Dead Letter

by Jonathan Valin

  I’d aimed too high and the slug hit him high in front, on the left shoulder. Hit him the way you see big-bore rifle slugs—the 470 Nitro Expresses—bounce against the hides of rhino or of elephant. With a dusty, sick-making explosion. Like I’d thrown a bag of red dirt at him instead of a bullet. It spun him all the way around toward the intersection. And it was only when he was facing away from me that I saw the hole it had made—all the way through his body and out the back of his coat. Jagged, red, the size of a grapefruit. His whole coat was red in back and smoking in the icy air.

  Grimes fell forward off the curb and went down to his knees on the pavement. I could see part of his face. Blood was dripping steadily from his mouth and from his nose. There was blood everywhere on the snow and on his coat.

  A woman on the other side of Taft had begun to scream, hands on her cheeks and mouth open wide. And several of the thrill seekers had stopped in their tracks and started running up Euclid to where I was sitting on the sidewalk. I could hear their feet on the ice behind me.

  “Get back!” I shouted over my shoulder. “Get the hell back.”

  I looked once at the body of the woman in the wool overcoat, wedged obscenely in the cracked windshield. Then got to my feet.

  Grimes was staring at me, over his shoulder.

  I pointed the magnum at him and said, “Don’t, Grimes.” Knowing full well that he was going to do it. Cocking the piece with my left hand because I knew.

  “Don’t!” I said again.

  “Why the hell not?” he said stupidly. His breath was like a red mist.

  He moved so quickly it was as if he’d never been hit. Around on his knees, the dull barrels of the shotgun nosing through the opening in his coat. I pulled the trigger again. And he fell back as if he’d broken in two. The shotgun went off with a boom—straight up, in a shower of sparks and smoke. Hitting nothing.

  I held the gun on him for another minute. Even though I knew he was dead. Bent back on his knees, the shotgun gleaming in his hands.

  26

  A POLICE marksman killed Linda Green—Grimes’ girlfriend, who’d created the diversion that allowed him to slip out the front door. He killed her with a single shot from an apartment window across from her second-floor room. Before she died, she’d fired over a thousand rounds from the machine pistol Grimes had left with her. And five of those rounds had killed Ted Lurman.

  I didn’t know that until after a squad car had pulled up at the Taft intersection and an ambulance had come to take what was left of Lester Grimes to the county morgue. The cops in the squad car were nervous and efficient and, once they’d found out whom I’d killed, palsy and sympathetic.

  “You had to do it. You had to do it,” one of them kept saying to me, as if he were defending a friend in an imaginary argument.

  I kept repeating his words as I walked up Euclid, but I was seeing Grimes’ blood frozen in the street and the smoke that had poured from his chest, like the vaporous smoke from a manhole cover. When I made it back to the apartment house and heard that Lurman was dead, I sat down hard on a snow bank beside the alleyway and tried to remember what my life had been like before Lovingwell and Lester O. Grimes had entered it.

  “Where’d they take him?” I asked one of the agents.

  “Christ Hospital,” he said. “We heard you dropped Grimes.”

  “I shot him,” I said.

  “Good work. He needed killing.” He looked closely at my face and said, “You did what you had to do.”

  He was a middle-aged man with a tired face and bloodshot eyes. I’d like to think that he meant what he said. Not because it was true, although it was as true as that kind of apology can be. But because a larger part of me than I liked to admit didn’t care whether it was true or not. I wasn’t feeling guilty about Grimes, just numbed and disgusted and grateful it was done. That’s what worried me about what the FBI man had said. Because if he didn’t care and I didn’t either, then it was just too damn easy to kill a man.

  One of the cops drove me to Christ and dropped me at the Emergency Room. They’d already put Lurman on ice. When one of the residents asked me if I wanted to take a look at the body, I asked him why.

  He shrugged. “Some people like a last look. It makes them feel like it’s over.”

  I made myself go down to the morgue and take a last look at Lurman, who had been a decent man. But seeing his corpse only made me feel sad and sorry, although that unsettling grief made me think better of myself than I had an hour before.

  I checked in on Sarah before going back to the Delores. The duty nurse gave me the only good news of the day. She was out of the coma. She was going to survive a nightmare that was almost ended. All but the very last bit.

  ******

  Sid McMasters drove me home at three in the morning. He didn’t say anything until he got to the front door of the Delores and then he said, “You did a good job.”

  “I’m not so sure,” I said wearily. “What does this mean about Sarah? Where does she stand?’

  McMasters looked at me unhappily. “Harry, I’ve tried to see it every way but the girl. And none of it works. We got a court order to look into Lovingwell’s safety deposit box. We cracked it last night, right before you and your FBI friends brought the whole force to Linda Green’s apartment. You know what we found inside?”

  He handed me a slip of paper.

  “I’m going to kill you,” it said. “For what you did to my mother.”

  “There were dozens of them,” McMasters said.

  I looked at the notepaper. “Anybody could have written this.”

  “They were typed on her typewriter, Harry. And when you take them and how she felt about her father and the fact that she was on the scene at the time of the murder...her best bet is to cop a plea. Insanity. I’d be willing to sit for it, and I’ve never said that before in my life.”

  “She didn’t kill him, Sid.”

  “You keep saying that, Harry. But saying isn’t proof.”

  “Lovingwell was blackmailing Michael O’Hara. He’d been blackmailing him for seven years. O’Hara had motive and opportunity.”

  “Can you prove it?” he said, perking up.

  “After this morning I can. I may even get a confession for you.”

  “Why don’t I just pick him up then?”

  I shook my head. “He’s not going anywhere.”

  Only that wasn’t the reason. After all the lies, after all the divagations, after that bloody night, I was owed the chance to hear the truth about Lovingwell. I’d earned it. What was more, I needed it. And not simply to save Sarah. But to reassure myself. Putting an end to the Lovingwell case was truly putting an end to “it.”

  “I’ll let you know, Sid. By noon.”

  He thought it over. “All right, Harry. We’ll play it your way until noon. Then I want to know exactly what you’ve got.” He sighed heavily. “I guess you’ve earned that much after what you did tonight.”

  I got out of the car and started for the lobby.

  McMasters leaned across the seat and called me back. “By the way, we found out where the suicide gun came from.”

  “Where?” I said.

  “Lovingwell bought it three months ago. Right about the time these notes started coming in.”

  27

  AT NINE-THIRTY the next morning I parked the Pinto on St. Clair and walked under the bare branches of the elms and oaks to the Physics Building on the south side of the street. Miss Hemann wasn’t at her desk, but O’Hara was in his office—just as he said he’d be. He asked me to close the door when I walked in and I did. He looked ill in the gray morning light. His face was drawn and there were great scorched circles under his eyes. A pile of letters and documents was sitting on his desk.

  “I’ve been sorting through some of my mementos,” he said, passing a hand over the loose papers. “It may be my last opportunity.”

  He looked up at me. It wasn’t a plaintive look. I didn’t feel any pity for him and he knew it. It
was a look of resentment, as if he held me responsible for McPhail and for Lovingwell and for his son. It was a look I didn’t completely understand. I told him again what I knew and what I suspected. He plucked a letter from the pile on his desk.

  “Daryl,” he said absently. “How does one explain Daryl? How does one account for that much hatred? For that much malevolence? I’m a scientist, Stoner, and I can’t answer the question, although I’ve tried. My God, I can show you, by computation, why space has to be curved. I can debate with you how far quantum physics may imply a deity in the universe. But Daryl...”

  I didn’t say anything. I wanted to hear him say it in his own way. I wanted to see it come together once and for all. And for his own reasons, he wanted to say it, too. Perhaps because he’d been holding it in for so damn long. He took a deep breath and started to talk.

  “In 1973 I became friends with Claire Lovingwell, Daryl’s wife. She was in a very bad way and I felt sorry for her. She’d been a handsome woman and very bright. I just couldn’t stand to see her go down all alone. We became friends. She confided in me. With my help she made arrangements to rewrite her will. What would have gone to Daryl at her death was set aside in a trust fund for her daughter Sarah. A trust over which Daryl had no control. At least that was the way it was intended to work.

  “Of course, at the time, I had no idea how malevolent Daryl could be. His behavior toward Claire while vicious was motivated by a sexual jealousy that was partly understandable. And then she was prone to exaggeration in her mental state. Who knew how much of what she said was true and how much was paranoid delusion?

  “So when Charley told me that Lovingwell had approached him about our paper, I thought it was in retaliation for what I’d done for Claire. A fit of pique and jealousy. I didn’t think any more of it, then. But I grossly underestimated my man. A serious error for a mathematician. The most serious error of my life.

  “Daryl got to Charley. Using his powers as chairman. And using innuendo and lies. He panicked the boy into believing that I was betraying him sexually with Claire. In a moment of fatal weakness he gave Lovingwell those damn letters. And that was it—that was the end. He had me and there was nothing I could do.”

  I didn’t say what I was thinking. That he could have been man enough to brave ridicule and save his friend. Probably the thought had never occurred to him or, if it had, he’d dismissed it with terror. So fragile and fundamental was his vanity.

  “What did Lovingwell blackmail you into doing?” I asked him.

  He took another deep breath and paused. I could see him thinking it over. Nothing he’d said so far had implicated him in Lovingwell’s murder. And he knew that. Nothing he’d said so far had taken me an inch beyond what I already knew. He looked at me closely and sighed—an exhausted, curious sigh. Then he looked back at his desk. “You know it anyway. Let it be said that I admitted to it, first.

  “After poor Charley was driven to suicide—gotten rid of, really, once he’d served his purpose—Daryl explained to me precisely how my life would be lived and has been lived for the past seven years. I was to be his creature, his Frankenstein. Over and above the extortion money, any piece of blackmail or savagery, any dirty job he wanted done, would fall to me. And you cannot imagine how savage he could be. My first assignment, of course, was Claire’s will. She’d rewritten it to put me in charge and left me the discretionary powers to invest the monies as I saw fit. Once Daryl gained control of those letters, the money was virtually his.

  “Poor Claire. She’d wanted to cheat him out of that satisfaction. She’d wanted to salvage something for herself and for her daughter. But he won in the end. With my help, he won. By the end of this year he would have gotten all of the trust fund that could be gotten. All of it that wasn’t tied up somehow. You see, that’s what worried him. Sarah wasn’t very conscientious when it came to money. Daryl knew that. But even she would find out that she’d been substantially robbed when the bank informed her that her account showed a balance of zero. Then there would have been an investigation and I would have been exposed. And so would Daryl.” O’Hara looked at me sadly. “Something had to be done.”

  “What?” I said. “What was he going to do?” O’Hara turned his face away. “Can’t you guess?” he said in a thick whisper.

  I thought about the pictures Lovingwell had stolen from Sarah’s room, about the rumors he’d spread about her depressions, about the ornate house with all its treasures, each one paid for in someone’s blood. And I knew. Knew so surely that it disoriented me—a familiar disorientation that I finally identified as the dark remainder of a very bad dream. An oedipal nightmare I had wandered into, years away from my own childhood. “He was going to kill her, wasn’t he?” I said, feeling it fully—the ancient monstrousness of it. “The son-of-a-bitch was going to kill her.”

  O’Hara nodded. “He’d been planning it for months. I think, in a way, he’d been planning it since Claire’s death.”

  “How?” I said. “How was he going to kill her?”

  “Her mother had been a suicide. Sarah’s death would have been arranged to look like the same thing. Daryl had taken steps to prepare for it. Purchased a gun. Stolen some pictures of Claire and Sarah that he was going to plant on her body. Written notes to himself. He’d even cashed in some of his stocks, to refurbish her trust fund, in case anyone decided to look into it after her death. Since she would have died without a will, it would have all come back to him anyway. He told me the entire plan on Tuesday afternoon of last week. He told it with characteristic glee.”

  “What was your role to be?”

  O’Hara blushed. “The executioner, Mr. Stoner. And, of course, afterwards one of the witnesses at the coroner’s hearing.”

  “And what was my role? Why was I hired?”

  O’Hara gave me a very odd look, as if I’d said something he hadn’t expected me to say. Whatever it was, it made him stop talking and lean back gravely in his desk chair. I didn’t like his look. I didn’t like the whole aura of reappraisal.

  “You don’t know why he hired you?” O’Hara said. Then he laughed—a single bark of mordant amusement. “I should have known.”

  O’Hara reached down to his desk drawer, opened it, and pulled out a small-caliber revolver. I jumped up and he whipped it at me like a teacher’s rule. “Just sit,” he said sternly.

  I did what he said.

  We must have sat there for a good five minutes—O’Hara holding the gun on me and staring vacantly at my face. Past my face, really, at something invisible to all the world but him alone.

  “You really are a fool, Mr. Stoner,” he said abruptly. But his face was still self-absorbed, his voice distant and unreal. “I was right about you all along. I should never have made the mistake of trying to kill you that night in the parking lot. I wouldn’t have, you know, if you hadn’t come to me so soon after Daryl’s death.”

  I gawked at him. “You? You tried to kill me that night?”

  He smiled and his eyes came back into focus on my face.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Why, the document, of course, Mr. Stoner,” he said with eerie amusement. “Don’t you remember the document you were hired to find?”

  “There was no document,” I said uneasily.

  “Oh, but there was. I have it right here.”

  He pulled a sheaf of papers from his desk and floated them over to me. The words TOP SECRET SENSITIVE were printed at the top of each page. I stared dully at the dry, onionskin paper and began to understand.

  “You were supposed to know about these. Daryl told me that you did. He said he’d told you all about me and that you’d expose me if I didn’t cooperate with him.” O’Hara laughed—a laugh that made me shudder. “And I believed him! Imagine that! After all these years, I believed him when I finally had the upper hand.”

  “These are the love letters, aren’t they?” I said, hefting the sheaf of papers in my hand. “The letters from McPhail?”

  O’Hara
nodded. “All he did was print TOP SECRET on them and stick them in his safe. Those are what cost Claire her fortune and Charley his life. Those are what he used for seven years to degrade and manipulate me. I loved Charley,” he said in a whine that made me turn from his face.

  I’d seen too many men die in the past week, seen too many victims and too many persecutors. So many that the roles didn’t make sense to me anymore. O’Hara didn’t make sense to me. Whimpering over a man whose life he could have saved if he’d been willing to face the truth about himself. He still couldn’t do it. Just as he couldn’t do it the day before, when I’d almost revealed it to Miss Hemann.

  And suddenly I realized that that hard-earned vanity was the only motive that would impell O’Hara to kill. Not for money, not for revenge, not even for the memory of poor Charley McPhail. He just didn’t have the guts, and that recognition chilled me to the bone.

  “How did you get them?” I said—not wanting to hear it. “How did you get your hands on these letters?”

  O’Hara brushed the question away with his pistol. “When I told him on Tuesday that it was over, that I had the letters in my hands, he laughed. He said it didn’t matter if I had the originals. He said he had photostats. He said he’d told you all about me. He said if I didn’t cooperate with him, he would have you prove that she’d stolen them and then expose me.”

  “Then she really did take them,” I said.

  But he wasn’t listening. “I wanted to help her, but what was I supposed to do? A man like me? In my position? What would people think? What would Meg think? And Beth? And Sean—” His voice broke.

  This time I did feel sorry for him. For the part of him that only wanted everything to be the way it had been when there were no Lovingwells—father, mother or daughter—to threaten his world.

  She had stolen the document, after all. And Lovingwell had hired me for precisely the reason he’d said he had—to recover some papers his daughter had stolen from his safe. Well, not precisely. There had been no doubt in his mind that she’d taken them. It was what she planned to do with them that must have bothered him. And that had been my job—to find out where she’d secreted them. Those papers I was honor-bound not to look at or tell anyone else about. That was how it was supposed to have worked, until he found out on Tuesday morning that she’d already handed them back to O’Hara. Then, I suppose, I became just another prop, a way of bullying O’Hara. Another part of the murder plan, like the threatening letters in his deposit box and the faked evidence of the robbery in the study and the nonsense about Sarah’s suicidal tendencies. Faked so cleverly that when it came time to be rid of Sarah L., there wouldn’t have been any problems. Lovingwell would tell me that he’d recovered the papers on his own; I’d go my merry way; O’Hara would proceed to murder Sarah; and nobody would ever know what had taken place.