here for experiment, he found himself in possession of a batch of records with a woman’s voice on them exactly like yours. That was nearly a year ago, but the use he could make of them probably didn’t occur to him until recently. He could kill two birds with one stone: divert any possible suspicion in Dundee’s mind from himself, and get revenge on you. He knew that Martha Cooper was in Europe, and figured that it would all be over, and you disgraced for good, before she returned. He knew, of course, that Dundee had a sonotel in Vail’s office, and had informed Vail.”

Vail snapped, “I told you I knew that sonotel was in my office. But I didn’t learn it from Brager.”

“No?” Hicks smiled at him. “We’ll see. Let me finish my report.” He continued to Judith: “So he faked that sonotel record, using excerpts from the records he had in Martha Cooper’s voice, and Vail collaborating with his own voice. You heard Vail himself admit that any good technician could do it. Then Brager found an opportunity to plant the faked record among those delivered by the detective agency, in a case in the testing room in the Dundee offices in New York.