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

Hicks felt his blood moving. That was totally unreasonable; the mere fact that a woman whose voice resembled Judith Dundee’s was bound for Dundee’s laboratory brought home no bacon; but it was not reason that pumps blood. He addressed another driver standing there:

  “If I’d been quicker on the trigger that lady might have been willing to save me a quarter. I’m going where she is.”

  “You’d have saved more than a quarter, brother. It’s three miles. One buck. Hop in.”

  Hicks got onto the front seat with him. As they rolled away from the station the driver asked, “Which do you want, the house or the laboratory?”

  “Why, is there a house?”

  “Sure there’s a house.” The driver explained, as one who likes to explain, encouraged by questions. The people who worked in the laboratory—Mr. Brager, young Dundee, and Miss Gladd—lived in the house. Likewise Mrs. Powell, who looked after the house. The outside man didn’t live there.

  “Was that Miss Gladd who got off the train?”

  “Her? No.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Don’t know.” He slowed the car, which had been speeding along the highway, swung it sharply to the right onto a narrow graveled road, and accelerated. “Never saw her before that I remember.”

  A little farther on the car had to swerve onto the grass to meet and pass the other taxi, returning, and in another minute it slowed to a crawl as it approached an entrance to a drive on the right.

  “Here’s the house,” the driver announced. “The drive goes on around some woods to the laboratory—”

  “This will do.” Hicks climbed out, got rid of a dollar, and stood there while the car backed, got turned, and sped off in dust. Then he walked up the curving drive toward the house.

  The age of the trees and shrubbery showed that the place was an old one, but the house had been modernized. Instead of a covered porch in front there was a flagged terrace open to the sky, the walls were stucco with a plain trim of a greenish material which Hicks suspected of being a Dundee plastic, and the windows had metal casements. No one was in sight. Hicks pushed the button beside the door, and when it opened and a florid-faced woman appeared, he asked for Mr. Brager.

  “He’s over at the laboratory.”

  “How do I get there, by the drive?”

  “You’ve got a car?”

  “Taxi. I sent it back.”

  “Then it’s shorter this way.”

  She bustled out to show him, off to the left, where at the edge of the lawn a path entered a strip of woods and undergrowth, and he thanked her and made for it. In the woods was a cool damp smell, and he had gone not more than forty paces when he came to a little bridge over a brook. That stopped him. There were not many things in life that he ever felt the need of, but among the few people who knew him well it was notorious that he needed a brook. He had, off and on, here and there, looked at dozens of brooks. Now he halted on the bridge and looked at this one, and listened to it. His thoughts, however, for the minutes he stood there, were more ironic than idyllic. The aimlessness of the brook was only apparent; his own aimlessness in following that voice.…

  “Looking for somebody?”

  The footsteps on the soft dirt path, not yet carpeted with autumn leaves, had not been audible. Hicks whirled, startled, and was looking at a young man clad in soiled white coveralls, hatless, with sober bluish-gray eyes set deep in a bony but well-arranged face.

  Hicks nodded and moved on off the bridge. “I’m looking for Mr. Brager.”

  “He’s at the laboratory. I doubt if he can see you—we’ve got the furnace going.” The youth stepped onto the bridge and turned back. “I’m Ross Dundee, his assistant. Will I do?”

  “I don’t believe so. It’s just a little personal matter.”

  “Righto.” He was off the way Hicks had come.

  Hicks went on. In another hundred yards or so the path emerged from the woods, and there, across a small meadow, was a low unadorned concrete building flanked by two venerable oaks. He approached. A graveled drive extended the length of the front and curved around either corner, evidently encircling it. From open windows came a low steady hum as of a gigantic motor. Toward the left was a door, and since no push button was there, Hicks turned the knob and entered.

  No space was wasted on a hall. This, evidently, was the office, a medium-sized room which at first sight made you blink on account of the riot of colored plastics. There was a purple desk, a row of blue filing cabinets, a mottled gray and yellow table covered with an assortment of gadgets, and chairs of all colors; and at another desk, that one pink, with a green typewriter and a red microphone perched on it, a girl sat crying.

  The scene was altogether so chaotic as to be grotesque, with the subdued hum of machinery from beyond walls providing a background like the rumbling of a dragon from the depths of a cavern—but it had competition from another dragon. Though no man was visible, a man’s voice filled the room, uttering strident and mysterious incantations:

  “Six eighty-four! 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.…”

  And the girl sat with her fingers dancing on the keys of her typewriter, typing away like mad, while tears ran down her cheeks and made dewdrops on both sides of her chin. Hicks gazed at her in consternation. Suddenly the man’s voice stopped, and immediately the girl, peering through the tears at the sheet in her machine, read off what she had typed into the red microphone. She spoke clearly and distinctly, stopping twice to catch her breath with spasmodic gasps.

  Then the subdued humming dragon had the field.

  “Mother of waters!” said Hicks in a tone of astonishment. “Do you have to splash on it to make it work?”

  The girl did not reply. She was using her handkerchief, removing dewdrops and streaks. Hicks noted with approval that her nails were not painted and her lips were her own—or at least not obtrusively chromatic. Her eyes, when they finally came to him, were clear and candid and direct.

  “I wasn’t splashing,” she said with spirit. “What do you want?”

  “That’s rude,” Hicks said firmly. “You shouldn’t be rude.”

  “Neither should you. You bust in here when I’m crying and make that crack about splashing.”

  “Okay. I’d like to see Mr. Brager.”

  “I’m afraid you can’t.” Her lungs’ urgent demand for oxygen spoiled her dignity. The air rushed in with little hissing gasps, shaking her shoulders and breasts. She gulped and recovered. “He’s very busy.”

  Hicks nodded. “I met Mr. Dundee on the path, and he said they’ve got the furnace going. Will it go all day?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes it does—”

  “What was the pressure on Lot Six from eleven to twelve?”

  It was the voice again. This time Hicks localized it as coming from a grill set in the wall at the girl’s right. She spoke into the microphone:

  “I haven’t that, Mr. Brager. Mr. Dundee wasn’t using the speaker, he recorded it, and it isn’t typed yet.”

  “Run over the plates and get it.”

  Hicks sat down in a yellow chair and took a newspaper from his pocket, but watched the ensuing performance instead of reading. The girl reached to a contraption at the end of her desk and pulled it closer, and from a rack attached to it selected one of a row of disks like phonograph records, except that they were the color of weak tea. She put it in place on the player and flipped a switch, and in a moment a voice sounded, the voice of Ross Dundee:

  “Thirty grams of Formula K give no result. Fifty grams increase the viscosity.…”

  When the third plate she tried gave her the desired information, she relayed it to Brager through the mircrophone, pushed the machine out of the way, and sat in readiness for another sortie by the dragon.

  She sighed deeply.

  Hicks asked, “Are you Miss Gladd?”

  “Yes.” She sighed
again. “That’s me. Why?”

  “I just wondered. I happened to know there was a Miss Gladd here, and when a young woman got off the train I was on and I heard her tell the driver to bring her here, I jumped to the conclusion she was Miss Gladd. She was about your build, but a few years older. And by the way—” Hicks glanced around as though the thought had just occurred to him—“where is she? Didn’t she get here?”

  “Not—not here. She’s over at the house.”

  “Oh, then you know her?”

  “She’s my sister.”

  “Then I was right about her name anyhow. She is Miss Gladd.”

  “Not any more. She married—her name is Mrs. Cooper.”

  “Cooper? I knew a—”

  The voice filled the room again, and the girl began on the typewriter. Hicks unfolded his newspaper, but still did not read. He was not in a mood to read. His blood had tricked him. It had begun to pump, he had felt it, when that woman had told the driver to take her to Dundee’s; and now she was only coming to see her sister! He had never been fooled like that before, by his blood or nerves or whatever it was, and he didn’t like it.

  Nor, obviously, did he accept it as final, for he continued to sit there. Parallelograms of the afternoon sun through the windows crept slowly across the floor. During the intervals between the dragon’s incantations he made efforts at conversation with Miss Gladd, but she was preoccupied and laconic. When his watch said ten minutes past four he decided, from pure obstinacy, that he wouldn’t go without a talk with Brager.

  But there was an intervention. Hearing a sound outside, Hicks stretched his neck to look through a window, and saw a car pull up on the drive and stop directly in front of the door. The man driving it popped out, and Hicks knew the man. It was R. I. Dundee. Just as the doorknob turned Hicks hunched over with his elbows on his knees, his head down, myopically intent on his newspaper. That way he could see nothing but Dundee’s feet passing in front of him, and his face could not be seen at all. Dundee’s voice sounded:

  “Good afternoon, Miss Flagg—that’s not your name. What’s your name?”

  “Gladd, Mr. Dundee. Heather Gladd.”

  “No wonder I couldn’t remember it. Where’s Mr. Brager, inside? I hear the furnace, don’t I?”

  “Yes, sir. Shall I tell him—”

  “No, I’ll go in.”

  Dundee’s feet were moving, receding, and Hicks was congratulating himself on having escaped an embarrassing encounter when suddenly the hum ceased and an instant later came the sound of a door opening, and Dundee spoke:

  “Hello, Herman.”

  “Hello, Dick.” It was the strident voice that had been coming intermittently from the grill for the past hour. “I saw you passing the windows. Ross told me you were coming out. He went over to the house—”

  “I saw him. I want a talk with you.”

  “Of course. But the furnace—excuse me. Who is that man, Miss Gladd, if you please?”

  “He’s waiting to see you, Mr. Brager.”

  That ruined it. Hicks arose and faced them. The incredulous and irate stare of R. I. Dundee gave Hicks an opportunity to observe that Brager was a flustery little man with a flat head and protruding eyeballs, somewhat ludicrous in a faded and spotted brown apron that reached below his knees.

  “What the devil,” Dundee blurted, “are you doing here?”

  Hicks, in a tone of most emphatic and unalloyed disgust, said one word.

  “Nothing.”

  And made for the door.

  Four

  Hicks sat on the narrow little footbridge, facing downstream, his feet dangling, watching the brook gurgling around the stones.

  He had been there only a matter of minutes when his head jerked sharply to the left. Footsteps from the direction of the laboratory—glimpses of a figure on the path, through the undergrowth—then he saw who it was. Heather Gladd was moving slowly, as though reluctantly, long-legged and something to watch, with a hint of youthful awkwardness in her grace like a two-year-old thoroughbred.

  She got to the bridge and Hicks twisted his neck to look up at her.

  “Can you get by?”

  “Sure.”

  But she stood there, and after a moment said, “What I ought to do is go back and tell Mr. Dundee you’re here.”

  “Why?”

  “He told you to get off the place, didn’t he? And he told Mr. Brager not to let you on again. Also he told him your name. Hicks.”

  “Right.”

  “Alphabet Hicks.”

  “Dundee didn’t tell Brager that.”

  “No, but I know.” She stepped onto the bridge. “I’ve seen your picture and read about you. I read the New Yorker. I’m a very smart girl.”

  “Good for you. Knocking off for the day?”

  “Yes. Mr. Dundee chased me.”

  “So you’re going to see your sister?”

  “Yes.” She grimaced. “And I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  She made no reply to that. Instead, she moved to the center of the bridge, and before he knew it was sitting there beside him, deftly flipping her skirt over her knees as her legs swung over the edge. Her shoulder, with a narrow white strap crossing it, visible through her thin green blouse, was inches lower than his, but her feet hung almost as far down as his did. Her length was mostly below her waist.

  “I’m not smart at all,” she said dismally.

  “Oh, come,” he reproved her. “Blow on it. Keep the home fires burning.”

  “But I’m not! Two days ago I was much older and much smarter than I am now.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Twenty-three.” She gestured impatiently. “That’s not the question. If I were as old as you are that wouldn’t necessarily make me as smart as you are. Nor as romantic as you are either. Are you really romantic? I mean, in your heart are you romantic?”

  “Sure I am. Head to foot.”

  She looked sideways at him. “You’re not kidding anybody. When I say I’m not smart I don’t mean I’m dumb. The way you wouldn’t do what that man wanted you to, and you quit the case, and then you went to the courtroom and made them put you on the stand, and told all about it, and you knew it would mean the end of your career—that was romantic! I’d love to do something like that. And the way, when they took that woman to jail, what’s-her-name—”

  “This is sweet,” Hicks interjected gruffly, “but I’m on a diet. I can wiggle my ears, too. Why were you so much smarter two days ago than you are now?”

  She looked at him again, not sidewise, but turning her head to face him, and demanded, “Were you ever in love?”

  “Certainly. I’m never out.”

  “I’m being serious.”

  “So am I. I fall in love an average of twice a week. I can fall in love with a girl your age, even younger, and anything from that on up—well, not indefinitely—”

  She shook her head. “Please,” she pleaded. “I mean the kind of love that—” She stopped for a word. “The desperate kind. The awful kind.”

  “Why, is that the kind you’ve got?”

  “Lord no, not me. Me in love?”

  “You can’t rule it out as contrary to nature.”

  “Well, I’m not. This is serious, terribly serious. Say you were in love with a girl, desperately in love, and you shouldn’t be. Say she didn’t love you, and anyway you were already married. Wouldn’t there be any way in the world to make you stop it?”

  “You might shoot me.”

  “No.” Her chin quivered. “Please don’t be flip. I’m serious. I really don’t know anything about love, not that kind. But you’re a man and you’re smart. Isn’t there anything I can—I mean, if a man falls in love like that, is it just simply incurable? You don’t need to think I’m dumb. There aren’t many girls my age who do know anything about love, the kind I’m talking about. I want to know what can be done about it.”

  “Well.” Hicks pulled at his nose. The brook beneath
their feet gurgled happily. “If you mean the man makes a nuisance of himself and the problem is to get rid of him …”

  “No. I mean how to make him stop.”

  “Stop being in love?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shoot him or marry him.”

  “You’re a lot of help,” she said bitterly. “It isn’t anything to be cynical about. I didn’t stop here to ask you about it. I didn’t even know I was going to until I realized I was sitting down by you. There’s nobody else I can ask. There simply isn’t any sense in it, two people unhappy and miserable just because one of them gets a crazy idea in his head. If it is in his head. He acts more as if it was in his stomach.”

  Hicks grunted. “Tell him that.”

  “Tell him what?”

  “That it’s in his stomach. Tell him anything like that you can think of. Make him hate you. At your age the instinct to cruelty is still fairly intact. Turn it loose on him. Or eat raw garlic—no, that’s no good. He’d eat some too and then he wouldn’t notice it.”

  She tried not to laugh, but first a sputter forced a way out, then she was laughing. For a moment she chortled along with the brook, and then abruptly stopped.

  “I didn’t want to laugh,” she said resentfully, her cheeks flushing.

  “That’s all right. It only proves what I said about your instinct to cruelty.”

  “It does not! I’m not cruel! But you are! And I didn’t think you would be! I thought you’d be wise and—and helpful.…”

  “You expect too much.” Hicks was looking at her face. “I’ve got a stomach too. I don’t like garlic, but I see now that there might be a good reason for eating it.” He added hastily, “Hypothetically, I mean. Anyway, I doubt if any wisdom except your own could be of any help to you. If all you wanted was to avoid annoyance, that would be simple, but you’re thinking of the happiness of two other people, and that depends on them more than it does on you. I don’t know them and you do. Of course it’s your sister, isn’t it?”

  Heather made no reply. She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and stared down at the water, her legs swinging to and fro. The fringe of tiny hairlets at the back of her neck were so nearly the same color as her skin that it was doubtful where it ended. Hicks was considering the matter as a problem in optics when presently she asked, without changing her position: