“I know what you can do for me, buddy. You can call that s.o.b. in the second district who uses you for a tax shelter and get him to turn off the heat!”
“Hey, Harry,” Jim said righteously. “Congressman Giofranconi isn’t a switchboard. I can’t just patch cords in and out of him. Not if I want to keep his business.”
“Jim, I’m not the one who should be saying this, but you owe me.”
“O.K.,” he said after a minute. “If it gets bad, I’ll pull his string for you. But only if it gets bad, Harry.”
God bless pork barrel politics! I thought as I hung up the phone.
It was half-past seven according to the clock hanging above the Police Clerk’s counter on the other side of the lobby. I walked over to the desk and pressed the service button.
“Can you tell me if a Miss Sarah Lovingwell has posted bond or been released on writ this afternoon?” I asked the clerk—a sour-looking, silver-haired old man in a stained print shirt and black gabardine slacks.
“The charge?”
“Murder.”
He didn’t bat an eye, just ran his finger down a work sheet until he came to Lovingwell, Sarah B. “Yeah. She was sprung at five-ten. Habeus.”
“Thanks.”
“Think nothing of it,” he said drily.
Sarah’s release was a good sign. It had gone off on schedule, which meant that McMasters had bought what I’d proposed. At least until I could deliver Lester O. Grimes. After that...well, there was always Congressman Giofranconi.
I stepped out of the courthouse into the cold evening air. There was a light dusting of snow on the parkway, and pedestrians were walking pigeon-toed along the sidewalks, skipping over puddles and patches of ice. There’s a lesson here, Harry, I said to myself. It’s bad weather all over town.
******
At nine-fifteen I pulled into the Lovingwell driveway and got out of the Pinto. There was a light on the second floor. Sarah’s bedroom light. I stared for a minute at the window. There was no sign of expectation. No face pressed against the pane. Nobody tripping eagerly downstairs to greet me. No front door thrown wide in welcome.
Maybe she’s changed her mind again, I thought. Like the petal-game—she trusts you, she trusts you not. Maybe you’ll walk up there and it’ll be the “no peddlers” look and the bum’s rush.
“Damn,” I said to myself. I was actually nervous. The way you can get at a party when you’re not sure of the company, not sure you want to hear this one’s lies and that one’s gossip.
I might have stood in front of the Pinto until dawn if I hadn’t seen the bedroom curtain flutter. It stirred me like a cry for help. I walked quickly up to the door and knocked.
She opened it slowly. Her face was half-hidden by the door, but what I could see of it told me that Sarah Lovingwell wasn’t going to be tossing brickbats at me this Thursday evening. She wasn’t going to be tossing anything at anyone. In the half-light of the hall she looked wan and exhausted. She also looked very frightened.
“I wasn’t sure you were going to come tonight,” she said. Her speech was thick and slurred. “I mean I wasn’t sure you were going to come at all.”
“I said I would, didn’t I?”
She laughed freakishly, then shuddered. “People don’t always do what they say.” If she was high on something, tripped out on soapers, I was in for a rough evening. Maybe even for a quick trip to the emergency room at General. The tremor in her movements, like an old woman’s gait, scared me.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said.
“All alone?”
“How else do you think?”
“I meant why didn’t you ask a friend to come over and stay with you?”
“Why?” she said. “To celebrate my release? To protect me from Les?” She looked at me with dull-eyed contempt. “Or do you mean to mourn with me over poor Papa?” She waved her hand dismissively, the way she’d done when I’d first spoken with her in the study on the day her father had died. “I didn’t feel the need. And, besides, friends are hard to come by tonight. At least, they are for me.”
“Do you feel up to talking?”
“Have you given me a choice?”
“I guess not,” I said.
“Then, come on. I want to show you something.” She turned from the door and walked tipsily upstairs. “I won’t bite you,” she said over her shoulder.
No, I thought. But I might bite you. Even stoned or fatigued, Sarah was a good-looking young woman. Not beautiful, but erotic in the prim promising way that certain convent girls can be erotic. And I’d been working up to some kind of foolish, romantic gesture for six lonely months. I tried not to think about it; but when I walked into Sarah’s bedroom my arm brushed against her breasts or she brushed against my arm, and when I looked at her face I caught a trace of a shallow and quite deliberate smile.
The room was a shambles. Clothes, boxes, papers were strewn everywhere. It looked as if the place had been searched with an unfriendly hand. I sat down on the bed and stared at the mess on the floor.
“Lose something?”
“In a way.” Sarah walked to the closet—the one in which I had found Lovingwell’s envelope—and picked up a shoe box. “You want to know why I came home on Tuesday morning, don’t you? Well, in a way, this is the reason.” She carried the box over to the bed and sat down beside me. “He’d taken it from me, and I wanted to get it back before he destroyed it.”
I studied Sarah’s face for a moment. “Before we get into this, I think I better tell you that in a few minutes you’re going to crash.”
“I know,” she said hoarsely. “I’m not stoned, if that’s what you think. I just couldn’t sleep in that cell. I couldn’t stop thinking about Les. When I got out, it was like coming down off speed. I lost all my energy.”
I wasn’t sure I trusted this giddy, exhausted version of Sarah L. She was worn out, all right; and she looked as if she hadn’t slept. But there was a movieland factitiousness about the whole business—the unlit house, the disordered room, the dull, ingenuous speech—that reminded me vaguely of the artificial way she had spoken of her father on Wednesday afternoon. She just wasn’t flighty enough, I suppose, for someone in the spot she was in. And the smile she had shown me when I’d brushed against her had been as calculated as Greenwich time. Sarah sensed what I was thinking.
“You really don’t trust me, do you?” she said.
I didn’t answer her.
“Well, I guess I don’t blame you. That was a lousy thing I said to you this afternoon. Especially since I found out that you were telling me the truth. I mean about Sean.”
“He had a hard time of it,” I said.
“So did I. I’m not trying to put you off. I’m just worn out.”
Sarah picked up the shoe box and placed it on my lap. “Now it’s yours,” she said. “I wonder how you’re going to like it?”
“What’s inside?”
“Mementos. Pictures of my mother.” She flipped the lid off the box and sorted through the pictures. “Look at this.”
She handed me a yellowed snapshot. It was a picture of a long-faced, rather aristocratic-looking woman, standing before a pond. The photo was of poor quality, but there was no mistaking the resemblance between its subject and Sarah.
“That one was taken in England,” she said. “In 1959. Father had gotten a Ford grant, and we spent that year on mother’s farm in Bucks.”
She looked down into the box and pulled out a second photo.
It was of her mother and father standing together in front of the same pond. Lovingwell looked exactly as he had the last time I’d seen him—deer-stalker cap, ulster coat, his sharp beard making a white V at the lapel. I took a close look at the mother’s face. There was something wrong with it. It reminded me of the photographs taken of Virginia Woolf before she committed suicide—an askew face, cheerless and disordered.
I flipped the photograph over. It was dated on the back in faint print—“August, 1972.”
“What happened?” I said to Sarah.
“You see!” she said triumphantly as if she were at once grateful and content that I had taken her point.
“Yes. Something happened to your mother.”
“There’s more,” Sarah said breathlessly. She began to pull one photo after another out of the shoebox. Some she glanced at before tossing on the floor. When the box was empty she knocked it, too, on the floor, and sat sullenly on the bed. Looking at her, I began to feel a little panicky.
“He did it,” she said in a hollow voice. “He killed her.”
I collected the photos from the floor and stuck them in my coat pocket. “We’ll talk about that later,” I said. “You need some rest. Do you mind going to my apartment? If your friend Les tries anything, I’d rather be on familiar ground.”
“Do I have a choice?” she said again.
“Not if you want my help,” I told her.
******
An unmarked police cruiser followed us over to the Delores. Sid wasn’t taking any chances, and, in a way, I was glad. I still didn’t have a handle on flighty Sarah L., and the police protection—which was meant as a reminder—felt good. When I’d parked and we’d gotten upstairs to the apartment, I took Sarah into the bedroom and sat her down on the bed.
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” I said.
“Don’t you want to talk?”
“In the morning. You’ve had a rough day.”
Sarah lay back on the mattress. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“Is that what you think?” I asked her.
She closed her eyes. “I don’t know. He used to tell me I was crazy. Everybody is, at times, aren’t they? He was crazy all the time. Wicked, wicked.” Sarah opened her eyes and looked up at me. “You’re not going to leave me alone here, are you?”
“I’ll be in the other room.”
“I’ll try to arrange a meeting with Les in the morning.”
She curled up under the blanket. I turned off the light, walked into the living room, poured myself a Scotch, and stretched out on the sofa. After downing the drink, I reached over to my coat and took the pictures out of the breast pocket. There were thirty of them—all dated in faint red print. A harmless enough legacy. And yet Sarah claimed that her father had wanted to destroy them. She might, in fact, have killed him to prevent their destruction. And killed him for what? For a picture of her mother beside an oak tree, maybe the tree behind the Lovingwell house? For another picture of Claire Lovingwell seated at a desk, her hand on her chin and her eyes leveled at the camera? Claire in shorts and halter; Claire in a print housedress; Claire, Daryl, and Sarah picnicking on the grass? Why would someone want to destroy a handful of album photographs hidden away in a closet? I thought of what Bidwell had said about Lovingwell and his wife. Maybe the Professor had felt that it was unhealthy for Sarah to dwell on pictures of her suicide mother. Maybe he’d thought that they fueled her hatred of him. The image of that dainty little man alone among all his treasures and of his daughter poring over the past in the upstairs bedroom was ludicrous and unsettling.
13
I HADN’T slept well on the couch—a slung leather Danish number that I’d bought on impulse at a furniture store in the Kenwood Mall. Like most Danish furniture it looked more comfortable than it actually was. Once I got it home I realized it was narrow and hard and smelled like a rubber pillow. All night long I kept dreaming that I was about to roll off it onto the floor. I had an aunt who used to recommend putting a chair beside your bed if you were worried about falling off the mattress. I never quite understood the logic—perhaps the chair served as a kind of magical boundary beyond which even the most restless sleeper wouldn’t venture. At any rate, at four in the morning, I tried her remedy; and the result was that I started dreaming about rolling off the couch and onto the chair.
At about seven I woke up to find Sarah Lovingwell sitting in the chair and smiling at me.
“Hi,” I said sleepily.
“Hi yourself.”
“Did you sleep well?”
“I slept like a log,” she said blandly. “It’s the first good rest I’ve had since Tuesday night.”
Sarah stretched on the chair and I could see her breasts rise against the loose denim of her shirt. She knew I was watching her, too. When she’d finished stretching, she ducked behind her long auburn hair and gave me a coy and sultry look.
“God, you’re a strange girl,” I said to her.
“I’ve got you guessing, haven’t I?” she said with a wink.
“There isn’t much about your family that isn’t a matter of guesswork.”
“That’s us, all right,” she said. “The mysterious Lovingwells.”
I got up and made some coffee while Sarah rattled the morning Enquirer. “Do you feel like talking?” I called to her from the kitchen.
“I suppose you mean about my father?”
“Yep.” I carried two cups of coffee into the living room. She was sitting on the couch and, in the morning light, she looked a lot younger and more vulnerable than she had the night before. But even in the morning light there was a certain pugnaciousness about Sarah L. Perhaps it was the way she held her head, tipped back slightly, as if she were reading fine print through invisible bifocals. Her eyes, sea blue and amorous, were cool behind those spectacles and far older than the rest of her face.
“So you want to talk about dear old Dad?” Sarah studied me amusedly. “You have a one-track mind, don’t you?”
“Detection is my life,” I said to her.
She laughed merrily. “Then this is the big test. Either I convince you that Father was a madman or you go to the police, is that right?” She twisted on the couch and said: “O.K. Where do you want to begin?”
“Let’s begin with these,” I said, setting the photographs on the coffee table in front of her. “I want you to tell me about the photographs and about what they represented, and let’s begin with the first one you showed me last night. The one of your mother standing in front of the pond.”
“The pond was on a farm in Bucks,” Sarah said. “It was her father’s farm. She’d inherited it in 1959. We’d gone to England on a grant, ostensibly for Father to do research but actually to make arrangements about death duties, entry fines. That sort of thing.”
“In the picture your mother looks—”
“Sane?” Sarah said. “There’s no reason to be embarrassed about it. She was sane, then. My mother was a weak-willed, vain woman; but she did have a genuine feeling for her home. She was very happy when we arrived at the farm. I think she thought of it as a sanctuary or last resort. My mother never quite accepted her marriage as a final condition, or thought of marriage itself as anything more than an escapade. It was as if her entire married life were a kind of preparation for that return home. But then she hadn’t bargained on marrying a man as tenacious and uncivilized as Papa.”
Sarah plucked a picture of her father from the stack and gazed at it. “I suppose you never really know your parents. They’re too close to you, like reading a page of print right in front of your eyes. And with someone like him it was even more difficult because so much of his life was hidden or invested in superficial things—in that moustache and that beard, in the tweed coat with the leather patches on the elbows, in meerschaum pipes and leather hair brushes. He’d grown up with money, and he liked it. So did Mother, but to her it was a kind of security, like the farm or the marriage. To him, it was an ornament of power. I suppose that’s one reason why I became a communist, because of his greed.” Sarah smiled at me. “I’m a very rich communist, now. Isn’t that funny?”
“I don’t think the police will find it so funny,” I said.
“You’re right. But I do have money of my own; I wasn’t lying to you yesterday. I have a trust fund. It was Mother’s last rational act—setting it up and insisting that Father have nothing to do with its administration.” Sarah ducked her head and brushed back her long hair with both hands. “Am
I being winning enough?” she said with a trace of laughter in her voice. “Doesn’t the thought of all that money convince you that I’m safe?”
“Are you trying to bribe me?”
“Are you bribable? If I was more sure of you I’d do it with sex.” She shook her hair out and laughed. “I’m being perverse again, aren’t I? It’s not really fair. When I was a girl I was thin with practically no breasts at all. He used to make fun of the way I looked. So I became flirtatious when I grew up.” She grinned. “Do you see a pattern developing here?
“I’ll tell you a story. When I was eighteen I went to my first formal dance. I went with Sean O’Hara. Before the dance, before Sean picked me up, I was in my bedroom, admiring myself in a mirror. It was my first strapless gown. I’d grown breasts by then. And I felt good looking at myself. Father came in, and when he saw me he kissed me on the cheek. And then he blushed. I looked down and saw that he had a hard-on. It made me feel sensational to know that I had that power over him. After that I went out of my way to expose myself to him, leaving doors open, walking around half-dressed or undressed. You see, in every other way it was me reacting to him.
“Do you think that’s queer or terrible? It probably is. I’m not like that in bed, though. I’m really pretty normal.”
“You’re doing it again, Sarah. And it’s making me nervous.”
“Am I?” she said insouciantly.
I glared at her and said: “Let’s get back to that picture of your mother. What happened in England?”
“That’s the hard part,” Sarah said timidly.
“It’s not going to be any easier in McMaster’s office or on a witness stand.”
“No, it’s not going to be easy anywhere.”
She drew herself up on the cushion and said, “It was money that started it. Father claimed that we couldn’t afford to maintain the farm in Bucks. Maybe he was telling the truth. But with someone like him the truth is always accessory. While we stayed on in Bucks, he was bargaining with a farmer in Devon about selling the property. He never asked her if she wanted to sell it—which she didn’t. I don’t think he ever asked another person what he wanted in this life. He just assumed he knew best. And in the end, he had his way. She didn’t have enough character to stand up to him. He sold her patrimony, but she never forgave him for it. And that was the start, if there is a ‘start’ to the disintegration of a marriage. That fall was the last time they slept in the same room. It was the last time I thought of them as being in love.
Dead Letter Page 10
