Dead Letter (17 page)

She shook her head again.

"Then we’ve got to have help."

"The FBI," Sarah said with astonishment. "I
don’t believe this is happening!"

McMasters wasn’t pleased with what I told him,
either.

"That kind of blows our deal, doesn’t it,
Harry? I mean if the girl can’t get in touch with him, why
shouldn’t I just put both of you back in jail?"

"For one thing, she’s innocent," I said.
"And for another Grimes wants to kill her. If you want him,
you’ll keep her on the outside."

"I’ll think it over," he said.

McMasters thought it over and called back fifteen
minutes later to tell me that the protection had been arranged.
"They’re already at your place."

"Am I supposed to contact them‘?"

"No. Just let things happen."

"Act normal, huh?"

"Your shadow is an agent named Ted Lurman. He’s
about six-foot, thirty-five years old, blonde hair. He’ll be
wearing a blue pin-stripe suit and he’ll have sunglasses on."

"In December?"

"You tell me, Harry. He’s supposed to be in
the lobby of the Delores right now. Two other guys, dressed as phone
company repairmen, will be coming to the apartment to look after the
girl."

"O.K.," I said. "I guess that’ll
have to do. Is there anything you want to tell me about the
Lovingwell case?"

He laughed. "You’ve got brass. All right, we
did uncover a couple of odd things. Over the last few months,
Lovingwell had been reorganizing his finances. Converting bonds,
selling off stocks. Withdrawing funds from his savings account at
Central Trust. He may have been planning a trip of some kind; but we
can’t connect it up with the murder."

"Maybe he was afraid of someone," I said,
thinking of that suppositious accomplice. "Maybe he was planning
to get out."

"We thought of that. That fellow O’Hara hasn’t
been too cooperative—especially after we roughed up his kid. But it
seems that he and Lovingwell had some sort of grudge match going on,
only it dates back a lot of years."

"What about?” .

"You ask a lot of questions for a guy harboring
a suspected felon. By the way, the lab has finished with Lovingwell’s
body. The girl can claim it any time she wants."

"I’ll tell her," I said.

While I finished getting dressed, Sarah called her
Friends of Nature again.

"What’s the word?" I said when I came
back into the living room.

"Sean can’t get in touch with him until
tonight."

Sarah looked at me anxiously. "Maybe it’s a
good thing you called the FBI. Are you going out?"

"I’m going to talk to Michael O’Hara. Beth
Hemann, the department secretary, told me that your father wanted to
speak to him on Tuesday morning. I’d like to know why. What do you
think of O’Hara, by the way?"

Sarah gave me one of her odd, disconcerting looks.
But then she was a master of them. "He was good to my mother
before she died. She made him executor of her estate and my trust
fund. She liked him."

"But you don’t."

"He’s all right," she said without
enthusiasm. "He’s run by his wife—or at least he used to be
before they separated—and I don’t care much for her. I had the
feeling that she was involved with my father at one time."

"Recently?" I said with interest.

W Sarah shook her head. "Years ago. Do you want
me to

come with you to see Mike?"

I thought about Lurman and said, "No. You’ll
be safe here. Two FBI men dressed as telephone repairmen will come up
when I leave. I’ll talk to O’Hara, then I’ll come back and we
can all sit down and plot a little strategy?

"How long are we going to have to put up with
this?"

"Until it’s over," I told her.
 

15

Lurman was leaning against a drooping rubber tree in
the tiny lobby. He was trying to look inconspicuous in his pin-stripe
suit and dark green sunglasses, but he’d only succeeded in looking
decent and uncomfortable. When I walked past him, out the front door
of the Delores, he counted ten and followed.

There was snow on the pavement from the previous
day’s storm; and, on Burnet, a woman in a maroon Buick was spinning
her wheels in the slush. From the side she looked like a small-town
widow—thin, thin-lipped, with a stern irreproachable face. But when
she turned my way, she gave me such a pathetic frown that I walked
out into the street and started shoving the rear of her car. I almost
laughed when I caught sight of Lurman, vacillating in an access of
indecision between the lobby and the sidewalk. If he was the FBI’s
idea of discretion, I was in for l an embarrassing afternoon. The
woman’s car finally broke free of the ice. She waved at me through
the rear window and I could see her tight little mouth form the
sentence: "God bless you!" After she’d driven off,
weaving through the slush and coughing blue exhaust into the morning
air, I crooked a finger at hapless Lurman and started down the side
stairs that led to the parking lot.Lurman walked very deliberately to
a black Chevrolet parked in front of the Delores and stood by the
door. He patted the hood a couple of times, in case I hadn’t gotten
the message.

Once I got the Pinto started, I puttered around to
the front of the building, where Lurman pulled out behind me. As we
drove away, I could see two telephone repairmen getting out of a
second black Chevy. The FBI! I thought.

Because of the snow it took me almost ten minutes to
get to Clifton. I kept Lurman in my rearview mirror all the way. We
passed McMicken Hall, looking stately in its mantle of snow, crossed
Riddle, and headed east down St. Clair. I parked in the underground
lot below the Physics Building and waited in the Pinto until Lurman
had found a place of his own. I was making jokes about him, but
deep-down I was happy to have an armed escort.

Lurman followed me at a decent distance into the
Physics Building and down the big, whitewashed hallway to O’Hara’s
office. When he saw me knock at the department door, he stopped at a
marble water fountain and pretended to take a drink.

"Hello," Miss Hemann said as I walked up to
her desk. "He’s on his way to a meeting with the Chancellor,
but he might have a few minutes to spare."

"What makes you so sure I didn’t come to talk
to you?"

She threw her hand at me and laughed. "Mr.
Stoner," she said playfully. "Shall I tell him you’re
here?"

"Please."

She went into the inner oflice and came back out a
second later. "You can go in," she said.

O’Hara was looking spry and outdoorsy in an
open-collared flannel shirt.

"Mr. Stoner!" he boomed. "How’s the
detective business'?"

"Right now, not so good."

"Sorry to hear it," he said. "But
don’t despair. Being a mathematician I dabble in statistics and I’d
be willing to bet that there’s some dirty little crime being
committed right now with your name on it."

"Thanks, but I’m booked up. The Lovingwell
murder, for instance."

"Are there no policemen? No courts? No grand
juries?"

"I was kind of hoping we could skip the sarcasm
this trip and talk about your friend."

"What friend?"

"You know. That colleague you wouldn’t tell
any stories about— out of respect."

O’Hara looked at me shrewdly. "Daryl and I
didn’t get along. It’s common knowledge. That doesn’t mean I’m
going to reveal his private life to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that
comes in off the street."

"This Harry’s been hired by Sarah Lovingwell
to look into her father’s death."

O’Hara leaned back in his chair. "Is that
right? I’ve always been fond of Sarah. It’s rather a miracle that
she survived in one piece, given her father’s personality."

I started to say something about his own offspring
but let it pass. "Over the last few days I’ve learned a good
deal about Daryl Lovingwell. Most of it contradictory. On the surface
he seemed to be a charming and intelligent man."

"He was that, certainly. It’s odd how
eccentricities can border on neurosis. Much of Daryl’s character
was poised like that. He sometimes reminded me of a very ornate,
highly polished mirror. Brilliant on the surface, but if you
scratched through the mica . . . there was a very dark side
underneath."

"On the day of his death," I said,
"Lovingwell tried to get in touch with you before phoning his
daughter. Can you think of a reason why he’d be so anxious to
talk?"

"I can think of half a dozen reasons. We went to
a faculty party on Sunday and he bent my ear for an hour or so about
his work and about Sarah."

"What about Sarah?"

"He was worried about her," O’Hara said.
"He was afraid she was slipping off into depression. You know
her mother was a depressive. I suppose he saw some of the same
symptoms in Sarah. I think it frightened him. But then it was always
hard to tell what Daryl really thought about anything." O’Hara
seemed to study my face for a second. When he couldn’t find what he
was looking for, he stared dully at the papers on his desk. "We
never hit it off, Daryl and I. He objected to my, shall we say,
athleticism. And his quirks always struck me as posed." He
looked back up at me and smiled like a jackal. "You say 
you’ve spent a few days investigating him? I worked with the man
for eight years and never understood him. I don’t know if he
understood himself. He was a little mad, Daryl Lovingwell."

"You and he had a dispute some years ago?"

O’Hara glared at me, as if I were pushing his good
spirits just a bit too far. "The McPhail business is a dead
letter. It was only a disagreement over the status of a graduate
student. A sad, good—hearted young man. Daryl was unhappy about the
outcome, and I’d be lying if I said that academic politics can’t
get vicious at times. But there was no bad blood between us
afterward. At least, no blood that hadn’t been bad before."

I thought about what McMasters had told me—about
Lovingwell’s financial arrangements—and said, "You don’t
think he would have left the department because of
this
McPhail business, do you?"

"I told you," he said, coloring. "That
was seven years ago. Anyway, Daryl had an endowed chair. He would
never have left this department."

"One last question?" I said.

"It’ll have to be brief," he said. "I
have a meeting to get to."

"The night that Lovingwell talked to you about
Sarah, did he mention anything about some missing papers?"

"No." O’Hara got up from his desk and I
followed him out of his office. "He mentioned no papers to me,"
he said as he opened the outer door. "Just Sarah. And now you’ll
have to excuse me."

He walked briskly down the hall.

"He doesn’t seem to like my company," I
said to Miss Hemann who was bent over her typewriter.

"That’s hardly fair, is it?" she said
without looking up. "I did tell you he had an appointment."
She stopped typing and eyed me curiously. "Why are you asking
him all these things, anyway?" .

It was a very good question, for which I didn’t
have a good answer. And for some reason I wanted to give her a good
answer. "It’s the job," I said a bit helplessly and then
felt embarrassed for having said it. I sat down on a chair beside the
desk and smiled foolishly at her. "It’s not just idle
curiosity, believe me."

"Oh, I believe you," she said. "But
you sound as if you could use some proof yourself."

"It hasn’t been my brightest week."

"It hasn’t been much of a week for any of us,"
she said drily.

I leaned back in the chair and stared at the
photographs hanging on the wall across from me.

"Do you have any idea what Professor Lovingwell
wanted to talk over with your boss on Tuesday morning?" I asked
her.

"Lord, no," she said. "It could have
been anything."

I thought of what Sarah had told me and said, "Could
it have been about the chairman’s wife?"

Beth Hemann blushed bright red. "What in the
world I do you mean?"

"When people bring the world into it," I
said, "they usually know what is meant."

"I have no idea what you’re talking about,"
she said stiffly. "If anything, Professor Lovingwell probably
wanted to talk about his own family. He’d been having problems with
his daughter, you know."

Who didn’t, I said to myself. Who hadn’t he told
about Sarah? The pattern was unsettling me. First Bidwell at Sloane.
Then O’Hara. And Miss Hemann. And you, too, Harry, I told myself.
You, too. In a certain light all our conversations about his daughter
could be viewed as admonitory and solicitous. Her impetuousness, her
drugs, her communism, her hatred of his work. They all contributed to
a picture of a rather desperate and misguided girl. One who could
easily steal a document or be made to look as if she had. He hadn’t
really lied to me —not in any obvious details. But when I thought
it over, I realized how much of my original reaction to Sarah had
been shaped by comparison to the portrait Lovingwell had drawn. Only
I also realized that a lot of my suspicion had been inspired by the
portrait Sarah had drawn of him. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if
you could know in advance just who was grinding which ax. And why.