Dead Letter

by Jonathan Valin

  “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 file—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.”

  “Murdered?” she said with what seemed like genuine surprise. “Who says he was murdered? How do you know that? The police haven’t told me that.”

  “I was just with the police,” I told her. “It kind of blows your theory about why he killed himself. Or was that a fib, too? Like the alibi?”

  “What do you want?” she said in an ugly voice. “Money? Is that it?”

  “I’m getting sick and tired of people treating me like low-life because of my job,” I said angrily. “I came here to help you, because I promised your father I would. And what I want is to find out what happened to that document and what happened to him.”

  “I don’t care what happened to him. Whether he committed suicide or not, he deserved to die.”

  I shook my head. “Are you sure we’re talking about the same man? Amiable, eccentric Daryl Lovingwell?”

  Sarah Lovingwell smiled for the first time since I’d met her. It wasn’t a pleasant smile, but it was a damn sight better than the dark looks I’d been getting up to that point.

  “I feel like Cary Grant in North by Northwest. Remember the scene when he says, ‘Forgive me. But who are those people living in your house?’ I think I’m owed an explanation.”

  She shook her head.

  “A cup of coffee?”

  “All right,” she said. “But that’s all.”

  ******

  As Sarah and I walked through the living room and down a narrow hall to the kitchen, I was taken again by the elegance of Lovingwell’s home. If houses tell you anything about their owners—and they invariably do—this one spoke clearly of a man who loved luxury. It spoke of old money glittering in a hundred different knickknacks—crystal animals, glazed porcelain statuary, the sorts of things you see advertised in the back of architectural magazines and wonder who on earth ever buys. Daryl Lovingwell had bought them. The brocade loveseats with inlaid burl, the silver tea sets, the bronze baskets and dull pewter ornaments. I spent a moment admiring a Swiss clock I had seen advertised for years in The New Yorker, while Sarah looked impatiently at the dial.

  “He had fine taste, your father,” I said to her.

  “He grew up with money,” she said with almost clinical dispassion. “He liked it the way other people secretly despise things. To him, it was a deep, ugly obsession.”

  The kitchen was big and white and comfortable. We sat at a butcher block table set in a small, glassed-in alcove that looked out on a rolling lawn which swept up to a huge, leafless oak and then down to a hedge of rosebushes. Sarah said nothing. Her hands played at the coffee cup, at the spoon. Her prim, pretty face was restless and self-absorbed.

  “Do you want to tell me why O’Hara lied to the police?” I said to her.

  She shook her head slightly. “What makes you think he was lying?”

  “Because he was following me in your car at 1:00 P.M. He and a black kid in a salt-and-pepper beanie. And I think you can tell me why.”

  She looked uneasily out the window toward the oak. “He planted that in 1949. The year he got his appointment here.”

  “Why do you always talk about him in that tone of voice—as if he were a character in a book?”

  A spark of amusement lit Sarah’s blue eyes. “You’re a smart fellow, aren’t you? I thought detectives were supposed to be plodding, dim-witted types. Muscles with speech.”

  “That’s the second time you haven’t answered my questions.”

  “And who are you to ask me questions?” she flared. “Just because my father hired you to do a job for him doesn’t give you the right to harass me and grill me like I was some derelict in a police line-up.”

  “There was a murder committed in this house,” I said, “and a theft. You may think the police fit your description of a detective, but don’t count on it. They’re going to find out that the O’Hara boy is lying. And they’re going to find out, from Bidwell, that a government document is missing. They’re going to find out you’re a communist, too. And the whole world knows how you felt about your father. One fine day those dumb cops are going to plod their way right up to your door.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” she said serenely. “And I don’t know anything about a government document.”

  “That may be true. But that’s not going to stop the police from investigating you and your friends of nature.”

  Sarah Lovingwell eyed me distrustfully. “Why do you care what the police do to me?”

  “I told you before. I promised your father I would look after you.”

  “That’s very noble,” she scoffed.

  “It’s not,” I said. “Your father left me in a tight spot. Technically, I’m withholding evidence right now. For all I know, evidence that would help the police tie up this case or help the FBI stop an important secret from falling into the wrong hands.”

  “Communist hands?” she mocked.

  “Look, I’m apolitical. You can start as many revolutions as you want, once I’m in the clear on this thing.”

  “We don’t start revolutions. The people do.”

  “Fine,” I said. “You tell the people it’s all right with Harry, once this case is settled. All I’m asking for is a little prerevolutionary cooperation.”

  “What kind of cooperation?”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. I want you to hire me.”

  “For what?”

  “Let’s say...to look into your father’s death.”

  “I’ve already told you, I don’t care who killed my father.”

  “Well, pretend he was someone close to you,” I said. “Someone you liked. That way I have a legal justification for not telling the cops about the document.”

  “And what do I get out of this?” Sarah asked me.

  “You get me out of your hair.” She glared at me. “It’s the only way,” I said to her. “It’s me or me. Take your pick.”

  8

  BY THE time I left for Sloane, Sarah and I had fashioned an uneasy truce. She agreed to hire me to investigate her father’s murder; and I agreed to stay out of her affairs. Just how that last neat trick was going to work I didn’t know. She wasn’t happy about the arrangement either. But
then annoying someone isn’t the surest way to earn their trust.

  I couldn’t get a handle on Sarah Lovingwell. She was a smart, attractive, self-assured young woman; and she was carrying around the sort of grudge that most folks take a lifetime to work up to—a genuine hatred so implacable that it can’t be explained. You have to be hurt beyond forgiveness to reach that plateau of anger. And for the life of me, I couldn’t see how dapper, Shavian Daryl Lovingwell could have fathered such a hate.

  I was about to step out the door when one of the biggest young men I’d ever seen in my life came striding up the front lawn. He must have been six-foot nine if he was an inch—he had a good half foot on me. But if you can believe it, it wasn’t his size that startled me. You’ve probably seen, in grocery stores and shopping centers, children, six or seven years old, running around in cowboy suits—fancy checked shirts with western piping, blue jeans with a runner down the leg and bunting at the cuff, big leather belts with silver-metal buckles, furry white vests, ten-gallon Stetsons, and cap guns with mother-of-pearl handles. If you left out the guns and the holsters, that’s exactly how this giant was dressed.

  “Howdy ‘pard,” he boomed in a voice that would have made a good bass in a barbershop quartet. He swept the big hat off with a flourish and smiled. “Lester O. Grimes,” he said daintily. “Friends call me ‘Cowboy.’”

  “No kiddin’?” I said. “Stoner. Harry Stoner.”

  “Is the lady of the house home?” Lester asked.

  “Miss Sarah!” I called through the door. “You have a caller.”

  Sarah came to the door. “Hi, Les,” she said. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  The Cowboy gave her an “aw, shucks” grin and crooked one foot behind the other. His pointed boots were embossed leather and lethal-looking.

  “Y’all from hereabouts?” he drawled.

  “Hereabouts is a pretty big place. I’m from Cincinnati, yeah. You?”

  “Bloody Basin, Arizona,” he said proudly. “It’s a mite south of Flagstaff.”

  “You’re pretty far east, aren’t you? For a cowboy?”

  “I’ve been doin’ a bit of travelin’ since I got out of the service. I come up to Ohio last year.”

  “To work?” I said.

  “In a way. Y’all a friend of Sarah’s?”

  I thought it over for a moment. “You could say that. I’m working for her. I’m a private detective.”

  “No!” he said, like I’d just told him I had kin in Bloody Basin. “When I was in ‘Nam, I knew a fella who wanted to be a private detective. A nosier man I never met. Always stickin’ hisself in places he didn’t belong.” Lester O. Grimes settled back on his bootheels and stared at me with a kind of wry displeasure. “You even look like this fella.”

  “Coincidence,” I said and started for the car.

  “No,” he said decisively and pushed me back with one paw. “I wouldn’t call it no coincidence.”

  “O.K.,” I said. “Tell me about him.”

  “Not much to tell. It got so that this fella wouldn’t leave us alone. And there are times when a man has to have his privacy. So we taught him a lesson.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “We killed him,” Lester O. Grimes said softly.

  “You killed him,” I said flatly. “That’s a mighty hard lesson to forget, isn’t it? Good thing I’m not in that guy’s shoes.”

  Grimes laughed heartily. “I’ll say. He was practically begging us to finish him at the end.” Cowboy made a disgusted face. “Don’t like to see that in a man.”

  “Does this story have a moral?”

  Grimes scratched innocently at his blonde forelock. “Yeah. I guess you could say it does. Y’see life’s kind of like the Army. You got your job to do and your buddy’s got his job to do. And people like ol’ Roger—that was his name—who insist on messin’ where they don’t belong—asking questions, talking to cops, taking pictures, maybe—they’re just bound and determined to find themselves some trouble. Yessir! And they always do.”

  “What did you say you did in the Army, Lester?”

  “Oh, I wasn’t in the Army. I was in the Corps. What they call a weapons specialist. Master Gunnery Sergeant. They’re some good ol’ boys in the Corps,” Lester O. Grimes said. “Yessir, I’d still be in there if they’d of had me.”

  “Well, nice talking to you.”

  “My pleasure,” he said as I walked past him.

  ******

  On the way out to Batavia, which is a small community about thirty miles northeast of Cincinnati, I kept trying to picture Lester O. Grimes in a gray overcoat and a green ski mask. But it was like trying to jam a size fourteen foot into a size nine shoe. He wouldn’t fit; but his message would. When people start shooting at you and threatening your life, it’s hard to miss the point. I’d blundered into something big, nasty, and very private; and the Cowboy and his three-gunned buddy weren’t going to let me lose my way again. No sir. They sure weren’t.

  I was contemplating what that big, nasty, private something might be when I spotted the huge A-shaped administration building of Sloane Labs rising above the pine trees. Like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis or the Mormon Memorial in D.C., Sloane is one of those structures that takes you by surprise. Sixteen stories high, all polished aluminum and tinted glass, it looks vaguely like a pair of enormous hands clasped in prayer. Beside the building, a great circular hillock, like an Indian burial mound, formed a large circuit, maybe four miles in circumference. And inside this raised oval, I swear, was planted a park, with deer and one hirsute buffalo roaming through the snow-draped pines.

  I turned off the highway onto a paved access road that led to the main building. There was a guardhouse about the size of a tollbooth a hundred yards down the road. I gave the guard my name and he waved me toward the visitor’s lot. It was a short walk from there to the main concourse, down an avenue planted with leafless ginkos. The lobby, an enormous arena, was planted with ginkos, too, and with a dozen other varieties of ornamental plants and flowering shrubs. They’d regulated the temperature and humidity inside the building so that most of the trees were still in bloom. I half expected to find the receptionist camped on a picnic blanket. Instead she was sitting in a round metal booth at the end of one of the garden trails that wove through the little forest. She had a dreamy, contented look on her face; and she smiled happily at me as I approached her.

  “Welcome to Sloane,” she said with good cheer. “You’re Mr. Stoner, aren’t you? Mr. Bidwell will be down in a moment.”

  I sat down on a sofa, set like a park bench in a square of earth, and listened to the soft music that was being piped in from somewhere above the arbor. There was something a little scary about this artificial paradise. Maybe it was the thinness of the deception—as if all the trees and grass, the courtesy to nature, could disguise the daily work of atom-smashing and nuclear experiment. Or, maybe, it was the dreamy look on that receptionist’s face and the thought that, if you stared long enough and in the right light, those trees and shrubs might actually come to seem like a real forest, the great A-shaped building like a towering herbarium, the four-mile accelerator like a mere pen for the bison and the deer. To me, the place had the shallow charm of a wax museum, only it was nature here preserved on exhibit—as posed and caricatured as a tableau out of history.

  Within five minutes, a thin, dapper man of about forty half-walked, half-marched up one of the trails to my bench.

  “Louis Bidwell, sir,” he said, extending a hand.

  There was nothing rustic about Louis Bidwell’s looks. His blond hair was cropped in military fashion, short at the back and sides; and he sported an immaculately trimmed mustache that gave his stern Southerner’s face a bit of dash. He looked like a young, hard-driving Atlanta business executive, one who had served six years in the Army and was now attached to the Reserves. Good company, a lady’s man, a bit of a drinker, and hard as nails. You could see that toughness clearly in his eyes, which were the cold, dis
tant blue of a winter sky.

  “We’re having a bit of a problem around heah today, Mr. Stoner,” he said in that smooth Southern voice. “Apparently some muskrats got into the ventilatin’ system of the accelerator.”

  “Muskrats?”

  “Yes, sir. They’ve colonized a section of the park near the lake.”

  “There’s a lake out there, too?” I said.

  “Yes, sir!’’ he said and almost clicked his heels. “We’ve gone to a good deal of trouble to preserve the natural beauty of this area.”

  “I think you’ve improved on it.”

  “Well, we wanted our personnel to feel as if they were working next to nature and to discourage the notion, which, I’m sorry to say, is all too prevalent about atomic research, that we are somehow tamperin’ with nature. The men out heah are no different than you and I, and they’re doing important work.”

  “I’d like to talk to you about one of your personnel,” I said. “Daryl Lovingwell.”

  “A sad thing,” Bidwell said sternly. “I’ve known the Professor intimately for ten years and, in all that time, our relationship was nothing but cordial and sincere. Make no mistake, that kind old man is going to be missed.”

  “You called Lovingwell on Tuesday morning, about eleven-thirty. Can you tell me what you and he discussed?”

  Bidwell gave me a soft, reproachful look. “I don’t want you to take what I’m going to say as an insult. But, before I answer that question, I’d like to know what interest you have in the matter.”

  “Fair enough. At the time of his death I was working for Professor Lovingwell.”

  “In what capacity?”

  “He hired me to recover some papers that were stolen from his safe.”

  Bidwell looked at me uneasily. “You are a private detective?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I see,” he said in a voice that made it clear that the fact did not sit well with him. “I take it that you suspect some connection between the theft of the papers you mentioned and the Professor’s suicide?”