Rex Stout

by The Sound of Murder

  She got up and started for the radio, but Hicks was on his feet and there ahead of her, blocking the way.

  “Don’t be absurd,” she said scornfully. “I merely want to look at it. Anyway, it’s mine. I paid you to get it for me.”

  Hicks removed the plate from the turntable. “You can look at it,” he conceded, “but I’m delaying delivery.” He held it before her eyes. “Not that I have any use for it at present, but I think it’s going to be needed as evidence to convict someone of murder.”

  She stared at him. “Nonsense,” she said shortly. “Just because that woman was killed at that place—it was her husband—”

  “No. It wasn’t her husband.”

  “But it was! The papers—and he ran away—”

  “The papers print what they know, which isn’t much. I know more than they do, but not enough. Maybe I know who killed her, but I’m not—”

  “If you think it was my son or my husband, you’re an idiot.”

  “I’m not an idiot.” Hicks smiled at her, tucking the plate under his arm. “Nor do you think I am, or you wouldn’t be offering me all your worldly goods to find out who cooked this up.” He tapped the edge of the plate with his finger. “What I’m telling you, when I do find out, you’re going to get more than your money’s worth. You’re going to be a witness at a murder trial. The only way to avoid that would be to throw this thing in the garbage can, and leave the perpetrator of it undisclosed and unpunished. Is that your idea of a happy solution?”

  Mrs. Dundee, meeting his eyes, said without hesitation, “No. I think perhaps you are being too clever. I don’t believe the murder of that woman, a stranger to all of us, had any connection with—this other.”

  “But even if it had, I go ahead?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s fine.” Hicks patted her on the shoulder. “Of course I was going to anyway.”

  “Don’t you think I knew it?” Judith demanded scornfully. “Neither am I an idiot.”

  Fifteen

  When he left the Dundee apartment at a quarter to six, Hicks was bound for Katonah. With a double purpose; he meant to get Heather Gladd away from there, and he wanted certain information from her or Mrs. Powell or both of them.

  If he had started for Katonah immediately, and driven recklessly, a life might have been saved; but he did neither. First he stopped at a haberdasher’s and procured a cardboard box and tissue paper for packaging the sonograph plate; next he drove to Grand Central and checked the package in the parcel room; and then he went to Joyce’s on 41st Street and ate baked oysters and arranged his mind.

  By that time it was too late. At the moment, twenty-five minutes past six, that Hicks was spearing his second oyster, Heather Gladd was sitting in the kitchen of the house at Katonah, finishing a lamb chop and drinking tea, and trying to pretend to listen to Mrs. Powell. The usual dinner hour was seven, but Heather, not wishing to join any gathering, however small, at the table, was anticipating it. The sun, she thanked heaven, was getting low; the day would soon be over; perhaps she would be able to sleep tonight.…

  The door from the dining room swung open and Ross Dundee was there. Heather glanced at him, and sipped her tea; the hand that held the cup was quite steady and she frowned at it. Ross looked at her uncertainly, stood hesitant, and blurted:

  “You’ve been dodging me.”

  “Leave her alone!” Mrs. Powell snapped.

  “I wasn’t aware,” Heather said, “that I was dodging anybody.”

  “But you—” Ross stopped himself. “There I go. Damn it, I never do say anything right! I mean to you. What I meant, I only wanted to ask you—” He stopped again, cocked an ear to listen, and strode across the room to peer through a window screen at a car that was coming along the drive.

  “My father,” he said. “Fine. You dodge me and I dodge him.” Three swift paces took him to the door and he had gone.

  “It’s terrible,” Mrs. Powell asserted disapprovingly. “A son and father like that! No wonder things happen!”

  Heather had no comment. She went to the garbage pail with her plate and disposed of the scraps, put the plate in the sink, and returned to her chair.

  “You look terrible,” Mrs. Powell said. “You look like a cabbage plant that needs watering. Go up and go to bed.”

  “I’m going to.” Heather sighed. “It’s hot up there.”

  A voice came bellowing from within the house: “Ross! Ross!”

  Mrs. Powell started for the door to the dining room, checked herself at the sound of footsteps, and the door came swinging in, bringing R. I. Dundee with it. He glanced from one to the other and demanded:

  “Where’s my son?”

  “He’s not in here,” Mrs. Powell declared.

  “I see he isn’t. I’m not blind. Is he at the laboratory?”

  “I don’t think so. I guess he’s outdoors.”

  “Is Brager back from White Plains?”

  “Yes, he got back about an hour ago. I think he’s over at the laboratory.”

  “Has anyone else been here?”

  “You mean police.” Mrs. Powell’s tone plainly implied that if he meant police he ought to be straightforward enough to say police. “Not since you left.” She turned at a sound behind her—the back door opening with a complaining squeak—and announced as if she had accomplished something:

  “Here’s Mr. Brager.”

  Brager, entering, looked around at them, ending with Dundee.

  “Oh, you’re back,” he said. He seemed more popeyed, and hence more bewildered, than usual. “Just get back?”

  Dundee nodded. “Is Ross at the laboratory?”

  “No.”

  “What took you so long at White Plains?”

  “Fools.” Brager was wiping sweat from his face with his handkerchief. “Fools!” he repeated. “Nothing but foolishness. I shall tell about it later.” He looked at Heather. “Miss Gladd, that transcript is all wrong. There are sections missing. You will please come and look at it.”

  “Leave her alone!” Mrs. Powell snapped. “She’s going to bed.”

  Brager glared at her, but Heather stopped the argument before it got started by arising and saying that it would only take a few minutes and she would rather go and get it done. Brager opened the door and they went out. Mrs. Powell, muttering, got a pan from a drawer and deposited it on the table with a savage bang. Dundee stood and scowled at her a moment and then disappeared by way of the dining room.

  Brager and Heather skirted the corner of the house, crossed the lawn, and entered the woods at the path. She was swinging along in front and he with his short legs was trotting to keep up. Her weary and harassed consciousness, grateful for the excuse, was concerned with the problem of the transcript. Had she skipped a whole plate? But she always checked them back.…

  Her mind slid off that wretched little hummock, back into the morass of reality, when, nearing the bridge over the brook, the grotesque events of the night were recalled. She broke her stride as she glanced aside at the scene of that nocturnal face, then went on, crossing the bridge and turning with the path.…

  “Miss Gladd! Stop a minute!”

  She halted and turned. Brager was right there, close enough to touch her.

  “That was a lie,” he said. “About the transcript. That wasn’t what I came after you for.”

  Suddenly and preposterously Heather began to tremble. She felt it in the muscles of her legs, around her knees. She had not, at least not consciously, been alarmed by Hicks’s warning of a possible danger to her person; certainly she had not been frightened; and if she had entertained any thought of peril the source last to be suspected would have been the popeyed flustery Brager. Yet now, suddenly and inexplicably, there in the depth of the woods alone with him, her knees were shaking and she wanted to scream. She nearly did scream. She wanted to back away from him and couldn’t. But she knew, she saw, that there was nothing threatening or sinister in the expression of his face, his comical round fac
e.

  She made her knees rigid. “This is ridiculous!” she said sharply.

  Brager nodded. “Everything is ridiculous,” he agreed. “I have all my life been ridiculous, except in my work. Now I cannot work. All this—” He made an odd little gesture. “This disturbance. It is impossible! The trouble is, I tell you frankly, I am sentimental. I always have been, but I suppress it. Science and work cannot be sentimental. But I cannot work. So I become sentimental, and therefore a fool. Cooper is there and wants to see you. Your sister’s husband. But I think I should be with you.”

  Heather’s eyes were wide. “Where is he?” She looked around as though expecting to find him behind a tree.

  “No, no. In the office. I told him I would bring you. He is unhappy. I have never seen a man so unhappy, and he is not guilty. He is absolutely not guilty!”

  “He’s waiting in the office?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll go on alone, Mr. Brager. You go back.”

  Brager shook his head. “No,” he said stubbornly, “enough things have happened here already.”

  Heather looked at him, decided it was useless to argue the matter, turned and resumed her course along the path. The senseless momentary panic that had seized her was entirely gone. As for George, she had no desire to see George, but there was something she wanted to say, a question she wanted to ask him.…

  The late afternoon sun was full in her eyes as she crossed the meadow, with Brager at her heel, until they were in the shadow of the oak trees and the laboratory building. She ran up the steps and opened the door to the office and entered. A breeze from an open window had scattered sheets of paper over the floor from her desk basket. She noticed that before she saw that there was no one in the room. No George was visible. She turned to Brager inquiringly. His eyes were bulging in astonishment.

  “He’s not here,” Heather said.

  “He was here,” Brager said complainingly. “In that chair!” He pointed. “I wonder if he—” He trotted to the door leading to the laboratory and disappeared within. Heather jumped when one of the sheets of paper, caught in an eddy from the window, flapped against her ankle. She gathered up the sheets, returned them to the basket, and put a weight on them.

  Brager came back. “Not there!” he said angrily. “Not anywhere!” He faced Heather as if she had subjected him to a personal affront. “I tell you this is finally too much! Where is he?”

  Heather was going to laugh. She knew she was going to, and she knew she must not. All day she had not cried, and now she was going to laugh, because the sight of Brager being mad at her on account of George not being there was irresistibly funny. She set her teeth on her lip.

  “It is outrageous!” Brager insisted. “Outrageous! It is at last too much! He sat in that chair and said he must speak to you! Did I telephone? No! I would not telephone because I thought someone might hear! I leave him here and I go after you! Because I thought he was unhappy! Because—”

  He stopped because the air exploded. Cracking, shattering the air, came the sound of a gunshot.

  Sixteen

  The two thoughts–if such cerebral lightning flashes can be called thoughts—that came to Heather as she stood frozen for a fraction of a second, were, first, that she had been shot, and, second, that Brager had shot her. Both betrayed the state of her nerves. The first was not repugnant to reason, since people have been known to remain upright after being pierced by a bullet; but the second was manifestly absurd. Brager was frozen as stiff as she was. She looked down at herself.…

  “That was a gun,” Brager said. “Outside.”

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  “Shooting a pheasant again.” Brager crossed to a window and peered through the screen; then he crossed back, to the door, and went out. After a moment’s hesitation Heather followed. Brager had disappeared around the corner of the building; she descended the steps and walked to the corner. Rounding it, and seeing Brager, she stopped, and stopped breathing. Then, without breathing, she ran the ten paces to him, to where he was bending over the figure of a man lying on the ground close to the wall of the building. As she got there Brager straightened up. She saw the face of the man on the ground, and breathed, a convulsive gasp.

  “Be quiet!” Brager said harshly. “I think I hear him.”

  He was peering into the woods, which on that side were only a dozen yards from the building. Heather could hear nothing. She was staring at George Cooper’s face, wanting to look away but unable to. It was the most horribly repulsive thing she had ever seen, with the lips twisted into the grimace of an imbecile, and two flies, a small one and a large one, perched on the edge of a hole in the right temple only an inch away from the corner of the eye. It was the flies that made it unbearable. She clenched her teeth and stooped to chase them away, but by the time she was upright again one of them, the small one, was back.

  “Here,” Brager said. He took off his coat and spread it over the grimacing face. “Can you stay here?”

  She asked inanely, “Where are you going?”

  “Inside to telephone.” He was trembling, and from his voice it was rage. “That is all I can do. I am not a brave man. I am not a resourceful man. This happens here by the wall of my laboratory, under my nose, I hear it, and all I can do is go inside to telephone. That is what men do nowadays when terrible things happen. They go inside to telephone. Bah!”

  He went. When he came out again, minutes later, Heather was standing backed against the wall, her clenched fists at her sides, her eyes shut.

  So when, around eight o’clock, Alphabet Hicks arrived, too late, the place was considerably more inhabited than he expected to find it. In the pleasant twilight, cars of sightseers and reporters were lined up on the grassy roadside in front, and at the entrance of the driveway a cluster of them, men and women and boys, were gathered around a tall and handsome state policeman on guard there. Hicks, seeing that from down the road, backed his car into the entrance of a pasture lane and got out and walked. His jaw was set and his chest was tight. He was thinking, “If he got that girl I’m a worm. No better than a worm. I should have taken her away.…”

  He asked the policeman at the entrance, “What’s going on?”

  The policeman eyed him and demanded, “Who wants to know?”

  “I do. The name is Hicks. If it’s a secret you can whisper in my ear.” There were titters. Hicks glanced around, picked a promising face, and asked it, “Between you and me, what’s up?”

  “Murder,” the face said. “A man murdered.”

  “What man?”

  “A fellow named Cooper. The husband of that woman that was killed here yesterday.”

  “Thanks.” Hicks started up the drive.

  The policeman let out a squawk, and, when Hicks disregarded it and kept going, dived after him. But no real difficulty developed, because Hicks saw a man coming down the drive, stopped in his tracks, ignored the policeman who grabbed his arm, and beckoned to the approaching man, whose Palm Beach suit and battered Panama hat had surely not been removed, nor the hat even shifted, since the day before.

  The man’s face did not light up with recognition as he caught sight of Hicks, but he said morosely, “Hello there.”

  “Hello,” Hicks said. “Is this Adonis holding my arm your superior or your inferior?”

  “Nobody knows. It’s a case of brawn and brains. If you’re a lover of peace, what the hell are you showing up here for?”

  “Business. I came on an errand.”

  “You know we’ve had another casualty?”

  “I just heard about it.”

  The man shook his head reproachfully. “It’s beyond me. Okay, come on, I’ll take you in to Corbett. Have you got another one of those cards? My sister wants one.”

  Hicks got out a card as they crossed the lawn, and handed it over. On the front terrace, which was deserted, the man asked him to wait and started inside, but Hicks stopped him:

  “If you don’t mind, what happened to Coope
r?”

  “Killed. Homicide.”

  “I know. Drowned, suffocated, strangled, stabbed—”

  “Shot.”

  “Here?”

  “Over at the laboratory.”

  “Anybody charged?”

  “I don’t know. That’s all I know. Nobody ever tells me anything. I get it on the radio when I go home.”

  The man opened the door and disappeared. In a few minutes he emerged again and told Hicks, “Come on in. It looks like you’re welcome.”

  District Attorney Corbett was installed again in the large and pleasant living room, at the big table with the reading lamp. Standing across the table from him was R. I. Dundee, and at one end of it a stenographer was seated. At the other end Manny Beck slouched in a chair. A policeman was just inside the door, and a man in plain clothes was in the background. When Hicks entered Corbett was speaking to Dundee in a tone of exasperation. That alone answered several questions for Hicks, knowing as he did that Corbett rarely addressed anyone old enough to vote in tones of exasperation, particularly a man of position and property like Dundee. Corbett was saying:

  “Certainly you’re not under arrest. Certainly not! No one is under arrest! But under the circumstances I have a right to insist on your co-operation as a responsible citizen and ask you not to leave here without permission. It is a fact that neither you nor your son can furnish corroboration of your whereabouts at the time Cooper was killed. I didn’t say you are suspected of murder. And your remark about persecution of your wife is utterly unwarranted. Utterly!”

  “We’ll see,” Dundee sputtered angrily. “I’ll stay here till my lawyer comes. I want to use the phone again.”

  “Certainly. This one?”

  “I’ll go upstairs.”

  “One more question before you go. About Hicks. You said you sent him here yesterday on confidential business. Did you send him here today on the same business?”