Dead Letter (5 page)

Once inside the apartment, I phoned Daryl Lovingwell
at the University and got the Physics Department secretary on the
line.

"He’s not here," she said nervously. "He
had to go home."

I didn’t like the quaver in her voice. "What’s
wrong?"

I asked her.

"You’ll just have to talk to the Professor,"
she said and hung up.

I dialed Lovingwell’s home, let the phone ring ten
times—just like they tell you to do in the phone book—and was
about to give up when someone picked up the receiver.

"Lovingwell?" I said.

"Who is this?" a man’s husky voice
replied.

I had the terrible feeling that I knew that voice,
that I’d heard it before and not in any classroom.

"I want to talk to Daryl Lovingwell," I
said.

"He can’t come on the line," the man
said.

"What’s going on here? Tell him it’s Stoner.
Harry Stoner. I’m sure he’ll want to talk to me."

"Oh, hello, Stoner," the man said affably.
"This is Sid McMasters."

I had a heart·sick moment. McMasters was a homicide
dick with the C.P.D. and I knew his voice because I’d worked with
him when I was on the D.A.’s staff better than a decade before. I
didn’t want to ask him, but I did—in a dull, weary voice that
made me sound like my own father. "What’s happened, Sid?"

"There’s been an accident here," he said.
"Lovingwell’s been shot. At least, we think it’s
Lovingwell."

"Oh, Christ/’ I said softly. "Is he badly
hurt?"

"He’s dead, Harry.
We aren’t sure, yet, but it looks like he may have killed himself
with a handgun."

***

It had happened to me before. Not often, but it had 
happened. I’d lost a client to suicide or to some stupid piece of
violence, because in my business a good half of  the people who
come to me should have gone to a psychiatrist instead. The paranoid
ones, tormented by creatures of conscience. And the bullies, looking
for someone to hurt or to do their hurting for them. It had happened.
But never so unexpectedly, so completely without warning. Lovingwell
just hadn’t seemed the type.

And, of course, what are you supposed to do? Pack it
in and pretend that you don’t care why a gentle, rather eccentric
soul decided to kill himself? And even if you could do that, which I
couldn’t, what about the daughter and the untidy little secret the
dead man entrusted to you? What do you do with it—after what it had
cost him? Do you go to the cops or to the FBI, which is precisely
what he didn’t want to do himself? Do you turn it over to someone
else? Probate it like another piece of property—one leather couch,
one portrait of Madame Récamier, and, oh yes, one missing document
that the Professor didn’t want the world to know was missing? Or do
you get on with the business at hand? And add to it a bonus
item—free, gratis, compliments of Harry the Sentimentalist? One
dead man and the reasons why he died, to be produced along with a
missing document that he may have died for.

It’s hard to explain. In a way you have to be a
bodyguard or a cop to understand the peculiar loyalties you feel to
your charge. And when that charge dies, even by his own hand, you
have to understand the mute, oddly professional grief a cop or a
bodyguard feels. As if life itself were part of the job and death an
outrageous violation of your contract. A personal failure. An insult
to the profession. And since it’s your job, what you do well, you
simply can’t leave it at that. At least, I couldn’t.

I went into that little cubicle that the realty
company calls a kitchen, fixed myself a cup of coffee, and gave
myself about half an hour to calm down. Then I walked out to the car
and drove through the snow to the Physics Building on St. Clair—a
great gray smokestack of a building with a crenelated top. In the
afternoon light it looked like a lonely, abandoned battlement
towering above Burnet Woods. The Professor’s ivory tower. It was my
first stop. And if I were lucky, I might find out why that secretary
had sounded so grimly abstracted when I’d called at noon. Stop two
would be the Lovingwell home. And if I were lucky again, the cops
would have finished by the time I got there and I would have Sarah
Lovingwell to myself.
 

5

The secretary of the Physics Department, Beth Hemann,
was a thin, red-headed young woman with the pale, trembly, earnest
face of a convent girl—one who had taken what the sisters had to
say to heart. She still dressed for the schoolroom—tartan plaid
skirt and plain white blouse.

There might have been a smudge of lipstick on her
lips and a touch of henna in her hair, but they seemed to mark the
limits of her daring. The calendar on her desk listed the feast days
in red.

The office in which we sat—she at her desk and me
in a wooden chair across from her—was surprisingly old-fashioned,
considering the streamlined exterior of the physics complex. The
whitewashed walls were crowded with photographs of past chairmen and
of departmental functionaries. The furniture was varnished oak—that
spartan wood that breaks the undergraduate heart. With the exception
of a 3-M copier humming mournfully in a corner, it was an absolutely
lifeless place. And the red-haired girl looked very small and lonely
in its center.

"This day has been unbelievable," she
confided. "I hope to God I never see another one like it. Poor
Professor Lovingwell. Poor, poor man."

"When I spoke to you at noon," I said to
her. "You told me he’d been called home."

"Yes," she said absently. "I didn’t
know, then. He’d gotten a phone call at eleven-thirty from Mr.
Bidwell at Sloane. All the in-coming calls are routed through the
office, so I’m sure it was Mr. Bidwell calling. Then Professor
Lovingwell came down here to ask if Professor O’Hara was in.
Professor O’Hara’s the Chairman of the Department. I said he’d
gone to the Faculty Club for lunch. The Professor told me he had a
phone call to make and left."

"Do you know whom he called?" I said.

"No. We don’t have anything to do with
outgoing calls. But he looked very upset when he came back to the
oflice. It scared me the way he looked."

"How?"

She tugged nervously at the collars of her white
blouse and said, "I remember thinking he looked as if someone
had died. I even asked him if anything had happened. Any family
trouble."

"And what did he say?"

"He just said he would be going home for an hour
or so and not to forward his calls."

"But you forwarded mine."

Beth Hemann ducked her head rather prettily. "I
was worried. I thought someone should contact him. I even phoned his
daughter."

"When was that?"

"At . . ." she looked at a yellow tablet on
her desk. "At twelve-fifty. I made a schedule for the police.
They asked me to."

She looked up at me expectantly and I began to think
that she was a little glad of the attention. That this rather dull
process of question-and-answer was a relief to her after the shock of
Lovingwell’s death. That she actually savored it—as if it were
her modest way of flirting.

It made me like her.

"What did Sarah say?" I said with a smile.

"She said she’d go right home and look after
him," Miss Hemann said. "Twenty minutes later a policeman
came in. It’s just been unbelievable."

"Do you think I could talk to your boss a
moment?" I asked her.

She made a concerned face, and I understood that her
boss had had a trying afternoon and that, like most good secretaries,
she wanted to spare him any additional worry.

"I’ll be gentle," I said and she laughed.

"All right, I’ll ask him."

She got up from behind her desk, smoothed her skirt,
walked over to the office door, and knocked once on the frosted glass
insert.

"Yes?" a hearty baritone voice called out.

"A gentleman to see, you, Professor. It’s
about Professor Lovingwell."

"O.K. Show him in."

Michael O’Hara was sitting behind his desk and,
when I walked in, he got to his feet and threw a huge smile my way,
as if that were his version of a handshake. A tall robust man of
fifty with a square, sallow Irish face, he looked more like a high
school gym coach than a physics professor—all hail-fellow good
cheer. But even at a first ‘look, there was something phoney about
his heartiness and his fund-raiser’s grin. Maybe I just had trouble
believing that anybody could be that cheerful without being a
predator at heart. His office was large and nondescript, except for a
wooden crucifix propped on the desk.

"So, how can I help you?" O’Hara said.

I sat down across from him and said, "You could
begin by telling me if you know why Professor Lovingwell tried to get
in touch with you this morning."

"Ah, Daryl," O’Hara said mildly. "What
is your interest in this business? You’re not working with the
police, are you?"

"No," I said. "I was working for
Professor Lovingwell."

"Doing what?" he said pleasantly.

"Investigating a private matter."

O’Hara snorted in disbelief. "He hired you—a
private detective?"

I nodded.

"That was Daryl," he said, still smiling.
"He was one of the oddest men I ever knew."

Smiling Michael O’Hara was beginning to get on my
nerves. "Could you answer my question?" I asked him.

"Sure," he said affably and hunched forward
in his chair. "I could tell you lots of interesting stories. But
I’m not going to."

"Why not?" I said.

"Because the man is dead. And whatever job you
were hired to carry out died with him. You have no business asking me
questions about Daryl Lovingwell."

He’d tried to say it with an impersonal scorn—the
way he might browbeat a student or a teaching assistant. But some
genuine anger had colored his voice. When I asked him what he had
against private detectives, he started to smile again.

"Nothing," he said. "I just don’t
believe in telling stories about a dead man who happened to be a
colleague. I’ll tell you this much. He wasn’t a happy man. I
don’t think he ever enjoyed his work, which was odd because he was
very good at it."

"You think that’s why he killed himself?"

"Oh, God, Mr. Stoner, how do I know? Why does
anyone kill himself? It’s an irrational thing. Now, if you’ll
excuse me, I have work to do."

I walked back out to the secretary’s desk and told
Beth Hemann that her boss was a difficult man.

She pinked and said deiiantly, "He’s a fine
man. He’s just had a terrible afternoon. He was close to Professor
Lovingwell and he’s not happy with the publicity about his death.
The police and the newspaper people have been pestering him since the
body was discovered. Come back in a few days. I’m sure he’ll be
more cooperative then."

Two squad cars were parked in front of the Lovingwell
house when I drove up Middleton at four that afternoon. A camera crew
was scurrying across the snowy lawn, and several other cars—including
Sarah’s tan V.W., Sean O’Hara’s blue Dodge van, and
Lovingwell’s Jaguar—were lined up in the driveway. The place was
busy, which as going to make my job difiicult. I thought about going
back to the Delores—O’Hara wouldn’t be following me any
more—and calling on the Lovingwell girl later in the evening. Only
that wasn’t going to make the questions wanted her to answer any
easier to ask; and then there was no guarantee she’d be willing to
talk to me after a long, terrible day with the police and the
reporters. I waasn’t sure how to handle it. I wasn’t sure how
much Sarah knew about me and about what I’d been hired to
investigate. Staring at that fine burgher’s home, I realized that I
wasn’t sure of anything yet. Who was allied with whom? Who was a
friend, who an enemy? Lovingwell’s suicide had set the whole
problem topsy-turvy, and it was like looking` at a chessboard that
somebody had bumped into in the middle game—pieces scattered
everywhere and no clues about how to set them back up.

Well, one clue. Something had gone very wrong early
in the day. So wrong that Lovingwell had killed himself.

It was a big, vague clue, obscured by lots of
mysterious doings—the theft of the document, the phone call from
Bidwell, the second call, Sean O’Hara and his black friend. The
police were probably on to most of it; but I had one advantage over
them. I had been in on the case from the start and I knew what they
did not—that Sarah Lovingwell was somehow involved.

I started up the walk to the front door when a police
guard stepped off the porch and asked to see my I.D. I told him to
call Sergeant McMasters outside. Five minutes later, Sid came out.

"Hello, Harry," he said.

"Sid. Can I talk to you?"

He tipped his fedora back on his head and ran a hand
through his stiff red hair. Sid has the face of a prize doll at a
county fair: carrot-topped, chubby-cheeked, with dull, unblinking
blue eyes that are the only true indicators of his character—which
is a cop’s blend of thug and deadpan comic. I’d known him for
about ten years and was as close to being his friend as any civilian
could be, although you never know when a veteran cop’s going to
decide that you’re one of them.