Dead Letter

by Jonathan Valin

  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 the 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 it. When I reached the parking lot at around seven-thirty that 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 car 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 outstretched 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, 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 snow 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 don’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 trance 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.

  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—the 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 five 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?”