Dead Letter

by Jonathan Valin

  DEAD

  LETTER

  The Harry Stoner Series, #3

  Jonathan Valin

  TO KATHERINE

  Copyright © 1981 by Jonathan Valin

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.

  First ebook edition 2012 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-316-7

  Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9342-7

  Cover photo © Milos Luzanin/iStock.com.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  MORE HARRY STONER EBOOKS

  DEAD

  LETTER

  1

  THE FIRST time I saw Sarah B(ernice) Lovingwell she was sitting on the stoop of her father’s home on Middleton Avenue. From where I was parked in front of the house she looked to be a pale, sober young lady with a sweet, demure face. She certainly didn’t look like the sort of girl who would cause trouble. At least, not the kind of trouble I’d been hired to investigate.

  Her father, Professor Daryl Lovingwell of the University of Cincinnati and Sloane National Laboratory, wasn’t sure whether his daughter had caused the trouble, either. That’s why he’d stopped at my office in the Riorley Building on a cold Monday morning in the heart of December. A dapper little man in his late fifties, he looked, I thought, like a polite, pallid George Bernard Shaw—high forehead, bald speckled flesh, trim white imperial cut to a satanic point, and white moustaches that exuded a faint odor of wax and of pipe tobacco. From the fine tailoring of his Harris tweeds and the trace of English accent that toned his speech like a silvery tarnish, he seemed to be a very proper gentleman, indeed. He seemed to be Lord Chesterfield in woolen bunting. But there was a wry gleam in his gray eye that suggested he wasn’t blind to the slightly eccentric impression he made. And after we began to talk, I got the feeling that, like most eccentrics, the Professor only used his quirks and oddities of speech and of dress in the right company—which appeared to include me.

  I’d pegged him for “family troubles” the moment I’d seen him come through the door. Maybe a wayward wife who, after twenty-odd years, no longer found Lovingwell’s eccentricities all that winning. But I’d been wrong. The wife was dead—seven years. It was his daughter he had come to talk about. His daughter and the theft of a document.

  “It would appear,” he said almost apologetically, “that my daughter may be a thief, as she was the only person I can think of with access to my study and my safe. I mean, of course, the only person with reason to steal the damn thing.”

  He looked around my office with such a sweet, unstudied air of astonishment that I began to feel sorry for him. After a moment he swallowed that astonishment hard and eyed me candidly. “You understand I should have gone to the authorities as soon as I discovered the document was missing. I should have gone to my good friend Louis Bidwell at Sloane or to the FBI. But if I’d done that...I mean if Sarah should, in fact, be implicated.” He shook his head and said, “I’m in a very difficult position.”

  There was no question about the legal bind he’d gotten himself into by concealing the theft. Under the National Security Act he was already liable to criminal charges. And, of course, that would mean the end of his career. To say nothing of the scandal it would create or the possible jail term he might face. And why had this odd little man done this I asked myself. Why had he jeopardized a lifetime’s work? For love, Harry. What they will do for love. Only, deep down, I didn’t think it was all that funny.

  So, as I usually do when I’m not amused by the inequities of this unequal world, I tried to change the odds and the Professor’s mind by suggesting that Sarah needn’t be involved. But he wasn’t having it. He smiled tolerantly, told me it was a “very decent” thing to say, and proceeded to explain the hard, unequal truth about his only daughter. “She’s a Marxist, Mr. Stoner. An ardent, intelligent Marxist. And she’s an environmentalist, to boot. An odd combination, perhaps—like an ivy wreath on a statue of Lenin. But potent, believe me. Sarah believes strongly enough in her principles to risk jail on their behalf. Indeed, she has risked going to jail for them in the past. I wouldn’t have come to you at all if I weren’t certain of this and of the fact that she would lie to me if I were to ask her whether she was involved in the theft. You see Marxists are a little like the Papists of the seventeenth century. They firmly believe that equivocation, as it used to be called, is a legitimate political tactic. Don’t misunderstand—I love my daughter dearly and she loves me. But my work has become a political issue to her. And to her way of thinking, politics takes precedence over individuals.”

  “Even fatherly individuals?”

  “Especially them, if they’re scientists at work on breeder reactors that may pollute the environment and disrupt ecological balances. Good Lord, since Three Mile Island, she’s barely spoken to me.”

  So much, I thought, for sentimental solutions. “The missing document,” I said. “Why would she have wanted to take it?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” he said with a pained look. “I know I sound ridiculous—rather like that dreadful little man, Nixon—but the document is a matter of national security. You’ll simply have to take my word that Sarah would have found the contents interesting. Moreover, I’ll have to insist for the same reason that, if you do recover the document or find out what Sarah’s done with it, you neither examine it nor tell anyone else about this case.”

  I laughed out loud. “How the hell will I know if I’ve found the damn thing?”

  “I might be able to describe the papers for you,” he said after thinking it over for a second with that same touching air of perplexity. “I think that much would be safe.”

  “All right, Professor,” I said. “What does this document look like?”

  Lovingwell closed his eyes and pressed his hands to his face as if he weren’t quite sure it was still his face. “It was thirty pages long. Typed in elite script on white, onionskin paper, with the imprint Top-Secret Sensitive at the top of each page. I stored it in a yellow manila envelope, at home in my office safe.”

  “Why there?” I said. “Top-secret stuff generally doesn’t leave the premises, does it?”

  Lovingwell dropped one hand from his cheek and opened a single, unhappy eye. “I was revising it. It was my work originally.”

  “Then you must have a top-secret clearance.”

  “I did have,” he said mordantly. “Look, I’m afraid I’m setting you an impossible task.”

  I rubbed the nape of my neck and admitted, “It’s a doozie, all right. I take it that all you want to know is whether your daughter’s involved in the theft. If she is, I’m to recover the goods or find out how she’s disposed of them. If not...”

  Lovingwell lowered his other hand and smiled for the first time since he’d entered the office. “Then I can assure you that I’ll turn this matter over to the FBI as quickly as I can. Of course, I’ll pay you the going rate and any additional expense. If you find the document, I’ll pa
y you a two-thousand-dollar bonus.” He looked at me nervously. “Do we have a deal, then?”

  It really wasn’t my kind of case—espionage. It was too complicated from the start and it carried with it all sorts of unsavory possibilities. But staring at that proper, earnest little man with Shaw’s face and the voice of a Cambridge don, I decided to make an exception. After all, Harry, I said to myself, if you leave the top-secret part out of it, it’s just another domestic theft, just another kind of family trouble. And the going-rate was two-fifty a day. And, anyway, after hearing him out, I liked Daryl Lovingwell enough to want to help him.

  “How long would I have to find this thing?” I asked him.

  “Two weeks. I can get by for that long. Maybe for a week longer. But no more than that.”

  “All right, Professor,” I said. “I’ll take your case.”

  He smiled with relief and held out his hand. “I’m so very glad. You know I got your name from a colleague in the University who thinks you’re a most trustworthy fellow. If you had refused me, I don’t know where I should have gone.”

  “No need to worry about that, now. I’d like to take a look at your safe this afternoon, if you’re free.”

  He pulled a worn leather pocket calendar from his coat. It was stuffed with loose papers and wrapped in rubber bands. He managed to open it without dropping an envelope and, after glancing briefly at one of the pages, said, “I teach at the University this afternoon and have an appointment at Sloane this evening. However, I do have some free time around three.”

  He looked back up at me and immediately caught what I was thinking. “She won’t be home after three,” he said with a slight blush. “She’s going on an excursion at two-thirty this afternoon.”

  “Then I’ll see you at three,” I told him.

  2

  SARAH LOVINGWELL was sitting on the front stoop when I parked across from Lovingwell’s house on Middleton at 2:30 that afternoon. It was a big, red-brick colonial on a winding street full of red-brick colonials, in that part of Clifton that could serve as the poster-child to suburban America. Its best season is late summer and early fall, when the maple trees that line the sidewalks begin to turn and the gray-haired householders go shirtless on their Lawn-Boys while their wives brown themselves on chaises in the backyard patios. In that dreamy season, Middleton and the other streets north of Wolper smell, night and day, of grass halps and of charcoal fires, of coconut oil and of the pungent chlorine salts that the children wear home from community pools. In that season you’d have to be mad to dream of anything other than those lazy, S-shaped streets, full of tree-filtered sunlight and of the men on their power mowers and of a kind of middle-American grandeur that is, itself, a piece of modern mythology.

  But the street wasn’t in season that Monday afternoon. And like something peculiarly disarrayed—like a familiar face seen in the wrong light or in an unflattering attitude—it looked its age in the winter sun and the glare of the snow chunked like thick white sod on the lawns and rooftops. The age, that is, of the American dream of which it was the most visible part. A dream that may be dying if the Arabs and the Iranians and the oil companies and those other dreary conspirators of the dollar have their ways.

  Sitting there, across from Sarah Lovingwell and the big, snow-capped house behind her, I had a vision of all the householders, standing shirtless on their summer lawns and staring aghast at the sheiks on their camels, who were bobbing slowly up Middleton—like some incredible Shriner’s pageant—and turning all of that lawn green back into the unbleached flour of desert sand. What a world, the householders were whispering. What a loveless world.

  What Sarah might be saying, I couldn’t tell. From what her father had told me, she might have cheered. But, then, politics isn’t something you can read in a face alone. To be perfectly honest, I thought that she looked like the last person on Middleton Avenue who would have applauded the decline of middle America. Sitting on the stoop, with her chin on her fists and her elbows on her knees, she looked perfectly innocent—not only of seditious thought, but of any thought at all. Now and then she stretched her arms in front of her, twisting her fists outward like she was stretching in bed. And her fists did stay clenched while I was watching her, but I figured that was because of the cold. Her face was long, pleasant-looking, and shy. A very English face, I thought. Small, sharp nose; small, very white teeth; thin lips; her father’s high forehead; active blue eyes; and the sort of fine, straight auburn hair that looks lovely blowing free across a pale face. She smiled often while she waited and talked to herself constantly, a habit I find endearing since I do it myself.

  Ten minutes passed and a blue Dodge van stopped in front of the Lovingwell home. The driver—black hair, full beard, checked tam pulled down to his eyes—honked once; and Sarah lifted one of those fists in salute, then jogged to the street. She got in the side door of the truck and off they went down Middleton. When they were out of sight, I took a fingerprint kit from the backseat, got out of the Pinto, and walked up to the front stoop.

  Lovingwell arrived about a quarter of an hour later, in a powder-blue Jaguar sedan. It didn’t look like the sort of car a physics professor could afford, even a celebrated physics professor. Daryl Lovingwell apparently had some money of his own. The Professor walked briskly up to the door, took a ring of keys out of his pocket, and fumbled with the lock. His face was pallid and nervous and, from the way his hands were trembling, I figured he wasn’t at all happy about what he and I were about to do. After a few seconds, he got the door open and we walked into a tiled hall, decorated elegantly with a cherry-wood pew and a lacquered Chinese cabinet. “I’ll take your coat,” he said. While he was hanging it up, I took a closer look around. There wasn’t any question that Daryl Lovingwell had some money of his own. What I could see of the house was furnished expensively and well. The living room alone—all buff calf and Persian blue and glossy burl—looked like a page out of Architectural Digest. Only far more masculine than their usual fare and, if possible, a little more expensive. Peering into that room was like peering through the door of a treasure house—it made me want to turn away and rub my eyes.

  “So,” Lovingwell said, “where do you wish to begin?”

  “Let’s look at the safe first. Then at Sarah’s room.” He gave me another of those sad, astonished looks—as if to say, “how could I get myself into this”—and led me down the hall to the study.

  The wall safe in Lovingwell’s wainscoted study was concealed behind a small portrait of Madame Récamier. It was not an elaborate set-up—a Mosler with a dial lock and a handle release. There were no signs that the lock had been tampered with—no drill holes, no damage. Which wasn’t at all good. I’d been hoping to clear the theft up quickly, hoping that I’d come in and find file marks on the tumblers. Then I could have told Lovingwell in good conscience that the theft was probably the work of a professional thief. Only that wasn’t going to happen. From the condition of the safe and of the study, the robbery had all the earmarks of an inside job. Which led me to step two—what they call in the P.I. handbooks the “all-important” interview.

  I sat down on a leather captain’s chair for the “all-important,” took a notebook out of my pocket to give me something to do with my hands, and began to ask those pert schoolboy questions that seem humdrum when you ask them and humdrum when you think back on them, unless you’re very lucky and happen to ask the right ones.

  “Who else knew about the safe?” I said to Lovingwell.

  “Any number of people knew where it was, if that’s what you mean. Only I knew the combination.” He sat down across from me on the corner of a huge mahogany desk and smiled ruefully. “Of course, that can’t be true, can it? Somebody else obviously knew the combination or I wouldn’t be in this pickle.”

  “There are many ways to open a lock, Professor,” I said. “Knowing the combination in advance is just the easiest. Was the safe open or shut when you discovered the theft?”

  “Just as y
ou see it,” he said. “I opened it on Sunday morning to begin revision of the document and discovered that the damn thing was gone. I told myself I must have forgotten it or mislaid it at the lab. It’s amazing the kind of lies you’ll entertain when you’re desperate. I put the document in the safe, all right. I put it in on Saturday evening when I came home from Sloane.”

  “Are you in the habit of taking papers home with you from the lab?”

  “Oh my, no. As you might guess, they don’t encourage that sort of thing.”

  “Since the morning that you opened the safe, has anyone but you touched the tumblers?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “No maid? No housekeeper?”

  Lovingwell began to laugh. “Do you think my daughter would permit me to hire a maid?”

  “She permits you to own this house,” I said.

  “If it’s any comfort, Sarah shares your point of view, to the degree that she spends as little time as she can here.”

  “Was she here this weekend? On Saturday evening?”

  “No,” he said. “She was not here in the evening. She came in on Sunday morning and stayed through the afternoon. She goes on excursions quite often since she’s become involved with the ecology movement. She belongs to a little club with a storefront office on Calhoun Street. The Friends of Nature. They take hikes and travel to parks. This afternoon, for instance, they’ve scheduled a trip to Whitewater Lake.”

  “She tells you where she’s going?”

  “We leave each other notes,” Lovingwell said.

  He opened the top drawer of the desk and pulled out a slip of paper. “This is our Saturday correspondence. I have Sunday’s, too. I thought they might be of importance, so I kept them.”

  I looked at the slip marked Saturday, December 13, 1980:

  FATHER: Sloane in afternoon. Home at 7:00.

  SARAH: Miami forest in morning. Clifton in afternoon. Don’t expect me home tonight.