Dead Letter (9 page)

Within five minutes, a thin, dapper man of about
forty half-walked, half-marched up one of the trails to my bench.

"Louis Bidwell, sir," he said, extending a
hand. There was nothing rustic about Louis Bidwell’s looks. His
blond hair was cropped in military fashion, short at the back and
sides; and he sported an immaculately trimmed mustache that gave his
stern Southerner’s face a bit of dash. He looked like a young,
hard-driving Atlanta business executive, one who had served six years
in the Army and was now attached to the Reserves. Good company, a
lady’s man, a bit of a drinker, and hard as nails. You could see
that toughness clearly in his eyes, which were the cold, distant blue
of a winter sky.

"We’re having a bit of a problem around heah
today, Mr. Stoner," he said in that smooth Southern voice.
"Apparently some muskrats got into the ventilatin’ system of
the accelerator."

"Muskrats?"

"Yes, sir. They’ve colonized a section of the
park near the lake."

"There’s a lake out there, too?" I said.

"Yes, sir!" he said and almost clicked his
heels. "We’ve gone to a good deal of trouble to preserve the
natural beauty of this area."

"I think you’ve improved on it."

"Well, we wanted our personnel to feel as if
they were working next to nature and to discourage the notion, which,
I’m sorry to say, is all too prevalent about atomic research, that
we are somehow tamperin’ with nature. The men out heah are no
different than you and I, and they’re doing important work."

"I’d like to talk to you about one of your
personnel," I
said. "Daryl
Lovingwell."

"A sad thing," Bidwell said sternly. "I’ve
known the Professor intimately for ten years and, in all that time,
our relationship was nothing but cordial and sincere. Make no
mistake, that kind old man is going to be missed."

"You called Lovingwell on Tuesday morning, about
eleven-thirty. Can you tell me what you and he discussed?"

Bidwell gave me a soft, reproachful look. "I
don’t want you to take what I’m going to say as an insult. But,
before I answer that question, I’d like to know what interest you
have in the matter."

"Fair enough. At the time of his death I was
working for Professor Lovingwell."

"In what capacity‘?"

"He hired me to recover some papers that were
stolen from his safe."

Bidwell looked at me uneasily. "You are a
private detective?" he asked.

"Yes."

"I see," he said in a voice that made it
clear that the fact did not sit well with him. "I take it that
you suspect some connection between the theft of the papers you
mentioned and the Professor’s suicide?"

"I’m not sure. The Professor’s daughter has
hired me to look into her father’s death, which wasn’t a suicide,
by the way."

"What!" Bidwell said with astonishment. For
a second his face hardened into absolute fury. "Are you playing
games with me, mister!"

"Lovingwell was murdered," I said. "I’ve
just talked to the police."

"Murdered," he said savagely. He looked
quickly around the little forest, as if he were afraid that someone
had loosed snakes, as well as muskrats, in his preserve. Then he
turned back to me. "You and I had better have a little chat,
Stoner. Under the circumstances, there are some things you ought to
know."

We went up to Bidwell’s office. It looked like a
high-priced psychiatrist’s suite—chrome, glass, and thick-pile
rugs. Except that instead of diplomas Bidwell had hung crossed
Mausers on the paneled walls.

"Have a seat," he said, gesturing to a
chrome-and-leather director’s chair in front of his desk.

"Do the police have any suspects?"

"Not yet."

"Do you?" he said deferentially.

"I know that the Professor was worried about
recovering those papers and that something greatly upset him on
Tuesday morning, after you called."

Bidwell looked thoughtfully at a folder on his desk.
I tried to make something out of that look, but couldn’t decipher
it. "He didn’t mention any papers to me," he said after a
moment. "Our conversation was purely personal." Bidwell
blushed as if he’d said a dirty word.

"You say you’re workin’ for his daughter?"
I nodded.

"Well," he said, still reddening. "I’m
afraid she was the subject of our talk."

"What about his daughter?"

"This is most awkward," Bidwell said. "But
I feel you have the right to know. I believe that Professor
Lovingwell was afraid his daughter might do violence to herself or to
him."

It was my turn to gawk, blush, and struggle through a
sentence. "He told you that Sarah was dangerous?"

"In so many words, yes. Ever since his wife’s
death seven years ago, that girl’s been nothin’ but trouble.
Daryl came to me several times in the past few years, most recently
on Saturday last, to talk it over. You see I have a daughter who’s
a bit younger than Sarah, but they . . . share some of the same
problems. I guess that’s why we got on so well," he said
sternly. And I suddenly realized that that diffidence was his way of
disguising affection for a friend. "That man had two crosses to
bear—first the wife and then the child. But he wasn’t one to
complain. Not even when the girl started messin’ with radicals and
interfering with his work. He said he admired her spirit." Such
charity was clearly incomprehensible to Louis Bidwell, who shook his
head with disgust.

"He’d of been better off stickin’ her in a
home," he said bitterly. "And the wife, too."

"Why would Sarah ‘do violence’ to her
father?"

Bidwell gave me a "you-tell-me-how-it’s-possible"
look.

"For five years that man nursed his wife through
one nervous breakdown after another. Never complained, never asked
for help. In spite of all his efforts, she committed suicide seven
years ago. Of course it was a terrible blow. And I personally don’t
think he was ever the same afterward. The worst of it was that Sarah
blamed him for her mother’s death. She had always been a little
unbalanced, like the mother. And the suicide just toppled her over
the edge. She started runnin’ around with hippies and radicals.
Just last Saturday, the Professor came up heah and confessed he’d
discovered she’d been takin’ drugs. He pretended he wasn’t
concerned. But I had the feeling, when we got done, that he feared
she might do violence. Either to herself or to him."

"Did he say that?"

"In so many words."

"And your call Tuesday morning?"

"Just to follow up on what we’d talked over on
Saturday afternoon. He didn’t seem upset on the phone. But when I
heard the news of his suicide . . . I’ll be honest, I blamed
Sarah."

"But you didn’t tell the police that'?"

"Out of courtesy to him. I don’t think he told
another soul what he told me. He was a sensitive and extremely
private man. And every time he’d mention Sarah it was only to
apologize or excuse her behavior. He loved that girl."

"And now that you know he didn’t kill himself,
that he was murdered?"

"I honestly don’t
know," Bidwell said. "It’s a terrible thing to think that
a daughter would kill her own father."

***

It was, indeed, a terrible thought. There’s
mischief and there’s crime, and then there are acts that seem to go
beyond our conventional notions of mayhem straight to some old,
fearful spot in the brain. I remember still, vividly, a custody case
that I worked on when I was just starting out. The man and woman
fought constantly over the child; then, one afternoon, the wife
wrapped the little girl in a gasoline-soaked blanket and left her,
blazing, on the husband’s porch. I felt that night, when I went
home to the Delores, as if I had seen a nightmare seep into the clean
day. It’s one reason why I could never be a cop. You can only
experience so much of that kind of cruelty before it ceases to be a
limit—a kind of boundary to what human beings are capable of—and
starts to become a law. And when you begin to measure people by that
standard, you don’t think of them as human beings anymore, but as
things—dangerous things.

As a rule I treat other folks as if they were pretty
much like me—built according to the same ratio of reason and
madness. But even allowing for a bit of mathematical error, the
Lovingwells were not like you and me. Whether they belonged in that
malignant netherworld where human acts cease to be human, I didn’t
know. Sarah didn’t look like a killer, for what that was worth.
Even her implacable hatred could be explained away, since I’d
talked with Bidwell. But that’s a bad habit—explaining things
away. And given the fact that my life had been threatened twice, I
didn’t want to make the mistake of substituting a prejudice for a
fact, even if it were a comforting prejudice. This is a hard world,
Harry, I told myself, as I walked back down the avenue of ginkos to
the visitor’s lot. And it’s naive to believe that children always
honor their parents, like the good book recommends, although the
distance between dishonor and murder was still enough to give me
pause.

Bidwell could have been exaggerating his story.
Disgust, anger, any number of motives could do that to a man. Of
course, he hadn’t looked the type to be rattled by death; but he
hadn’t looked the type to be chummy, either. Yet he had told me a
great deal more than I’d expected. Well, more and less. There had
been no talk about the document, no mention on his part of
Lovingwell’s papers, or of the "trouble" Sid McMasters
said Lovingwell had been in at the lab. And that was damn curious.
Any self-respecting security officer in the world would keep tabs on
secret papers going into or out of his establishment, particularly if
he’d been having an espionage problem. Bidwell had to know that
Lovingwell had checked the document out on Saturday afternoon; yet
he’d made no effort to recover it after the Professor’s death on
Tuesday. Maybe Louis Bidwell wasn’t being as candid as he’d
wanted to appear. I drove back to town thinking about Bidwell and
about what he had and hadn’t told me.
 

9

It didn’t take a detective to see there had 
been trouble at the Lovingwell house when I drove up Middleton at six
that night. Squad cars crowded the street, and there was sweet
cordite smoke drifting through the dusky air. I parked behind a city
ambulance and hopped out of the Pinto. A dozen uniformed police were
strutting along the sidewalk between the patrol cars. They had tough,
anxious looks on their faces. On the neighboring porches children and
parents stood in tight groups, talking actively to each other and,
now and again, pointing to the Lovingwell home. In the distance, the
scream of a siren floated away toward a hospital or a precinct house.
Whatever the problem had been, it was settled now. But my heart was
pounding hard as I walked up to one of the patrolmen—a young cop
wearing a hard white helmet and carrying a vicious-looking pump
shotgun in his hands—and asked him what had happened.

"There was a little trouble here," he said
coyly.

"Look," I said. "I work for Sarah
Lovingwell and I’m asking you what happened?"

"You work for the girl‘?" he said. "Maybe
you’d better me with me."

He led me through the clump of patrol cars onto the
lawn and up the concrete pathway to the front door. There was blood
on the stoop. A good deal of it.

"Jesus," I said under my breath. "Was
anyone killed?"

The cop kept walking. "One of our men is down,"
he said stiffly. "We don’t know how bad, yet."

"The girl?" I said. "Sarah?"

He didn’t answer.

We walked through the front door. The scene on the
lawn had been a small gathering compared to the convention in the
entrance hall. There were so many men in the passageway that I had to
stand beside the Chinese cabinet while the cop cleared a path to the
living room. Once inside, I spotted Sid McMasters sitting on the buff
leather couch and shouted to him.

"Stoner," he said. "Come over here."

"What in hell happened?" I asked him when
I’d worked my way to the sofa. He stared at me grimly. "I sent
a squad car up here to pick up the Lovingwell girl. One of her
friends didn’t want her to come along. There were some words and he
started shooting."

"Was it a big guy in cowboy duds?"

Sid gave me a look that straightened my spine. "Just
how did you know that?"

"I was here about four hours ago. I saw him
then. He was waiting for Sarah."

"Yeah? Well, he shot a patrolman in the stomach.
The back-up squad didn’t know what was going down inside—some
sort of goddamn mix·up—and the son-of-a-bitch got out the back
door."

"And the girl?"

"We’ve got her and the O’Hara boy in the
lock-up right now."

"Why did you decide to pick her up, Sid?" I
asked him.

"Those pictures you gave us," he said. "We
ran makes on all of them and a couple came up dirty. A bombing at a
Tennessee nuclear plant."