Rex Stout

by The Sound of Murder

  “Hicks?” Dundee turned and saw him. “No!” he blurted, and tramped out.

  Hicks went to a chair near the table, sat down, and observed, “When he’s mad he’s mad.”

  Corbett made no reply. He offered no hand and was obviously in no condition to make a pretense of geniality. He looked at Hicks as if he had never seen him before, chewed at his lip, and said nothing.

  Manny Beck snarled savagely, “Where have you been?”

  “My goodness,” Hicks protested, “I seem to have come to the wrong place.”

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “Born in Missouri. Boyhood on a farm. Harvard. Graduated law school 1932—Where have I been when?”

  “Since you left the courthouse this afternoon.”

  “New York.”

  “Where in New York?”

  “Now listen. Name a time and I’ll name a place.”

  “Six thirty.”

  “Joyce’s restaurant on 41st Street, eating baked oysters. The waiter and the hatcheck girl will sign it. I left there a little before seven and drove straight here.”

  Beck grunted and glared. Corbett’s baby mouth looked as if he intended to whistle, but instead he spoke:

  “You missed out with your trio on the alibi today. Only two of you made it.”

  “Two is better than one,” Hicks said sententiously. “Provided they jibe.”

  “They jibe all right. Your two pals. Have you discussed it with them?”

  “As I told you, I just got here.”

  “I thought you might have had a phone call at that restaurant, say a little after six thirty. Maybe the waiter would sign that too. I thought perhaps you left just after getting a phone call.”

  “Nope. No phone call.”

  “What did you come out here for?”

  “I was under the impression I came on Dundee’s business, but he says not. So I guess I’m investigating a murder. I’m finding out who killed Martha Cooper.”

  Manny Beck grunted. Corbett said sarcastically, “That’s kind of you.”

  “Not at all. I’m interested.”

  “A few hours ago you were trying to trade in her husband.”

  “Yes, I know. Of course that’s out, now that you’ve got him in custody. He can’t very well slip away again if he’s dead.”

  “Who told you he’s dead?”

  “A gentleman out front informed me. I’ll be glad to discuss it with you if you’ll tell me the details. All I know is that it happened at the laboratory, and he was shot. So naturally you have the advantage of me.”

  “That’s a goddam shame!” Beck rasped. “I swear to God, Ralph—”

  “Be quiet,” Corbett admonished him. “Look here, Hicks. At the moment I have no way of tightening any screws on you. Being a very smart man, you know that. You also know that while I am not as smart as you are, I am not half-witted. Let me ask you a question. Do you know what happened here about two hours ago?”

  “No.”

  “No one phoned you about it?”

  “No.”

  “For the present I’ll accept that. About a quarter to six Brager was in the office at the laboratory building when the door opened and Cooper walked in. This is what Brager says. Cooper sat down and started to talk. He was rambling, incoherent. He talked about his wife, and his life being ruined, and he didn’t kill her but he was going to find out who did, that was all he wanted to live for. He went on and on. When Brager went to the telephone Cooper wouldn’t let him use it. Finally Cooper started on the subject of his sister-in-law, Heather Gladd. He thought Heather knew something about her sister’s death that she would tell him if he got a chance to talk with her, and that was what he had come for. He was so earnest about it that Brager believed him and took pity on him. So Brager says.”

  Hicks nodded. “I wouldn’t quote you on it.”

  “Right. Brager went to the house and found Heather in the kitchen with Mrs. Powell and Dundee. Corroborated. He got her away by a pretext, and on the way to the laboratory told her about Cooper wanting to see her. When they got there Cooper wasn’t in the office where Brager had left him. Brager looked in the laboratory. No Cooper. He returned to the office and they were discussing the situation when there was the sound of a shot. Right in their ears. That’s the way Heather put it. Windows were open. Brager went to the window and then outdoors, and Heather followed him. Cooper was lying on the west side of the building, two feet from the wall, dead. Brager thought he heard someone moving in the woods, but saw no one, and the sound stopped. He went in the office and phoned. They both stayed right there until the police arrived. Bullet hole in Cooper’s right temple. No powder burns. No weapon found.”

  Hicks was frowning. “Does Miss Gladd confirm all that?”

  Corbett nodded. “To a T. She is a charming girl. A very beautiful girl.”

  “Are you talking to me?”

  “Well.” Corbett looked at Manny Beck and back at Hicks again. A little sound which could have been called a chuckle escaped from him. “God knows I don’t blame you for having good eyes and a warm heart. Remember you haven’t confided in me. For instance, you may or may not know that Cooper was madly in love with the younger sister before he married—and when he married—the older one.”

  “I wasn’t acquainted with them.”

  “Neither was I. But naturally we’ve been checking up. You know how these things are. A lot of ideas come to you, most of them foolish, but you keep trying. First we were interested in Cooper, then when he was out, one idea we got was about Heather. Cooper came out here to see her Monday evening. In a jealous scrap with her sister, you know? In a rage, temper? She could easily have swung that candlestick.”

  “I get it.” Hicks smiled at him. “I alibied her because she has a pretty face and nice legs. I sure go cheap. What about Brager?”

  “There is reason to believe that he is by no means immune to female charms. And she has been living right here in the house with him for over a year.”

  Uh-huh, Hicks thought, you’ve been looking under blotters too. He said, “Of course I ought to be indignant, but I’ll save it. What about Cooper, then? I’ll bet she shot him. Sure she did, and Brager’s got her alibied for that too. That puts him one up on me.”

  “Horsing around,” Manny Beck growled. “You sure can take it, Ralph.”

  Hicks gestured in irritation. “I’ll tell you, Corbett. In plain words. You’re funny and you’re slick and you’re dirty. You don’t any more believe that junk than I do.”

  Corbett chuckled. “Time for me to be indignant. I said it was just an idea. For instance, what if Cooper knew she had killed her sister, and she had to shut him up? You don’t like it?”

  “I wouldn’t even say that. I don’t even not like it.” Hicks stood up. “So with your permission—”

  “Wait a minute. Sit down.”

  Hicks sat down.

  Corbett rested his elbows on the table, rubbed his palms together, and cocked his head on one side. The expression on his face was apparently intended to be judicial. Manny Beck, with his eyes closed, was slowly shaking his head right and left, as if to indicate that the immediate external world, both of sight and of sound, was too painful to be borne.

  “I’ll put it to you this way,” Corbett said. “There is no question about about your being in possession of information about these people directly or indirectly relevant to these murders. Of course you are. I want it. The people of the State of New York want it, through me. How are they going to get it? By coercing or threatening you? No. Not you. For two reasons among others: you’re bullheaded, and you don’t like me. Forget about me. You’re dealing with the people of the State of New York. You know more about it than I do, but it’s quite possible that if you had come clean yesterday or this afternoon, Cooper would still be alive. I appeal to you. There’s a murderer loose. The chances are twenty to one that we’ll get him. Or her. I appeal to you. You ought to help us. If you do, we’ll get him quicker, that’s all and I
give you my word here and now that we’ll do everything possible to protect the interests and private secrets of any innocent person. We’ll stretch that point as far as it will go.”

  Manny Beck groaned.

  “Pretty good speech,” Hicks said.

  “Well?”

  Hicks shook his head. “No. You and the people of the State of New York have too much in common. I wouldn’t trust either of you to tell up from down. They kicked me out of my profession because I didn’t keep my mouth shut when I saw a rotten stinking piece of injustice being perpetrated in one of their courts, and now you say they want me to get chummy with you and tell you everything I know about a bunch of people who are having trouble. They can go right on wanting. Nowadays I make my own decisions regarding what I tell and don’t tell, and especially whom I tell and don’t tell. You say you’re going to catch this murderer. I don’t think you are. I don’t believe you’re ever going to get a smell of him. I think I’m going to catch him.”

  Corbett cleared his throat.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Beck straightened up in his chair. “The only thing in God’s world that would get under this guy’s hide is three hours in the basement.”

  Hicks smiled at him. “You’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you?”

  “I would indeed, son. I would indeed.”

  Corbett said, “You may regret this. I’ll try to arrange that you do. Meanwhile, stay on the premises.”

  “What am I charged with?”

  “Nothing. But don’t leave.”

  “I’ll make my own decision about that too.”

  “You will? Then it’s like this. If you try to duck you’ll be arrested as a material witness. I can back that on the strength of your offer to deliver Cooper this afternoon. You may even have known where he was, and his movements since he skipped last night are certainly a vital part of this investigation.”

  “Oh, I’m willing to tell you that.” Hicks stood up. “I took him home with me and gave him a good bed and a good meal. Then he came up here to get killed. Also he stole my candy.”

  “Ha, ha,” Corbett said.

  “You’re as funny as a funeral,” Beck growled.

  “When I do tell you something,” Hicks complained, going out, “you don’t believe it.”

  Seventeen

  At the moment of middle twilight when Hicks was backing his car into the pasture lane, Heather Gladd was up in her room, seated by a window, looking out but not seeing anything. She had gone there as soon as her interview with the district attorney had ended.

  She was thinking about herself. Until yesterday she had never seen a dead person except in a coffin. Then her sister—who had been the only person alive whom she had deeply loved—so suddenly and unexpectedly and shockingly. Then George, with the two flies at that hole in his head. What she was thinking about herself was that she was a completely different person from what she had been two days ago. Then her attitude toward the emotional tangle in which George and Martha and she were involved had been unbelievably puerile and infantile, in spite of the tears she had shed. She had been exasperated and petulant, that was all, as at some petty annoyance like finding that all her stockings had runs in them. And she would have gone on like that, she admitted grimly, possibly forever, a frivolous shallow simpleton, if death had not come to teach her. She had literally not known that there was anything in the world as ugly and final as death, and that things that happen between people could bring it. The first thing about death, when it came close to you like this, was that it made you feel dead yourself. She had not cried since she had found Martha dead. That was because she was dead herself. Yet she had acted sometimes as if she were alive—for instance, with Ross Dundee about those sonograph plates. Why hadn’t she simply gone and got them and given them to him? What difference did it make now? And why had she acted.…

  That knock was at her door.

  She got up and crossed the room and opened it.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “May I come in?” Ross Dundee asked.

  “Why—why, yes.” Heather stood aside. “I thought maybe they were sending for me.” She started to close the door, decided not to, changed her mind, and closed it.

  Ross stood. She stood. Their eyes met. “They may not send for you again,” he said lamely. “I hope not.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Only I can’t tell them any more than I’ve already told them.”

  “You were sitting down. Sit down.”

  She hesitated, then returned to the chair by the window. He went and stood in front of her. Silence.

  She looked up at him. “Did you want to ask me something?”

  “Well, I … wanted to tell you something. To say something. This is the first time I’ve ever been in this room.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes. I started to come in several times when you weren’t here, but I never came farther than a step in. I had an odd feeling about it.” He dismissed it with a gesture. “But that wouldn’t interest you. I don’t imagine anything anybody named Dundee could possibly say would interest you.”

  “I have nothing against anybody named Dundee.”

  “You ought to have,” Ross said bitterly. “You have every reason to. You’ll always remember this place, and us, with—I don’t know what. Hate, I suppose. I know that and there’s nothing I can do about it. I admit I didn’t believe you when you said Cooper didn’t kill your sister. I thought he had. Now I don’t know what to believe. It’s impossible that anyone here could have killed them, no one had any reason to, so I suppose the only thing to believe is that someone came when she was here, and went in the house and got the candlestick and killed her, and came back today when he was here and killed him. I realize how crazy that is, but it’s the only thing I can believe, because if that wasn’t it my father must have done it. You didn’t and Brager didn’t and I didn’t and Mrs. Powell didn’t. You say that fellow Hicks was with you at the laboratory yesterday, so he didn’t.”

  He stopped. In a moment he went on, “One thing you said yesterday. About my father and me being here when your sister was killed. I said it was stupid, but it wasn’t. What do you know about us? How do you know we’re not homicidal maniacs? It was me that was stupid, not you. Of course, I know I’m just a plain ordinary dub, but you don’t.”

  “You don’t think you’re a dub at all,” Heather declared, meeting his eyes. “You think you’re pretty hot stuff.”

  “I do not!”

  Heather made a gesture.

  “All right,” Ross said savagely. “You’ve had me wrong from the start, and now nothing will ever change you. I realize that. But today I realized that it was actually possible that you suspected me of killing your sister! Why shouldn’t you? How do you know I didn’t?”

  “I never said—”

  “I know you never said it, but you hinted at it. And now Cooper too. At the time he was killed I was down at the old orchard. I didn’t even hear the shot. I know nothing, absolutely nothing, of who killed him or your sister, or why, or anything. Do you believe that?”

  “No.”

  “But you must! You must believe it!”

  “It isn’t a question of must. What I believe and don’t believe—”

  “But you have simply got to!” Ross came a step closer. “I can stand your not liking me, and your not caring a damn about how I feel about you, about how I love you, I can stand that because I can’t help myself, but you’re not going away from here thinking that I had anything to do, anything at all, with the terrible things that happened here! You are not! You have no right to think a thing like that about me!”

  “On the contrary,” Heather asserted, “I have.”

  “You have?”

  “I not only have a right, I have a reason.”

  “Reason?” He stared at her. “You have a reason—”

  “Certainly I have,” Heather said firmly. “You never knew my sister, did you?”

  “I did not.”

  “Y
ou never met her or knew anything about her?”

  “How could I? She was in France. You told me about her. I only met you—”

  “Then where did you get that sonograph plate with her voice on it? And why—”

  “Where did I get what?”

  “That plate with Martha’s voice on it. And why were you so anxious and determined to get it back?”

  Ross was gaping at her incredulously. “Are you saying—are you trying to tell me—”

  A knock, a series of sharp taps, sounded in their ears—not at the door, but on the wall against which the dresser stood. It was followed at once by a voice sharp with anger:

  “Damn you, what do you mean by that?”

  Then another voice, quick footsteps, a door opening, and, as Heather got to her feet, the door of her room swung open and Brager was there; and entering immediately behind him was a man in the uniform of the state police. The policeman was saying in an unfriendly tone:

  “Okay, it’s your wall and you tapped on it. If you people aren’t careful there’s going to be some tapping around here on something besides a wall.”

  “What’s the idea?” Ross demanded.

  Brager’s eyes popped at him, popping with indignation. “He expects me to keep still!” he sputtered. “He comes to my room! He hears voices at my open window, coming from your open window, and he stands there to listen, and he expects me to keep still! I know policemen do those things, all right, they do, but that is no reason to think I am a swine! To expect me to keep quiet while he listens to you and you are not aware of it! I knocked on the wall!”

  He glared defiantly at the policeman.

  “Thank you, Mr. Brager,” Ross said. “He’s quite welcome to anything he heard.” He scowled at the policeman. “We’ll shut the window and try to keep our voices low enough not to disturb you—”

  “I’ll save you the trouble,” the policeman said dryly. “If the lady will please come downstairs. If you’ll just come with me, Miss Gladd?”

  “She’s been there,” Ross asserted truculently. “They’ve already talked with her.”