Alphabet Hicks

Fourteen

It could not have been called a happy family scene.

A man habitually careless in apparel and grooming may yet be quite personable, and often is, but when one who is ordinarily well combed and brushed and closely shaven, and impeccably dressed, becomes temporarily unkempt, the effect is deplorable. R. I. Dundee, seated on a Louis Quinze chair in his wife’s dressing room, presented the appearance, if not exactly of a bum, of a man who had been bumming. By contrast, his wife, even with visible puffs under her eyes and a sag to her shoulders, was dainty and fresh and congruous in the daintily furnished and decorated room.

She was standing when Hicks was ushered in, and shook hands with him. Dundee stayed in his chair and offered no hand. Hicks, invited, took a seat when Mrs. Dundee did, covering his lap with a newspaper folded only twice — not a common way to carry a newspaper.

“You were here last night,” Dundee said irritably.

Hicks nodded. “I’m working for your wife.”

“Damn little work you seem to be doing for anyone.” Dundee’s tone was a sneer. “For her or me or anyone. I came here to try to get her out of this mess and keep her out. She has betrayed me, she has half ruined my business that I’ve spent my life building up, but she still bears my name, she is my wife, and I don’t intend to have her involved in that idiotic murder!”

“I’m not trying to involve her,” Hicks declared mildly.

“You might as well be!” A fleck of moisture came from between Dundee’s lips, sailing into the air. “Excuse me,” he said bitterly. “I even spit when I talk! You advised her to tell that detective she wasn’t there yesterday! You told her to deny it!”

“You’re insane, Dick,” his wife said quietly. “I denied it because it wasn’t true. I mean it literally, you’re insane.”

“You’re damn right I’m insane!” His chin trembled. “You’re damn right I am!”

“Even so,” Hicks put in, “you might help us to clear up a point. Calm down a little. What makes you so sure your wife was there yesterday?”

“I’ve told her!”

“Tell me.”

“It’s perfectly absurd,” Mrs. Dundee said. “The same thing that man said last night. Ross heard me talking. Of course he didn’t.”

Hicks’s eyes stayed on Dundee. “The chief trouble with you,” he stated, “is that your blood goes to your head too easy. You need a valve fixed. It makes you assume that everyone but you is a fool. I’m not a fool. About that murder, they’re trying to involve your wife because they’ve learned that Cooper, the husband, didn’t do it, and they think they’ve caught your wife in a lie.”

“He was here again this morning,” Mrs. Dundee said.

“And he’ll keep on coming. Whereas the only ones who have lied to them, to my knowledge, are you and me.” Hicks was looking at Dundee. “What if I decide to protect myself by telling the truth? Wouldn’t that be nice? I want to know where Ross was when he heard his mother’s voice.”

Dundee was scowling, with his lips compressed. He opened them enough to say, “He was on the terrace.”

“What time was it?”

“About three o’clock. When he got to the house. Just after he met you by the bridge.”

“Where did the voice come from?”

“Through the open window. From inside the living room.”

“Didn’t he go in?”

“No. He went around to the rear and up the back stairs to his room. He didn’t want to meet his mother just then. He knew I was coming out to have a talk with him, and he wanted to talk with me first. He thought she had come with me. Later, out of his window, when he saw me drive in, he thought she had come with you. He called to me from the window and I went up to his room, and we had a talk, but he didn’t tell me his mother was there. After I left to go to the laboratory he went downstairs to see her, and she wasn’t there. Of course she did go with you, and when she saw me drive in she left.”

“You say. Did Ross go to the terrace?”

“No. The house was empty. Mrs. Powell had gone to the village. He called his mother and got no answer.”

“What was it he heard her saying through the living room window?”

“She said, ‘Then I’ll wait here for you.’ ”

“Just that?”

“Just that. Then he heard her hanging up. The phone. He thought she might be coming to the terrace, so he hurried off.” Dundee was glaring at Hicks. “Later, after the dead woman was found, he got worried, and the damn fool phoned here to ask his mother about her being there, and discovered he was being overheard. Then when that detective came here you and she made it worse by denying that she was there. You should have admitted that she went out there with you and came back alone. You can’t lie about things like that when a murder is being investigated. Maybe she couldn’t be expected to have better sense, but by heaven, you could!”

“Then you and Ross are both convinced she was there?”

“Certainly we are!”

“On account of that one short sentence he heard through a window?”

“He knows his mother’s voice, doesn’t he?”

“I suppose he thinks he does.” The glint was in Hicks’s eyes. “And rather than assume he was mistaken, which is not beyond possibility, you prefer to think that your wife is lying about it — not to mention me?”

“She has been lying to me for God knows how long,” Dundee said bitterly. “Living a lie!”

“You can’t reason with him,” Judith Dundee said wearily. “It’s no use. Either he’s mad, absolutely mad, or something has happened that I wouldn’t have believed — he wants to finish with me—”

Husband and wife stared at each other, as only a husband and a wife can stare when, after a quarter of a century of the little explosions that punctuate married life, a bomb has utterly destroyed all bonds of communication and understanding.

Hicks said, “Let’s drop that for the moment. I want to try something more interesting and possibly more helpful. Have you got a phonograph here?”

The stares went to him.

“What?” Judith asked in astonishment.

“A phonograph. I’ve got a record I want you to hear.” Hicks slipped the plate out of the newspaper. “If you—”

“What is that?” Dundee was on his feet, reaching, demanding. “Let me see that!”

Hicks held him off. Judith was on her feet too. “Is that—” She stopped, went to a large console against the wall which had been designed and decorated to match the furniture, and opened a lid. “This radio has a record player. Here...”

She turned dials. “This is the volume, this is tone control.” She made way for Hicks. He fixed the plate in position, turning the switch, saw that the pick-up arm was automatic, and stood there, leaning on a corner of the cabinet. A voice came from the loud-speaker:

“By God!” Dundee blurted. “That’s it! Where—”

“Shut up,” Hicks commanded him sharply. “Your wife wants to hear it.”

Judith Dundee stood motionless three paces off from the cabinet, facing it, looking at the loud-speaker grill. Hicks watched her face. At the beginning it was intensely interested and faintly contemptuous, but at the first sound of Jimmie Vail’s voice she started with amazement and gaped incredulously. Then she was rigid again, her chin uptilted, her lips apart, and stood without moving a muscle right to the end. The automatic switch clicked and the disk stopped turning.

The effect on Dundee was pronounced. He had sat down and gazed as if hypnotized at the back of his wife’s head. Now he said, not with heat, not in triumph, but in a tone of gloomy and harsh finality:

“There it is. There it is, my dear.” He looked at Hicks and demanded, “Where did you get it? From Brager? From my son?” He looked at his wife again. “There’s nothing you can say. Of course. What have you got to say?”

She said nothing. Hicks addressed her:

“That’s the evidence I was telling you about last night. From a sonotel planted in Vail’s office. That’s what you hired me to do, get the proof your husband said he had. Done. Huh?”

Judith Dundee moved. In no haste, deliberately, she returned to her chair, sat, and folded her hands in her lap. With no glance at her husband, she looked at Hicks, and there was a tremor, the tremor of controlled passion, under the metallic hardness of her voice.

“Yes, you did it,” she said. “But you’re not done. I have quite a little property of my own. You can have it — any or all of it. Whatever it takes, whatever you want, when you find out how that contemptible trick was played, and who did it, and why.”

“Good God!” Dundee was gawking at her. “Trick! You mean you’re trying to deny it?” He pointed a trembling finger at the radio. “Did you hear it? Good God, didn’t you hear it?”

He left his chair and stood in front of her. “I know you, Judith,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “I know you’ve got iron inside of you. I didn’t ever think you would do a thing like this, but you did. Now you won’t admit it, I know you won’t, but I wanted to show you that I know. Not that I suspect, I know.” He pointed a finger at the radio again. “There it is!” He shook the finger at his wife. “And I’m warning you about that other thing, your being up there yesterday. As your husband, I warn you! In that you’re not dealing with me, you’re dealing with the police. With murder! Do you want to be suspected of murder? Do you want this whole dirty business shouted about in a courtroom and printed in the papers? Will you, for God’s sake, will you come to your senses and tell the truth, so we can decide what to do?”

“You are either crazy, Dick,” his wife said in the same hard voice, “or I have lived with you for twenty-five years without even getting acquainted with you. I’m not proud of that.”

“Look here,” Hicks said. “Both of you. You’re only making it worse. When I said listening to that thing might be helpful I meant it. I’m going to run it through again, and I want—”

An inarticulate noise came from Dundee’s throat, and he turned and tramped from the room.

Hicks gazed after him, then moved away from the radio and sat down. Mrs. Dundee pressed her palms to her eyes.

After a silence they heard, from a distance, a door closing.

Judith looked at her hands, dropped them again onto her lap, gazed at Hicks’s face a moment, and said, “I don’t like your eyes. I thought I did, but I don’t.”

“You’re tough, all right,” Hicks said admiringly. “Do you want to hear that thing again?”

“No. What good would that do?”

“Is it your voice?”

“No.”

“What!” His brows lifted. “It isn’t? At that, it may not sound like it to you. People are often astonished at a recording of their own voice.”

“It may sound like my voice,” Judith said. “I don’t know. But I know it isn’t me. It isn’t me simply because it couldn’t be! I never had any such conversation with Jimmie Vail, and another thing, there are some phrases that I never say. It isn’t me.” Her hand made a fist and hit her knee. “It’s a despicable trick! It—”

She got up and started for the radio, but Hicks was on his feet and there ahead of her, blocking the way.

“Don’t be absurd,” she said scornfully. “I merely want to look at it. Anyway, it’s mine. I paid you to get it for me.”

Hicks removed the plate from the turntable. “You can look at it,” he conceded, “but I’m delaying delivery.” He held it before her eyes. “Not that I have any use for it at present, but I think it’s going to be needed as evidence to convict someone of murder.”

She stared at him. “Nonsense,” she said shortly. “Just because that woman was killed at that place — it was her husband—”

“No. It wasn’t her husband.”

“But it was! The papers — and he ran away—”

“The papers print what they know, which isn’t much. I know more than they do, but not enough. Maybe I know who killed her, but I’m not—”

“If you think it was my son or my husband, you’re an idiot.”

“I’m not an idiot.” Hicks smiled at her, tucking the plate under his arm. “Nor do you think I am, or you wouldn’t be offering me all your worldly goods to find out who cooked this up.” He tapped the edge of the plate with his finger. “What I’m telling you, when I do find out, you’re going to get more than your money’s worth. You’re going to be a witness at a murder trial. The only way to avoid that would be to throw this thing in the garbage can, and leave the perpetrator of it undisclosed and unpunished. Is that your idea of a happy solution?”

Mrs. Dundee, meeting his eyes, said without hesitation, “No. I think perhaps you are being too clever. I don’t believe the murder of that woman, a stranger to all of us, had any connection with — this other.”

“But even if it had, I go ahead?”

“Yes.”

“That’s fine.” Hicks patted her on the shoulder. “Of course I was going to anyway.”

“Don’t you think I knew it?” Judith demanded scornfully. “Neither am I an idiot.”