Rex Stout (11 page)

Hicks, still blocking the door, met the cold gaze of the small gray eyes of the visitor. “Tag?” he inquired.

The man shook his head. “I’m as surprised as you are. Maybe more.
And
interested. I’m here to see Mrs. R. I. Dundee.”

“She has a headache. I’ll be glad to give her a message.”

“I’d like to talk to her.”

“At this time of night?”

“This is the only time there is right now.”

“Wait a minute.”

Hicks closed the door in the man’s face, made sure it was locked, returned to the living room, crossed to the divan, and told Mrs. Dundee:

“It’s Mr. Manny Beck, chief of the Westchester County detectives.”

“What—” Her jaw dropped.

“He was there this afternoon. He’s investigating that murder. I don’t think he knows anything about your trouble with your husband. He says he didn’t follow me here, he came to see you, but I don’t know why. You can let him in or not as you please. If you don’t he’ll be back in the morning, and it might be more picturesque to take him on while I’m here. I came here, by the way, to discuss with you a confidential matter which is none of his business, and of course I have told you about the murder.”

Mrs. Dundee was sitting straight, her hands in her lap, the
fingers interlaced, tight. “But I know nothing—What can he possibly—”

“Same here. Shall we find out?”

“Yes.”

“Good for you.” He patted her on the shoulder. “If he springs a surprise, shut your eyes and groan from your headache. I told him you’ve got one.”

He went back to the hall and opened the door and told Manny Beck:

“She really has got a headache, but you can have ten minutes with me present as timekeeper. To relieve your curiosity, she is interested in the job I’m doing for her husband, and I came to report on that. Naturally I told her about the murder.”

“Naturally,” Beck growled, and crossed the threshold.

If what Beck had was a surprise, it did not appear that he regarded it as one, for he made no effort to build up to it, and the question that revealed it came out quite casually. After acknowledging the introduction and taking the chair Hicks placed for him, he apologized, if not with urbanity, at least with civility, for intruding at that late hour, and even said he was sorry that Mrs. Dundee had a headache. Then he said he understood that Hicks had told Mrs. Dundee of what had occurred at the house at Katonah that afternoon.

She nodded, and pressed a palm to her forehead.

Beck asked, “Do you know Mr. George Cooper?”

“No.”

“Did you know his wife? Martha Cooper?”

“No. I’d never heard their names until Mr. Hicks told me a little while ago.”

“Yeah.” Beck scowled and then unscowled. “About Hicks telling you. I thought maybe you already knew about it.”

“About what?”

“What happened up there. The murder.”

“How could I?”

“I thought maybe it happened before you left. What time did you get there?”

Mrs. Dundee’s eyes widened. “What are you talking about? Get where?”

“Katonah. That house. This afternoon.”

Her eyes stayed wide. “I have never been to that house.”

“Before today?”

“This is ridiculous! I wasn’t there today.”

“You weren’t!”

“Certainly not!”

Beck emitted a grunt so skeptical as to be derisive. “Your son Ross phoned you at five minutes to six this afternoon, didn’t he?”

Her eyes went shut. “He—” The eyes opened again. “I don’t know what time it was that he phoned.”

“It was five fifty-five. He phoned from the extension in the upstairs hall. He asked you how and when you got there this afternoon, and what time you left, and you refused to tell him.”

“Wait a minute,” Hicks put in. “This is a—”

“It’s absurd,” Mrs. Dundee said scornfully. “I didn’t refuse to tell him. I told him he must be dreaming because I hadn’t been there.”

“And he said,” Beck growled, “that he knew you had been because he heard you talking.”

“Ah,” Hicks said.

“What?”

“I said ah.”

“Ah what?”

“Nothing. Go ahead. Two minutes left.”

“This,” Mrs. Dundee said emphatically, “is perfectly absurd. I told my son he couldn’t have heard me talking because I wasn’t there, and he said he must have been mistaken and told me to forget about it, and rang off.”

“Sure,” Beck agreed, “because he caught on that he was being overheard. So he hung up. Naturally he don’t want his mother mixed up in a murder investigation, and naturally you don’t want to be. Therefore, the best way to avoid that is to tell me what time you got there, and what you did, and how long you stayed.”

Mrs. Dundee looked at Hicks and said incisively, “This man is a fool.”

“No,” Hicks contradicted her, “he’s a little above the average. He merely has a bum steer. Do you remember, Beck, in the Atherton case I gave you my word that that bicycle you found in the pond had nothing to do with it? I give you my word now that Mrs. Dundee was not out there today. As a favor, to save you trouble.”

“Thanks,” Beck said in no tone of gratitude. “That settles it. Maybe, you think. People don’t go from New York to Katonah and back again on a magic carpet. Have you considered that?”

“Certainly. That’s what I meant about saving you trouble. If you won’t take my word for it—” Hicks shrugged. “The ten minutes is up. If there’s anything else you want to know, make it snappy.”

Beck stood up. His little gray eyes bored down at Mrs. Dundee. “If you weren’t involved in that business out there, Mrs. Dundee, you’re not acting sensible. Believe me. You’re not acting sensible.” He wheeled and stooped to tap Hicks’s knee with a blunt forefinger. “Listen, bub. You made a monkey out of me once. That’s enough. Once.”

He turned and marched off. Hicks followed him out to the door, and stayed there until the elevator arrived. Beck, entering it, turned and held up a stiff finger.

“Once,” he growled. “Plenty.”

The door slid across.

When Hicks got back to the living room Mrs. Dundee was bent over with her elbows on her knees and the heels of her palms pressed against her eyes. He sat down and folded his arms and regarded her with one side of his mouth screwed up. After a minute he said gruffly:

“I’ll beat it and you take another pill and go to bed.”

She shook her head. In a moment she raised it. “This is ghastly, simply ghastly.” Her voice had the metallic hardness that made it a new voice. “And that woman murdered—there—today—it’s simply grotesque!” She made a gesture. “Tell me. That record. Tell me …”

When Hicks left, at one o’clock, he had another check in his pocket, but no additional information of any importance. Mrs. Dundee had arrived at Vail’s office a little after twelve noon and spent twenty minutes there, receiving for her pains only cool courtesy and a flat denial that he had ever obtained Dundee trade secrets by any means whatever. The phone call from her son around six o’clock had lasted only a minute or so and had been as Beck had reported it. She had tried twice to call him back but the wire had been busy. She insisted that she had never been in Vail’s office before that day. She knew quite well what a sonotel was; indeed, one had been installed in her own apartment for purposes of experiment, until after a month she had insisted on its removal, something over a year ago.

When Hicks arose to go she accompanied him to the door, and he drew his finger back from the elevator button to say:

“By the way, that picture you gave me yesterday. That photograph of yourself. Have you been passing them around?”

“Not indiscriminately. Why?”

“I just wondered. I happened to be in Brager’s room up there, and I noticed he has one.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “That could be funny if anything could be funny now. He asked for it and I gave it to him.” The frown tried to be a smile but didn’t make it. “He has it in view? Then he doesn’t adore me any more. A fresh calamity. If he did he would keep it in a secret drawer. Are you by any chance asking if I have bestowed favors on Mr. Brager?”

“Lord, no,” Hicks said hastily.

“I assure you I haven’t. At my age adorers get to be more of a rarity and things like pictures go much more cheaply.”

“You even gave me one,” Hicks agreed, and pressed the elevator button.

On the street, he walked around the corner to where he had parked the car. Driving downtown, he considered taking it to a garage on First Avenue, but decided to save a dollar by leaving it on the street, and spend the dollar on a bed he knew to be vacant on the floor above his own. Not only that, he would transfer George Cooper to the upper floor, if necessary by portage. That mattress was his own property, a good mattress being one of the few items of impedimenta which, in his blueprint of life, a free man might reasonably encumber himself with.

But he didn’t lie on it that night.

Leaving the car at the curb, he mounted the two flights, let himself in with his key, switched on the lights, and saw an empty bed. He stared at it a moment, then tramped out and down to the next floor. No George Cooper was in the bathroom. He returned upstairs, stood scowling at the bed, decided that the occasion required the eating of chocolates, crossed to the bureau and opened a drawer—and the scowl became ferocious.

“Good God,” he said aloud in accents of consternation, “the damn louse stole my candy!”

He sat on the edge of the bed and considered the situation. It had already been sufficiently cloudy and complex, what with three plausible theories regarding Mrs. Dundee’s trouble and at least four regarding the murder, and now it was chaotic. If Cooper was merely a guy with a screw jolted loose by shock and grief, nothing was altered by this latest development besides the candy, but if theory number four on the murder was the true one,
it was quite a different matter. There might be a second murder before the night was out.

It might already have happened … it might be happening now.…

He went out and down the stairs to the street and climbed in the car. The dashboard clock said half past one as he turned north on First Avenue.

Out in the country the September night was cool and the orchestra of crickets and katydids applied itself to its intricate lovely symphony—or its infernal racket, to those who felt that way about it—with an urgency that forecast the imminence of an early frost to chill the musicians into silence.

The windows of the office in the laboratory building had been closed to keep the night air out, so that the cricket concert came only faintly to the ears of the three men who sat there around midnight, but it appeared from the expressions on their faces that they would not have been attentive to it in any case. Herman Brager looked exasperated and peevish, Ross Dundee stubborn and truculent, and R. I. Dundee about ready to explode.

He did explode. He pushed the record-playing machine away, shoved aside stacks of sonograph plates, and pounded the desk with his fist.

“It’s a damned farce! I’ve spent twenty years of my life building this into one of the soundest and most successful businesses in the country, and this is what I’ve come to! You don’t like it, do you? My God, neither do I! I’ll repeat it and keep on repeating it, my own wife selling me out, and one of you helping her do it! Shut up! And stealing the evidence I got of it! It wouldn’t surprise me if you were the both in on it! Not a bit! Not
a bit! By God, I’ll clean it all out, this place and the factory and the office, the whole works, and start over again!”

He sat trembling.

“I can resign,” Brager said in a strained voice. “That is all I can do with dignity. I can resign. I resign.”

“So can I,” Ross said. His face as white; his eyes focused on his father. “I guess Mother was right, I shouldn’t have gone to work for you. We should both have known better. We might have known something impossible would happen. But I told you this afternoon—even when you lose your temper you shouldn’t say things that are absolutely crazy.”

Dundee got up and walked to a window and stood there with his back to them.

“Everybody loses his temper once too often,” Brager said. “I don’t dare lose my temper. I haven’t lost my temper for thirty years. All I can do and keep my self-respect—I can resign.”

There was a long silence but for the outdoor orchestra, which no one heard. Finally Dundee turned around and faced them.

“Facts are facts,” he said harshly.

Brager shook his head. “Not in science,” he declared. “A fact is a phenomenon observed or recorded by an imperfect instrument.”

“Bosh! A sonotel may not be perfect, but it doesn’t lie. As you do, or my son does, or both of you. I heard that record, and I heard my wife’s voice. That is a fact.”

Brager’s lips tightened. “I will not lose my temper. I will repeat, I know nothing of that record. Your son may lie about it, I don’t know. A boy will do many things for his mother. But try to be reasonable about it, Dick. I am not in his position, am I? Why should I do such a thing?”

“I don’t know, but I can guess. I once heard you talking to my wife.”

“I have often talked with your wife.”

“I know you have. This time you didn’t know I was there. I listened because it was amusing. It was amusing then. Nor did I resent it. I never have resented it because other men have found my wife attractive and desirable, why the devil should I? But if you ask me why you should lie for her, or even why you should conspire with her to sell me out, I say I can guess why. I tell you straight, Herman—where are you going?”

It was not Brager who had moved, but Ross. He was on his way to the door. With his hand on the knob he turned:

“I’m leaving.”

“You’re staying here till we settle this.”

“No. I’m leaving. I was going to go without saying anything.” Ross’s jaw quivered. He clamped it shut and went on through his teeth: “I didn’t say it this afternoon, but I’ll say it now. You’re my father, and I’ve known you all my life, and I think you’re trying to get rid of Mother, and I think that record is a fake and you did it. I didn’t want to say it!”

He was out and the door was closing behind him. Dundee started for the door, but Brager, surprisingly quick, intercepted him and caught his arm.