Dead Letter (10 page)

"And you figured Sarah was part of it?"

"For chrissake, Stoner! " McMasters
bellowed. "It was your idea! We don’t know if she’s part of
it or not. All we wanted to do was ask her a few questions when your
friend in the cowboy suit blew his stack."

"His name is Grimes," I said. "Lester
O. Grimes. He’s from a little place called Bloody Basin, Arizona.
Served in the Marine Corps in ’Nam as a weapons specialist, Master
Gunnery Sergeant. He came to Ohio about a year ago."

"How the hell do you know that?"

"He told me. He also told me he was going to
kill me if I didn’t keep away from Sarah, the Friends of Nature,
and the police."

"Well, judging by this evening, I’d say he was
a man of his word." McMasters gestured to a plainclothesman
standing by the door of the study. "You want to tell Collins
what you just told me?" he said.

I told the detective what I knew about Lester O.
Grimes. When he was through taking down my story, I went looking for
Sid again. I found him talking on the phone in the study. When he
finished, he looked up at me with the exhausted satisfaction of a man
who’s heard lated good news.

"This foul-up may turn out all right," he
said wearily. "But you’re going to be out one customer."

"What do you mean?"

"The Lovingwell
girl," he said. "We’re going to hold her for the death of
her father."

***

Mrs. Arthur Weinberg was her name.

She lived two doors down from the Lovingwells in
another colonial with a red-brick facade and a graceful white frame
porch. Her husband taught Romance Languages at the University; and
Mrs. Weinberg kept house, save for Tuesday afternoons when she worked
as a volunteer at the Clifton Daycare Center. She was a genial woman
of about sixty, with a plump, good-natured face and a grandmotherly
fondness for Sarah Lovingwell and for all the other "children"
who had grown up on her street.

She had wanted to help Sarah when the police came
swarming across the lawns and through the backyard arbors in search
of rangy Lester Grimes. It was only after talking with the detectives
that she realized that she might have made a mistake. "I didn’t
intend to get her in trouble," she told me when I stopped by the
Weinberg house late that night. "It was the last thing on my
mind. I won’t testify to what I said if it comes to trial."

"There’s no reason to blame yourself," I
told her. "Sooner or later, the police would have discovered
that Sarah’s alibi was a lie."

"But that’s not why I told them!" she
protested. "I thought it was all connected to this evening’s
shooting. Not to Daryl’s death."

What Mrs. Weinberg had told the detectives was this:
on Tuesday morning, some time around noon, as she was loading her
station wagon with the materials she needed for the Daycare Center,
she had looked up and spotted Sarah Lovingwell walking toward the
Lovingwell
house.

"I waved to her, but she didn’t see me. So I
went on packing up the car. There was nothing odd about seeing Sarah
walking down the street. And, of course, when Daryl . . . when we
found that he was dead, I remember thinking how tragic it must have
been for her to walk in and see him lying there. And then I thought .
. . my God, I was present at that terrible moment and didn’t even
know! There’s a disturbing poem in which a man is raking leaves in
his yard and rakes up a skeletal hand. I don’t think I’ve ever
had it come home to me that brutally—that horror is there, like the
hand beneath the leaves." Mrs. Weinberg ducked her head
apologetically.

"You’ll have to excuse my way of talking. It
comes from living with a teacher of poetry."

I smiled at her.

"When the detectives came here, I thought their
questions were aimed at explaining tonight’s trouble. I told them
how fond I was of Sarah. What a good girl she had I always been. And
then that moment just came back to me—well, it had never really
left—and I blurted it out, thinking it would prove something about
her strength of character. When they started asking me more questions
about that afternoon, I knew I had said something wrong; and I didn’t
say anything else. But it was too late, then. I could tell from the
looks on their faces that I had confirmed a terrible suspicion."
Mrs. Weinberg looked at me sadly. "She couldn? have had anything
to do with Daryl’s death. I’m certain of it. Why, it’s a wonder
she survived at all in that household."

"You mean because of her mother’s illness and
death?" I said.

"That, of course. And other things. You are
working for her, aren’t you?"

I nodded.

"Then you must know how she really felt about
her father."

"I know," I said. "But I don’t
completely understand it."

Mrs. Weinberg smiled at me as if I’d uttered a
familiar adage. "No one does. Do you know what I think? I think
that he was a little mad."

"Did you know him well?"

She shook her head. "None of us did. He kept
almost entirely to himself." She winked mischievously and said
behind her hand: "He was a terrible snob, although I suppose
that was part of his charm. That and his tweed coats and his briar
pipes. And the curious way he had of slipping into and out of an
English accent, as if the language were a velvet smoking jacket or a
pair of leather slippers. You know how they say of high fashion
models that clothes 'hang well' on them? Daryl was like that.
Culture, or his Saville Row version of it, hung well on him. At
least, on the surface it did."

She looked back through the screen door—to see if
her husband was listening—then turned to me with a conspiratorial
smile. "Let me be plain with you," she said. "I feel
the need to be understood, after being so misunderstood by those
policemen. I didn’t really like Daryl. There was something wrong
with him; and, while Sarah has never told me anything specific in
confirmation, her hatred of him is confirmation enough. It’s easy
to say that she inherited her mother’s madness and to attribute her
hatred to that. That’s how my husband, Arthur, feels. But I don’t.
Daryl did something to that girl, something unforgivably cruel. An
unpardonable sin. And that’s why she hates him."

Mrs. Weinberg smiled again. "You don’t believe
me. I’ve queered it by talking like a poetry teacher."

"I read," I said testily.

"I meant no offense. It’s just that I get
enthusiastic about things that other people generally think are
fanciful. Read enough poems and you look to the patterns beneath the
surfaces. You also begin to see probabilities the way certain
artifacts have to fulfill themselves. Daryl Lovingwell was such an
artificial creature, so plumped with superficial grace, that I found
myself reading him like a poem. And unless my genre expectations are
misfounded, he was not at all the man he appeared to be."

I shook my head and said, "Let me 'be plain'
with you, too. Three days ago Daryl Lovingwell hired me to do a job
for him, a job that would have been unnecessary unless, as he
claimed, he loved his daughter. Yesterday he died; and Sarah told me,
in all candor, that she hated her father and that he hated her. The
thing of it is, they were both so damn convincing.

"I’ve spoken to a man today who knew
Lovingwell intimately and he believed that the Professor loved his
daughter. He also thought that Sarah might have killed him. There’s
that, and the police, and Sarah’s hatred on the one hand; and on
the other, there’s you, Mrs. Weinberg, and your intuition."

"And you," she said. "And your
intuition."

I laughed. "Yes. And me, too. At least, until
the police force me to choose sides."

"There are probably ten thousand reasons,"
she said, "why I can picture Daryl Lovingwell as something other
than the debonair anglophile he pretended to be. Everything from the
tone of voice he used when calling Sarah home to supper to the way he
stood at the graveside when he buried Claire, his wife. But not one
of them would serve as conclusive evidence. And taken together, they
would probably tell you more about me than they would about him. I’m
sorry. I wish I could be of more help. But I can’t give you what
you want, Mr. Stoner. Only he could tell you the truth about himself.
And he’s dead."

Mrs. Weinberg looked up Middleton to the Lovingwell
house. "I’ve lived on this street for twenty years; and in all
that time I’ve never seen anything like the past two days."

As I walked off the porch I could hear her asking her
husband who it was who had written that poem about the householder
who rakes up a severed hand.

I was angry when I walked back to the Lovingwell
house. If I had found a stone to kick, I would have sent it flying
right through some burgher’s picture window. The night was alive
with gossip. In every living room of every house in Clifton, someone
was talking about Sarah Lovingwell. And by morning the newspapers
would have the story, too. Everyone in greater Cincinnati would know,
or think they knew, a little bit about Daryl Lovingwell’s death.
Everyone but me.

The police would start getting anonymous tips. Some
less reluctant, less neighborly Rose Weinberg would recall seeing
Sarah walking down Middleton at noon on Tuesday. Bidwell would read
the morning Enquirer and decide that here was where chivalry must
end. He or somebody at Sloane would remember the missing document (if
there wasn’t some dogged little federal cop tailing me already).
And the Cincinnati police would put two and two together and ask me
to check the figures. That’s where you’re going to wind up,
Harry, I told myself. As a police accountant. And poor misunderstood
Sarah L. will get twenty to life. And you’ll get a suspension and a
light jail sentence. If you’re lucky.

If you’re not lucky, you’ll get a felony murder
charge, a criminal espionage charge. Withholding evidence. Abetting a
felon. Demonstrating carelessness, sentimentality, and
self-destructive impulses. Or, maybe, Lester Grimes will do some
addition of his own and invite you to step out into the dusty streets
for an old-fashioned shootout. I pressed my coat pocket impulsively.
It was there, like a lump of scrap beneath the cloth. But it won’t
do you any good, Harry, I told myself. Not unless you shoot first.
And you’re far too fair-minded a gent for that.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t admit that I might have
been wrong about one of the Lovingwells. Like the joke goes, I may be
crazy but I’m not stupid. I knew I could be wrong about any number
of things. What made me so damn mad was that I still didn’t know
what right and wrong meant in this affair. Worse, I had the awful
feeling that, if it happened the next day that another mild-mannered,
sensible-seeming Lovingwell came to me with an oath on his lips and
love, like a chocolate stain, on his sleeve, I would probably do the
same things and end up in the same spot. What it comes down to in the
end is that you hope for the things that you don’t get out of life;
and I’m so constructed that a doomed love, no matter how doomed,
wins my chips every time.

I jerked the car door open, threw myself down on the
seat and stared blankly at the Lovingwell house. You couldn’t see
door or window or gable. Just a black mass, a little darker than the
night sky. Goddarnn it! I said to myself, I want to find something
out! I don’t care what it is. I was sick of holding it all in my
head, like those chess problems I used to try to solve when I was
pretending to be Philip Marlowe. Ten moves and I ’d forget who I
was, where I was, and what I was doing. The hell with it, I told
myself. Tomorrow we go to the police. Let them take care of Sarah
Lovingwell. She never wanted your help anyway. And as for Lovingwell
pére . . . like Rose Weinberg had said, he was past caring.
 

10

I drove up to the Bee and had a steak and a Scotch, a
Scotch and another Scotch. I shot the bull with a couple of friends
and actually found myself flirting with a blonde schoolgirl who
looked vaguely like Kate. She wasn’t having any, so I drifted back
to the bar. I thought maybe Bullet would show up; but he didn’t.
And by one o’clock in the morning, I was too loaded to care. I
dropped by the schoolgirl’s table on my way out, to give her one
last try.

"Think I’ll take you home with me," I
said to her.

"Think again," she snapped.

I was still thinking when I found my car, parked
beneath the winter skeleton of a maple tree on Telford. "Big
deal college girl," I said as I fiddled with the door. Something
cold and metallic brushed against my cheek. I didn’t even have to
look. Not on a dark sidestreet, on a moonless December night. "It’s
in my pants pocket," I said. "Right rear. I’ve only got
twenty bucks, but it’s yours if you want it."

I heard the guy laugh softly. Then I heard him cock
the piece. The hair on my arms and on the back of my neck stood on
end. "Jesus Christ," I said. "Don’t shoot me, buddy.
Take the money!"

"I got your permission?" a wry Negro voice
returned. He shoved me against the car. "Don’t even think
about moving."

I spread-eagled against the car door while the gunman
picked my pants pocket. He took the wallet out. "Says you’re a
private detective," he said and laughed. "You best find you
a different line of work."