Dead Letter

by Jonathan Valin

  “I’m a private detective.”

  That tickled her. “You’re joshing me?”

  “Nope. It’s a poor trade, but mine own.”

  “Who are you investigating? Charley?”

  “No. The death of a man named Lovingwell.”

  “I know him,” she said. “He’s the son-of-a-bitch that gave Charley such a hard time. I told Charley to stick up for himself. To tell that bastard he wouldn’t do his dirty work for him. But...” She waved her hand, as if she were bidding the idea goodbye once and for all. “He never had anything in here, my boy, Charley.” She pressed her stomach and made a sour, disappointed face.

  I could see that Clovis McPhail had been a hard woman all of her life. Hard on her son. Probably hard on her husband. In a household where everything was kept just so. It made me dislike her a little.

  “He should have gone into a profession. I always told him that. With a profession you know where you stand. You got your feet on the ground. You got money coming in. He wouldn’t listen. Just like his old man. He’d go off in a corner somewhere and sulk. What kind of man...” She gave me an abashed look.

  “I know about Charley’s problem,” I said gently.

  “He made me sick with it. His friends, too.”

  “Who were his friends?”

  “Kids. Like him.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  She looked at me shrewdly. “What are you driving at?”

  “Charley was having a relationship with someone at the University. The other party broke it off with him right before he died. Do you have any idea who the other man was?”

  “I might,” she said.

  It was becoming a game to her. She had something I wanted and it was not in her nature to give things away for free. In that she reminded me of Daryl Lovingwell. I thought about what she might be after until it became obvious.

  “It must be hard living here alone,” I said. “On a widow’s benefits.”

  “You don’t know the half of it. Lou didn’t leave me a penny.”

  I looked around the room. “You could use a new lamp. That one’s about done for.”

  “A new TV, too.”

  “What kind of TV were you thinking of?”

  She hopped out of the chair. “I got the catalogue upstairs. Sometimes I read through it and circle things I want to buy. I mean if I had the money.”

  “Why don’t you go get it?”

  She smiled raffishly and scurried off. When she came back, she had the mail-order catalogue in her hand. She had something else, too. An old envelope. She handed them both to me.

  “That,” she said, pointing to the envelope, “came the day Charley died. Take a look at it, if you want. If you think it might help.”

  She was something, all right. A real hardbitten something.

  I stuck the catalogue in my coat pocket and examined the envelope. It was postmarked Cincinnati, Ohio, January 17, 1973. There was no return address. Inside was a note typed on onion skin paper. No watermark. “Charley,” it read,

  Saying I’m sorry that things haven’t worked out the way we thought they would is miserably less than you deserve from me. You know I didn’t want this to happen. He kept telling me it wouldn’t happen. Now I don’t know what to do. As long as he has all the cards, I’ll just have to do what he wants. Forgive me if you can.

  The letter was signed, “Mike.”

  “He never saw this?” I said.

  “No. He never saw it.”

  “Do you know who Mike is?”

  She nodded. “O’Hara. The bastard came sucking around here right after Charley died. Pretended he was paying a condolence call. Lou believed him, but I knew better. He wanted the letter back. But I’d be damned if I’d give it to him. He sends me a few bucks every Christmas. Guess he thinks that’ll buy me off. The way I look at it, the son-of-a-bitch owes me a lot more than that for what he did to my son. You can see that from the letter.”

  I got up from the rocker. “Do you know what Lovingwell wanted from your son? Why he gave Charley such a hard time?”

  “Letters,” she said. “He made Charley give him some letters. Like that one. Only worse.”

  “From O’Hara?”

  “Yes. He didn’t want to do it, but my boy Charley never was much on guts. And then Lovingwell told him something that made Charley mad.”

  “Do you know what it was that made him angry?”

  “Nope.”

  “Can I keep the letter?”

  She looked at me slyly. “You got that catalogue good and safe in your pocket?”

  I patted my coat.

  “Then I guess it’ll be all right,” she said.

  But she thought better of it as I was leaving and made me give her a business card and my word as a gentleman and a scholar that I would hold up my end of the deal. I gave her both, although I couldn’t help thinking, as I walked down to the car, what poor credit the word of gentlemen and scholars made in the world I’d uncovered.

  24

  AND SO I had a suspect for the first time in better than a week. And a piece of evidence, to boot. It’s odd how these things work. I’d gotten off on a wrong track, like Lurman had said the night before. Perhaps because I’d never quite grasped—in spite of all that I’d learned about him—just how singlemindedly vicious Daryl Lovingwell had been. I wouldn’t make the same mistake again. I’d gone off fishing for a clue or a lead. And I’d come up with a dead boy who’d committed suicide like Claire Lovingwell and with Michael O’Hara. Smiling Michael O’Hara, who so desperately wanted the world to see him in disguise that he’d abandoned his lover rather than brave public exposure. Now start being a detective, Harry, I said to myself as I walked back down the snowy walk to the car. You’ve got two dead people, a blackmailer, and a man who’s vanity made him a perfect target for extortion. Put them all together and see what you come up with.

  ******

  It took us another hour to drive back to town, through that chilly countryside shagged with snow. And fifteen more minutes to wend our way up Ludlow to Bishop Street. I parked in front of that handsome Frank Lloyd Wright house and sat quietly for a moment on the car seat, thinking it out, deciding how best to proceed.

  “Do you think he’s in there?” Lurman said to me. “O’Hara?”

  I shook my head. “They’re divorced. Or in the process. And it’s not the kind of marriage that could be patched up, even by the death of their son.”

  “Then why bother?”

  “It’s not O’Hara I want to talk to,” I said. “Not yet. Not until I’m sure about why he was being blackmailed.”

  “What’s the mystery?” Lurman said. “It’s enough that Lovingwell was blackmailing him, isn’t it? And that much is clear from the letter. You’ve got your motive. What you really ought to be doing is exploding his alibi for Tuesday morning.”

  “He hasn’t got an alibi,” I said.

  “I thought he was supposed to be at the Faculty Club, having lunch?”

  “That’s what Beth Hemann said. And Beth Hemann is in love with the bastard. It doesn’t make much difference anyway. The Club’s off Jefferson on University grounds—only a half-mile from Middleton. He could have made it over there between courses and still made it back in time for dessert.”

  “Then why not just turn it over to McMasters and be done with it? We’ve got other problems to take care of. Remember?”

  I turned on the car seat and stared at him. “I’m going to say this once, Ted. About a week ago, a man came into my office and hired me to find something that didn’t exist. I’ve got to know why he did that. And I don’t want you or McMasters or anyone else telling me how to do my job. You got that?”

  “Take it easy, Harry,” he said. “I’m on your side.”

  I got out of the Pinto and walked through the snow up to the big front door. There was a black wreath hung on the brass knocker. I pressed the lighted bell and a few minutes later she answered.

  She was drunk again
. Much drunker than she’d been two days before. Her face looked raw with grief and whiskey—shapeless as a crushed hat and drained of all that crude energy that had made it seem so smart and vigorous looking. She was wearing a dayrobe and slippers.

  “What is it?” she said. “What do you want?”

  “To talk,” I said.

  “No talk. Don’t have any talk left. My son—”

  Her chin quivered violently and she slapped her right hand across her mouth.

  “I know about Sean,” I said heavily. “Tonight I’m going to try to do something about the man who killed him.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “Won’t help.”

  “I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for Sarah. And for myself.”

  “Sarah?” She swallowed hard. “Is Sarah all right?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She was holding her own this morning. But she’s still in very bad shape. That’s why I have to talk to you.”

  Meg O’Hara lowered her hand from her mouth and pulled nervously at the neck of her robe. I began to feel a little sick at heart. She wasn’t a sympathetic woman—she wasn’t the type who courted sympathy. And maybe the tears and the drunk were just for show. Maybe they were her way of working up to a grief that she couldn’t really feel. If she were as much like Lovingwell as I suspected, she couldn’t feel anything at all—outside of her own needs. But seeing her rubbed raw like that made me suspicious of my own motives. And for a second I was chilled by the thought that I wasn’t showing much more humanity than the professor himself. That I’d become greedy, like him—for a truth that wasn’t going to satisfy my itch to explain him. Then I thought of the girl, alone in that hospital room. And I went ahead with it.

  “Sarah is going to be arrested for her father’s murder unless I can prove she’s innocent. I need your help to prove that.”

  “How?” she said. “What help?”

  “You said that you were close friends with her mother. I want you to tell me about Claire and your husband.”

  All of the liquorish grief left Meg O’Hara’s face. “You think Michael killed Daryl?” She curled her lip as if she would spit. “He didn’t have the guts. My husband’s half-fag, Mr. Stoner. And I don’t mean rough trade, either.”

  “I know about that,” I said. “I still want to know about him and Claire Lovingwell.”

  She shivered against the wind and pulled the robe tightly against her breast. “All right,” she said. “I owe the girl something. Come in.”

  ******

  We sat in the parlor again, on the sculpted couch. Only this time there were no tea sets and bedroom eyes. No talk of whiskey and love-making. Just that burned-out woman wrapped primly in her dayrobe and the sound of her voice—vacant, tinged with grief, recounting the distant past as if she were reading from an old, melancholy book.

  “We were very close friends, Claire and I. Something alike. Only she didn’t have my talent for survival.” Meg O’Hara swept her hand across the twill of the sofa seat. “Up until Saturday night, I thought her death was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.” She looked into my face. “That’s why I took my fling with Daryl after she died—to revenge myself on Michael for what he’d done to her.”

  I said, “What did he do?”

  “He deserted her, Mr. Stoner,” Meg O’Hara said. “He deserted her when she needed him most. She and Michael had been having an affair—or their version of one. I knew about it. At that point I didn’t care.”

  “That was very civilized of you.”

  She laughed. “Would it have been more civilized to live together and to pretend we still loved each other? I would have done anything, sacrificed anything to keep her alive. And for awhile I thought Michael was doing her good. He was very theatrical about it, of course. She was his wounded Beatrice and he was going to save her from the death of madness.” Meg O’Hara curled her lip again in disgust. “He was always posturing grandly in his affairs—making them into historical romances, high school dramas that he starred in and directed and produced. He had to be careful, you see, had to make them suitably unreal or someone might have realized what a talentless fake he was. At least that wasn’t much of a problem with Claire. She was in such a bad way that he never had to prove himself—sexually. I know for a fact that at the same time he was courting her he was sodomizing a graduate student in the Physics Department. My big, strong husband!”

  “Charles McPhail,” I said.

  She looked surprised. “You know about that, then?”

  I nodded. “Why did your husband desert Claire Lovingwell?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if he knew himself. He’d virtually taken charge of her affairs—she’d even made him executor of her estate. Was constantly attendant on her. And then he just stopped. She’d call him, day and night. At first he’d make excuses for not seeing her and then he didn’t even bother to answer the phone. A few weeks later, she killed herself.”

  “But she didn’t change her will?” I said.

  She shook her head as people do when they’re no longer listening to what’s being said. “He was still the executor. She’d left it all to Sarah, with the provision that Michael handle the investments and manage the money until Sarah was of age.” Meg O’Hara stared off into space. “I’ve never forgiven him for what he did to Claire. I think that’s why we...” She stopped short and sloughed off her mood. “Oh, hell. We do what we do, don’t we? I’ll tell you this, though. He didn’t kill Lovingwell. He just isn’t man enough.”

  It wasn’t until I walked out the door that I realized she’d been defending him all along, as if by making him look weak and indecisive she rendered him incapable of murder. It was one of the oddest testaments to love that I’d ever seen.

  ******

  The next step was simple enough. Lurman handled it with professional skill, once we’d gotten back to the Delores. A few phone calls to local banks. A few strings pulled with glee, as if he were showing me how an investigation ought to be handled. And by five o’clock we knew for sure what I’d suspected as soon as I saw the love letter. What I guess I should have known days before, when Sarah had first mentioned the trust fund in the same breath with her father’s unappeasable greed. He’d been blackmailing O’Hara, all right. But it was Sarah’s money—or Claire’s—that he’d been after. He hadn’t been able to frighten his wife into willing it to him, not with Michael O’Hara acting as her support. So he very deftly knocked that support from under her and, in the same coup, managed to frighten O’Hara—a man who by all appearances was easily frightened—into doing his dirty work for him. After prying the love letters out of McPhail’s hands, he’d forced O’Hara to abandon Claire Lovingwell; and after a few weeks of whispered threats, she’d finally lost her nerve and killed herself. McPhail had been eliminated in the same way. And then it was just Daryl and O’Hara and all that money.

  “Apparently O’Hara would draw funds out of the trust at regular intervals,” Lurman said. “And within a week to ten days, the same amount would show up in Lovingwell’s account. They were bleeding her dry, Harry. Of course, the bank is going to do a complete audit, now. But from the size of the sums involved, she was almost broke and didn’t know it.”

  “It doesn’t pay to be a commie,” I said drily.

  “It didn’t pay to be Lovingwell’s daughter, that’s for sure,” Lurman said. “Or anybody close to him.” He rubbed his hands together. “So now you know.”

  “Now I know,” I said. Only it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel a hundred percent. I had a motive, all right. But O’Hara had had seven years of that same motive—seven years to brood over what he’d been forced to do to Charles McPhail and Claire Lovingwell. What had made him decide that seven years and one more day were just too much to bear? And why had Lovingwell hired me in the first place? How did Sarah and I fit into the picture? Because we had to fit, I knew that much. Daryl Lovingwell had been too damn meticulous to leave anything to chance.<
br />
  I pulled the love letter from my jacket pocket and stared at it. “Wouldn’t you think,” I said to Lurman, “that a man as cautious as Lovingwell would have taken steps to prevent O’Hara from retaliating against him?”

  “He had those letters, Harry,” Lurman said. “I guess that was his protection.”

  “What if O’Hara managed to get his hands on those letters?” I said.

  “Then why would he need to shoot Lovingwell?”

  Why, indeed? I said to myself. What would drive a man with such a thin skin to risk murder?

  I got up from the recliner.

  Only Michael O’Hara could tell me the answer to that. And I intended that he would. Even if I had to blackmail him myself, even if I had to dangle that last love letter over his head like a sword. I glanced at my watch, which was showing twenty after five, and said, “I’m going out again.”

  “The hell. You’ve got to be here to get that call.”

  “I’ll be back in time,” I said. “A half-hour is all I’ll need.”

  “And if Grimes doesn’t want to give you that half-hour, Harry?”

  I walked over to the roll-top and pulled the magnum from the top drawer. Lurman looked at it and shook his head.

  “Too much weapon,” he said with grave authority. “You’d be lucky to get off two shots.”

  “Not with you along to back me up, old boy.”

  He looked at his watch and said, “This is really necessary, right?”

  I nodded.

  “And only a half-hour?”

  “At most.”

  “All right,” he said and got to his feet with a groan. “Where are we going this time?”

  I pulled out the phone book, thumbed through it until I came to O’Hara, Michael C., and said, “To Ohio Avenue. To O’Hara’s home.”

  ******

  It was a tiny apartment off campus, in a building full of tiny apartments. His wife hadn’t left him much—that was obvious. And if Lovingwell had been putting on the squeeze, too, the past seven years must have been very grim indeed for Michael O’Hara. I knocked at the wooden door and Miss Hemann answered.