Dead Letter

by Jonathan Valin

  “My II-S didn’t do me much good,” I said.

  “Yeah, but you was a patriot. Anyway, I don’t call no military police work servin’ your time.”

  I laughed. “It got hairy enough on occasion.”

  “Bro’ you sound like Larry. That po’ soul don’t know the war is over yet.”

  Larry Soldi was Bullet’s hired man.

  “Look at these hands,” Bullet said. “They’re a wide receiver’s dream. But these hands are what’s costing me four hundred dollars a month in alimony. You know about alimony, don’t you, Harry?”

  The waitress brought Bullet his drink and we sat quietly for a minute, sipping our liquor. I knew I was acting the straight man, but I just couldn’t resist. “How did your hands cost you four hundred dollars a month?” I asked him.

  “‘Bout time,” he said. “We were playing in Green Bay in early seventy. It was so damn cold that most of the guys were wearing gloves. Only I’m a wide receiver so I had to go bare-handed. Well, I’m walking up and down the sideline, trying to keep warm, when one of the Green Bay cheerleaders—a blonde girl with a shit-eating grin on her face and the devil in her blue eyes—comes sashaying up to me. She bats those eyes like a schoolgirl and says, ‘I got a little bet going with the other girls?’ She says it like that, like a question. I say, ‘Yes, mama?’ ‘I bet those girls that there’s a relation between the length and thickness of a man’s fingers and the length and thickness of his...’ She just looks down to the spot, not shy but conclusive. ‘Uh’m,’ I say. ‘Why you pick me?’ ‘Well,’ she drawls, ‘you’re the only one not wearing gloves, except for that boy over there.’ She gestures to Bobby Lee Jackson, the quarterback. I take a look, and, shit, if his fingers ain’t as small around as chicken bones. Then I look back at my own paws and up at her. Only she hasn’t stopped looking down at that spot. Kind of like the game was being played down there and it was third and long?”

  “I get the picture,” I told him.

  “I had more trouble staying on my feet during the first half than a hog on ice. Every time I looked over to the sideline, I saw her, one hand on her hip and her eyes narrowed like she was appraising a jewel. Half-time comes around and coach says to me, ‘Bullet you’d better start paying some attention to what’s going on on the field, or you ain’t going to be starting next half.’ Christ, I wasn’t pulling no attitude or nothing. I was just jinxed. I tried to get my mind right before we left the locker room, but the first thing I see as we start walking back to the field is that girl, standing up in the runway and staring at her hands like they was a map. When she sees no one but me is looking, she kisses one of those long fingers like she done burned it—a sweet little peck—and rubs her tummy with the other hand.

  “I had the worst hard-on that second half I’ve ever had in my life. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it, either. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t run. I sure as hell couldn’t go into the game, because it was a national broadcast and they go crazy if you touch your groin after you been speared. With that tent pole in my pants I would have been the laughing stock of the country.”

  I grinned at him.

  “Harry,” he said. “You’re the most suspicious white man I ever met. Why don’t you just be still and let me finish my story?

  “It’s getting to be the end of the third quarter and I’m still sitting on the bench, with a coat over my shoulders and my head bowed down like I’m praying. Every once and awhile one of the other players comes over and laughs kind of softly as he passes by. Finally coach walks up and says, ‘All right, Bullet, what’s it going to take?’ I just look up, miserable and helpless. ‘Well, fuck her then,’ he tells me. ‘But, for chrissake, get it over with. We’re seven points down!’ ‘I would coach,’ I tell him. ‘Only I can’t stand up.’

  “Harry, you’re not going to believe this, but with the game close like that and with me out of the line-up, we just couldn’t complete any of the long stuff. So coach calls time out and they bring a stretcher onto the field. ‘Lie down,’ he says to me. ‘What?’ I say. ‘Just lie down.’ So I do like coach says and they cover me with a blanket. I see one of those hand-held cameras poking around, so I turn on my side and, by God, they carry me off the field like I’m hurt. As I’m being carried off, I see out of the corner of my eye one of the assistants talking to that blonde tease along the sideline. And, sure enough, as soon as I get to the runway, she sidles off after me.

  “Harry, I played the best fourth quarter of football you ever seen. I caught ‘em with my hands, with my feet. I caught ‘em with my goddamn teeth. And we won that game, Harry. Afterward, coach comes to me and says, ‘If she can do that between quarters, think what she could do before the game.’ I didn’t have to think about that. Only mistake I made was marrying the bitch instead of just using her to warm up with.”

  “Bullet,” I said to him. “You’re full of shit, you know that?”

  “I got brown eyes, ain’t I?” He laughed so loud the glasses stacked along the bar rang. “Let me see your hand,” he said, swiping at my arm. “Oh, man, I can see from here what your trouble is.”

  “That’s not it, smart-ass,” I said.

  “It’s always that, Harry. That’s about the only thing life’s taught me.” Bullet smacked his lips. “Pussy’s behind everything. Pussy or money. Now, don’t you want to tell me what life’s taught you?”

  “You’re a strange nigger, Bullet.”

  He laughed again. “Well, at least you’re smiling. And that’s something.”

  It was indeed.

  ******

  Between Bullet and the liquor I kept smiling right up until nine o’clock, when Professor Lovingwell, looking like Sherlock Holmes in an ulster coat and deer-stalker cap, walked into the bar.

  “This isn’t your idea of a disguise, is it?” I asked him when he sat down across from me.

  He looked miffed and replied: “I wear this outfit every evening when I go out walking. Do I look that ridiculous?”

  “Eccentric,” I said.

  Lovingwell sighed. “That word, again. It’s been following me around most of my life.”

  “And all you ever wanted was to be one of the guys.”

  “Hardly.” He glanced about the room as if the Busy Bee were not his idea of a good time and said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to make this fairly quick. Sarah thinks I’ve gone out for a walk—damn deception, again. If I don’t return in an hour or so, she’ll get worried or suspicious or both.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll come straight to the point. I told you this afternoon that someone might be setting your daughter up. Since I’ve examined the prints that analysis has changed.”

  “Now you think someone’s trying to ‘set me up,’ do you?” he asked.

  “Very good. You’re starting to think like a detective.”

  He shrugged. “It’s fairly obvious. My fingerprints on the safe. The empty envelope in my house. I’ve thought it through all evening and I’m a little afraid of my conclusion.”

  “Why would she do it?” I said.

  Lovingwell threw up his hands in dismay. “I simply don’t know. Our relationship isn’t perfect. I don’t know of a father’s and daughter’s that is. We’ve fought a bit lately. As I told you, she hates the work I’m doing on reactors. And I can appreciate her point of view. The hell of it is when you start arguing with someone, you say things you don’t mean. It’s hard to take them back later,” he said with a grimace. “Let me be honest with you. I’ve been very critical of my daughter’s lifestyle. Some of the criticisms were prompted by jealousy, some of them needed to be said. Sarah’s the kind of person who can never do things halfway. She flings herself into every enterprise, whether it’s politics, romance, or drugs. I didn’t object to the boys—well, I did but I didn’t say so. The politics I sympathize with. But the drugs. The night before the document was stolen we had a ‘discussion,’ as it’s known around our household. I’d found some pills in her room while I was cl
eaning up. She accused me of snooping behind her back. I accused her of...well, of doing a stupid and illegal thing. Saturday morning she walked out and didn’t return until Sunday afternoon.”

  Lovingwell stared darkly at the tabletop. “It doesn’t look very good for me, does it? I mean if someone should, shall we say, ‘blow the whistle’?”

  “No,” I said. “Not so good.”

  “I can’t believe it,” he said. “I just can’t believe that Sarah would do this to me.”

  “It doesn’t have to be Sarah,” I said without much conviction. “After all, she hasn’t reported you to the FBI, yet. Or turned the papers over to Mother Jones. We could still be reeling in a red herring. Think back—was there any time this morning or this afternoon that you put your hand to the safe without opening it?”

  Lovingwell nodded. “It slipped my mind but this morning before I went to work I stopped to look at the safe. Just to look at it, the way a patron might look at a wallspot from which a painting had been stolen. I think I’d put my hand to the tumbler when Sarah called to me from the study door.”

  “What did she want?”

  “Nothing, really. Just to know if she could borrow a few dollars.”

  It didn’t have to mean anything and I told him so.

  “I hope you’re right,” the Professor said. “Because this thing is beginning to frighten me. If it isn’t resolved soon, I’m afraid I’ll lose my nerve.”

  “You’ll be all right,” I told him. “I’ll start tailing Sarah in the morning. If she doesn’t lead me to the document or to her accomplice in a few days, we’ll turn the case over to the FBI.”

  “Only if she’s in the clear,” Lovingwell said. “And remember—she’s not to know that I’m having her...investigated.”

  4

  CALHOUN STREET in Clifton is a crowded, urban road, lined on the south side with storefronts, fast food joints, and swart brownstone apartments and, on the north, with those university dormitories that look a little like sets of giant building blocks made of glass and steel. It was not, all told, a likely spot for a nest of conspirators or of spies. And yet, in spite of her demure good looks, Sarah Lovingwell seemed to be one or the other. Seems, not is, I told myself. Only it was such a strong case of seeming that I had trouble drumming up a healthy skepticism.

  At ten o’clock that Tuesday morning I’d followed my seeming suspect up Middleton to Clifton Avenue, through the slippery side streets filled with dirty snow and drooping elder branches, to the door of the Friends of Nature Club on the south side of Calhoun. Judging from the flaky decal on the top of the front window, the clubhouse had once housed a shoe repair shop. There was an open lot to its west and on its east a used-clothing store, with one forlorn mannequin in the window, dressed like a befuddled flapper in a cloche hat and a silk chemise with a string of big white pearls on her breast. The poor mannequin looked so cheerless and out of place in the weather that I began to grow rather fond of her. But then she was the only thing I had to look at, save for the half-dozen collegiate-types bundled in fat, shiny parkas who passed her by without a second glance.

  Sarah had pulled her tan V.W. into an alley beside the clubhouse and gone into the building through a side door. In and maybe out—I couldn’t see the rear of the clubhouse from where I was parked. But then I didn’t really care where Sarah went that morning. It was the Friends of Nature who interested me. For almost two hours, right up until noon, I sat in the Pinto with a candy bar in one hand and a Minox in the other. And every time someone went in or came out of the club, I stopped gnawing the candy and snapped a picture. It was a little like insurance work, which I don’t like to do but which also happens to be the most common kind of job that this detective (and every other detective in the world) gets thrown at him since the courts have liberalized the divorce laws. So, you snap the picture, Harry. And scrunch up in the car seat like a bitter fetus. And maybe you come up with a face that the good Professor will be interested in. Not an insurance swindler—not this time. But somebody from the lab or the University who could have served as Sarah’s accomplice. At least, that was the general theory I was going on. And, after all, it was only a matter of a couple of hours.

  About twelve, I got tired of insurance work and general theories and decided to take a quick look inside the club. The wind was howling down the street, making the telephone wires snap like jump ropes on concrete and freezing me through my top coat as soon as I got out of the car. I ran across Calhoun Street—well, high-stepped it through the mire—slid up to the club door and ducked inside. At first glance, I thought the place looked vaguely like a political headquarters, which was an interesting point if my seeming suspect were indeed a spy. There were long folding tables scattered about the floor; papers, pamphlets and handouts stacked on the tables; Sierra Club posters on the walls; and hints of marijuana smoke drifting into the room from the rear office. All in all, it could have been a chapter of the Young Republicans. A few of the friends were warming their hands in front of an old Franklin stove by the front door; most were busy-stuffing envelopes. So busy that they didn’t seem to notice me. Which was just fine. I wandered toward the rear of the club, where a bulletin board was posted with the day’s activities. For Tuesday the sixteenth it read: “Joint Protest with Friends of the Arts to save the Fountain. 2:30 P.M. at the Art Museum.” The Fountain was Our Lady of the Waters on Fountain Square—once the cynosure of downtown Cincinnati. But since they’ve torn the Albee down and thrown up those huge steel towers about the square, the statue doesn’t seem much more than another misplaced piece of memorabilia—the sort of monument that town councils love to bury away, because half of them aren’t sure that anything more than a decade old isn’t slightly un-American. I liked the fact that the Friends wanted to preserve the Lady from further attacks and I was also mildly amused by their enemies list, which was posted next to the bulletin board. Several ominous-looking, hand-drawn posters, made up to look like the wanted sheets in post offices, had been strung across the wall. The Mayor was number one, followed by the chairmen of the boards of Cincinnati Bell, the Metro bus system, C.G.&E., Proctor & Gamble. Most of the faces were predictable. The one that wasn’t belonged to Daryl Lovingwell. Even in the drawing he looked alarmed, as if he were shocked to find himself in such company. The portrait was signed at the bottom—Sarah L.

  I didn’t see the artist around. But that was all right. I didn’t want to see her or her to see me. I checked my watch, which was showing twelve-ten, and decided that if I left the club immediately I could drop off the film in time to get it back that evening, check in at my apartment, grab some lunch, and still make it up to Mt. Adams in time for the rally. So I picked up a few pamphlets from one of the folding tables, nodded to a blonde girl stuffing envelopes, and walked out the door.

  ******

  I’d deposited the film at a Shutter Bug on Vine and was heading up McMillan to my apartment when I realized that the car behind me looked too familiar. It was a tan V.W., Sarah’s car. Only Sarah wasn’t driving it. I took a good look in the mirror when I got to the stop light at Highland. The man behind the wheel had a checked tarn pulled down over his forehead and a big, bushy black beard. Sean O’Hara, I said to myself, Sarah’s boyfriend. I’d never seen the guy sitting next to him before. He was high yellow, about twenty-five, sparsely bearded, wearing a Big Apple cap, with a face that was thin, acne-scarred and mean.

  I realized as I watched him watching me that I had been taking the Lovingwell case much too casually, treating it strictly as a piece of domestic theft, as “family troubles.” From the look on that black kid’s face, I decided damned quickly that he and O’Hara were just trouble, plain and simple.

  I didn’t try to give them the slip. Hell, I don’t drive well enough to lose anybody. But I did take the precaution of pulling into the lot at the rear of the Delores when I got back home at twelve forty-five, and the extra precaution of parking between two burly old Cadillacs. I took a good look around before walking to the fr
ont of the building, but O’Hara and the black kid had driven past me, down Reading toward town. Which didn’t really make me feel any better. Something was wrong or I wouldn’t have been followed in the first place.

  Once inside the apartment, I phoned Daryl Lovingwell at the University and got the Physics Department secretary on the line.

  “He’s not here,” she said nervously. “He had to go home.”

  I didn’t like the quaver in her voice. “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “You’ll just have to talk to the Professor,” she said and hung up.

  I dialed Lovingwell’s home, let the phone ring ten times—just like they tell you to do in the phone book—and was about to give up when someone picked up the receiver.

  “Lovingwell?” I said.

  “Who is this?” a man’s husky voice replied.

  I had the terrible feeling that I knew that voice, that I’d heard it before and not in any classroom.

  “I want to talk to Daryl Lovingwell,” I said.

  “He can’t come on the line,” the man said.

  “What’s going on here? Tell him it’s Stoner. Harry Stoner. I’m sure he’ll want to talk to me.”

  “Oh, hello, Stoner,” the man said affably. “This is Sid McMasters.”

  I had a heart-sick moment. McMasters was a homicide dick with the C.P.D. and I knew his voice because I’d worked with him when I was on the D.A.’s staff better than a decade before. I didn’t want to ask him, but I did—in a dull, weary voice that made me sound like my own father. “What’s happened, Sid?”

  “There’s been an accident here,” he said. “Lovingwell’s been shot. At least, we think it’s Lovingwell.”