The only person in the room who was manifestly not sharing in the general atmosphere of fatigue and tenseness and vexation of spirit was the man in the Palm Beach suit and battered Panama hat, who was on a chair in a corner with his head resting against the wall, fast asleep. At the other extreme was Manny Beck, chief of the Westchester County detectives, who was striding up and down, glaring at every one implacably, his massive jaw fixed in a forward thrust of obdurate pugnacity; and three state policemen and a couple of men in plain clothes were keeping out of his path. James Vail, Ross Dundee, and Herman Brager were on chairs which they had pulled out from the row along the wall. Heather Gladd sat at her own desk, with her elbows propped on it and her face covered by her hands, and seated at the end of the desk to her left was Judith Dundee, her back straight and her shoulders up, but her face drawn with strain and apprehension.
No one was talking, except the crickets and katydids outdoors, and their fretful and querulous exchanges were not calculated to soothe anybody’s nerves.
Eyes jerked to the inner door to the laboratory when it opened and three men entered. R. I. Dundee, in front, glanced around, took a step toward his wife, changed his mind, and sat on the nearest chair. Hicks crossed to Heather, muttered something to her, and propped himself against her desk and folded his arms. District Attorney Corbett with no sign whatever of joviality either on his pudgy face or in his voice, spoke to the room:
“Mr. Hicks is going to say something. Not as my representative. He is in no sense speaking officially. I want that understood. Manny, will you cut out that marathon? Sit down or hang yourself on a hook!”
Beck stopped in his tracks and glared.
“If Hicks represents no authority,” James Vail demanded, “what is the purpose—”
“We’ve had that out,” Corbett snapped. “I’ve told you, Mr. Vail, that you are not under arrest, you are not being detained, and you are at liberty to go or stay. I’ve told you that after a private consultation by Hicks and Dundee and myself there would be a statement by Hicks. If you were brought here by him against your wishes, your redress—”
“Baloney,” Hicks said impatiently. “You know darned well, Vail, what I’m going to do. I’ve got the label ready for the guy who murdered Martha Cooper and George Cooper, and I’m going to paste it on him. What are you chewing the rag about? You wouldn’t miss it for a dollar.”
Vail, ignoring him, spoke to Corbett: “I have explained to you that it is ridiculous to suppose—”
“He’s not doing the supposing,” Hicks said acidly. “I am. If it will make you feel any better, I’ll begin by explaining that in the discussion at Mrs. Dundee’s apartment I was merely theorizing, just as you were. Your suggestion was that Dundee was the murderer, though you knew he wasn’t. My suggestion was that you were the murderer, though I knew you weren’t. It didn’t do any harm, since we were just waiting for a phone call anyhow. But now I’m ready to talk turkey.”
Vail arose, walked deliberately across to R. I. Dundee, and gazed down at him. “Look here, Dick,” he said ominously. “This Hicks is a madman. You still have a slim chance to pull out of this with your hide on. For the last time I ask you, will you listen to me? Will you talk with me privately?”
“No, damn you,” Dundee said harshly.
“You won’t?”
“No.”
Vail, with his thin mouth compressed until there were no lips at all, returned to his chair, stuck his thumbs in his vest pockets, and addressed Hicks. “Go ahead. I’ve done my best.”
“I know you have.” Hicks smiled at him. “You see, you’re handicapped. Not only do I know more than you think I do, but Dundee and the district attorney do too. When I went to that spot on Crescent Road and found it unoccupied, I was fairly certain that you had all made a beeline for Mrs. Dundee, because I had told Mrs. Gladd to go to her if anything went wrong, and I knew that both you and Ross would go along — though for different reasons. So I came here and had a little talk with Dundee and the district attorney. In passing, I wish to pay a deserved tribute to my old friend Manny Beck. With his usual thoroughness and foresight, he had kept men stationed in this building after he was summoned here to investigate the killing of Cooper. True, he had no idea what it was the men were guarding—”
“Go to hell,” Manny Beck snarled.
“But their presence made it impossible for the murderer to return and remove a vital piece of evidence.” Hicks, propped against the desk, kept his eyes on Vail, whose chair was between Ross Dundee’s and Herman Brager’s. “It will be valuable evidence in a courtroom, but it is even more valuable for the effect it will have on you here and now. First, though, I ought to ask you, are you sure you know what an accessory is? An accessory after the fact?”
Vail made a contemptuous noise.
“I guess you do.” Hicks smiled. “You began, there at Mrs. Dundee’s apartment, by saying that you didn’t intend to expose yourself to the danger of being arrested as an accessory to a murder.” Suddenly, unexpectedly, Hicks’s eyes darted to the man at Vail’s right. “You see, Brager, that was your worst miscalculation. You figured that Vail would stand for anything, even murder, to prevent disclosure of his own dirty work, but you might have realized that there was one risk he wouldn’t—”
“What is this?” Brager’s eyes were popping with indignation. “Dirty work? I am aware you are paid by Dundee—”
“Wrong again,” Hicks cut him off. “You’re about the wrongest guy I’ve ever run up against. Your alibis were absolutely childish. Take Thursday afternoon. I came in here — will you help me out with this, Dundee?”
Dundee got up and disappeared through the door into the laboratory, closing the door after him. Hicks went on:
“I came in here and found Miss Gladd here at her desk, tears running down her face, typing like mad, with a man’s voice filling the room — Miss Gladd, will you please switch on that loud-speaker?”
Heather looked at him blankly.
“Turn it on. Not the machine, the loud-speaker from the laboratory.”
Heather reached to a switch at the end of her desk and flipped it, and instantly a man’s voice, Brager’s voice, came from the grill in the walclass="underline"
“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...”
Hicks, moving to the end of the desk, turned it off.
“Foolishness!” Brager blurted. “That is merely—”
“It is merely,” Hicks snapped, “a demonstration of the method by which you got in on a three-way alibi with Miss Gladd and me at the time Martha Cooper was being killed. It’s a new twist on an old gag. Because your voice wasn’t supposed to be coming to us directly, but over a loud-speaker system, and therefore it worked. All you had to do was start a bunch of records on that machine you have in there, connected with the mike, with the proper intervals of silence, and you could go out the back way and take whatever time you needed for your errand. And you had to hurry up about it, since Ross Dundee had gone to the house, and Miss Gladd had just learned on the telephone that her sister was there, and Dundee himself was expected—”
“Foolishness!” Brager repeated. His eyes went to Corbett. “This is an insult you permit—”
A shot rang out, shattering the air.
Brager started from his chair, then sank back into it. Heather was on her feet, rigid, staring at the window. Judith Dundee and her son were both halfway across the room toward the door to the laboratory, but they were intercepted by policemen in their path and by Hicks’s sharp command: