Rex Stout (3 page)

“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.”

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.

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.