Alphabet Hicks

Twenty-four

At a quarter to three in the morning all lights were on in the office of the Dundee laboratory, at the apex of the meadow triangle surrounded by woods. The night was sultry and oppressive, not a foretaste of the frosty month to come, but rather a left-over from the one supposed to have departed weeks ago; and the cricket and katydid concert, entering through the open windows, was desultory and disheartened, irritating to weary and nervous ears in its feeble stridency. No less irritating to tired and nervous eyes was the glancing of the lights off the slick surfaces of the pink desk and the purple one, the gray and yellow table, the chairs and various gadgets in all conceivable colors.

The only person in the room who was manifestly not sharing in the general atmosphere of fatigue and tenseness and vexation of spirit was the man in the Palm Beach suit and battered Panama hat, who was on a chair in a corner with his head resting against the wall, fast asleep. At the other extreme was Manny Beck, chief of the Westchester County detectives, who was striding up and down, glaring at every one implacably, his massive jaw fixed in a forward thrust of obdurate pugnacity; and three state policemen and a couple of men in plain clothes were keeping out of his path. James Vail, Ross Dundee, and Herman Brager were on chairs which they had pulled out from the row along the wall. Heather Gladd sat at her own desk, with her elbows propped on it and her face covered by her hands, and seated at the end of the desk to her left was Judith Dundee, her back straight and her shoulders up, but her face drawn with strain and apprehension.

No one was talking, except the crickets and katydids outdoors, and their fretful and querulous exchanges were not calculated to soothe anybody’s nerves.

Eyes jerked to the inner door to the laboratory when it opened and three men entered. R. I. Dundee, in front, glanced around, took a step toward his wife, changed his mind, and sat on the nearest chair. Hicks crossed to Heather, muttered something to her, and propped himself against her desk and folded his arms. District Attorney Corbett with no sign whatever of joviality either on his pudgy face or in his voice, spoke to the room:

“Mr. Hicks is going to say something. Not as my representative. He is in no sense speaking officially. I want that understood. Manny, will you cut out that marathon? Sit down or hang yourself on a hook!”

Beck stopped in his tracks and glared.

“If Hicks represents no authority,” James Vail demanded, “what is the purpose—”

“We’ve had that out,” Corbett snapped. “I’ve told you, Mr. Vail, that you are not under arrest, you are not being detained, and you are at liberty to go or stay. I’ve told you that after a private consultation by Hicks and Dundee and myself there would be a statement by Hicks. If you were brought here by him against your wishes, your redress—”

“Baloney,” Hicks said impatiently. “You know darned well, Vail, what I’m going to do. I’ve got the label ready for the guy who murdered Martha Cooper and George Cooper, and I’m going to paste it on him. What are you chewing the rag about? You wouldn’t miss it for a dollar.”

Vail, ignoring him, spoke to Corbett: “I have explained to you that it is ridiculous to suppose—”

“He’s not doing the supposing,” Hicks said acidly. “I am. If it will make you feel any better, I’ll begin by explaining that in the discussion at Mrs. Dundee’s apartment I was merely theorizing, just as you were. Your suggestion was that Dundee was the murderer, though you knew he wasn’t. My suggestion was that you were the murderer, though I knew you weren’t. It didn’t do any harm, since we were just waiting for a phone call anyhow. But now I’m ready to talk turkey.”

Vail arose, walked deliberately across to R. I. Dundee, and gazed down at him. “Look here, Dick,” he said ominously. “This Hicks is a madman. You still have a slim chance to pull out of this with your hide on. For the last time I ask you, will you listen to me? Will you talk with me privately?”

“No, damn you,” Dundee said harshly.

“You won’t?”

“No.”

Vail, with his thin mouth compressed until there were no lips at all, returned to his chair, stuck his thumbs in his vest pockets, and addressed Hicks. “Go ahead. I’ve done my best.”

“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.

“But it began to get gummed up right from the start. Ross, thinking to protect you from what he suspected to be a plot, made off with the record and brought it out here and hid it, and your husband had to postpone the showdown until he could find it again. That was bad enough, but it was nothing compared to what happened Monday evening, five days ago. George Cooper suddenly appeared, arriving here Monday evening to see Miss Gladd, and his wife had returned with him from abroad. That was worse than a nuisance, it was a threat of disaster. Martha was apt to show up here any minute, and if Ross met her and heard her speak, good-bye. So Brager made preparations. When Martha did come, Thursday afternoon, he was ready with a batch of records that would place him ostensibly in the laboratory while he sneaked through the woods to the house and took whatever action the circumstances offered. His luck seemed to have turned again. He was able to get into the house unseen, wield the candlestick through the open window without appearing on the terrace, and leave again and return to the laboratory still unseen. Also, I was here in the office with Miss Gladd, making his alibi that much better.”

“You gave us that alibi,” Manny Beck growled.

Hicks ignored him. “But still, even with Martha’s voice quiet for good, everything was far from rosy. Brager had plenty to worry about. Where the devil was the record? He had to find it and destroy it. Also Vail, learning of the murder, would know who had done it, and Vail might be hard to handle. Friday morning Brager phoned him from White Plains and arranged to meet him. They met, and probably it was an unpleasant session, but for his own protection Vail agreed to keep his mouth shut. Also he decided to take steps of his own, and as a starter he called on me. At my place he saw Cooper, and learned that Cooper knew of the sonotel record — had actually heard it, or at least part of it.

“Of course that was bad. Very bad. On leaving my place Vail got in touch with Brager — probably phoned him by prearrangement to some number in White Plains — and told him about Cooper. Undoubtedly he urged him to make every possible effort to find that record. For Vail’s voice was on that record.”

Hicks turned to Vail. “This raises the question, naturally, whether you were an accomplice in Cooper’s murder. I doubt it. I think you were already as close as you ever wanted to be to murder, and a good deal closer. I think you merely warned Brager of Cooper’s knowledge of the record, and urged him to sidetrack Cooper if possible, and above all to find the record.”

“I’ll thank you when you’re done,” Vail said in a tone of controlled fury.

“Don’t bother,” Hicks told him, returning to Mrs. Dundee. “Also Vail arranged for a rendezvous with Brager, Brager designating the spot on a deserted stretch of road not far from here. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had used that spot before during the three years that Brager was selling Vail the Dundee formulas. Anyhow they used it today. Vail drove there at once, and waited. It was getting hot for him now, entirely too hot for comfort. In fact, he was scared stiff.

“But I doubt if Brager was scared. He’s too cold-blooded to get scared. Look at him now, he’s not even scared now, though God knows he ought to be. What he did, he beat it back here as fast as he could come and prepared to receive Cooper by getting his revolver from wherever he kept it, and by getting the recording machine in the laboratory in readiness so that all he had to do was turn on the switch. Since no one else saw Cooper when he arrived, I suppose Brager met him at the entrance and took him around by the road here to the laboratory. You may think I don’t know what he said to him, but I do. No question about it. He told him he had that record he was looking for, and he took him into the laboratory to prove it by playing the record. Cooper wouldn’t know the difference between a recording machine and a playing machine. Brager started the machine going, and while Cooper was gazing at it, waiting to hear the record, paying no attention to Brager, Brager shot him in the temple, with something — his handkerchief — over the muzzle of the revolver to prevent powder stain. So I do know. It couldn’t have been any other way.”

Hicks glanced at Brager, and back at Judith. “But he’s not scared yet. Okay. There was no blood, or very little. He dumped Cooper’s body out of the window, maybe went outside to arrange it in a good position, removed the record of the shot he had made and put it on the playing machine, and placed the playing machine against the open window. Then he went to the house to get an audience. It didn’t matter much who the audience was, but the one he had the most plausible excuse for was Miss Gladd, so he took her. They arrived here and found Cooper not present, to Brager’s pretended astonishment. He went into the laboratory to see if Cooper was there, the real reason he went, of course, being to switch on the playing machine. He scooted back in here to rejoin Miss Gladd, and in a minute bang went the shot. Since that partition is soundproof, and windows were open, it sounded as if the shot was outdoors. Naturally, they ran out—”

Heather blurted incredulously, “Then George wasn’t — it wasn’t that shot that killed him?”

“Sure it was,” Hicks assured her. “He was killed by the shot you heard, only you didn’t hear it until half an hour or so after it was fired. And you’ve just heard it again. So will the judge and jury when the time comes. It’s an extremely convenient arrangement. It will be the first time in history that the sound of the shot itself is used as evidence in a murder trial.”

District Attorney Corbett spoke for the first time. “If it is admissible,” he squeaked.

“Pooh,” Hicks admonished him. “Found as it was right there in a cabinet? That was the biggest blunder you made, Brager. I admit it presented a problem, since Miss Gladd was here with you until the police came, and that plastic is indestructible, but it does seem you might have done better than merely stick it in among other records in the cabinet. I suppose you figured that no one would have brains enough to look for it, and of course you would have had a chance later to remove it if Beck hadn’t kept men here. It took them only an hour to dig it up after I tipped Corbett off. If I were you I wouldn’t build any hope on Corbett’s misgiving about its being admissible as evidence. Take my word for it, that shot will be heard by a judge and jury. And still you’re not scared?”

“That shot,” Brager said contemptuously. “That record of a shot was made for experiment many weeks ago. I will say that one thing. Beyond that I say nothing.”

“I’m surprised you say that much,” Hicks declared. “I expected you to go dumb on me. One other thing, your phoning that message to Miss Gladd that sent her to where Vail was waiting. I’ll bet you thought that was slick as grease. You thought it would drag Vail out into the light, and then he would have to stand by you no matter how many murders you committed. But you were wrong. There’s one risk Vail won’t take. At least I don’t think he will.”

Hicks’s eyes darted, stabbed at Vail. “How about it? Where do you go from here?”

Vail sat motionless, frozen. It did not appear that he was aware that Hicks was looking at him or had spoken to him, for his own eyes, narrowed to nothing by the drooping fleshy folds of his lids, were directed only at space.

“It’s a question,” Hicks went on to him, “of throwing out the baby to appease the wolves. If Corbett can convict Brager of murder without your help, he can convict you as an accessory. Knowing Corbett, I can assure you he will do just that, if you hold out on him. That’s the risk if you play it pat. If you come clean and help Corbett, Brager is a pushover. His conviction is a cinch, and you’re out as far as murder is concerned, but you’ll have to settle with Dundee about the formulas, and you may have to find a new place to eat lunch. It’s six of one and about three dozen of the other. And you choose now. If you talk now and sign a statement, you go home. If you don’t, you go along with Brager. That is official. Is that official, Corbett?”

“It is,” Corbett declared. “That’s about the size of it, Mr. Vail.”

“Damn you!” Vail said through his teeth; and his eyes, malevolent still but no longer wary, aimed at Hicks, left no doubt as to whom he was damning. “If he had killed you too it would be worth it!”

“Ah,” said Hicks, “I see you prefer to go home.”

Not even then did Brager, staring popeyed across at Judith Dundee, look scared.