Dead Letter (3 page)

"I don’t know," I told him. "It’s
a damn good question."

"And the fresh set of prints?"

"Again, I don’t know. Someone may have started
to pen the safe and been interrupted. Or it could have been an
accident. The safe could have been wiped clean and when someone may
have come along and touched it."

Lovingwell glanced back over his shoulder at the
wall.

"It's beginning to look as if my private study
is about as private as a coach station."

"It’s seen some
curious use," I agreed.

***

At about five-thirty that afternoon, I solved the
case. or, at least, part of it. It was as easy as lifting those
prints off the tumbler and just about as plausible. It was on the
floor of her closet. In the back, wedged tween two shoe boxes. Hidden
the way a child hides when he wants to be caught by his parents and
whisked to supper or to sleep. A yellow manila envelope with the logo
"Sloane National Lab." printed on it. It was empty, but it
was the one.

"That’s it, all right," Lovingwell said
as we sat over two cups of coffee in a dining room with red flock
walls cherrywood sideboards and a huge crystal chandelier overhead.
"You’ve made quick work of this."

"Too quick," I said to him. "The whole
thing stinks."

Lovingwell nodded half-heartedly. "It does seem
careless of her to leave such damning evidence out in the open.
Especially since she knows that I clean the house regularly."

"Careless isn’t the word for it. I’m going
to make you a bet," I told him. "I’m going to bet you
that the prints on the safe are Sarah’s."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning that someone’s trying to set her up.
Or that’s the way it looks now."

"Then she’s innocent?" he said hopefully.

"I don’t know."

He ducked his head and said, "I wish you did.
Well, at least you’ve made a good start today."

"I guess that depends on what I find out,"
I said to him.
 

3

Given the unusual nature of the evidence I’d come
up with, Lovingwell decided to postpone his appointment at Sloane. I
was call him at home as soon as I found out whether the prints on the
safe were actually Sarah’s. I understood his anxiety—I was a
little intrigued myself. And while I don’t like to tailor my work
to fit anybody else’s time-table, I made an exception—my second
on the case—for at exceptional little man. As soon as I got back to
the Delores—the four-story brownstone apartment house I've lived in
for the last eleven years—I unpacked the kit, flipped on the Zenith
Globemaster so that I’d be within earshot of a voice, pulled a
folding chair up to my roll-top desk, got out the magnifying glass
that came with the O.E.D., and went to work.

Reading fingerprints is like reading a road map—there
are certain keys that tell most of the story. With a print you look
first to see which of the three basic types you’re dealing with:
loop, whorl, or arch. That alone can often decide the question. If
you find a whorl print on an item and your suspect shows up with
loops, you’ve eliminated one suspect. It gets a lot more
complicated if print-types match up. Then you have to analyze each
one. If you’re lucky and working for a police department, you can
make slides and simply compare transparencies to get a match. If
you’re sitting on a folding chair and working out of an ice-cold
apartment, you spend half an hour plotting bifurcations, hooks, dots,
bridges, and enclosures. You
also smoke half
a pack of cigarettes and constantly remind yourself that it’s
really worth it because no two pairs of hands are alike.

At seven o’clock, with that last piece of
conventional wisdom in mind, I rubbed my eyes, picked up the phone,
and called Daryl Lovingwell.

"I finished checking the prints on the safe with
the others I took from Sarah’s room and from your study."

"And?" he said. "Were you right? Were
they Sarah’s?"

"You’re not going to like this, Professor,"
I said. "But the prints off the tumbler are yours."

Lovingwell agreed to meet me at the Busy Bee on
Ludlow at nine that night. I picked the Bee because I needed a drink.
And if what I suspected was true, I figured Lovingwell was going to
need one, too. I hadn’t been in the Bee in some months. Not since
Kate Davis had left for California in July. It wasn’t as if I’d
been avoiding the place. I just hadn’t had much use for a bar, even
a bar as comfortable as the Bee. Bright and noisy on the lower level,
if you like it bright and noisy, and dark and intimate on the bar
floor, it’s the perfect spot to listen to the bittersweet music of
a cocktail piano and, if you’re lucky, to share a drink with
someone like Kate. Only I hadn’t been having much luck since she’d
gone. I hadn’t wanted to.

When we made the decision to live apart for two years
we’d agreed that there weren’t any strings attached to either one
of us. And maybe for Kate, with her very modern, very liberated sense
of self, there weren’t. Only I was sitting on the other side of a
generation gap, and the longer we were apart the more lonely and
vulnerable I’d begun to feel. Kate saw other partners as definite
possibilities—possibilities that had to be consciously admitted, in
keeping with her feeling that a secret, any secret, was a potential
trap. I saw them as violations of a code.

And best left untalked about. That’s what an
old-fashioned sense of morality will get you every time—an
old-fashioned sense of guilt and shame. So, after a recedivistic
fling or two that I’d indulged in mostly out of a sense of
loneliness and frustration, I’d started staying out of bars and out
of trouble. And scribbling off letters to her like a high school
headache. And trying to keep myself from hopping on the red-eye
flight to San Francisco. All the while telling myself that
capitulating to the Puritan inside me was no way to live—it
certainly wasn’t Kate’s way—that it would be better to do
something impulsive, to hop on that red-eye flight or hop into
someone’s bed for more than a night. Anything to put a finish to a
life that was being lived as if I were awaiting an important call. A
call that I knew, deep down inside, probably wasn’t going to come.

You always have your work, Harry, I kept telling
myself. But that hadn’t seemed as comforting or as interesting an
alternative as it had once seemed. Or, at least, that’s the way I
was feeling when I stepped into the Busy Bee at eight that night.

Hank Greenburg was posted at the bar when I walked
in. I marched straight up to him and ordered a Scotch.

"For chrissake!" he said. "Where have
you been?"

Hank’s a big, gap-toothed man, with a pencil
moustache and a genuine fondness for his regulars. We’d always
gotten along. He slapped a glass on the mahogany bar, filled it to
the brim, and said, "On the house. And don’t argue."

"Who’s arguing‘!" I said.

He looked me over with that proprietary air that only
worried mothers and bartenders can get away with. I was a little
afraid he was about to ask me whether I’d lost any weight. But
after he’d seen me come in with Kate for the better part of a year,
I knew it wasn’t me alone he was thinking of.

Hank bought me a second Scotch and we chatted for a
few minutes. Then I took what was left of the drink over to one of
the booths, sat down, and made ready for Professor Lovingwell—the
man whose imperilled love I was going to save. After thinking that
proposition over for a few minutes, I began to feel very silly and
very low. And I probably would have stayed in that funk all night
long, if another friend whom I hadn’t seen in months hadn’t
clapped his big hand on my shoulder.

"Harry," he said. "Where the hell you
been?"

I smiled before I looked up, because I knew from the
deep, no-nonsense voice exactly who it was and exactly what was going
to happen next. "Bullet" Robinson was one of those men who,
when he claps you on the arm, intends to pick you up and plop you
down in his world. And I knew that that world was a cheerier place
than the spot where I’d been living for the last ten minutes.

He sat down across from me at the booth. A big,
coal-black man. Bigger than I was. With enormous shoulders and an
enormous paunch that tipped the table a little when he leaned forward
and a sleepy, oriental face that made him look rather like a
six-foot, seven-inch B. B. King.

"Bullet!" I said.

"Harry, where you been keeping yourself? I ain’t
seen you up to the store in three months."

Bullet ran the Hi-Fi Gallery in the Clifton Plaza—a
terrific place to browse, full of mellow sound and exotic components
and a lot of laid-back young men and women who talked endlessly that
special language of stereophiles while Bullet presided at the
register like a cheerful black Buddha. I’d known him for better
than fifteen years, ever since he’d been a tight end for the
Bearcats and one of the few local talents who’d made it to the
pros. He’d had seven years with the Lions, before he’d lost that
battle with his belly for all time and been cut in training camp.
He’d come back to Cincinnati after that, bought the stereo store
with his nest egg, and grown cheerfully and loquaciously prosperous.
He was always full of football stories and unsound advice. And I was
very grateful for the company.

"What you mopin’ around for?" he asked
tartly. "You going to spoil your good looks. And then none of
them ladies’ll want you."

"How’s business, Bullet?" I said to him.

"Oh, it’s going."

"Not like the old days, huh? Pigskin glory."

"You ain’t going to believe this, Harry,"
he said. "But I never liked football."

"I’ve heard this, Bullet."

"No you ain’t." He picked up my Scotch
and raised it a waitress. "One more of these, honey. Straight
up. I’m not kidding," he said, turning back to me. "You
know that shit they feed you—how if you’re black, it’s
athletics or nothing? Well, in 1965 it was true. I had a vooice to
make, Harry. It was a football scholarship or Nam. While nice white
boys like you was trotting down to the allergist, I was earning my
II-S by tackling dummies and pushing around blocking sleds."

"My II-S didn’t do me much good," I said.

"Yeah, but you was a patriot. Anyway, I don’t
call no military police work servin’ your time."

I laughed. "It got hairy enough on occasion."

"Bro’ you sound like Larry. That po’ soul
don’t know the war is over yet."

Larry Soldi was Bullet’s hired man.

"Look at these hands," Bullet said.
"They’re a wide receiver’s dream. But these hands are what’s
costing me four hundred dollars a month in alimony. You know about
alimony, don’t you, Harry?"

The waitress brought Bullet his drink and we sat
quietly for a minute, sipping our liquor. I knew I was acting the
straight man, but I just couldn’t resist. "How did your hands
cost you four hundred dollars a month?" I asked him.

"‘Bout time," he said. "We were
playing in Green Bay in early seventy. It was so damn cold that most
of the guys were wearing gloves. Only I’m a wide receiver so I had
to go bare-handed. Well, I’m walking up and down the sideline,
trying to keep warm, when one of the Green Bay cheerleaders—a
blonde girl with a shit-eating grin on her face and the devil in her
blue eyes—comes sashaying up to me. She bats those eyes like a
schoolgirl and says, ‘I got a little bet going with the other
girls?’ She says it like that, like a question. I say, ‘Yes,
mama?’ ‘I bet those girls that there’s a relation between the
length and thickness of a man’s fingers and the length and
thickness of his . . .’ She just looks down to the spot, not shy
but conclusive. ‘Uh’m,’ I say. ‘Why you pick me?’ ‘Well,’
she drawls, ‘you’re the only one not wearing gloves, except for
that boy over there.’ She gestures to Bobby Lee Jackson, the
quarterback. I take a look, and, shit, if his fingers ain’t as
small around as chicken bones. Then I look back at my own paws and up
at her. Only she hasn’t stopped looking down at that spot. Kind of
like the game was being played down there and it was third and long?"

"I get the picture," I told him.

"I had more trouble staying on my feet during
the first half than a hog on ice. Every time I looked over to the
sideline, I saw her, one hand on her hip and her eyes narrowed like
she was appraising a jewel. Half-time comes around and coach says to
me, ‘Bullet you’d better start paying some attention to what’s
going on on the field, or you ain’t going to be starting next
half.’ Christ, I wasn’t pulling no attitude or nothing. I was
just jinxed. I tried to get my mind right before we left the locker
room, but the first thing I see as we start walking back to the field
is that girl, standing up in the runway and staring at her hands like
they was a map. When she sees no one but me is looking, she kisses
one of those long fingers like she done burned it—a sweet little
peck—and rubs her tummy with the other hand.

"I had the worst hard-on that second half I’ve
ever had in my life. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it,
either. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t run. I sure as hell couldn’t
go into the game, because it was a national broadcast and they go
crazy if you touch your groin after you been speared. With that tent
pole in my pants I could have been the laughing stock of the
country."