Dead Letter

by Jonathan Valin

“I’m not sure. The Professor’s daughter has hired me to look into her father’s death, which wasn’t a suicide, by the way.”

  “What!” Bidwell said with astonishment. For a second his face hardened into absolute fury. “Are you playing games with me, mister?”

  “Lovingwell was murdered,” I said. “I’ve just talked to the police.”

  “Murdered,” he said savagely. He looked quickly around the little forest, as if he were afraid that someone had loosed snakes, as well as muskrats, in his preserve. Then he turned back to me. “You and I had better have a little chat, Stoner. Under the circumstances, there are some things you ought to know.”

  We went up to Bidwell’s office. It looked like a high-priced psychiatrist’s suite—chrome, glass, and thick-pile rugs. Except that instead of diplomas Bidwell had hung crossed Mausers on the paneled walls.

  “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing to a chrome-and-leather director’s chair in front of his desk. “Do the police have any suspects?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Do you?” he said deferentially.

  “I know that the Professor was worried about recovering those papers and that something greatly upset him on Tuesday morning, after you called.”

  Bidwell looked thoughtfully at a folder on his desk. I tried to make something out of that look, but couldn’t decipher it. “He didn’t mention any papers to me,” he said after a moment. “Our conversation was purely personal.” Bidwell blushed as if he’d said a dirty word. “You say you’re workin’ for his daughter?”

  I nodded.

  “Well,” he said, still reddening. “I’m afraid she was the subject of our talk.”

  “What about his daughter?”

  “This is most awkward,” Bidwell said. “But I feel you have the right to know. I believe that Professor Lovingwell was afraid his daughter might do violence to herself or to him.”

  It was my turn to gawk, blush, and struggle through a sentence. “He told you that Sarah was dangerous?”

  “In so many words, yes. Ever since his wife’s death seven years ago, that girl’s been nothin’ but trouble. Daryl came to me several times in the past few years, most recently on Saturday last, to talk it over. You see I have a daughter who’s a bit younger than Sarah, but they...share some of the same problems. I guess that’s why we got on so well,” he said sternly. And I suddenly realized that that diffidence was his way of disguising affection for a friend. “That man had two crosses to bear—first the wife and then the child. But he wasn’t one to complain. Not even when the girl started messin’ with radicals and interfering with his work. He said he admired her spirit.” Such charity was clearly incomprehensible to Louis Bidwell, who shook his head with disgust. “He’d of been better off stickin’ her in a home,” he said bitterly. “And the wife, too.”

  “Why would Sarah ‘do violence’ to her father?”

  Bidwell gave me a “you-tell-me-how-it’s-possible” look. “For five years that man nursed his wife through one nervous breakdown after another. Never complained, never asked for help. In spite of all his efforts, she committed suicide seven years ago. Of course it was a terrible blow. And I personally don’t think he was ever the same afterward. The worst of it was that Sarah blamed him for her mother’s death. She had always been a little unbalanced, like the mother. And the suicide just toppled her over the edge. She started runnin’ around with hippies and radicals. Just last Saturday, the Professor came up heah and confessed he’d discovered she’d been takin’ drugs. He pretended he wasn’t concerned. But I had the feeling, when we got done, that he feared she might do violence. Either to herself or to him.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “In so many words.”

  “And your call Tuesday morning?”

  “Just to follow up on what we’d talked over on Saturday afternoon. He didn’t seem upset on the phone. But when I heard the news of his suicide...I’ll be honest, I blamed Sarah.”

  “But you didn’t tell the police that?”

  “Out of courtesy to him. I don’t think he told another soul what he told me. He was a sensitive and extremely private man. And every time he’d mention Sarah it was only to apologize or excuse her behavior. He loved that girl.”

  “And now that you know he didn’t kill himself, that he was murdered?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Bidwell said. “It’s a terrible thing to think that a daughter would kill her own father.”

  ******

  It was, indeed, a terrible thought. There’s mischief and there’s crime, and then there are acts that seem to go beyond our conventional notions of mayhem straight to some old, fearful spot in the brain. I remember still, vividly, a custody case that I worked on when I was just starting out. The man and woman fought constantly over the child; then, one afternoon, the wife wrapped the little girl in a gasoline-soaked blanket and left her, blazing, on the husband’s porch. I felt that night, when I went home to the Delores, as if I had seen a nightmare seep into the clean day. It’s one reason why I could never be a cop. You can only experience so much of that kind of cruelty before it ceases to be a limit—a kind of boundary to what human beings are capable of—and starts to become a law. And when you begin to measure people by that standard, you don’t think of them as human beings anymore, but as things—dangerous things.

  As a rule I treat other folks as if they were pretty much like me—built according to the same ratio of reason and madness. But even allowing for a bit of mathematical error, the Lovingwells were not like you and me. Whether they belonged in that malignant netherworld where human acts cease to be human, I didn’t know. Sarah didn’t look like a killer, for what that was worth. Even her implacable hatred could be explained away, since I’d talked with Bidwell. But that’s a bad habit—explaining things away. And given the fact that my life had been threatened twice, I didn’t want to make the mistake of substituting a prejudice for a fact, even if it were a comforting prejudice. This is a hard world, Harry, I told myself, as I walked back down the avenue of ginkos to the visitor’s lot. And it’s naive to believe that children always honor their parents, like the good book recommends, although the distance between dishonor and murder was still enough to give me pause.

  Bidwell could have been exaggerating his story. Disgust, anger, any number of motives could do that to a man. Of course, he hadn’t looked the type to be rattled by death; but he hadn’t looked the type to be chummy, either. Yet he had told me a great deal more than I’d expected. Well, more and less. There had been no talk about the document, no mention on his part of Lovingwell’s papers, or of the “trouble” Sid McMasters said Lovingwell had been in at the lab. And that was damn curious. Any self-respecting security officer in the world would keep tabs on secret papers going into or out of his establishment, particularly if he’d been having an espionage problem. Bidwell had to know that Lovingwell had checked the document out on Saturday afternoon; yet he’d made no effort to recover it after the Professor’s death on Tuesday. Maybe Louis Bidwell wasn’t being as candid as he’d wanted to appear. I drove back to town thinking about Bidwell and about what he had and hadn’t told me.

  9

  IT DIDN’T take a detective to see there had been trouble at the Lovingwell house when I drove up Middleton at six that night. Squad cars crowded the street, and there was sweet cordite smoke drifting through the dusky air. I parked behind a city ambulance and hopped out of the Pinto. A dozen uniformed police were strutting along the sidewalk between the patrol cars. They had tough, anxious looks on their faces. On the neighboring porches children and parents stood in tight groups, talking actively to each other and, now and again, pointing to the Lovingwell home. In the distance, the scream of a siren floated away toward a hospital or a precinct house. Whatever the problem had been, it was settled now. But my heart was pounding hard as I walked up to one of the patrolmen—a young cop wearing a hard white helmet and carrying a vicious-looking pump shotgun in his hands—and asked him what had happened.


  “There was a little trouble here,” he said coyly.

  “Look,” I said. “I work for Sarah Lovingwell and I’m asking you what happened?”

  “You work for the girl?” he said. “Maybe you’d better come with me.”

  He led me through the clump of patrol cars onto the lawn and up the concrete pathway to the front door. There was blood on the stoop. A good deal of it.

  “Jesus,” I said under my breath. “Was anyone killed?”

  The cop kept walking. “One of our men is down,” he said stiffly. “We don’t know how bad, yet.”

  “The girl?” I said. “Sarah?”

  He didn’t answer.

  We walked through the front door. The scene on the lawn had been a small gathering compared to the convention in the entrance hall. There were so many men in the passageway that I had to stand beside the Chinese cabinet while the cop cleared a path to the living room. Once inside, I spotted Sid McMasters sitting on the buff leather couch and shouted to him.

  “Stoner,” he said. “Come over here.”

  “What in hell happened?” I asked him when I’d worked my way to the sofa.

  He stared at me grimly. “I sent a squad car up here to pick up the Lovingwell girl. One of her friends didn’t want her to come along. There were some words and he started shooting.”

  “Was it a big guy in cowboy duds?”

  Sid gave me a look that straightened my spine. “Just how did you know that?”

  “I was here about four hours ago. I saw him then. He was waiting for Sarah.”

  “Yeah? Well, he shot a patrolman in the stomach. The back-up squad didn’t know what was going down inside—some sort of goddamn mix-up—and the son-of-a-bitch got out the back door.”

  “And the girl?”

  “We’ve got her and the O’Hara boy in the lock-up right now.”

  “Why did you decide to pick her up, Sid?” I asked him.

  “Those pictures you gave us,’’ he said. “We ran makes on all of them and a couple came up dirty. A bombing at a Tennessee nuclear plant.”

  “And you figured Sarah was part of it?”

  “For chrissake, Stoner!” McMasters bellowed. “It was your idea! We don’t know if she’s part of it or not. All we wanted to do was ask her a few questions when your friend in the cowboy suit blew his stack.”

  “His name is Grimes,” I said. “Lester O. Grimes. He’s from a little place called Bloody Basin, Arizona. Served in the Marine Corps in ‘Nam as a weapons specialist, Master Gunnery Sergeant. He came to Ohio about a year ago.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “He told me. He also told me he was going to kill me if I didn’t keep away from Sarah, the Friends of Nature, and the police.”

  “Well, judging by this evening, I’d say he was a man of his word.” McMasters gestured to a plainclothesman standing by the door of the study. “You want to tell Collins what you just told me?” he said.

  I told the detective what I knew about Lester O. Grimes. When he was through taking down my story, I went looking for Sid again. I found him talking on the phone in the study. When he finished, he looked up at me with the exhausted satisfaction of a man who’s heard belated good news.

  “This foul-up may turn out all right,” he said wearily. “But you’re going to be out one customer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Lovingwell girl,” he said. “We’re going to hold her for the death of her father.”

  ******

  Mrs. Arthur Weinberg was her name.

  She lived two doors down from the Lovingwells in another colonial with a red-brick facade and a graceful white frame porch. Her husband taught Romance Languages at the University; and Mrs. Weinberg kept house, save for Tuesday afternoons when she worked as a volunteer at the Clifton Daycare Center. She was a genial woman of about sixty, with a plump, good-natured face and a grandmotherly fondness for Sarah Lovingwell and for all the other “children” who had grown up on her street.

  She had wanted to help Sarah when the police came swarming across the lawns and through the backyard arbors in search of rangy Lester Grimes. It was only after talking with the detectives that she realized that she might have made a mistake. “I didn’t intend to get her in trouble,” she told me when I stopped by the Weinberg house late that night. “It was the last thing on my mind. I won’t testify to what I said if it comes to trial.”

  “There’s no reason to blame yourself,” I told her. “Sooner or later, the police would have discovered that Sarah’s alibi was a lie.”

  “But that’s not why I told them!” she protested. “I thought it was all connected to this evening’s shooting. Not to Daryl’s death.”

  What Mrs. Weinberg had told the detectives was this: on Tuesday morning, some time around noon, as she was loading her station wagon with the materials she needed for the Daycare Center, she had looked up and spotted Sarah Lovingwell walking toward the Lovingwell house.

  “I waved to her, but she didn’t see me. So I went on packing up the car. There was nothing odd about seeing Sarah walking down the street. And, of course, when Daryl...when we found that he was dead, I remember thinking how tragic it must have been for her to walk in and see him lying there. And then I thought...my God, I was present at that terrible moment and didn’t even know! There’s a disturbing poem in which a man is raking leaves in his yard and rakes up a skeletal hand. I don’t think I’ve ever had it come home to me that brutally—that horror is there, like the hand beneath the leaves.” Mrs. Weinberg ducked her head apologetically. “You’ll have to excuse my way of talking. It comes from living with a teacher of poetry.”

  I smiled at her.

  “When the detectives came here, I thought their questions were aimed at explaining tonight’s trouble. I told them how fond I was of Sarah. What a good girl she had always been. And then that moment just came back to me—well, it had never really left—and I blurted it out, thinking it would prove something about her strength of character. When they started asking me more questions about that afternoon, I knew I had said something wrong; and I didn’t say anything else. But it was too late, then. I could tell from the looks on their faces that I had confirmed a terrible suspicion.” Mrs. Weinberg looked at me sadly. “She couldn’t have had anything to do with Daryl’s death. I’m certain of it. Why, it’s a wonder she survived at all in that household.”

  “You mean because of her mother’s illness and death?” I said.

  “That, of course. And other things. You are working for her, aren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Then you must know how she really felt about her father.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I don’t completely understand it.”

  Mrs. Weinberg smiled at me as if I’d uttered a familiar adage. “No one does. Do you know what I think? I think that he was a little mad.”

  “Did you know him well?”

  She shook her head. “None of us did. He kept almost entirely to himself.” She winked mischievously and said behind her hand: “He was a terrible snob, although I suppose that was part of his charm. That and his tweed coats and his briar pipes. And the curious way he had of slipping into and out of an English accent, as if the language were a velvet smoking jacket or a pair of leather slippers. You know how they say of high fashion models that clothes ‘hang well’ on them? Daryl was like that. Culture, or his Saville Row version of it, hung well on him. At least, on the surface it did.”

  She looked back through the screen door—to see if her husband was listening—then turned to me with a conspiratorial smile. “Let me be plain with you,” she said. “I feel the need to be understood, after being so misunderstood by those policemen. I didn’t really like Daryl. There was something wrong with him; and, while Sarah has never told me anything specific in confirmation, her hatred of him is confirmation enough. It’s easy to say that she inherited her mother’s madness and to attribute her hatred to that. That’s how my h
usband, Arthur, feels. But I don’t. Daryl did something to that girl, something unforgivably cruel. An unpardonable sin. And that’s why she hates him.”

  Mrs. Weinberg smiled again. “You don’t believe me. I’ve queered it by talking like a poetry teacher.”

  “I read,” I said testily.

  “I meant no offense. It’s just that I get enthusiastic about things that other people generally think are fanciful. Read enough poems and you look to the patterns beneath the surfaces. You also begin to see probabilities—the way certain artifacts have to fulfill themselves. Daryl Lovingwell was such an artificial creature, so plumped with superficial grace, that I found myself reading him like a poem. And unless my genre expectations are misfounded, he was not at all the man he appeared to be.”

  I shook my head and said, “Let me ‘be plain’ with you, too. Three days ago Daryl Lovingwell hired me to do a job for him, a job that would have been unnecessary unless, as he claimed, he loved his daughter. Yesterday he died; and Sarah told me, in all candor, that she hated her father and that he hated her. The thing of it is, they were both so damn convincing.

  “I’ve spoken to a man today who knew Lovingwell intimately and he believed that the Professor loved his daughter. He also thought that Sarah might have killed him. There’s that, and the police, and Sarah’s hatred on the one hand; and on the other, there’s you, Mrs. Weinberg, and your intuition.”

  “And you,” she said. “And your intuition.”

  I laughed. “Yes. And me, too. At least, until the police force me to choose sides.”

  “There are probably ten thousand reasons,” she said, “why I can picture Daryl Lovingwell as something other than the debonair anglophile he pretended to be. Everything from the tone of voice he used when calling Sarah home to supper to the way he stood at the graveside when he buried Claire, his wife. But not one of them would serve as conclusive evidence. And taken together, they would probably tell you more about me than they would about him. I’m sorry. I wish I could be of more help. But I can’t give you what you want, Mr. Stoner. Only he could tell you the truth about himself. And he’s dead.” Mrs. Weinberg looked up Middleton to the Lovingwell house. “I’ve lived on this street for twenty years; and in all that time I’ve never seen anything like the past two days.”