Rex Stout by The Sound of Murder Read Free Book Online

with them a while as long as I could stand it, and then I got the plate from the end of the case and took it to myroom and locked it in a drawer of my desk, and went home and—spoke to my wife.”
    “Why didn’t you take the plate with you?”
    “That’s what I’d like to know,” Dundee said bitterly. “I didn’t want to hear the damned thing in my home—and the servants—and it was a business matter. My wife denied it—”
    “I know that part.”
    “Very well. I spent that night at a hotel. The next day I asked my wife—”
    “I know that too. She was to go to your office at four o’clock to hear the proof, and at three you phoned her not to go.”
    “Yes. Because I got the plate from my desk and went to the testing room and started it on the machine, and it wasn’t the one. I supposed someone had put another plate at the end of the case, though I thought I had kept my eye on it. And all the others were gone, case and all. After the conference they had taken everything from the testing room, some to the factory and some out here. I sent instructions to both places to return all JV plates to me—”
    “JV for Jimmie Vail?”
    “Yes. That’s how Sharon’s man marked them, JV and the date, in pencil. This plastic takes either pencil or ink. I got them back and ran them through, but it wasn’t there.”
    “Did you get back the same number of JV September fifth plates as there had been originally?”
    “I don’t know. I hadn’t counted them.”
    “Didn’t Sharon have a record of the number he had turned in?”
    “No. His man gets paid by the day, not per plate.”
    “Does he hear the sounds—the conversations—as they are recorded?”
    “No. The way it works—”
    “I wouldn’t understand it. Does Sharon run the plates through, listen to them, before he sends them to you?”
    “No.”
    “Then no one but you ever heard that record?”
    “I suppose not. I hope not. But
I
heard it.”
    “Sure, I know you heard it. Have you done any more searching?”
    “Yes. The factory and here, both. There are thousands of these plates filed away, tens of thousands, but no more of the JV plates were found. So I—”
    Dundee stopped abruptly.
    Hicks nodded. “So here you were having a go at every plate in the place, no matter how it was marked. Suspecting that someone had deliberately changed the marking?”
    “Suspecting nothing,” Dundee snapped. “But I want that plate.”
    “So do I,” Hicks said sympathetically. “I’ve been paid two hundred dollars for it. Were Brager and your son present at the conference that afternoon?”
    “They—” Dundee bristled. “My son,” he said, and stopped as if he had completed a sentence. Possibly he would have gone on to furnish the remainder of it if there had been no interruption, but Hicks’s eyes had left him to concentrate suddenly on the view through the window. Dundee turned his head to look, and saw that it was Heather Gladd approaching, trotting across the meadow. It was more of a shuffle than a trot, her feet and legs betrayed into clumsiness by the urgency that impelled them; and as she got to the edge of the graveled drive in front of the building she stumbled and nearly fell, regained her balance, came on to the door, and entered.
    She was panting, which was incongruous and even startling, because her face, which should have been flushed from an effort that made her pant, was gray with no color at all except for a smudge of dirt that streaked from a corner of an eye toward a corner of her mouth.
    Dundee said something, but disregarding him, she opened a leather handbag she was carrying, fumbled in it, and took out something which, unfolded, proved to be a ten-dollar bill. She held it out to Hicks and said:
    “That’s for a retainer. I need some advice.”

Six
    Dundee repeated what he had said before.
    “We’re busy,” he said sharply. “Go back to the house.”
    Hicks was out of his chair. He took a folded white handkerchief from the