Dead Letter (7 page)

I didn’t tell the cops about my speculations. I had
no proof to support them—only a feeling and the fact that O’Hara
had been following me earlier in the day. Anyway, by the time the
doctors finally got to me, the cops had lost interest entirely. When
I came out of the examination room with a bandaged left forearm, a
tetanus shot in my butt, and a bottle of Darvon in my hand, they’d
already left. It took me another half-hour to catch a cab to the
Delores.

I don’t think I’ve ever opened a door more
carefully than I did that night when I got back to my apartment. I’ll
be honest—I was really spooked. In fact, if some neighbor had
hailed me in the hallway, I might have screamed. Regardless of what
you may have seen in the movies, detectives just don’t get shot at
all that often. And the fact that I didn’t know why I was being
shot at made it that much worse.

It took me a week to satisfy myself that nobody was
hiding in the apartment. I acted like a kid on a stormy night,
opening every closet door twice. The nice part about being a kid is
that you can do that sort of thing and feel good and safe when you’re
through. When I finished I felt distinctly like an idiot and not a
bit safer than when I’d started. I went over to the liquor cabinet
and poured myself four fingers and a thumb of Scotch. Then I turned
on the Globemaster and turned in a talk show on WGN in Chicago.
Between the liquor and the soothing sound of a voice, I slowly
recovered my sanity.

Someone tried to kill you," I said aloud.
"That’s all."

I kept saying it with different inflections, like an
actor practicing a line from a play. "Someone tried to kill you;
someone tried to kill you; someone tried to kill you!"

After a time, I believed it. Then I asked out loud,
"Why would someone try to kill you?" And when I couldn’t
answer that, I asked "Who?"

At the emergency room I’d been certain that my
assailant was Sean O’Hara or his black friend. In my apartment that
began to seem less and less likely. First, there was the time
element. Before I’d left Lovingwell’s home, I’d seen O’Hara
sitting on the living room couch, glimpsed his Dodge van in the
driveway as I’d walked up Middleton to where I’d parked the
Pinto. It had taken me about a quarter of an hour to drive back to
the Delores. Unless Sean had been following me in another car, he
couldn’t have known that I was headed home. And he would’ve had
to have been moving pretty quickly to make it out the door, into a
car, and over to the Burnet lot in fifteen minutes. Second, there was
the physical evidence. The killer could have been O’Hara, but he
couldn’t have been the black boy, O’Hara’s friend. I hadn’t
seen much of the kid in the rearview mirror. Just enough to know that
he was a thin type and, if head size correlates at all with body
size, not a particularly tall kid, either.

Thinking the problem through wasn’t a complete
waste of time; it made me realize that, while I might have had the
wrong suspects, I had to have the right M.O. Whoever had tried to
kill me must have followed me in a car to the Delores’s parking
lot—unless he’d been sitting there for almost five hours in the
cold. He’d waited until I’d gotten out of the Pinto, then he’d
popped from behind the rosebushes and taken ten shots at me. That
meant that whoever it was had known that I was at the Lovingwell
house. I began to feel unbalanced again—the way I’d felt in the
study when Sarah Lovingwell had told me that she’d hated her father
and that he’d hated her. I thought it through one more time, but
the facts stayed the same. I hadn’t been followed once that
afternoon; I’d been followed twice. And the second time, I ’d
been totally unaware that someone was following me.
 

7

First thing in the morning I called Louis Bidwell at
the Sloane Lab. I was in a delicate position. I didn’t want to tell
him what I knew about the missing document; on the other hand, if the
document was the reason he had called Lovingwell on Tuesday, I wanted
to know what had been said, especially if it had anything to do with
an internal security problem. Bidwell, who spoke in a thick Alabamian
accent—the voice of every second lieutenant I’d ever known—was
polite and not very helpful.

"If you want to come all the way out heah ta
Batavia, ah’ll be more than happy to show you around. But you do
understand that my dealings with Professor Lovingwell are
confidential?

I told him that I understood and that I wanted to see
him anyway. We arranged an appointment for three. If worse came to
worst, I figured I could propose a trade: what I knew for what
Bidwell knew. I could temper it by not telling him that Lovingwell
had suspected his daughter of the theft; but, anyway you looked at
it, I would still be breaking my word to the Professor. Are you
looking for a document or a motive for suicide, Harry? I asked
myself. And the answer was, suicide or robbery, what choice did I
have? As long as Sarah Lovingwell refused to cooperate with me, I had
no legal justification for pursuing any inquiry. And she had made it
very clear that she wouldn’t cooperate. For a second I thought
about chucking it all, just phoning McMasters or the FBI and letting
them handle it. That would be the sane thing to do, I told myself. No
more people snubbing you, or following you, or shooting at you.
Especially shooting at you. I rubbed my arm through the bandage and
wondered again why anyone would have tried to kill me. Obviously it
had something to do with Lovingwell, because I wasn’t the sort who
had made a lot of bad enemies—sent killers up the river. So it was
either the Lovingwell matter or a terrible case of mistaken
identity.Unless someone had been watching the Lovingwell house on
Monday afternoon, the only time I’d been exposed was on Tuesday
morning when I ’d taken those pictures outside the Friends of
Nature Club. I didn’t think that anybody had been watching me while
I was busy with the Minox. But I could have been wrong. If I had
accidentally seen someone I wasn’t supposed to see, that might
explain why O’Hara and the black kid had been following me at noon.
It might also explain my three-gunned assailant. I’d intended to
show the photographs to Lovingwell on the off-chance that he might
recognize a face—someone who had recently been in his home or,
mirabile dictu
, at
Sloane. Now it seemed like the better part of something to show the
photographs to Sid McMasters and the FBI.

I showered and shaved while listening to a Rossini
overture and practically charged out the door at nine A.M. For a
second I thought my car had been stolen, until I saw it tucked like a
nettle in a Bible between a Buick and an outsized Caddie. I zipped
down to the Shutter Bug—a little hole in the wall on upper Vine,
hung like a delicatessen with all sorts of tasty items (Nikons,
Hasselblads, Leicas)—and picked up the pictures. Then drove
downtown to a sporting goods store on Elm.

I waited a second before getting out of the car.
After the Ripper case, my handgun permit had been suspended for
eighteen months—thc State Board suspends you automatically if
you’re involved in a killing. Since the fall of 1979, I’d had no
legal right to carry a weapon. In fact, I hadn’t even handled a gun
in several months, which had proved no hardship up until the night
before. I’d no intention of being caught defenseless again. But
before I break a law, I always like to think through the consequences
very thoroughly. So I waited in the Pinto and thought them through
again; and when my life didn’t seem any less valuable the second
time around than it had the first, I got out of the car and walked
into the store. An old coot in a cardigan sweater and baggy chinos
was giving the woman behind the front register a hard time.

"That’s where you’re wrong little girl,"
he said to her decisively.

"Take a calendar, John, for chrissake," one
of the salesmen called to him from the back of the store. "Give
him a calendar, Lois."

"What the hell do I need a calendar for"?"
John exploded. "I’m a happily married man. I don’t need no
new dates."

Lois, the register girl, laughed raucously.

I walked past the fishing tackle and camping
equipment to a long glass display case on the west side of the store.
The kid in charge of the gun display was still laughing at John’s
joke.

"No new dates," he said to me.

"Yeah, I heard it the first time. I’m looking
for a gun."

"We got ’em. All calibers and makes."

"What’s the most powerful handgun you stock?"

The kid went kind of glassy-eyed, as if this were a
moment he’d been waiting for all his life. "Smith and Wesson
Model 29 .44 magnum," he said dreamily. "This gun will cut
a man in two at twenty feet."

"You do a lot of that, do you?" I said.

"Huh?" His eyes broke back into focus and
he stared at me sourly. "Maybe you’re looking for something
smaller? To hunt rabbit or squirrel?"

"No," I said. "That’ll do. I like my
meat well-done, and this way I can kill it and cook it at the same
time."

I bought the pistol with a four-inch barrel and a box
of shells and walked out to my car. When no one along Elm seemed to
be watching, I unwrapped the gun and stuck it in my overcoat. It felt
like I was carrying a steam iron in my pocket.

It took me iive minutes to drive across town to the
Police Building on Ezzard Charles. I parked in the Music Hall Lot and
walked through the snow up to that long yellow building that looks
like nothing so much as a fifties high school. After getting cleared
and tagged by a desk sergeant, I took the elevator up to the second
floor and Sid McMasters’ office. I found Sid sitting behind a desk,
peeling oranges with a Swiss Army knife.

"Fruit?" he said, holding out a section.

"Watch your language," I told him.

McMasters laughed noiselessly. "Heard you got
shot at last night," he said in a mild voice.

"Wouldn’t have anything to with Lovingwell,
would it?"

"You tell me," I said.

"It might." McMasters speared an orange
section with his knife and chewed on the fruit. "I got some news
for you, Harry. That suicide. Well, it ain’t quite kosher. In fact,
it’s
trafe
. From
what the lab is putting together, it looks like your late client
might not have done himself in, after all."

"Murder?" I said grimly.

"That’s the ticket," McMasters said. "The
position of the body wasn’t right. He was shot here."
McMasters put down his knife and jabbed his right temple with a thick
forefinger. "We found blood and tissue on the safe, so he must
have been standing in front of it at the time of the shooting.
Somebody tried to clean off the metal, but they didn’t do a very
good job."

"Where was the gun?"

"By his hand. But that doesn’t mean much."

"Prints"?"

"His. But they’re perfect. Just like somebody
rolled each finger in ink and pressed it onto the butt."

"No smears or smudges," I said half to
myself.

"That’s right," McMasters said.

"Who do you suspect?"

"We don’t have a clue."

"What about the daughter?"

"That’s a grim little thought coming from
you," he said. "You were working for the family, weren’t
you?"

"I still am."

"Well, unless you know something we don’t,
she’s in the clear. The O’Hara kid swore up and down she was in
the nature club office until one P.M. yesterday."

"He did, huh?" I threw the package of
photographs onto his desk. "I’d like you to have the FBI take
a look at these. See if they can make any of the faces. Tell them to
check the local subversives fi1e—Marxists, Weathermen, stuff like
that."

McMasters fingered the envelope and looked
uncertainly at the snapshots. "What’s this about?"

"They’re members of that little club that
Sarah belongs to. The Friends of Nature. It’s possible that the
club is a communist front."

McMasters’ eyes lit up. "Yeah?" he said
happily.

"That could be a
help. Thanks, Stoner. I’ll have this checked out."

***

Traffic was heavy on the expressway because of the
weather; so I spent almost half an hour getting back to Clifton. I
took the Hopple Street exit to the Parkway, the Parkway to Ludlow,
ground my wheels up that long, lazy hill that flattens out at Resor,
then picked my way among the side streets to the Lovingwell home. I
pulled into the driveway behind Sarah’s V.W. and Lovingwell’s
Jaguar and stepped out into the white glare of the morning sun.

Sarah Lovingwell answered the front door on the first
knock. She looked less haggard than she had the previous afternoon,
though her face was still pinched with fatigue.

"I thought I told you that I never wanted to see
you again," she growled.

"That was yesterday. I thought you might need me
today."

"Why? Nothing’s changed. You still remind me
of him."

"Plenty’s changed. Your father didn’t commit
suicide. He was murdered. And your boyfriend lied to the police about
being with you at the time of the Professor’s death."