Dead Letter

by Jonathan Valin

  “How would a guy like Frisco come at you?” I said.

  “Quick. Probably at night. And he’ll be armed to the teeth. There’s a chance he’ll flip out before he gets to you, ‘cause dudes like that were wired like Claymores. Sooner or later they always blew themselves up. That’s what happened to Frisco. One day he just walked off into the jungle with a knife in his belt and that was the end of it. Don’t try talking to this guy. Dudes like Frisco just don’t have anything to say. If you see him before he sees you, my advice is kill him. And make sure the bastard’s dead, too, ‘cause he’ll have lots of juice working for him and he’ll have a dozen different ways of wasting you.”

  I leaned back against the glass counter and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “So all I can hope to do is beat him to the draw.”

  “I’m sorry, Harry,” Soldi said. “But that’s the way it is. Guys like that just won’t walk into a trap. Man, they used to sit around for hours without moving a muscle, just waiting for the right moment to do their work.”

  “Well thanks, Larry,” I said to him.

  Soldi walked back to the rear of the shop and I could almost see the energy draining out of him with each step. Bullet looked at me a long moment and said what I’d been thinking, “Harry, you’re in real trouble.”

  ******

  It took me a quarter of an hour to convince Bullet that there was no way he could help me. And at that I wasn’t sure he’d really bought what I told him. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me as I left the store—like I was a piece of equipment with his own personal five-year warranty on my chest. To be honest, after talking to Larry Soldi, I didn’t like the look of anyone or anything on the mall—the blue-haired woman with a shopping bag on her arm who was gazing into Walgreen’s window, the black kids hanging around the liquor store, the Samoyed nosing at some garbage in a wire trash can, and, least of all, Ted Lurman, who was leaning up against his Chevy pretending he was a station chief in Paris. Wake up, man! I almost shouted at him.

  It wasn’t that Soldi had told me anything I didn’t already know. It was just having it confirmed so thoroughly that shook me up. Because if Larry were right, there’d be no percentage in sitting around waiting for Lester to show his hand. He’d have to be tracked down. And then he’d have to be killed. And if I didn’t want Sarah and me to end up as casualties in an FBI set-up that backfired, I’d have to make sure the killing was done as coolly and efficiently as possible. That meant I’d have to have some help. I’d have to have access to an informant who could tell me precisely where Grimes was going to be at precisely the right moment.

  As I drove back to the Delores I began to form a little plan. If Sarah could get Sean O’Hara and some of the other Friends of Nature to cooperate with us, we might be able to track Grimes down that very night. The trick would be getting O’Hara to play ball. If he wouldn’t the FBI could always tail him and his friend Chico Robinson until they led us to Grimes’s lair. And once that was over, I could get back to the document and Daryl Lovingwell.

  ******

  Sarah answered the door when I returned to the apartment. She had wrapped her auburn hair in a plaid scarf. Standing barefoot in her peg-leg jeans and checked shirt, she looked domestic and adorable.

  “Hello, lady,” I said, kissing her on the lips.

  “Hello, man.”

  “Why so housewifely?” I said as I hung up my coat.

  “We have guests.”

  “And did you have a nice morning?”

  Sarah shrugged. “It could have been worse. They could have been Republicans.”

  The two telephone repairmen were sitting on the living room couch. One of them was about twenty-five, short, with a flushed, pretty, Italian face. He eyed Sarah hungrily as we walked up to them. The other guy was looking straight at me. He was about fifty, stocky, balding, and morose—a big-boned man with the grave, sad-eyed face of a Methodist elder.

  “Harry Stoner,” I said.

  The young one said, “Ed Lionelli. This is my partner, Carl Sturdevant.”

  “Where’s Lurman?” Sturdevant said in a deep, unfriendly voice.

  “He was right behind me. I guess he’ll be up in a minute.”

  Sturdevant looked at his watch. “We’ve got to get cracking,” he said. “We’ve got to make some plans.”

  I looked at Sturdevant and knew immediately that he was dangerous. A red-baiter. A holdover from the Hoover regime. He was the type who could get Sarah and me killed and feel righteous about it. I started to tell him what he could do with his plans when Lurman knocked at the door. Sarah ushered him into the room, and as he walked past me, he flipped off the dark green glasses and held out his hand.

  “Ted Lurman,” he said.

  “Harry Stoner.”

  Lurman nodded to Lionelli and Sturdevant and surveyed the room. “You into stereo?”

  “No. I just stopped at the store to talk to a friend.”

  “I used to be,” he said. “In the service. Hell, I could pick up a Revox A-700 for six bills in Germany.”

  “I think they’re well over a thousand bucks here,” I said.

  Lurman smiled. “I know. I sold two of them in New York when I got stateside.”

  Now, this is more like it, I said to myself. “I thought you guys were all honesty and light.”

  “We are,” he said. “Actually things have kind of loosened up since Hoover broke his promise to himself and died. Isn’t that right, Ed?”

  Lionelli stared at Sarah and practically licked his lips. “Yeah, we’re real loose now.”

  “Did you get any action on the street?” Sturdevant said.

  Lurman shook his head.

  “Then we’ll have to smoke him.”

  “Hold on,” I said.

  Sturdevant burped in surprise.

  “You were saying?” Lurman said.

  I sat down on the Easy-Boy and Sarah drifted in behind me. “How much do you know about the way Lester Grimes operates?”

  “We know he’s a smart, dangerous, and slightly crazy man,” Lurman said. “He’s good with weapons and he’s clever. The job he did on that school superintendent was a work of art.”

  “How so?”

  “He just timed it to perfection. We went back over the scene later and we figure he must have sat in front of the building opposite superintendent Bolter’s apartment for two or three hours. In broad daylight, mind you. With a machine pistol under his coat. About five Bolter draws the living room curtains and Grimes pulls out the piece, loads it, and shoots him six times before the poor bastard can let go of the drawstring.”

  “He’s that good a shot?” I said.

  “Deadly and proficient. We’re not sure, but we think he may have killed a narcotics agent in San Francisco, too,” Lurman said. “This time, he used a shotgun. At close range.”

  “A sawed-off?” I said with a shudder.

  “Yeah. It’s paradoxical. One crime in the style of a Mafia button-man and the other like a barroom brawler.”

  “What about the ‘Cowboy’ business?”

  “Apparently he’s been fascinated with guns and gunmen most of his life. Some of the people we interviewed in California said he liked to switch hats. Some days he was the good guy and some days the bad. Some days he was the town sheriff and others the hot-blooded outlaw. It’s not that he’s completely looney. He knows that there’s more than a little wrong with him; and he’s been known to warn friends away when he thinks he’s losing control. What he is is a paranoid with a wry sense of humor; and the Cowboy act is a way of dramatizing his own craziness.”

  “How the hell did someone like him get involved in radical politics?”

  “A lot of vets did,” Lurman said. “You know men just can’t come back home after seeing a lot of death and sit down at the old spot at the table and swallow the same pap. Look who was doing all the sniping in the Miami riots. Lester was involved in the Vets Against the War movement back in the early seventies and drifted from that into more vio
lent protests.”

  I took a deep breath and glanced up at Sarah. She was staring somberly at Ted Lurman. I touched her hand and she looked down at me. “Do you think you can get in touch with Sean again?”

  “Why?”

  “We need his help,” I said. “Grimes is a trained killer and I don’t think he’s going to walk into any trap that we set up. He’s going to kill us in his own sweet time and maybe these gentlemen will get him after we’re dead and maybe they won’t. Our only real chance to stay alive is to find Grimes before he finds us. And Sean can help us find him.”

  Sarah knit her brow. “If you expect Sean to betray Les, he won’t do it.”

  “Not even for you?”

  “Christ, Harry, that’s lousy.”

  “Yes. It’s a choice between lousy and dead.”

  “Once he finds out that we’ve thrown in with the FBI, Sean may not even talk to me, much less help me.”

  “I’ve got an answer for that one, too. But you’re going to hate it.”

  Sarah stared at me coldly. “You mean lie to him, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “You don’t tell him about the FBI. You don’t tell him the real reason we want to find Grimes. You just tell him that you want to make amends with Cowboy. Tell him that you’ve broken off with me. Set up a time and place for the reconciliation, and we’ll go in your place.”

  “God,” Sarah hissed.

  “Do you think I would say it if I could think of anything else? Christ, Sarah, it’s him or us now.”

  “I’ll think it over,” she said tartly and stalked off into the bedroom. I sat back in the chair and lit a cigarette.

  “That’s your idea?” Lurman asked after a moment.

  “That’s the idea, buddy,” I snapped. “There isn’t going to be any set-up on this one. No decoys. And that girl isn’t going to be involved in the pay-off. When we hunt down Grimes, it’s just going to be you, me, and your two friends.”

  “It’s a good idea,” Lurman said.

  I took a deep drag and blew it out. “It’s a shitty idea. But if O’Hara plays along, it’ll work.”

  ******

  I filled the three agents in on what I knew about Grimes, O’Hara, and Robinson; and we decided that if Sean wouldn’t cooperate, we’d split up and follow him and Chico in the hope that one of them would lead us to the Cowboy. While Sturdevant and Lionelli were discussing how the tail should be run, I pulled Lurman into the kitchen and asked him for a favor.

  “Do you know a security man named Louis Bidwell?” I said.

  “Chief at Sloane?”

  I nodded. “I want you to get a copy of Daryl Lovingwell’s security file from him.”

  “Does it have anything to do with Grimes?” Lurman said.

  I didn’t even have to think about the lie. I just looked him in the eye and said, “Yes.”

  “All right,” Lurman said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  After setting that wheel in motion, I walked into the bedroom to talk with Sarah. She was stretched out on the blanket, face-down, her head buried in the pillows. When I touched her on the shoulder, she turned over and looked unhappily into my face.

  “You think I’m being a shit, don’t you?” I said. “That I’m enjoying this?”

  “I don’t think you enjoy it, but they’re my friends. At least, Sean is.”

  “You still love him?” I asked.

  Sarah wiped her eyes with her fingertips and said, “I like him. What does that have to do with it?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I guess I was being ‘jealous’ again.” She laughed half-heartedly. “I know it’s lousy, but if you don’t want to be involved in the violence, it has to be done this way.”

  “There’s violence and there’s violence.” Sarah sat up on the bed and drew her knees to her chin. “This is a bad thing, Harry. You must feel it, too. I told you before—I don’t think I would have survived adolescence without Sean.”

  “Sarah, the cold truth is that you’re not going to survive adulthood without him.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’d just like to have the illusion of a choice.” She brushed her hair back and got up off the bed. “I’ll call him. But I can’t lie to him.”

  “Sarah, you might as well cut your own throat. If O’Hara tells Grimes what we’re up to, he’ll have the edge.”

  “Sean won’t tell him.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because he loves me, Harry,” she said flatly.

  I thought it over. “You’ll be trading on his feeling for you.”

  “How nice of you to put it that way.”

  “You’re the one that wants the illusion of a choice.”

  “Yes,” she said bitterly. “I’ll be trading on his feelings. But, at least, I won’t be lying about why I’m doing it. And now I better go make that call. If I think about it too much, I’ll chicken out.”

  I left the room, and, a minute later, I could hear her dialing the phone.

  ******

  When I walked back into the bedroom, Sarah was wearing her scruples on her sleeve. But there was a little human triumph mixed with the remorse.

  “He’ll meet with us,” she said simply.

  “When?”

  “Tonight. In the lot at Old Coney. You and I are to come alone.” Sarah stretched out on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “I ought to feel worse than I do,” she said earnestly.

  “The hair shirts are in the big bureau, second drawer from the bottom.”

  She rolled on her side and smirked at me. “It’s just that it was too easy. I thought he would be more principled than he was, and now that it’s done I’m disappointed in him. He owed it to himself and the movement to refuse me.”

  “Your father was right,” I said with a sigh. “He told me you could never do a thing halfway.”

  “Him.” She waved her hand. “If it wasn’t for him, none of this would have happened. No picture-taking, no Cowboy, no FBI.”

  “No us, either,” I said.

  Sarah smiled. “Well, I hadn’t thought of that,” she confessed. “On the other hand, we might have met anyway.”

  “But would we have made love, anyway?”

  “It’s an interesting question.” Sarah rolled over to me, put her hands around my neck, and pressed her forehead against mine. “How does it look from here?”

  “Doubtful,” I said.

  “You’re not supposed to look,” she said with mock petulance. “You’re supposed to commune.”

  “Is that how the communists do it?”

  Sarah butted me hard.

  “Ow!” I said.

  “Damn it,” she said suddenly. “I’m mad!”

  “Well, take it out on someone else,” I said, rubbing my forehead.

  “You know what I think—I think Father planned this whole thing to get me in trouble with Lester.”

  “You want to hear something strange?” I said. “I found out this morning that your papa told O’Hara that he was worried about your mental health. Two days ago, Louis Bidwell at Sloane told me dear old Dad had told him the same thing.”

  “I must have been acting crazier than I thought.”

  I shook my head. “Maybe your father wanted people to think you were crazy. Maybe that’s why he hired me.”

  “Because he thought I was crazy?”

  “Crazy enough to steal a top-secret document.”

  “That damn thing again,” she said.

  “That damn thing may be the key to this whole mess.”

  Sarah frowned and, for a second, all the playfulness went out of her face. “Why can’t you let it alone, Harry? Isn’t Les enough? Why don’t you just forget that thing?”

  I said, “What would you think if I told you that your father was a spy?”

  Sarah gawked at me, then started to laugh. “Father?” she said merrily. “A spy?”

  “It fits with all the information I’ve been able to gather.”

  “A spy!” Sarah roared.


  “Look. Your father told at least two people he thought you were crazy, then he hired me to keep an eye on you. In the meantime, he was converting stocks and bonds into cash—in short, acting like somebody preparing to make a quick getaway. This morning, Meg O’Hara told me that she thought money would be at the bottom of this business. And I think she might be right.”

  Sarah stopped laughing. “Explain your theory.”

  It took me a moment to collect my thoughts, because in a way I was explaining the theory to myself, as well. “Say your father had been surreptiously photographing documents and selling them for cash. Say someone, maybe Bidwell, was catching on. Not to your father, but to whomever your father was working with at the lab. In order to divert suspicion, your father fakes a robbery.”

  “Fakes it!” Sarah said with astonishment.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure it was faked. At the time I examined the study I knew something was fishy—only at the time I thought someone was setting your father up.”

  “Someone meaning me?”

  “That’s the way it looked. But I didn’t know your father then. He was an amazing man.”

  “Marvelous,” Sarah said acidly.

  “If I’m right, he showed real genius in planting the original clues—the envelope in your closet, the prints on the safe. They were perfect clues, and I mean that quite literally. Perfectly unsmudged prints, perfect and perfectly available evidence. They were so perfect that he knew they’d be ambiguous and so perfectly ambiguous that he could play them anyway he chose. Or anyway I chose. That’s the beauty of it. If I was too dumb to smell a set-up, the clues pointed to you. If I was smart enough to see an unknown hand behind their arrangement, they still pointed to you. It took genius, all right. And a certain degree of malevolence that still astonishes me, in spite of what I’ve learned about your father’s character. If my theory is right, he set you up cold-bloodedly to divert suspicion from himself. While the police and I were busy trying to prove your guilt or innocence, he was preparing to skip the country. Once he’d straightened out the financial side of it, I suppose he would have called Bidwell about the document, reluctantly confessed his suspicions, pointed out that he’d hired a man to look into it, and said that he was going away for a few days to think the matter out. A couple of days would have stretched to a couple of months—while you were cooling off in the slammer—and by the time the lie was unraveled, he’d have disappeared for good.”