Rex Stout - Alphabet Hicks 1941 - The Sound of Murder

  DRIVEN TO MURDER

  “Get off the road and stop the car or I’ll stop it for you,” Hicks said.

  She obeyed. The car slowed down, bumped onto the grassy roadside, and stopped.

  “Leave the engine on,” Hicks said. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  In the dim light from the dashboard Hicks could see her tight lips and wide eyes. “I am referring to George Cooper. You know where he is. You wanted an excuse to leave. You’re going to phone him or you’re going to see him—”

  He stopped abruptly, gazing at her. She made no sound. In a moment he said softly, “I’ll be doggoned,” opened the door on his side, started to get out, suddenly turned back, and commanded her:

  “Get out of the car.”

  She didn’t move.

  Bantam Books by Rex Stout

  Ask your bookseller for the books you have missed

  BAD FOR BUSINESS

  BLACK ORCHIDS

  THE BROKEN VASE

  DOUBLE FOR DEATH

  THE HAND IN THE GLOVE

  THE LEAGUE OF FRIGHTENED MEN

  THE MOTHER HUNT

  THE MOUNTAIN CAT MURDERS

  NOT QUITE DEAD ENOUGH

  THE PRESIDENT VANISHES

  THE RED BOX

  RED THREADS

  THE RUBBER BAND

  SOME BURIED CAESAR

  THE SOUND OF MURDER

  TOO MANY CLIENTS

  THE SOUND OF MURDER

  A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1941 by Rex Stout.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by

  mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address: Bantam Books, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76807-0

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  About the Author

  One

  If Judith Dundee had not glanced at the name of the taxi driver, there before her on the framed identification card attached to the panel, she might eventually have found some other way out of her trouble. Or she might not.

  What caused her to glance at the name was a little incident that occurred when the taxi, with her in it, stopped for a red light at 50th Street and Park Avenue. Three or four pedestrians eyed the cab to make sure it was going to stop, and the face of one of them, a well-dressed and dignified gentleman who might have been on his way to a directors’ meeting, lit up with pleased recognition. He stepped from the curb to the side of the cab, thrust a hand in to the driver for a shake, and offered a greeting in the tone he would have used to a fellow director:

  “Hello, Hicks, how are you?”

  That was the first and last appearance of the well-dressed gentleman in Judith Dundee’s life, but in that brief moment he did her a valuable service. Her mind jostled momentarily from its concentration on the stew she was simmering in, she glanced at the framed card on the panel and saw the name “A. Hicks.” The “A” pushed speculation further and aroused memory, as the cab started forward and rolled on uptown.

  She remembered the yellowish brown eyes which, by their glint and the configuration of their lids, looked like a cat’s or tiger’s eyes … and the magazine article she had read about him a year or so ago, a Profile in the New Yorker … Harvard Law School … his melodramatic disbarment during his first year of practice … submerged years not revealed … night watchman … subway guard … the famous Harley case … the girl with clothespins on her fingers and toes.…

  Preoccupied as she had been when she entered the cab at 40th Street, she had had no glance for the face of its driver. Now, when it stopped in front of her apartment house in the Seventies on Park Avenue, she did not step out though the halberdier with no halberd opened the door. Instead, she leaned forward to the opening:

  “Mr. Alphabet Hicks?”

  The driver’s head turned, came around to her, and she saw his face—and the eyes. They were fully as remarkable as she had remembered them to be. She asked inanely:

  “So you’re driving a taxi now?”

  “No,” Hicks said.

  She laughed nervously. “It was a stupid question.” She shook her head at the halberdier and he closed the door and retreated across the sidewalk. She resumed, “Of course you don’t remember me. About a year ago—you were working for a tree company then—I read that article about you—I wanted you for the lion at a dinner party and you wouldn’t come—”

  “Dundee,” Hicks said.

  “Then you do remember?”

  “No, I was just guessing. There’s a car behind that wants to get in here.”

  “Let them—” She glanced back; and the impulse that had been fluttering in her took control. “Look,” she said decisively, “I want to talk with you. Not to persuade you to come to a dinner party. I’m in trouble.”

  One end of his wide mobile mouth curved upwards and made him look sardonic. “What kind of trouble?”

  “I can’t tell you—it’s a long story. You can park around the corner and come up to my apartment. Will you? Please?”

  “Okay.” He eased the gear in.

  Judith Dundee wasn’t forty-five years old, but in a few months she would be. Whether she looked it or not depended on the time of day or night, the lighting, the state of her mind and nerves, and who was doing the looking. As far as physical details were concerned—the smooth well-kept skin, the large dark eyes, the brown hair still brown, the throat nicely curving from a chin that was her daintiest feature—she was quite capable of being taken for under thirty, when the conditions were ideal.

  On that Wednesday in September, however, the conditions were apparently far from ideal. She looked distinctly draggy as she sat on a divan in a corner of the slightly grandiose living room of her duplex apartment high above Park Avenue.

  “The trouble I’m in,” she said, “is very—intimate.”

  The taxi driver merely nodded. There on a chair, he looked less than ever like a taxi driver, even disregarding the details that his face was too clean and his clothing not greasy enough.

  “I mean,” Judith said, “that I wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. But I have to get help from somebody. I was thinking of going to a detective agency this afternoon, but I don’t know any, and it would be so distasteful—” She made a face. “Not that it isn’t already distasteful. Then I saw you and remembered what I ha
d read about you … and the marvelous things you had done … and your eyes were the cleverest I ever saw.…” She stopped and looked embarrassed.

  “You’ll have to make the sale,” Hicks said dryly. “I just accepted your invitation to come up and listen.”

  “I know you did.” She sat and looked at him a moment, then said abruptly in a new and harsher tone, “My husband has gone crazy.”

  Hicks grunted. “I’ve never handled a maniac—”

  “No, no,” she said impatiently. “But he has. It’s simply insane. We’ve been married twenty-five years. Our life together hasn’t been exactly continuous bliss—for one thing, I’m extravagant, I always have been—not to mention any of his faults—but we’ve done fairly well. We’ve raised two children, which is what marriage is for, I believe, and we’ve never tried to poison each other. I imagine our friends would say that our marital happiness rating is well above the average. And suddenly one day last week, Tuesday, a week ago yesterday, he came home from the office and confronted me with a perfectly terrible look in his eyes and asked me how often I had been to see Jimmie Vail!”

  She halted. Hicks looked uncomfortable. He muttered, “Jimmie Vail?”

  “Yes!”

  “What’s that, a man?”

  “Certainly he’s a man. I was dumfounded. When I could speak I said that if at my age I went in for clandestine meetings with a man I would pick a better specimen than Jimmie Vail. With the same eyes and voice he said, ‘I don’t mean that. You know what I mean. I mean how often have you been to his office to betray the secrets of my business. I have proof. You might as well tell me.’ That left me speechless again. Before I could speak he said, ‘Who did you get it from, Brager? Did you worm it out of Brager? And did you pay him what he wanted? And how much did Vail pay you? Did you get a good price?’

  “I asked him if he was crazy. He said it was useless for me to try to deny it, he knew I had done it, all he wanted was the details, the full story, so he could decide what to do. It was impossible to get him to talk sense. We were here in this room. Somebody came, and he left and didn’t return that night. The next day, towards noon, he came, and started all over again, just the same gibberish. It was awful. Finally he said if I would go to his office at four o’clock that afternoon he would prove it to me, and I said I would go, and he left. I really thought he was unbalanced. Around three o’clock he telephoned and told me not to come to the office, just told me that and hung up. I went anyway, and was told he wasn’t there. That evening he came home late—and absolutely refused to discuss it! He still refuses to discuss it! If I try to, he leaves. Before people, he treats me—he tries to act as if nothing had happened. When we’re alone—we just aren’t alone. We have adjoining bedrooms, and he keeps the connecting door locked. When I went into his room by the hall door a few nights ago—well—he simply won’t discuss it! Did you ever hear of anything so utterly senseless? Now did you?”

  “It sounds pretty odd,” Hicks admitted. “What kind of business secrets does he think you sold?”

  “I suppose manufacturing secrets for making plastics. That’s the only—”

  “What are plastics?”

  “Why—plastics!” She looked as if he had asked what were apples. “Everything is made of plastics, or soon will be—fountain pens, clocks, furniture, dishes—Ford is experimenting with them for automobiles. They come in all colors—”

  “Does your husband manufacture plastics?”

  She nodded. “His firm is one of the largest. R. I. Dundee and Company. The office is on 40th Street and the factory is at Bridgeport, and that’s about as much as I know about it. He never discusses business with me—or very little.” Her voice took on a sudden edge, a note of metallic hardness. It was all the more noticeable because it was a distinctive and attractive voice, with richness and color, and a slurring of the hard consonants and a fullness of the soft ones that made it warm and pleasing. The abrupt change was slightly shocking. “How,” she demanded, “could I betray secrets if I didn’t know any? And have never had an opportunity of learning any? And anyway, it’s idiotic! What if your wife suddenly accused you of—of—”

  “Never had one.” Hicks’s tone did not indicate that a filling of the vacancy was contemplated. “But I see your point. Who is Jimmie Vail? Does he make plastics too?”

  “Yes, he’s the head of the Republic Products Corporation.”

  “A competitor?”

  “Very much so. He and my husband used to be friends, but not any more. My husband says he’s a crook and a thief. I don’t know much about it, but apparently Vail has been getting Dundee formulas in some underhand way—or my husband thinks he has. That’s been going on for two or three years.”

  “How well do you know Vail?”

  “I used to know him rather well. I haven’t seen him for a long time.”

  “Have you been to his office recently?”

  “I never have. I don’t even know where it is.”

  “Your husband asked if you had wormed it out of Brager. Who is Brager?”

  Judith Dundee’s lips curved in a little smile, whether of disdain or pure amusement could not be told. “Herman Brager,” she said, the R’s fuller and the G softer in her attractive voice than they were in Hicks’s twang. “A scientist. According to my husband, a genius; and perhaps he is, I don’t know. He does experiments and makes amazing discoveries. He has been with the company for several years. He wouldn’t work at Bridgeport, said there were too many people around, so my husband fitted up a laboratory for him up in Westchester, near a place called Katonah.” Her lips smiled again. “He’s what is called a character.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Oh, yes. Not so well personally, if that’s the way to put it, but I’ve seen him often. My husband often has him here. He comes into town twice a month and dines here and they spend the evening talking business. And by the way—I said I never had an opportunity to learn a secret—but perhaps I did. Once Mr. Brager left his brief case here overnight, and possibly it was full of secrets. I can’t say, because I didn’t look. It must have been important, because my son drove in especially the next day to get it.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  She pursed her lips. “About a month ago.”

  “Is your son with the company?”

  “Yes, indeed. He’s twenty-four years old.” Her tone acknowledged the difficulty of crediting her with a son of so advanced an age, and to do her justice, it was rather surprising. “He finished a postgraduate course at M.I.T. in June, and now he’s up there with Mr. Brager.” She shifted her position on the divan, with a gesture of impatience. “But that’s irrelevant, isn’t it?” She made another gesture, of appeal, and smiled at him. “Won’t you help me? It’s so preposterous, and I feel so darned helpless! I went to a lifelong friend—he was best man at our wedding—and he has been to see my husband twice. That’s where I was this morning, at this friend’s office—he says that my husband absolutely refuses to discuss it and there’s nothing he can do. So I thought of going to a detective agency, and then I saw you, and remembered what that article said.”

  She put out a hand, palm up. “You will help me, won’t you? Of course, since you despise money—but I can afford to pay whatever you ask—” She ended on a note of embarrassment.

  “I don’t despise money.” Hicks surveyed her, and the glint in his unblinking eyes was more than ever the lazy but watchful insolence of a cat’s eyes. “In spite of what that article said, I’m not a nut. I admit one thing. It would be a lot of fun to find out if you really did sell your husband’s business secrets and what you’re really after is to learn what kind of proof he’s got hold of. Also I admit I could use about—” he paused a moment—“about two hundred dollars.”

  She met his eyes. “I’ve told you the truth, Mr. Hicks.”

  “Okay.” His eyes didn’t change. “I’ll take a crack at it. As I say, I need some cash. And I want a picture of you—a nice handsome picture.
And maybe you can tell me a few more things.”

  It appeared that she couldn’t, at least nothing useful or significant, though for another half an hour she answered his questions. When, a little later, he left, in his pocket was a check, and in an envelope under his arm was a large photograph of Judith Dundee, quite good-looking, even striking, with a gay tilt to her head and a provocative smile on her lips. There had been no explanation of his need for that. Down on the street, he returned to his cab and got in and started the engine.

  On Madison Avenue in the Forties, a patrolman new to the beat was speaking in a grieved tone to his precinct sergeant, through the police phone box:

  “… I was here on the sidewalk and this taxi stops right by me, and the driver gets out and says, ‘How do you do, Officer,’ and hands me this piece of paper. I unfold it and look at it and it says—here, I’ll read it—‘Kindly phone Sheridan 9–8200 and tell Jake, the checker, to send a driver for the cab. I have no time because the police are after me.’ It’s signed, ‘A. Hicks,’ and that’s the name on the identification card in the cab. The writing’s hard to read, and then I look around and he’s gone. Nowhere in sight. I started—”

  “What did he look like?”

  “About thirty-five maybe, medium height, kind of slow-moving—at least I thought he was—big wide mouth, funny eye like a Chink—no, not like a Chink—”

  The sergeant cackled. “That’s him. Alfred Hicks, alias Alphabet Hicks. Save that paper for me, I want to keep it.”

  “Maybe I can pick up his trail if I—”

  “Forget it. Kindly call the number he asked you to.”

  “Do you mean,” the patrolman’s voice shrilled with indignation, “it was just a prank?”

  “Prank hell.” The sergeant cackled again. “He saved a nickel, didn’t he?”

  It would be a pleasure to record that during the ensuing hours of that Wednesday afternoon swift strides were made toward the solution of Judith Dundee’s problem, but it would be contrary to fact. Though Hicks performed various errands, the only perceptible progress was toward the disappearance of Judith Dundee’s money, beginning with cashing the check. The major expenditures were as follows: