Alphabet Hicks

Twelve

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.

“Cooper? The husband? About a dime,” Corbett said.

“Make it a bent nickel,” Beck snarled.

“What’s the matter?” Hicks asked in surprise. “Am I too late? Have you already got him?”

“No.” Corbett tilted his chair back and clasped his hands behind his head. “I’ll tell you, Hicks. As I said yesterday, I know better than to try any subtlety with you. You know as well as I do that Cooper didn’t kill his wife. The way I know, we’ve checked him in New York at a quarter to three, borrowing a car, and in Croton at four o’clock, asking the way here, and at ten minutes past five the doctor said that she had been dead over an hour. That’s the way I know. Now just to even up, tell me how you know.”

“You mean how I knew?”

“Sure.”

“That Cooper didn’t do it?”

“Sure.”

“If I had known that, would I be apt to come all the way up here to try to trade him in?”

Beck uttered a word which the stenographer certainly did not record.

“You sure would,” Corbett chuckled. “Knowing you as I do. That’s exactly the point. If you really want to make a deal, if you really want something nice, like a year’s lease on the sunny side of Main Street for instance, why don’t you offer something interesting? How about trading in the murderer?”

“Glad to. Write his name and address on a piece of paper—”

“Horse around,” Beck said disgustedly. “You know damn well what he came for. He wanted to find out what we’ve got. He wanted to know if we still had Cooper down for it. Okay. Now he knows. Anything else, Hicks? How about a timetable? Here.”

Beck shuffled among papers on the desk and found one. “Here’s the timetable. Like to have a copy? ‘2:45, Martha Cooper arrives at house. 2:50, you arrive. 2:58, you meet Ross Dundee at the bridge over the brook. 3:05, you arrive at the laboratory. 3:02, Ross arrives at the house. 3:15, Mrs. Powell goes to the village to shop. 3:50, R. I. Dundee arrives at the house.’ And so on. Want a copy?”

“No, thanks. Those things just mix me up.”

“Me too.” Corbett looked reprovingly at Beck. “I don’t think it calls for sarcasm, Manny. We have no reason to suppose that Hicks is actually an accomplice. He is merely obstructing justice. All we are sure of is that he knows a lot more about those people than we do, he almost certainly knows why that woman was killed, and he probably knows who killed her.”

Corbett addressed himself to Hicks with great affability. “Naturally, as soon as we checked Cooper definitely out, which we finished with this morning, we checked everybody else in. Take for instance that triple alibi, you and the girl and Brager.”

“Take it?” Hicks smiled. “I’m devoted to it. I cherish it. Speaking of triples, those three things you are sure I know give you a percentage of zero. I don’t know any of them.”

Beck grunted derisively. Corbett laughed, ha ha, and then tightened his baby mouth.

“Absolutely straight,” Hicks asserted. “Of course I know things about Dundee’s business, since I am on a confidential job for him, but I’m groping in the dark for any connection between him, or any of them, and Martha Cooper. That’s what I came up here for. I might be able to help a little before this is over, and I thought it would be a good idea for you to pass me anything you may dig up about Martha Cooper.”

“Jesus!” Beck snorted. “Gall? Match it! Try and match it!”

“You notice,” Corbett observed, “that I am not trying to put you through anything.”

“Yeah. Much obliged.”

“Not at all. I don’t believe in wasting energy. But I’ll make a remark. You are not a member of the bar. If things should warm up, you will not be able to plead privileged communication. And I shall be inclined to do my duty as the prosecuting officer of this county. My full duty. So I had better ask you one question for the record. Do you possess any information about the murder of Martha Cooper, regarding opportunity, motive, identity of the murderer, that you have not given me?”

“Yes,” Hicks said.

Corbett looked startled. “Yes? You do?”

“Sure.” Hicks got up and took his hat from the desk. “I know that if her voice had been soprano instead of contralto—” he was on his way out and turned at the door — “she wouldn’t have got killed.”

Beck told Corbett, “I’d give a year’s pay to break his goddam alibi.”

Hicks had intended, after finishing at the courthouse, to go on to Katonah, for, among other things, assurance that Heather was keeping the promise she had made him; but now that Cooper was out of it he wanted to get rid of him without delay, and before doing that he needed a talk with him. Heather had stated that her sister had not known Brager or Vail or either of the Dundees, or anyone connected with the Dundee firm or Republic Products; but that, Hicks decided now, would not do. That was the hole to explore, and the best way to start the exploration was with George Cooper.

It lacked a few minutes of four by the dashboard clock when he stopped the car in front of the address on 29th Street. Before going upstairs he dived into the restaurant, and found the proprietor in the kitchen.

“Okay, Rosy? Feed him yet?”

“By all means okay,” Rosy declared. “He has been served like a king, in his room. He can drink coffee, that man. And there is another man up there.”

“What! With him? You let—”

“No, no. Not with him. A man to see you. I invite him to sit in my restaurant, not a bad place, not a dirty place, but he insists he will wait upstairs. If he expects me to carry a chair—”

Rosy stopped because his audience was gone. Hicks went to the stair entrance and mounted the two flights. A guess was in his mind as to the identity of the visitor, but it proved to be wrong. It was not Ross Dundee. The man waiting in the upper hall in front of the door to Hicks’s room was larger and older and fleshier than Ross Dundee, and as Hicks reached the landing he recognized him. It was James Vail, the head of the Republic Products Corporation.