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

  Suit of clothes $65.00

  Pocketknife 2.50

  Two-pound box of chocolates 2.25

  Postal money order for British War Relief 100.00

  Photographs of Myrna Loy, Bette Davis, Deanna Durbin and Shirley Temple 4.00

  $173.75

  At seven o’clock that evening Hicks was eating spaghetti and arguing about Mussolini at the family table in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant on East 29th Street. At nine o’clock the table was cleared and a pinochle game was started. At midnight Hicks went upstairs to the furnished room for which he paid six dollars a week.

  In yellow pajamas piped in brown, he sat on the edge of the bed and opened the box of chocolates and smelled it with a long deep inhalation.

  “I’ll earn it and then I’ll eat it,” he muttered. If he had known how much of a chore the earning was to be, he might have added, “If I’m still alive.”

  Two

  In the reception room of the executive offices of the Republic Products Corporation high above Lexington Avenue, the receptionist sat at her desk and tried not to yawn. Losing the struggle, she covered her mouth with a palm. It was five minutes past nine, Thursday morning. Life presented a dreary outlook. Her feet hurt. Dancing till after one o’clock, and less than six hours’ sleep, and standing up in the subway … no more, she just couldn’t take it, not at her age … that was all right when she was younger, but now she was twenty-three, nearly twenty-four—

  “Good morning,” said a twangy voice.

  The voice irritated her. Her tired eyes saw a man in a new-looking brown suit, and a face that was new to her, with a large envelope under his arm.

  “Who do you want to see?” she asked. Ordinarily she said “Whom,” but, feeling as she did, that was beyond her.

  “You,” the man said.

  That old gag deserved, and usually received, chilly disdain. But the idea that anyone on earth could want to see her then, the way her face felt and the way her feet hurt, was so perfectly excruciating that she had to laugh. She burst into laughter.

  “No,” the man protested. “Really. I want to ask if you’d like to take a trip to Hollywood.”

  “Sure,” she said scornfully. “Does Garbo need a double or what?”

  “You’ll never get anywhere,” said the man severely, “with an attitude like that. Here’s opportunity knocking at your door and listen to you.” He placed the envelope on the desk, opened the flap, extracted a large glossy photograph, and held it in front of her. “Who is that?”

  With one glance she said sarcastically, “John Barrymore.”

  “Very well,” he said reproachfully. “You’ll live to regret it. There’s four more pictures of movie stars in here. If you can identify all five, you get a year’s subscription to the Movie Gazette. Free. Then you write an article of a thousand words and send it to our contest editor—”

  “I don’t know any thousand words.” She glanced at the photograph again. “But if they’re all as easy as that. Shirley Temple.”

  “Right.” He pulled out another one. “Now watch your step.”

  She snorted. “Those eyes? Bette Davis.”

  “Two right. This one?”

  “Deanna Durbin.”

  “And this?”

  “Myrna Loy.”

  “Good for you. Four down and one to go. This last one?”

  She squinted at it. She took it from him and peered at it from different angles. “Huh,” she said, “I thought there was a catch in it. This is probably some dame that sat on a wagon in ‘Gone With the Wind’ when they fled from that town in Virginia, I think it was—”

  “Atlanta, Georgia. But you wrong me. I think you ought to recognize her without straining your brain beyond its capacity. Dressed differently, of course. For instance, imagine her getting out of the elevator and walking up to you here at your desk—with a hat on, remember, and some kind of a wrap probably, and sort of nervous, and saying for instance that she wanted to see Mr. Vail—”

  The girl hissed at him.

  He followed her glance and saw a man approaching—a large man, well fed and well shaved, with a broad nose and a thin mouth. He had been headed from the elevator for the corridor leading within, but swerved and was approaching.…

  “Good morning, Mr. Vail,” the girl said as brightly as though her feet were perfectly all right.

  His “Good morning” sounded more like Bulgarian. “What’s all this?” he demanded, stopping at the desk. He frowned at the photographs, at the stranger standing there. “I heard you mention my name—”

  “Just accidentally, Mr. Vail,” the girl said hastily. “He was only telling me—only showing me—”

  She stopped because something queer was happening. Vail had glanced at the photograph she had put down, the unidentified one, had bent over to look at it, and then had abruptly straightened up; and the expression on his face frightened her, though it was directed not at her but at the stranger. Though she had seen him angry before, she had never seen his lips as thin as that, nor his eyes drawn so narrow.

  “Ah,” he said. Then suddenly he smiled, but it was not a smile to reassure anybody, least of all the man it was aimed at. “There is some explanation of this, I suppose? This picture of a lady—an old friend of mine?”

  The stranger smiled back. “I can make one up.”

  Vail took a step. “Who are you?”

  The other took a wallet from his pocket, fished out a card, and offered it. Vail took it and looked at it:

  A. HICKS

  M.S.O.T.P.B.O.M.

  He looked up, unsmiling. “This—this hash?”

  The other gestured it away. “Unimportant. One of my titles. Melancholy Spectator of the Psychic Bellyache of Mankind. The name is Hicks.”

  “Who sent you here?”

  Hicks shook his head. “I didn’t come to see you, Mr. Vail. Some other time, maybe.” He reached for envelope and photographs.

  “Leave those things here and get out!”

  But Hicks gathered them up with one swoop of his hand and made for the elevator. In a moment a down car stopped for him.

  As he emerged from the building no sign of the smile was on his face. He was beginning to suspect that he was in for something nasty. It seemed likely, considering how startlingly Vail’s narrowed eyes had been those of a wary and malevolent pig, that some one was going to-get hurt.

  He sat on a bench in Bryant Park and thought it over.

  The office of R. I. Dundee and Company was on 40th Street near Madison Avenue, a mere five-minute walk from that of its hottest competitor, Republic Products Corporation.

  At eleven o’clock that Thursday morning, anyone seeing R. I. Dundee seated at his desk would not have guessed that only ten minutes ago a phone call from the Chicago branch had brought the glad tidings that a $68,000 contract for plastics had just been closed with Fosters, the biggest manufacturers of loose-leaf binders in the country. Dundee sat staring at a corner of the rug with an expression of mingled dejection and choler. With his regular precise features and his well-fitting conservative gray coat, he looked like a man intended by both nature and himself to be neat and personable, but with his disarranged hair and his bloodshot eyes, the intention was shockingly impugned.

  He shifted in his chair and groaned, and when there was a knock at the door he yelled in a tone of extreme exasperation, “Come in!”

  A boy entered and handed him a card:

  A. HICKS

  C.F.M.O.B.

  Beneath was written in ink, “Have just seen Mr. James Vail. It might interest you.”

  Dundee straightened up and gave the card another look. He rubbed it with his thumb and forefinger, and looked at it again.

  “What does this man look like?”

  “He looks all right, sir. Except his eyes maybe. They’re kind of gleamy and menacing.”

  “Send him in here.”

  The boy went. When, a moment later, the visitor entered, he got a cool reception. Dundee stayed in hi
s chair, offered no greeting, and stared up at the newcomer. Hicks stood on the other side of the desk and returned the stare, then circled around to a chair, sat, and said:

  “Candidate for Mayor of Babylon. Not Babylon, Long Island. Babylon.”

  Dundee blinked with irritation. “What the devil are you talking about?”

  Hicks pointed to the card which the other still held in his fingers. “Those letters. That’s what they stand for. To save you the trouble of asking. Sometimes they help to open a conversation, but in this case of course Jimmie Vail’s name would have been enough. Wouldn’t it?”

  “What about Vail? What do you want?”

  Hicks smiled at him. “First I’d like to get acquainted a little. If I bounce it right back at you, what I want, you’ll probably tell me to get out, as Vail did, and then where are we? The way you look, on edge the way you are. And with that stubborn mouth you’ve got. But I guess I can lead up to it. Yesterday afternoon your wife paid me two hundred dollars.”

  “My wife!—” Dundee goggled at him. “For what?”

  “For nothing. That’s the sad part of it. It happened that I needed the money, so I took it. If you made the money and it’s being wasted, it’s your own fault. I’ve never heard of anything dumber than a man accusing his wife of treachery and claiming to have proof of it, and then refusing to produce the proof or even to discuss it. Whether she’s guilty—”

  “Get out!” Dundee said. His voice trembled with rage.

  Hicks shook his head.

  Dundee stood up. His hands were shaking. “Get out!”

  “No,” Hicks said, not moving and not raising his voice. “You ought to see yourself in a mirror. Your wife thinks you’re out of your head and she may be right. If you handled your business problems the way you’re trying to handle this one, by simply having a fit, you’d have been bankrupt long ago. I’ve come here to make you an offer, and I’m going to make it before I leave.”

  “I don’t want any offer—”

  “How do you know till you’ve heard it? If you’d let your brain cool off a little, you’d realize that I’m in a position to get you what you want. Your wife has paid me money. She has confidence in me. You told her it was useless for her to try to deny she had sold your business secrets to Vail, you knew she had done it; what you wanted from her was the full story so you could decide what to do. What if I can get that out of her? Wouldn’t that help?”

  “I see.” Dundee’s lips worked, and he clamped his jaw to make them stop. He gazed down at the other’s face.

  “That would be worth something, wouldn’t it?” Hicks argued. “But of course you’d have to give me something to work with. For instance, that proof you were going to show her—I’d have to know what that was—I’d have to know enough of what you know to be able to impress her—”

  “Ha,” Dundee said derisively. “You would?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Where did you see Vail?”

  “At his office.”

  “Did my wife send you to him?”

  “No. I was just poking into holes.”

  “Do you expect me to believe that?”

  “I think it’s fairly credible.”

  “I don’t. What are you, a lawyer?”

  “No. I’m just a guy. A sort of a freak. You might say, an outlawyer.” Hicks gestured it away. “I understand your reluctance. You don’t know whether I’m enough of a philosopher to double-cross your wife, or whether I’m trying to pull a fast one on you. That’s a risk you have to take. However, I can prove that I was disbarred from practicing law, and that ought to be a point in my favor. You can check that.”

  Dundee had stopped trembling. His blood, obviously, was under control again; he had no longer the aspect of a man about to clutch a throat or pick up a chair and hurl it. He asked in a hard, even tone:

  “Where did my wife get hold of you?”

  “That’s a long story. I have a—I’ve had some notoriety.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Of course you’re working for Vail.”

  “No. I never saw Vail before today.”

  “I don’t believe it.” Dundee’s nostrils bulged and subsided again. “I’d like to wring your damned neck. Get out of here.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “I said get out.”

  Hicks, his lips pursed into an O as if he were going to whistle, sat for five seconds gazing up at the stubborn jaw and mouth, the cold fury of the contracted pupils in their bloodshot whites. Then he heaved a sigh, lifted himself to his feet in no haste, got his hat from a corner of the desk, and walked out.

  After the door had closed, Dundee stood there without any change of expression, slowly rubbing his palms up and down the sides of his thighs. He kept that up a while, then sat and pulled his phone over and told it, “Get me the Sharon Detective Agency.”

  Three

  Hicks sat on a bench in Bryant Park again, watching a pigeon strut. It was an utterly disgusting and sordid mess, and he was in for it. Not its least disgusting aspect was that he had only twenty dollars left of Mrs. Dundee’s two hundred. He could take the subway downtown and borrow a hundred and eighty from old man Harley and pay Mrs. Dundee back. He sat and watched the pigeon and considered that, and finally decided to eat lunch first.

  But it was significant that instead of making for Third Avenue, where a plate of stew, with bread and butter, was twenty cents, he went to Joyce’s on 41st Street, got comfortable in one of the leather-upholstered booths, and ordered a double portion of baked oysters.

  And it was there that he found a short cut to a trail which otherwise he would have reached only after long and laborious twists and turnings. He was spearing the last oyster when something so abruptly caught his attention, by way of his ear, that the oyster on his fork was halted in mid-air. He had been so preoccupied with his own concerns that he had been oblivious to the murmur and clatter of the restaurant, and probably would have remained so had not a sudden lull in the general noise cleared the way for an instant, so that he heard the voice quite plainly. It came from directly behind him.

  It said, “… going now, and you can’t stop me!”

  It was the voice of Judith Dundee.

  The oyster still brandished on his fork, Hicks twisted his head. The voice went on. Enough reached his ear to confirm his recognition of it, and to tell him that it came from the booth adjoining his, over the back of the upholstered seat, but in the renewed surrounding noise no more words were audible. He could hear, or thought he could, a low urgent masculine voice replying to her, and was straining his ear to recognize it, when he became aware of swift and impetuous movement. Were they leaving? He slid to the edge of his seat and peered around, and got a view of a female figure, the back of it, in a gray woolen suit and a fur neckpiece, darting down the aisle. Alone. On sudden impulse he acted. Tossing a dollar bill on the table and grabbing his hat, he followed. As he passed the adjoining booth a glance showed him that it was occupied by a man about his own age, with a sharp pointed nose incongruous in a face white and puckered with distress.

  By the time Hicks got to the sidewalk Mrs. Dundee was thirty paces away, headed east. He kept his distance. There were people—Inspector Vetch of the Homicide Squad, for instance, who would have richly appreciated the situation. Absolutely typical Hicks, Vetch would have said, tailing the woman who had hired him.

  But he would have been wrong, as Hicks soon discovered for himself, when the gray woolen suit turned left on Madison Avenue and he caught a glimpse of its wearer’s profile. It was not Mrs. Dundee!

  He stopped short. Then he went on again, impelled by logic. That voice had come from the booth behind his or he would cut off his ears. And that woman had come from that booth and there had been no other woman in it. At least he would hear her speak again. He closed up. She turned right on 42nd Street and entered Grand Central Station, and when she headed across the concourse for a ticket window he was only ten paces behind. There was a man ahead of her at
the window, and as she stopped she turned for a look at the clock.

  It certainly was not Mrs. Dundee. She was something more than half Mrs. Dundee’s age, but not much. She was fair, extremely fair; and when her glance, leaving the clock, rested on Hicks’s face for an instant, his eyes dropped, away from the pain and distress in hers. It came her turn at the window and she spoke through the grill:

  “Round trip to Katonah, please. There’s a train at one-eighteen, isn’t there? Track twenty-two? Thank you.”

  It was the voice he had heard in the restaurant. Hicks stared incredulously at the back of her head. The resemblance to Judith Dundee’s voice was startling, little short of amazing. Even so, that might be dismissed as none of his business, as merely one of nature’s rare slips in her monumental task of differentiating two billion two-legged creatures one from the other; but what about Katonah? She was going to Katonah!

  That was too much. When she had moved away he bought a ticket to Katonah, hurried to the track entrance, and reached the platform in time to see her enter a coach. Inside he took a seat behind her, three seats removed from hers, and presently the train started. She had removed her hat and neckpiece, and he could see the back of her head. It was a well-shaped head, and her hair was fair and soft-looking.…

  Beyond White Plains the train was a local, and the ride consisted mostly of jolts, stops, starts, and more jolts, but at least it kept to schedule, and Hicks’s watch told him it was 2:39 when the trainman opened the door and called Katonah. He followed the quarry down the aisle to the vestibule, descended at her heels, and paused to light a cigarette as she looked uncertainly around. Three cars were backed up to the platform extension, with men standing by them calling “Taxi!” and she headed for one. Hicks was there close enough to hear when she spoke to the driver:

  “Dundee’s? On Long Hill Road? Do you know where it is?”

  The driver said he did, and opened the door for her, and they were off.