Rex Stout - Alphabet Hicks 1941 - The Sound of Murder Read online

  Not that he was sitting there analyzing it and saying farewell to an epoch; he was not thinking in terms of epochs.

  “I always do get off on the wrong foot with you,” he began after a silence. “I did the very first day—not the first day I saw you—but you know—that day. When I asked you to go to the movies.”

  “You commanded me to go to the movies.”

  “Good lord! Command! Me command you! I know exactly what I said, the exact words. I said, ‘Get the car out while I change my clothes and we’ll go to the movies.’ Isn’t that right?”

  “Something like that. It doesn’t matter. That’s approximately it.”

  “And you said you didn’t care to go, and I went with Brager and Mrs. Powell, and three minutes after we left you took the station wagon and went by yourself, merely because you resented the way—”

  “I didn’t resent it. I merely preferred to go alone.”

  “Well, you didn’t like it. Did you?”

  “Certainly not.” Heather was looking at him. “But I’m not as touchy as all that. It was just that it was obvious that being Mr. Dundee, Junior, you regarded me as being at your disposal as the fancy struck you, and it didn’t strike me that way.”

  “What! You don’t mean that!”

  “Of course I do. It was obvious. For heaven’s sake don’t think I’m complaining, it hasn’t bothered me any, and I’m quite aware that a conceited kid like you often doesn’t know what he’s doing anyway.”

  “Conceited! My God!”

  “You don’t even know you’re conceited? You’re the type. Perfect. The boss’s son. All the best firms have them. Sometimes I’ve thought there must be a book of rules for it and you were following them.”

  “Of all the—” Ross was stunned.

  The crickets and katydids were tapering off.

  “Listen,” Ross said earnestly. “This is ridiculous. You must be kidding me. I may be a little conceited about my work—but no, I’m not even conceited about that, I just know I’m pretty good at it. If you think I’m conceited about girls—why listen, I’ve hardly ever looked at a girl. The fellows at school used to ride me because they thought I was girl-shy, but I wasn’t. Once about four years ago I gave a lot of consideration to it, why girls didn’t seem to impress me any one way or the other, and I decided that it was only because I was more interested in other things. Oh, I danced once in a while, and so on, but you know, all that kissing around and stuff, I tried it a few times, but I never really got into it. I decided I probably had a mother-fixation, but a fellow, the only one I ever discussed it with, said he didn’t think so because if I had I would be more emotional about it. He used some other word, but he meant emotional. Anyway, I never had the feeling that I had to kiss a girl, the way some fellows seem to feel that they’ve got to kiss a girl or bust—I never felt like that until that day in the office I leaned over and kissed you on the cheek. Then I knew it wasn’t—”

  He stopped abruptly.

  “Good lord,” he said in a tone of stupefaction, “you thought I was being conceited!”

  Heather didn’t say anything.

  “I certainly can stick my thumb in my eye,” Ross declared. “The way you acted that day I kissed you, at first, I admit it made me sore, because a kiss on the cheek is not anything involving moral turpitude, but if you thought I did it because I was conceited and expected you to like it—it wasn’t that at all, I did it because it came on me and I couldn’t help it. Anyway, I never did it again, and I could never get started talking to you. You wouldn’t let me. You never gave me a chance. So I got what I thought was a pretty clever idea. But I see now, you probably thought I was only being conceited, it was just a conceited idea.”

  He stopped.

  Heather asked, “What idea?”

  “Those records.”

  “What records?”

  “Don’t do that,” he implored. “Please don’t. I don’t blame you, I have no right to ask you, I know I haven’t, but that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Otherwise I wouldn’t—”

  “Oh! That’s what you’ve been talking about.”

  “I didn’t say I have been, I said I wanted to. Another one got in by mistake, a record I’ve simply got to have.”

  “Have you looked in the filing cases?”

  “It’s not there. It’s unmarked. It would be with the ones you’ve got. If you played it—”

  “You seem,” Heather interrupted, “to be under the delusion that I have a precious hidden treasure of unmarked sonograph plates. I don’t know how—”

  “I didn’t say they’re precious. I don’t say they’re any treasure. But you must have done something with them. Darn it, you couldn’t eat them! I’m asking you—please! Don’t you realize how embarrassing and humiliating this is for me? I can’t very well tell you—”

  “Someone’s coming. Your father and Mr. Brager.”

  They could not be seen on account of the intervening shrubbery, but the sound of their voices was quite close. Heather arose abruptly, said good night, and disappeared into the house. Ross, to escape an exchange of words with his father, tiptoed quickly to the far end of the terrace and was in an angle of the shrubbery by the time the footsteps of the two men reached the flagstones. He heard the door open and close behind them. In a quarter of an hour he went inside, listened a minute at the foot of the stairs and heard no sound from above, and ascended to his room. When he wound his watch before getting into bed it said five minutes after one.

  The indefatigable orchestra was still at it an hour and forty minutes later when a car with its lights dimmed went creeping along the road in front of the house, passing the entrance without turning in. A quarter of a mile farther on it stopped, backed into a lane to turn around, and retraced its route, passing the entrance again. A hundred yards beyond, it swerved onto the roadside and stopped.

  The driver turned off the lights and the engine, climbed out, and walked back to the entrance. There was no glimmer of light from the house, vaguely discernible through the trees.

  “Nuts,” Hicks muttered. “A peaceful rustic scene.”

  He started up the curving driveway, half expecting momentarily to be challenged by a police guard, but he reached the house and circled it to the hedge of shrubbery bordering the side terrace without being halted. There he stood on the grass and frowned at himself. What was he going to do now? Go back to the car and drive home and go to bed? Get a flashlight and search the place for a corpse? Rouse everyone and tell them he had come to see if they were all alive?

  “This is me,” he muttered at the darkness. “Life size. Why in the name of God—”

  He wheeled sharply and stopped breathing. A door had creaked and he recognized the creak, having caused it himself some eight hours earlier when he had entered the kitchen and scared Mrs. Powell out of her wits. The creak came again. Silently and swiftly on the grass, avoiding the flagged walk, he stepped to the rear corner of the house and, shielded by the foliage of a vine, was peering through the interstices of the leaves when he hastily drew back flat against the wall and stood rigid.

  The figure passed so close to him that there was no doubt of its identity; it was Heather Gladd, in a long dark coat. She walked rapidly, but not at all furtively, with no backward glances, straight across the lawn to the entrance of the path in the woods.

  Hicks waited until the woods had swallowed her and then followed. If from cover she turned for a look to the rear he would of course have been seen on the open lawn in the starlight, but there was no sign that she had; and once in the woods himself, he saw the beam of a flashlight forward on the path. It bobbed along thirty yards ahead of him, and he let it increase its distance, sure now that she was bound for the laboratory, and concentrating on the effort not to betray his presence by a misstep in the pitch darkness of the woods.

  Suddenly he halted, for the light had stopped bobbing and had changed its direction. He stepped from the path for the protection of a tree trunk, thinking she had heard him and was turning for an inspection of the rear, but the beam swept only to a right angle and began bobbing again. Apparently she had left the path, about where the bridge was. Hicks went forward with more speed and less caution, for he could hear the brook plainly and knew it must be a tumult in her ears. Almost with too little caution; he reached the bridge sooner than he expected, caught a toe on it, and nearly fell.

  He left the path for the protection of a tree trunk and watched a strange performance not twenty paces away. There at the edge of the brook she had placed the flashlight on a rock and removed her coat. The beam of the light was aimed down at the rushing water, not at her, but he could see that she was removing her shoes or slippers and rolling up the legs of her pajamas, and he wondered idiotically if the upshot was going to be that he had driven fifty miles in the dead of night to sneak up on a pretty long-legged girl and watch her go wading.

  Then he saw that she had brought something with her. He could not tell what it was; he could see only that it was something fairly large which she picked up from the flat rock where she had also placed the flashlight. With it in one hand, and the light in the other, she stepped gingerly into the brook, waded in a few feet, and stooped over until she was bent double. Her back was to him and he couldn’t see what she was doing with her hands. At length she straightened up and waded back to the bank, and one of her hands was empty. She put the light down on the rock and started unrolling her pajama legs.

  Hicks knew his location wouldn’t do. The tree wasn’t big enough, and on her return to the path the beam of light would be directly at him. The best course was to cross the bridge. He moved cautiously, and was about to step on the bridge when suddenly he whirled around.

  It could not have been a sound that alarmed him, abov
e the commotion the brook was making, but something did, for he whirled completely around before the blow fell. He saw something moving, right there at him, and then he went down.

  Eleven

  A blow on the side of the head with a thick club could, certainly, kill a man; at the least it might be expected to crack his skull. But to an owl on a limb the nocturnal tableau there in the somber woods, in the instant following Hicks’s cropper, would have seemed much closer to the burlesque than to tragedy. There was no outcry, even from the girl in thin summer pajamas who stood on a rock manipulating a flashlight. Its quivering beam spotted first a man who from his position might have been saying his prayers, and then another man with his features contorted in an expression of desperate resolve, gripping in his uplifted hand the shattered remnant of a rotted piece of sapling. And as though not to spoil it for the owl by giving it a gravity it did not deserve, the girl called sharply:

  “George! Behave yourself!”

  Hicks, on his feet again, was momentarily stunned not by the puny blow which had caught him off balance but by surprise. If, as he went down, he had found leisure to guess at the identity of his assailant, certainly the last on the list would have been George Cooper.

  Cooper’s uplifted hand slowly came down and the remnant of his club dropped from his fingers. The light swung away from him back to Hicks.

  “Have you gone crazy too?” Heather demanded shrilly.

  “I’m not crazy,” Cooper said in the tone of a scolded boy denying that his hands were dirty. The tone suddenly changed: “You! You keep away from her!”

  Hicks, stepping over stony uneven ground in the dark, paid no attention to him. Heather, in her pajamas, was a pillar of white. Reaching it, Hicks demanded gruffly:

  “Let me have that light.”

  “I’ll keep the light,” she said determinedly. “I’d like to know—”

  “So would I,” Hicks declared. “What’s more, I’m going to.” He snatched the light from her fingers and walked into the brook.

  That is, he got one foot in, before she grabbed him. It was not precisely an attack; she didn’t hit or kick or scratch; but she got his coat with both hands and pulled so violently that, with his insecure footing, they nearly went over in a heap.

  “Let go,” Hicks commanded. “I’m going to see what you were up to.”

  “You are not!” She held on, tugging at him. “Give me—if you dare—”

  Something hard and heavy came through the air and hit Hicks on the shoulder and staggered him. Swinging the beam of light, he saw Cooper, not ten feet away, straightening up with a second large rock clutched in his hand. Hurling Heather from him and leaping sidewise with one effort of all his muscles, he got the light on Cooper again just as he was letting the rock go. This time the missile caught him squarely in the chest and knocked the breath out of him. He faltered an instant, recovered, bounded forward, and landed on Cooper’s jaw just as he was coming up with another rock. The rock dropped to the ground with a soggy thud; Cooper, merely sinking in a heap, made no sound.

  Hicks whirled with the light to Heather. She stood with one hand clutching her pajamas where they had been torn from her shoulder, unblinking against the light, her lips parted, like a wild thing in the woods.

  “You hurt him,” she said harshly. “How much did you hurt him?”

  “That’s a darned shame,” Hicks said sarcastically. He felt himself and took a deep breath and decided his ribs were intact. “He’ll survive. I might have got killed being romantic. I could have held you in my arms close to me and let the next one hit you.” He went and got her coat and held it behind her. “Put this on before you start sneezing.”

  She let her arms go in and he pulled the coat around her and then flashed the light on her feet and saw that they were shod.

  “Give me that light,” she demanded.

  “When I get through with it. I’m going to see what it was you put in the brook. And don’t try any—”

  “I didn’t put anything in the brook.”

  “You had something in your hand. And you didn’t throw it in, you rolled up your pajamas and waded in. The most sensible thing you can do—”

  “Listen.” She had his sleeve, was close to him, her face lifted to his. “Please listen! Will you listen to me?”

  “Not all night.”

  “What that was—what I put in the brook—it’s absolutely silly! It has nothing to do with anything!” She shook his arm. “You must believe me! It’s just simply absolutely nothing!”

  “Okay, I’ll wade in and see if I can find nothing. I’ve already got one shoe full of water. And if you undertake anything like rock throwing, I’ll tear your pajamas into strings and tie you up, which is meant literally.”

  “You’re a fine romantic, you are—”

  Hicks pulled loose and stepped into the brook. A stone turned under his foot beneath the water. When he had recovered his balance he glanced over his shoulder at Heather, but apparently she intended no assault from the rear, so he went on. The water, nearly up to his knees, felt ice cold as it sloshed around his calves. Facing upstream, he got the light at the proper angle to make the bottom visible, and began the search. Bottom, consisting of brown rocks of various shapes and sizes, was all he saw. After some minutes he took bearings again from the big flat rock on the bank where she had previously left the flashlight, moved a few feet downstream and a little to the right, bent closer to the water for another/try, and saw a rock under the water of a different shape and color from any other. He peered at it. It was a rock—no, it was not a rock. He plunged his hand under the surface to feel it, and knew immediately, from its smoothness and circular edge, what it was—or rather, what they were; and in their middle, holding them down, was a heavy rock. He removed the rock, grasped the circular edge firmly, and came up with it.

  An exclamation came from Heather.

  Hicks waded back to the bank.

  “You see?” Heather said through her teeth. “I told you it was nothing. You see?”

  “I wouldn’t say that a dozen sonograph plates are simply absolutely nothing,” Hicks said dryly.

  “It’s not a dozen, it’s eight,” Heather took a step. “Listen, Mr. Hicks. You were nice to me. I thought you liked me. Don’t you like me?”

  “Sure, I’m crazy about you.”

  “Don’t be like that. Please don’t. Give them to me. Or put them back where they were. Just put them back. Don’t you trust me? Do you think I’m a liar? I swear to you—”

  “Save it,” Hicks said curtly. “We’re all going to catch pneumonia. Here’s the program. It’s a nice night for a concert—wait a minute.”

  He put the light on Cooper, who was sitting on the ground staring blankly around.

  “You, Cooper!” Hicks said. “George Cooper! Recognize the name?”

  “Go to hell,” Cooper muttered. “Who are you?”

  “He’s all right,” Hicks asserted. “Here’s the program. I’ll get him to the laboratory. I can manage without the light. You take it and go to the house and get the key to the office and bring it over. Then you can go back and go to bed.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Have a concert. Listen to these plates.”

  “You are not!”

  “I am.”

  “I won’t get the key to the office.”

  “Then I’ll wake Brager and get it from him.” Hicks patted her on the shoulder. “Use your head, dearie. You say you want these plates under a rock at the bottom of the brook, God knows why, but that’s what you want. Maybe after I listen to them I’ll put them back there. Maybe I won’t, but maybe I will. One thing sure, I’m not going to turn loose any of them before I hear what’s on them. As much as I like you. And you ought to put on some warm stockings. Take this light and go get the key.”

  She took the light. “I’ll tell you one thing,” she said fiercely. “I don’t like you. What about George? Why did you bring him back here? When you promised you wouldn’t?”

  “I didn’t promise I wouldn’t. But I didn’t. He got away from me.”

  “You’re lying!”

  “All right, I’m lying. Which I am not. Ask him, but not now. Go get that key.”

  She went. For a minute he watched the light bobbing along the path, then, stepping with care in the pitch dark, he moved toward the dim white blob that was Cooper’s face.