Dead Letter (6 page)

"I can use the break," he said. "It’s
messy in there. The daughter’s all upset and the lab boys haven’t
quite finished. What’s your interest in this thing, anyway?"

"Lovingwell hired me to look into a burglary
that occurred over the weekend."

"Yeah‘! Why didn’t he call us?"

"It was a personal thing. He didn’t want to
call the law in if he could get the items back without a fuss."

"What was stolen?"

"Some papers from his safe. Nothing you’d be
interested in."

McMasters looked at me cagily. "You sure about
that, Harry?"

"Sid," I said. "Wou1d I lie to an old
friend like you?"

"I hope not, Harry, because I wouldn’t like it
if you did," he said. "Not a bit. In fact, I’d hate it."

"I’m just an innocent bystander in this
thing," I told him. "I came by to pay my respects and see
if Miss Lovingwell wanted me to keep investigating the theft."

"Uh-huh."

"Do you know why he did it?"

"He didn’t leave a note," McMasters said,
"if that’s what you mean. From what we can piece together so
far, he’d been depressed about his work. The security man out at
Sloane, Louis Bidwell, phoned him this afternoon. We’re not sure
right now—those federal boys are like clams—but Lovingwell may
have been in some trouble at the lab. They have been having a problem
with security leaks out there or so I’ve been told. Anyway, he
called his daughter after talking to Bidwell, then went home and shot
himself. She claims he wasn’t upset on the phone, that it was just
a routine call about when she was coming home today."

"Could I talk to her?"

"It’s 0.K. with me, if it’s O.K. with her."

We walked past a knot of plainclothesmen into the
livg room, where Sarah Lovingwell was sitting on the buff leather
couch. Sean O’Hara sat next to her holding her hand. From the
expression on her face, he could have been holding a tree limb.
O’Hara’s eyes lit when he saw me, just a brief flare like an
ember exploding in a dead fire; then his face went cold again.

"Miss Lovingwell‘?" McMasters said.
"Harry Stoner wants to talk to you."

She didn’t look up.
 
"I
was working for your father, Miss Lovingwell. I wonder if I could
talk to you for a minute?"

"She’s in shock, man. Can’t you see she’s
in shock?" It was O’Hara.

"I’m all right," Sarah Lovingwell said
hoarsely. Her voice surprised me. It was deep and smoky, not at all
like her father’s Cambridge drawl. "You said your name is
Stoner?" She blinked a few times as if she were awakening from a
bad dream. "I’ll talk to you." She got up from the couch.
O’Hara stood beside her but she brushed him back. "It’s
O.K., Sean." He glanced at me nervously and sat down. "Let’s
go in the study. They’re done in there, aren’t they?" she
asked McMasters.

"Yes, ma’am," he said.

We walked into the study, and Sarah closed the
sliding panel door behind us. There was a chalk outline on the rug by
the door with a dark wine-colored stain next to the head. I stepped
around the outline as gingerly as if the body were still lying there.
When I turned around, Sarah was staring vacantly at the marks on the
rug.

"Don’t look at it," I said. "We can
go to another room."

"No," she said, waving her hand as if she
were calming a child. "I want to get used to it. When my mother
died, I almost lost my mind. I saw her dead in the hospital, but . .
. it was different when I saw her in the coffin." She laughed
bitterly. "What movie is it where the man looks at his wife in
the coffin and says, ‘What have they done to her face? She never
looked like that"? That’s how it was. I’d seen her dead, but
I hadn’t accepted it. And when I saw her in the box—she’d never
looked like that. So . . ."

She fluttered her hand again. "I want to get
used to it this time. I want to know he’s dead. That way, when I
look at the thing in the coffin, I’ll know it’s really over."

"Why did he do it, Miss Lovingwell? I talked to
him just last night and he didn’t seem to be particularly depressed
then."

"No, I’m sure he was charming. He could be
very charming in his odd way. He prided himself on his eccentricities
of look and dress, though he claimed he didn’t. Why did he kill
himself ?" she said in a voice that was not quite under control.
"To punish me."

"Does that surprise you?" Sarah Lovingwell
said after a moment.

"Very much."

"You think I’m hysterical, don’t you? In
shock?" She gave me a cold, frank look. "My father hated
me. I hated him. It’s not a pleasant fact, but it’s true."

"You hated him because of what he did? Because
of his job?"

"Oh, no. I didn’t like it. But there were far
better reasons to hate Daryl Lovingwell."

I shook my head. "Do you mind if I sit down?"

"Surely. I wouldn’t sit on that one though.
Blood."

I walked over to the window seat and sat down on the
cushion. "Do you know why your father hired me?" I asked
the girl.

"No," she said without a trace of
hesitation. I studied her face. It wore an ingenuous look, the look
of someone waiting an explanation. I began to feel very odd. "Your
father hired me to find out whether you’d stolen a government
document from his safe. That safe," I said, pointing to the
wall.

"And why would I have stolen this document?"

"He said that you were a Marxist and that you
hated his work."

"Both are true statements."

"Look," I said. "I’m very confused.
Let me ask you bluntly, did you steal a government document from your
father’s safe?"

"No," she said.

I took a deep breath. "I want to be clear about
this. I promised your father that I wouldn’t turn this over to the
FBI until I was sure that you weren’t involved or until I’d
recovered the document. If I go to the police now with what I know,
you could be in a great deal of trouble."

"Oh," she said mildly. "So you’re
suppressing evidence to protect me?"

"No, I’m living up to a bargain I made with a
dead man who claimed that he loved you."

Sarah laughed with genuine amusement. "Did he
claim that?" she said curiously. "Did he really claim
that"! Oh, Papa, what a strange man you are." She stopped
laughing and stared at me again with that same icy candor. "I
hated my father," she hissed. "And I’m glad he’s dead.
He thought he could kill me by doing this"—she pointed to the
floor—"obscenity. But I’m stronger than he thought and I’ll
survive. Is that all?"

I shook my head. "Just the beginning. Why did
you hate him?"

"That isn’t any of your business," she
said abruptly.

"Our talk is over. If you want to go to the
police with what dear old Dad told you, feel free. If he owed you
money, you can send me the bill. Otherwise I don’t want to see you
again. You remind me of him," she said with disgust. "And
after this is over, I don’t ever want to think of him again."

"I’m not dropping this case until I’ve
solved it," I told her. "It would be easier if you’d
cooperate. If you don’t . . . call me if you change your mind.
Harry Stoner. I’m in the book."
 

6

It’s not that you expect other people’s lives to
be a little neater, a little less complicated than your own. You
don’t expect that with a crime, especially with a suicide. But you
don’t expect Gothic romance, either. And that’s what Lovingwell
family relations were beginning to resemble. I wondered if the girl
was crazy or if I was. If Daryl Lovingwell had hated his daughter, he
was the best liar I’d ever met.

I kept turning it over in my mind as I drove back to
Delores. One thing was certain. Somebody was lying to me, and it
wasn’t a little fib. It was a great big vicious piece of deception
and it made me nervous to think about.

When I reached the parking lot at around seven-thirty
at night, I just sat in the car for a minute and watched the wind
eddying among the snow drifts. There wasn’t a soul in sight in that
big dark lot; the chill factor must have been twenty below; and I
suddenly didn’t want any more to do with Lovingwell "family
troubles." Serves you right, Harry, I said to myself, for taking
on families instead of their troubles.

I’d gotten out of the ear and was working my way up
the south row of the lot, skating awkwardly over the icy tarmac and
now and then grabbing hold of a fender to steady myself, when I saw a
tall, rather husky man standing in the shadows where the dogberry
trees and rosebushes spilled down the hillside on the edge of the
front yard. Now, there wasn’t anything unusual about a man stepping
out of the wind, especially on lower Burnet Avenue, on a bitterly
cold night. Only this guy wasn’t ducking out of the wind. This one
was standing upright and staring at me. Which, in itself, didn’t
mean a thing. Only I’d gone through a very rough day, so for no
good reason I didn’t like the fact that a man in a gray herringbone
overcoat with a green ski mask on his head was standing in my
rosebushes and staring at me.

"What are you looking at?" I shouted over
the wind and probably would have said some much nastier things if the
man in the gray overcoat hadn’t reached calmly into his pocket and
then pointed his arm at me in that stiff, graceless gesture that is
unlike any other gesture a man can make.

"Good God!" I said—make that shouted. The
wind was so loud that I couldn’t hear my own voice. Or the crack of
the revolver that the man in the gray overcoat was pointing at me.

The windshield of a Ford parked about a
foot-and-a-half to my left exploded as if it had been hit with a
sledge hammer.

I dove blindly to my right and was damn lucky I
didn’t bash my head on the fender of a Buick. The man kept on
firing—the gun tucked like a sachet inside his cuff. All I could
see was the line of flame flying from his out-stretched arm.
Windshields were popping all about me, exploding like light bulbs
ground underfoot. And every once in awhile, a bullet would dent a
grille or slam into a hunk of chrome with a sick-making crunch. And
in spite of all of this, I couldn’t quite believe it was happening.
Couldn’t believe that some madman with a pistol—and it was a
major caliber judging from the way it had folded up that first
windshield—was trying to murder me.

I stayed tucked against that front bumper until I’d
counted three exploded windshields and ravaged grilles, and then
scrambled to the rear of the Buick, dug my foot into the snow like a
runner positioning his leg in a chock block, and took off toward the
basement door.

It was all right as long as I was behind the six or
seven cars parked between me and the rear wall. But there was a good
twenty feet of open ground between that last car and the building,
and if the gunman were using an automatic he’d have at least one
shot left. So I crouched behind the last car for a second, trying to
catch my breath and praying that somebody in the building had heard
that bang that sounds like an amplified hand-clap or the thud and
tinkle of smashed glass. And, meanwhile, some not quite sane part of
me was busy calculating odds—one of those "if you do this, if
you don’t do that" conversations that didn’t sound quite
real even to me. If you don’t go down on the ice, Harry. If the
son-of-a-bitch is really out of ammunition. And if he’s not? Well,
he’d have the now to contend with, wouldn’t he? And then there
wasn’t much light coming from the basement door. And he was an
erratic shot. And the hard truth is that you won't stand a chance
where you are now. I took a deep breath, wiped the sweat out of my
eyes, and lit out.

It was a mistake. As soon as he saw me dash from
behind that last car, he raised both arms like a man in a stance and
began to fire again. Flames shot out of each coat sleeve this time.
The bullets kicked at the snow in front of me, making it leap as if
it were windblown and sparking brightly on the concrete beneath it.
Jesus Christ! I shrieked to myself. And then I did the obvious
thing—I shrieked it out loud, as loud as I could, and went
barreling like a semi, with its brakes gone and its whistles
screaming full-blast, through that little door and into the dark
concrete hallway, where I went down hard on my butt. I’d
practically taken the door off its hinges.

And either the gunman had knicked me with a lucky
shot or I’d put my hand through the glass insert in the door,
because when I caught my breath I realized there was blood on my left
arm.

I sat very still on that cold basement floor for a
few seconds—counting my blessings—then crept back up to the
window and peeked out at the lot. But the gunman was gone. So I said
a little prayer to Whoever is in Charge of These Things, made my way
to the apartment, and phoned the cops.

Even though there were only two other patients in the
emergency room at General Hospital—a young black kid in a
blood-spattered T-shirt and an old woman wrapped in a man’s
overcoat—it took the doctors over an hour to get to me, which gave
the patrolmen who had picked me up a chance to make time with the
duty nurses. Between passes, they got my story for the record. I gave
them as complete a description as I could of my assailant: a tall man
in a gray herringbone overcoat, with a green ski mask covering his
face, and at least three revolvers in his side pockets. But I guess I
couldn’t blame them for splitting their attention between me and
the nurses. That kind of description is known in the trade as "male
suspect armed" and isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
Once in a thousand times, a cop will spot a felon who’s too stupid
to change his clothes; and, occasionally, a guy will be pulled in on
another charge and a gun or a mask will be found in his pockets. But
my attacker wasn’t going to be caught by chance, because my
attacker was a killer whose only target had been me. He wasn’t a
professional killer or, if he was, he was a damn poor shot. I figured
he was an amateur with a grudge. I figured he was either Sean O’Hara
or his black pal. What I couldn’t
figure
out was why.