Rex Stout (14 page)

Hicks put a protecting hand over the stack of plates. “I admit,” he said dryly, “that this is a considerable surprise. Why in the name of heaven you should sneak out at two
A.M.
to baptize a bunch of plastic love letters in a brook—”

“It’s none of your business why! Don’t you dare do another one!”

“If they bore you,” Hicks said imperturbably, “go outdoors. Or go back and go to bed. I’ll compromise. I’ll run through them first, doing only a sentence of two. Go back and sit down. You know darned well I can tie you up if I want to.”

She took another step forward, hesitated, marched back to her chair, and sat breathing through her nose. Hicks started another plate.

“That’s a sentence,” Heather snapped.

Hicks removed the plate, put another one on, and started the machine.

Hicks took it off and started another.

As Heather started from her chair with a cry of incredulous amazement, Hicks stopped the machine. Cooper was bolt upright, as if suddenly straightened and held rigid by a current of electricity, his jaw hanging.

“Martha!” Heather cried. “That’s Martha!”

“Is it?” Hicks asked quietly. “And how come? In among your love letters?”

“I don’t know!” She was at the desk. “I don’t—let me see it! Let me—”

“No, no.” Hicks held her off. “You’re putting on a good show, but—”

“I’m not putting on a show! It’s a trick! You had it—you put it—”

“Shut up,” Hicks said curtly. “And don’t be silly. You said there were eight plates. Here they are, and this is one of them. You had them. You knew darned well what was on them. You’ve listened to them. And now you pretend—”

“I’ve never listened to that one! I’ve never heard that! I tell you it’s Martha! My sister!”

“You were hiding it in the brook with the others.”

“I wasn’t! I didn’t know it was—there was one I hadn’t—I only got it—”

Heather stopped. She gazed at Hicks, and he saw the change in her eyes.

“Oh,” she gasped.

There was a chair beside her and she dropped onto it.

“I—” She gulped. “I never heard that before. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know how it got there. I wish you—I want to hear it—all of it—”

Hicks’s eyes—the eyes which Judith Dundee had called the cleverest she had ever seen—were going straight through her. For a long moment she met them unfalteringly.

“So you don’t know how it got there,” Hicks said softly.

“No. I don’t.”

“You just admitted that you knew there was one of them you hadn’t listened to. How did that one get there?”

“I—it—” Her teeth caught her lip.

“You’re not doing so well,” Hicks said sympathically. “Certainly you know how it got there. I saw you beginning to wonder how Ross Dundee ever got hold of a record of your sister’s voice, and I admit that would take some wondering. Let met try a little guessing. How did Ross get these plates to you? Slip them under your door?”

Heather didn’t answer.

“I’m going to find out. Shall I ask him?”

“Don’t you—dare—”

“Then open up, and wide. Did you find them under your pillow?”

“No. In the racks. At the office. In among the others.”

“You mean you would find one of them in with the regular plates that you were to type from?”

“Yes.”

“You wouldn’t know what was on it until you began to run it off, would you?”

“At first, I didn’t, the first time or two. But they were unmarked, and if I came to one that wasn’t marked I would put it aside and later I would—I was just curious—when no one was there—”

“Certainly. And this one you say you never listened to?”

“It was the last one. I just got it—it was in the rack—”

“What day? This week?”

“Wednesday.” She hesitated. “No. Tuesday. Because Monday evening George came, and it was the next day, and I didn’t
feel like—I didn’t want to hear it—so I took it and put it with the others—”

“Where? In your room?”

“Yes. I had to put them somewhere. They’re indestructible. I couldn’t just throw them away.”

“Of course not. But that raises a point. The plates have been in your room all the time. The brook has been here all the time. Why did you suddenly get the idea of immersion at half past two in the morning?
This
morning?”

“Because I did.”

“Why?”

“Because I—I just happened to.”

Hicks shook his head. “It’s an important point. I may have to ask Ross Dundee if he can throw any light on it.”

“You will not,” Heather said fiercely. “You promised you wouldn’t if I told you about it.”

“I promised nothing. But anyway, you aren’t telling me. Maybe I can help. Did Ross tell you that he wanted one of the unmarked plates back? And you pretended you didn’t have them because you didn’t want to admit you had kept them? And apparently he wanted that plate so badly that you figured out a way of getting it to him? Namely. Put them in the brook and then tell him that was where you had been getting rid of them, and he could go and get them. That way he wouldn’t know you had been saving them up. Something like that?”

“You knew—” Heather was gaping at him. “He must have told you—you knew that plate was there—”

“No. I didn’t. Once a year my head works. Did Ross explain why he was so anxious to get one of the plates back?”

“No.”

“Did he ask if you had listened to it?”

“No. I didn’t—I wasn’t admitting that I had listened to any of them.”

“Did he tell you what was on it?”

“No. And I don’t understand—Martha! That’s Martha’s voice! And you knew about it too—you don’t need to pretend you didn’t—”

Heather stood up, her jaw set with determination. “I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “I’m going to find out about this. I don’t expect you to tell me anything—you think I’ve just barely got enough brains to take dictation and run a typewriter—but Ross Dundee will tell me, and he’ll tell me now!”

She started for the door. The barefooted Hicks got ahead of her.

“Get out of my way!”

“In a minute,” Hicks said soothingly. “The idea with brains is to use what you’ve got. You mean you’re going to get Ross out of bed and make him explain where he got that record of your sister’s voice?”

“I certainly am!”

“I offer two objections. First, you’ll have to tell him how you suddenly found out about it in the middle of the night, which will be a little embarrassing, since you have hitherto refused to admit that you were saving his love letters. Second, there is better than an even chance that you’ll be committing suicide.”

Heather goggled at him. “Committing—what?”

“Suicide. That you’ll die shortly.” Hicks, facing her, took hold of her elbows. “Listen, dearie. I am not hell on wheels, but I can add and subtract. It is true I had some knowledge of that sonograph plate, but I didn’t know where it was, and my knowledge was incomplete in other respects, and still is. There’s only one person who knows all about it, and that’s the man who murdered your sister.”

Heather stared, and he saw the horror in her stare.

“No,” Hicks said. “I’m not saying it’s Ross Dundee. I don’t know who it is. You were right that it’s not George Cooper. And I’m right when I tell you that if you let out a word about that sonograph plate, your chances of living out the week are slim. That’s all I can tell you now, but I’m telling you that. And the same goes for Cooper.”

Heather said, “You’ll have to tell me more than that.”

“I will when I can. I can’t now.”

“You have to. I have to know how Ross Dundee got it. And why he wants it.”

“You will.” Hicks released her elbows. “In the meantime, you are not to mention it. To anyone. This is bad.”

“Bad,” Heather said. “My God, bad!”

“Very bad,” Hicks conceded. He went to the chair where he had hung his wet socks, sat down, and started pulling one of them on. “Cooper, too. I wish to heaven they had him at White Plains. I’ll have to take him back to town with me. I need some sleep. So do you. I had better take all the plates, too. If Ross asks about it again, stick to it that you don’t know anything about them. Will you do that?”

“I—guess so.”

“No guessing.” Hicks paused in his tussle with the second sock to look at her. “Promise?”

She met his eyes.

“I promise,” she said.

Rosario Garci, who operated the restaurant on the ground floor of 804 East 29th Street and owned the building, such as it was, weighed a hundred and ninety-two pounds, was five feet six, had a face as round as a dinner plate, and was called Rosy by his friends and most of his customers. At one o’clock Friday afternoon he looked up from his doughboard in his kitchen when a form darkened the doorway leading to the front of the premises.

“Ah, Mr. Heecks! Did she work?”

“Pretty good.” Hicks relieved himself of his burden, a bulky wooden box-shaped phonograph, by depositing it on a table. “She needs oil.”

“I warn you she’s a pip.”

“She’s all of that. Much obliged. I’m going out. That fellow upstairs will probably sleep all day, Rosy. We didn’t get to bed until six o’clock. If he wakes up, feed him. If you could run up once in a while—”

“Sure. Work off some fat.” Rosy cast his eyes swiftly upward. “Maria, for the love of Christ, if you catch me eating! When Franky comes home from school he can sit on the stairs and listen.”

“That will be fine. But don’t disturb him.”

“Never in God’s world,” Rosy said solemnly.

Hicks went to the sidewalk and got in the car that was the property of R. I. Dundee and Company, and started uptown.

While eating the cutlets and spaghetti and salad that he had
asked Rosy to send up when he went down to borrow the phonograph, he had listened to the sonotel plate a dozen times, and at the end would have had to toss a coin to decide whether the voice was Judith Dundee’s or Martha Cooper’s.

As he listened, he could have sworn it was Judith Dundee, but that had to be discounted because he had heard Martha Cooper speak not more than a hundred words altogether. And Heather and George had both, immediately and unhesitatingly, taken it for Martha.

The text was not illuminating. The other voice of the conversation was unmistakably Vail’s, and most of his words came through clearly, but a great part of the female voice was in so low a tone as to be nearly inaudible. Plainly, though, she expressed the hope that Vail would be pleased with what she had brought him, and he replied that he would be if it turned out to be anything like carbotene. And twice Vail spoke of “Dick,” which of course would be Dundee; and at the end he spoke of money, and said he would see her again when he had looked over what she had brought.

And he called her Judith. Wasn’t that conclusive? No, Hicks told himself stubbornly. Remembering that other voice, so amazingly like Judith Dundee’s by one of nature’s freaks, now never to be heard again, nothing was conclusive.

Up the West Side Highway, over the Henry Hudson Bridge, on the wide parkways, Hicks rejected all conclusions.

At White Plains he found a parking space for the car and walked two blocks to the Westchester County courthouse. In the anteroom of the district attorney’s office a dozen people were waiting on chairs, precisely the people to be found any day of the year in a district attorney’s anteroom, and after sending in his name Hicks became one of them. He sat for a quarter of an hour, idly watching comings and goings, with his mind off on other errands, when suddenly he bounced up to intercept a man on his way out.

He got the man’s elbow.

“Mr. Brager, if you have a couple of minutes to spare—”

“I haven’t,” Brager snapped. His eyes were popping with fury. “Do you realize that this world is full of fools? Of course you don’t! You’re one of them!”

He scurried off, was gone.

“Genius,” Hicks muttered. “He had better be.”

“A. Hicks!” a voice sounded from his rear, in a tone to be
heard nowhere on earth but in a courthouse. Hicks turned, saw that the gate was being held open for him, and passed within.

At the end of a corridor he was ushered into a spacious, even pleasant room, which he had visited on several occasions some eighteen months previously. Three men were there. A youth with a supercilious nose sat at a table with a notebook. Manny Beck, not arising, squinted his little gray eyes and emitted a grunt that could have been meant for greeting. The district attorney, Ralph Corbett, got up to extend a hand across his desk, his pudgy face beaming with cordiality.

“This is an honor!” he declared. “Really! An honor! Sit down!”

Hicks took a seat, crossed his legs, and gazed at Corbett’s baby mouth with a glint in his eye.

“That was quite a coincidence last night,” Corbett said.

“Which one?”

“Beck running into you at Mrs. Dundee’s. I had a good laugh when he told me about it. You saying yesterday that you knew her slightly! And there you were at midnight having a těte-à-těte, and her in negligee! Really! If that’s how it is when you know them slightly, what must it be like when you really get acquainted? Ha ha.”

“Then it’s something,” Hicks said unsmilingly.

“I’ll bet it is. Beck told me what you said you were there for. Also that you gave him your word that Mrs. Dundee wasn’t at Katonah yesterday. Maybe you came to tell us that you’ve changed your mind about that?”

“No. I came to make a deal.”

Manny Beck growled and shifted in his chair.

“A deal?” Corbett asked.

“Yes.”

“On behalf of?”

“Myself.”

“Shoot. What have you got?”

“A hunch. I’m not sure I’ve got anything. But what would you give for Cooper?”

Beck growled in a different key.