Rex Stout (25 page)

Ross said to his mother, “That’s when I knocked him cold. I grabbed the gun and beaned him with it.”

“D’Artagnan,” Hicks grunted. “Where’s the gun?”

“Right here.” Ross took it from his pocket.

“Let me see it.”

Ross hesitated.

“Don’t be silly,” his mother told him. “Give it to him. Is it loaded?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t look.”

Hicks did look. “It is,” he announced. He put the muzzle to his nose and sniffed several times, then slipped the pistol into his pocket. “People who jump over cars at men with guns,” he stated, “are too brave for this world, so they usually get sent to another one. Continue the explanation, Vail. It’s fascinating.”

Vail spoke as before to Mrs. Dundee. “So far, Judith, I have told you facts. I have not gone into theory. But I ought to, I’ll
have to, to make you understand what I meant when I spoke of the vital necessity of a very careful and very rigorous discretion. Only before I do that I need some information myself. Doubtless Hicks can give it to me.”

“It’s yours for the asking,” Hicks declared. “What, for instance?”

“First about Cooper. He was shot?”

Hicks nodded. “While you were waiting there on the road for him but keeping yourself concealed. At six thirty-five Brager and Miss Gladd were in the office of the laboratory and heard a shot. They went outdoors and found Cooper with a hole in his temple, dead. Brager thought he heard movement in the woods, but saw no one.”

“Where were the rest of you?”

“Mrs. Dundee was in New York. So was I. Father and son were around the place somewhere. Outdoors.”

“Together?”

“No.”

“Then …” Dundee paused, and shook his head. “Where is that sonotel record?”

“Safe.”

“In whose possession?”

“If I say it’s safe, whose do you think? Mine.”

“Good,” Vail said approvingly. “I was afraid the police had it. Did you get it from young Dundee?”

“I got it by a combination of ingenuity, intrepidity, and dumb luck. From whom or where is for the present my business.”

“It doesn’t matter so long as you have it. I was afraid the police had got hold of it. Another item of information I need, Miss Gladd seems to have received a message that took her to the place where I was waiting. She seems to think I sent it, but young Dundee seems to think you did. Did you?”

“No.”

“Who did?”

“That’s a question,” Hicks said judiciously. “Miss Gladd and I conversed in her room and agreed to sneak out of the house separately and meet down the road where I had a car. While she was sitting in the car with Ross, who was apparently already in training for the role of D’Artagnan, a boy came with a message that had been phoned to his home, which was near by. It was signed ABC, meaning me, I suppose, and told her to drive to a certain spot and find me in a car with the license JV 28.”

“Ah,” Vail said.

“Right. Ah.”

The fat folds of Vail’s lids were leaving him no eyes at all. He murmured, “The message was phoned to a near-by house.”

“Correct. You may have time out to reflect on that if you—”

“I don’t need to reflect. The conclusion is obvious. You didn’t send the message, if for no other reason, because you didn’t know I was there in that car. I couldn’t have sent it, because I didn’t know where Miss Gladd was. Who did know where she was besides you? You say you conversed with her in her room. Could Brager have overheard you?”

“Brager?” Hicks’s eyes glittered. “Now you’re putting on speed. I didn’t see that one go by. Why Brager?”

“Could he have overheard you?”

“Well—his room is next to Miss Gladd’s, but there’s a wall between them and we kept our voices down.”

“Bah,” Vail said contemptuously. “Brager probably has that house wired like a central for experimental purposes, and a sonotel mike the size of a prayer book will pick up a whisper at twenty feet. Unquestionably he heard you, and he telephoned the message.”

“Say he did.” Hicks’s brow was creased. “For the sake of the argument. I still can’t see you. What put that playful idea into his head?”

“I don’t know, but it isn’t hard to guess. A double motive, I should say. Cooper was dead. Brager thought I might possibly get from Miss Gladd the information I had hoped to get from Cooper; and he wanted to be sure Miss Gladd got away, not only from that place but also from Dundee—and from you who were in Dundee’s pay. He knew she was in danger, because she was dangerous. She might at any moment, by any chance, meet Mrs. Dundee and hear her voice, and that could not be permitted to happen.”

“Oho!” Hicks ejaculated. “Now I get you! Brager and I would make a good team. The same thought struck me.”

“Do you mean,” Mrs. Dundee demanded, “that Brager wanted to get her out of reach of my husband? Of Dick?”

“I do,” Vail asserted. “Dick was desperate because he was in deadly peril. If anyone learned of the amazing resemblance between your voice and Martha Cooper’s—if the police ever got that tip and got started on that trail—they were sure to get him for the murder of Mrs. Cooper and her husband. And they still are. That’s what I’m here to tell you. They still are!”

The reaction to Vail’s startling pronouncement, while not violent, was noticeable. Heather gripped Hicks’s arm and stared at his face inquiringly. Ross stood up and uttered a word not in common use in the presence of women. Judith gazed directly at Vail, if not in complete disbelief, in scornful incertitude.

“Nonsense,” she said sharply. “Dick might have trumped up something against me. I’ve refused to believe it, but I admit it’s possible. But he did not murder—”

“Please!” Hicks said peremptorily. He was cocking an eye at Vail, his head sidewise. “This is really a very fine theory. Beautiful! As I understand it, Dundee prepares to explode a mine under his wife by concocting this phony sonotel record. No sooner does he touch it off than the whole scheme is endangered by the unexpected return of Martha Cooper from abroad. Ross has heard the record. If he meets Martha Cooper and hears her speak, with a voice so amazingly like his mother’s, he is bound to smell a rat; and there is Martha, right there on the place. So Dundee seizes a lucky opportunity and kills her.”

“Bosh!” Judith said incisively.

“No, no,” Hicks protested. “Not bosh at all, as a theory. Dundee having acted impulsively and impetuously, which is in character, finds upon reflection that he is still in a hole and even a deeper one. He not only reflects, he probably hears things. With wires and sonotels and God knows what all over that house, he almost certainly hears things. He may have heard Ross and Miss Gladd discussing that sonograph plate. He may have met Cooper and talked with him when Cooper went there this afternoon. He knows that his wife may show up out there at any moment, especially since she has heard the sonotel record, and
he knows I have the record. At any rate, as Vail has said, he knows that if either Cooper or Miss Gladd meets his wife and hears her speak, he is in for it. So he kills Cooper.”

“This is absolute—” Judith began.

“Don’t do that,” Hicks told her. “We’re working on Vail’s theory, and it’s a beaut. It’s the only one that fits the known facts. Vail is intelligent enough to realize that. He also realizes that if we all keep our mouths shut, if we give the police no hint of all this shenanigan about the sonotel record, Dundee is safe. They’ll never even seriously suspect him, let alone hang it on him. Isn’t that it, Vail?”

“Certainly. It’s obvious—”

“It sure is. I never saw anything obviouser.” Hicks glanced around, and back at Vail. “But I don’t know if you can make it unanimous. Ross won’t blab, not caring to see his father convicted of murder. Mrs. Dundee won’t. Of course I won’t, because I’m getting paid. You won’t, for friendship’s sake. Your old pal, Dick Dundee. But I don’t know about Miss Gladd. How are we going to silence her?”

Heather and Judith spoke at once.

“If you mean you believe—”

“That’s utterly ridiculous—”

“Please, ladies! Never get mad at a theory! Have I stated the situation correctly, Vail?”

“You have.”

“And you sort of rely on us to bring Miss Gladd into line?”

“I rely on no one. I merely present the problem. I admit that I wouldn’t like to have all this gone over in a courtroom, but the Dundees stand to lose a good deal more than I do. Maybe you do too, I don’t know.”

“I do indeed,” Hicks agreed heartily. “Therefore I’m going to poke around in the ashes before I commit myself. You can’t object to that.”

“I’m not objecting to anything.”

“Good. Then take that sonotel record. The theory is that Dundee faked it by using Martha Cooper for Mrs. Dundee’s voice, and getting someone to imitate yours. You seem to have read the paper this morning, so you must know that Martha Cooper went to Europe with her husband nearly a year ago and only came back Monday. So please tell me how Dundee used her when he faked that record.”

“I don’t pretend to know exactly when and where it was done.”

“I know you don’t. But theoretically?”

“It could have been done before she left.”

“A year ago?” Hicks’s brows went up. “He kept it around a whole year before he decided to use it? That’s possible, of course, but I don’t like it. It’s not neat. I’d like to suggest an alternative.” He turned to Heather. “Your sister visited you at Katonah a couple of times before she went to Europe, didn’t she?”

“Yes,” Heather said. “I told you.”

“And there was a sonotel installed in that house at the time, for experiments?”

“Yes.”

“Did your sister come by train, or did she drive?”

“She drove. She had a little convertible—”

“And might she not, on one of those visits, have said something like this to you? Quote: ‘Good lord, let me sit down and gasp a while! I know I’m late, but I had an awful time getting here. I never saw such traffic.’ Unquote. Might she not have said that to you?”

“Yes. She might.” Heather was frowning. “I think I remember—I’m not sure. Of course she might.”

“Might is good enough. For that, but not for this. This is more important. Did she, on either occasion, bring you something? Some kind of a gift?”

“A gift?” Heather looked blank. Then suddenly her face lit up. “Oh, of course! A dress! My tan—” Her eyes went down. “I have it on! She brought me this dress!”

“That’s a nice little concidence.” Hicks patted the dress where it curved over her knee. “Nice dress. Then of course it was natural that she should say that she hoped you’d be pleased with what she had brought you. Did she say that?”

“I suppose she did. Of course.”

Hicks nodded, and turned to Vail. “So there you are. That’s on that record, Martha Cooper saying that she hoped the person she was talking to would be pleased with what she had brought. That’s about all she does say of any significance. Most of the material items of the conversation—for instance, a reference to carbotene—are in your voice—I mean the imitation of your voice. So I suggest this. The sonotel records from that machine
installed experimentally in the house at Katonah were sent to Dundee. Among them were some of the conversations between Miss Gladd and her sister, and the remarkable resemblance of the sister’s voice to that of his wife was of course noted by Dundee. He got—no matter when, possibly only recently—the notion of faking a record. He found someone to imitate your voice, and for his wife’s part of it he used selected items from the records he had in Martha Cooper’s voice. He knew, undoubtedly, that Martha Cooper was in Europe, or he wouldn’t have risked it. What do you think of it?”

Vail emitted a noncommittal grunt.

“You don’t like it?”

“It’s ingenious,” Vail admitted. “But it seems unnecessarily devious.”

“On the contrary. It’s far more plausible than your suggestion that Dundee faked the record nearly a year ago and kept it all that time before using it. As you know, he’s an impetuous man. What I want to know, is it technically possible? Could a sonotel record be faked by using—only for parts of it—scraps from other records?”

“Certainly. Any good technician could do it.”

“Fine.” Hicks looked pleased. “That settles that detail. That was the chief thing that bothered me, though there are one or two other little points—”

Judith cut in, “This is perfectly absurd! I don’t believe it and I never will believe it.”

“Nobody expects you to,” Hicks told her. “We are theorizing.”

“Then why go on with this crazy—”

“We go on because it’s interesting. Very interesting. Also because I’m expecting a phone call from District Attorney Corbett and this is as good a way to pass the time as any. Better than any. I don’t believe you appreciate the exceptional beauty of Vail’s theory, especially since we’ve established the possibility that the sonotel record was faked by using another record or records of Martha Cooper’s voice. It will stand more wear and tear than any other theory I’ve ever met. Say, for instance, that your husband could prove, somehow or other, no matter how, that he didn’t fake that record, and he didn’t kill Martha Cooper, and he didn’t kill George Cooper. Under such a blow as that most theories would totally collapse, but not this one. It would remain intact. All you would have to do would be to
substitute someone else as the murderer, either your son or Vail himself.”

Ross, scowling, blurted truculently, “Look here—”

Hicks waved him away. “Forget it, son. I’m not going to pick on a tough baby like you, leaping over cars at armed men. I’ll use Vail instead, to show what I mean. If you don’t object?”

A corner of Vail’s thin mouth had a twist to it. “It seems to me that we’re not here to pass the time. You say you are expecting a call from the district attorney. I want to say, I must warn you, all of you, that if my name is dragged into this, if I am brought into this in any way, I shall be compelled to give the authorities the whole story. Omitting nothing.”

“Sure,” Hicks agreed. “We understand that.” He went back to Mrs. Dundee: “To show you about that theory. Let’s say Vail faked that record and did the murders, for example. You’d hardly have to change a thing, only a few details. Why did he fake the record? To lead suspicion away from the individual in the Dundee organization—a confidential secretary or assistant—from whom he had been getting the Dundee formulas. How did he fake the record? The confidential secretary noticed that among the experimental records from Katonah were some with a voice exactly like Mrs. Dundee’s, and that gave him the idea, which he passed on to Vail. They didn’t even have to find someone to imitate Vail’s voice, Vail did that part himself. In that detail, at least, it’s an improvement on Vail’s original theory. How did they plant the fake record? Simple. The confidential secretary merely inserted it in the case of records that had been delivered to Dundee by the detective agency as coming from Vail’s office.”