“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.”