Dead Letter

by Jonathan Valin

  “She’s no longer a child, you know,” Lovingwell said a little defensively. “She’s twenty-four years old. When she says she won’t be home for the evening, I don’t interrogate her.”

  “She has a boyfriend?”

  “More than one, I think,” he said delicately.

  “Does one of them have a beard and drive a blue Dodge van?”

  “That would be Sean O’Hara. He’s the son of a colleague. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason, really,” I said. “I saw him pick up your daughter and I was curious. It comes from the job or maybe the job comes from it. I’ve never been able to figure that out.”

  “That interests me,” Lovingwell said. “Because I’ve never been able to figure out why I do what I do, either. Occupations are a little like childhoods, aren’t they? They seem to be the most banal and incomprehensible parts of our lives. Do you know that I don’t even like what I do! Isn’t that remarkable? All this fuss about my work and I don’t even care for it. It’s my daughter whom I care for. If I wasn’t in so bloody deep, if there weren’t so many people and so much money dependent on me, I’d quit and go hiking with Sarah. There’s a lot of that sort of thing in my soul. You see, I don’t really like to sit in a room, solving dry little puzzles.” He smiled at me pleasantly. “Your job must be a bit like that, Mr. Stoner.”

  I smiled back at him. “Not so dry, I’m afraid. If it were only a puzzle, if people weren’t involved...”

  “I’m offended,” he said. “If you think what I do doesn’t involve people, why would I need your services?”

  “True enough.”

  “Sarah is my only child. She’s the only thing in the world I care about. This is a very human problem, believe me. I want you to save my life, Mr. Stoner. I want you to save Sarah. Can you do it?”

  Could I do it? Could I rescue someone in love? I looked up at the Professor’s long, Shavian face and shook my head. Under different circumstances we might have sat together in that plush, monied room and had a doleful chat about what we would and wouldn’t do for love. But I was on his time; and I didn’t know him well enough; and anyway I’d had that chat some ten thousand times that fall and winter after Kate Davis had left me for Berkeley and two years of graduate work in sociology.

  “I’m not in the saviour business,” I said a little bitterly. “At least, I like to think I’m not. But things may not be as bad as they seem.” I took another quick look around the handsome room. “Something’s not right here. I mean beyond the obvious fact of the theft. And frankly I haven’t got enough information to figure it out.”

  He sat back on the desk and peered at me warily, as if he weren’t quite sure he wanted to hear what I was about to say. “You can’t help me, then?”

  “I didn’t say that. I don’t know yet if I can help you or not. All I can tell you now is that something isn’t right here.”

  He stroked the side of his nose with a single finger and his gray eyes lost their cautious look. “Explain,” he said. And for a moment I felt as if I were in the classroom with the good Professor at its head. Staring directly into my face, with that finger beside his nose, he looked, for all the world, like a character out of a Dickens novel. I figured he was listening with his head now, as well as with his heart. So I made it as simple and complete as I could.

  “Let’s assume for the moment that your daughter did commit the crime. Let’s say she came back to the house on Saturday night, after you’d gone to sleep, opened the safe, took the document, went back to Calhoun Street or wherever she was staying, then came home again on Sunday morning as if nothing had happened. For the time being that seems like the most probable hypothesis. The safe shows no sign of damage, which means that whoever opened it either knew the combination or picked the lock. Lock-picking is an art that takes years to master; so unless this crime was the work of a professional burglar—and I’m not ready to rule that out completely—it was certainly an inside job. Which fits your daughter. Your daughter had a motive or, at least, you’ve said she had. Since I don’t know what the document is about, I don’t know how it relates to her politics. But I’ll take your word that it does. Now, here’s the problem:

  “Even if your daughter found the combination to the safe, even if she had sufficient motive to burgle her own house, why would she do it last Saturday night? How could she possibly know you were going to bring top-secret papers home with you on that evening? Unless you dropped a hint, either on the phone or in conversation, that you were planning to revise your papers on Sunday morning—”

  He shook his head and said, “That’s hardly something one would ‘hint’ about, is it?”

  “Then she couldn’t have known it would be there. Not without somebody’s help—somebody at Sloane or the University. Somebody who can keep an eye on your research.”

  “A spy?” Lovingwell said incredulously.

  I said, “That’s one possibility.”

  “And the other?”

  “That Sarah wasn’t looking for the document at all.”

  Lovingwell lifted his finger from his nose and gawked at me. “But that’s crazy.”

  “Suppose there was something else in the safe, something Sarah wanted to get her hands on. And suppose, by sheer accident, on the night she’d chosen to crack the safe, she also found a top-secret document along with whatever she was originally after. Stranger things have happened, believe me.”

  “There was nothing in the safe,” he said firmly. “Nothing outside the document that would have been of the slightest interest to Sarah.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s go with the first theory, that she was working with an accomplice. Maybe the safe can help us with that. I’m going to try to lift some latent prints off the lock.”

  “Do you want me to open the safe, then?”

  “No.” I took a brush and a bottle of powder from the fingerprint kit and walked over to Madame Récamier—the courtesan who was so beautiful and mysterious that a color was named after her, which, when you think about it, is about as rare a compliment as a man could pay a woman. I turned her face gently to the wall and began to dust the tumblers.

  “I’m going to need your fingerprints, too, Professor,” I said over my shoulder.

  He said, “Fine.”

  ******

  Lifting a print is a little like trying to pick up a penny while you’re wearing gloves. It took me ten minutes to get the first one onto the rubber stopper. There were two others on the lock but, judging from their location, they belonged to the same hand. Lovingwell watched me as I worked, peering over my shoulder with the sort of blank uncertainty with which he’d watch a mechanic repair his car. Toward the end of the job his presence began to bother me, but not because he was looking on. I liked Lovingwell in a mild way. I liked his accent. I liked his eccentric looks and the candor he’d shown about his job and about his daughter. I liked him enough that I didn’t like what I was finding out from the safe. There was one set of prints on the tumbler and one on the handle. Just one. No smudges. No other prints anywhere on the safe. And that’s what I didn’t like. They were crystal clear prints, fresh as dew. Perfect and perfectly impossible.

  “Are you sure no one has cleaned the safe in the last two days?” I asked Lovingwell as I packed up the kit.

  “Lord, you’re a suspicious fellow. I told you, no. But why do you ask?”

  I looked back at the Mosler and said, “There are prints on here. Perfectly preserved. I don’t know whose prints they are at this point. I’m not even sure I want to know.”

  “Well, I’m no detective,” he said. “But it seems to me those prints would be a boon in helping you solve the case.”

  I shook my head.

  “And why not?”

  “This thing should be covered with latents. Even if the burglar wore gloves, your prints would still be all over the safe. Try to open a lock without shifting your hand and you’ll see what I mean. Every time you revolve the dial, you grasp the tumbler in a new s
pot. There are only one set of prints on this safe. And they’re perfect.”

  Lovingwell pulled sharply at his beard and gave me a bewildered look. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that someone took some pains to wipe off the safe and whoever did it must have done it between the time you last closed the safe and now.”

  “Why would anyone do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “It’s a damn good question.”

  “And the fresh set of prints?”

  “Again, I don’t know. Someone may have started to open the safe and been interrupted. Or it could have been an accident. The safe could have been wiped clean and then someone may have come along and touched it.”

  Lovingwell glanced back over his shoulder at the wall. “It’s beginning to look as if my private study is about as private as a coach station.”

  “It’s seen some curious use,” I agreed.

  ******

  At about five-thirty that afternoon, I solved the case. Or, at least, part of it. It was as easy as lifting those prints off the tumbler and just about as plausible.

  It was on the floor of her closet. In the back, wedged between two shoe boxes. Hidden the way a child hides when he wants to be caught by his parents and whisked off to supper or to sleep. A yellow manila envelope with the logo “Sloane National Lab.” printed on it. It was empty, but it was the one.

  “That’s it, all right,” Lovingwell said as we sat over two cups of coffee in a dining room with red flock walls and cherrywood sideboards and a huge crystal chandelier overhead. “You’ve made quick work of this.”

  “Too quick,” I said to him. “The whole thing stinks.”

  Lovingwell nodded half-heartedly. “It does seem careless of her to leave such damning evidence out in the open. Especially since she knows that I clean the house regularly.”

  “Careless isn’t the word for it. I’m going to make you a bet,” I told him. “I’m going to bet you that the prints on the safe are Sarah’s.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that someone’s trying to set her up. Or that’s the way it looks now.”

  “Then she’s innocent?” he said hopefully.

  “I don’t know.”

  He ducked his head and said, “I wish you did. Well, at least you’ve made a good start today.”

  “I guess that depends on what I find out,” I said to him.

  3

  GIVEN THE unusual nature of the evidence I’d come up with, Lovingwell decided to postpone his appointment at Sloane. I was to call him at home as soon as I found out whether the prints on the safe were actually Sarah’s. I understood his anxiety—I was a little intrigued myself. And while I don’t like to tailor my work to fit anybody else’s timetable, I made an exception—my second on the case—for that exceptional little man. As soon as I got back to the Delores—the four-story brownstone apartment house I’ve lived in for the last eleven years—I unpacked the kit, flipped on the Zenith Globemaster so that I’d be within earshot of a voice, pulled a folding chair up to my roll-top desk, got out the magnifying glass that came with the O.E.D., and went to work.

  Reading fingerprints is like reading a road map—there are certain keys that tell most of the story. With a print you look first to see which of the three basic types you’re dealing with: loop, whorl, or arch. That alone can often decide the question. If you find a whorl print on an item and your suspect shows up with loops, you’ve eliminated one suspect. It gets a lot more complicated if print-types match up. Then you have to analyze each one. If you’re lucky and working for a police department, you can make slides and simply compare transparencies to get a match. If you’re sitting on a folding chair and working out of an ice-cold apartment, you spend half an hour plotting bifurcations, hooks, dots, bridges, and enclosures. You also smoke half a pack of cigarettes and constantly remind yourself that it’s really worth it because no two pairs of hands are alike.

  At seven o’clock, with that last piece of conventional wisdom in mind, I rubbed my eyes, picked up the phone, and called Daryl Lovingwell.

  “I finished checking the prints on the safe with the others I took from Sarah’s room and from your study.”

  “And?” he said. “Were you right? Were they Sarah’s?”

  “You’re not going to like this, Professor,” I said. “But the prints off the tumbler are yours.”

  ******

  Lovingwell agreed to meet me at the Busy Bee on Ludlow at nine that night. I picked the Bee because I needed a drink. And if what I suspected was true, I figured Lovingwell was going to need one, too.

  I hadn’t been in the Bee in some months. Not since Kate Davis had left for California in July. It wasn’t as if I’d been avoiding the place. I just hadn’t had much use for a bar, even a bar as comfortable as the Bee. Bright and noisy on the lower level, if you like it bright and noisy, and dark and intimate on the bar floor, it’s the perfect spot to listen to the bittersweet music of a cocktail piano and, if you’re lucky, to share a drink with someone like Kate. Only I hadn’t been having much luck since she’d gone. I hadn’t wanted to.

  When we made the decision to live apart for two years we’d agreed that there weren’t any strings attached to either one of us. And maybe for Kate, with her very modern, very liberated sense of self, there weren’t. Only I was sitting on the other side of a generation gap, and the longer we were apart the more lonely and vulnerable I’d begun to feel. Kate saw other partners as definite possibilities—possibilities that had to be consciously admitted, in keeping with her feeling that a secret, any secret, was a potential trap. I saw them as violations of a code. And best left untalked about. That’s what an old-fashioned sense of morality will get you every time—an old-fashioned sense of guilt and shame. So, after a recedivistic fling or two that I’d indulged in mostly out of a sense of loneliness and frustration, I’d started staying out of bars and out of trouble. And scribbling off letters to her like a high school headache. And trying to keep myself from hopping on the red-eye flight to San Francisco. All the while telling myself that capitulating to the Puritan inside me was no way to live—it certainly wasn’t Kate’s way—that it would be better to do something impulsive, to hop on that red-eye flight or hop into someone’s bed for more than a night. Anything to put a finish to a life that was being lived as if I were awaiting an important call. A call that I knew, deep down inside, probably wasn’t going to come.

  You always have your work, Harry, I kept telling myself. But that hadn’t seemed as comforting or as interesting an alternative as it had once seemed. Or, at least, that’s the way I was feeling when I stepped into the Busy Bee at eight that night.

  Hank Greenburg was posted at the bar when I walked in. I marched straight up to him and ordered a Scotch.

  “For chrissake!” he said. “Where have you been?”

  Hank’s a big, gap-toothed man, with a pencil moustache and a genuine fondness for his regulars. We’d always gotten along. He slapped a glass on the mahogany bar, filled it to the brim, and said, “On the house. And don’t argue.”

  “Who’s arguing?” I said.

  He looked me over with that proprietary air that only worried mothers and bartenders can get away with. I was a little afraid he was about to ask me whether I’d lost any weight. But after he’d seen me come in with Kate for the better part of a year, I knew it wasn’t me alone he was thinking of.

  Hank bought me a second Scotch and we chatted for a few minutes. Then I took what was left of the drink over to one of the booths, sat down, and made ready for Professor Lovingwell—the man whose imperilled love I was going to save. After thinking that proposition over for a few minutes, I began to feel very silly and very low. And I probably would have stayed in that funk all night long, if another friend whom I hadn’t seen in months hadn’t clapped his big hand on my shoulder.

  “Harry,” he said. “Where the hell you been?”

  I smiled before I looked up, because I knew from the deep, no-no
nsense voice exactly who it was and exactly what was going to happen next. “Bullet” Robinson was one of those men who, when he claps you on the arm, intends to pick you up and plop you down in his world. And I knew that that world was a cheerier place than the spot where I’d been living for the last ten minutes.

  He sat down across from me at the booth. A big, coal-black man. Bigger than I was. With enormous shoulders and an enormous paunch that tipped the table a little when he leaned forward and a sleepy, oriental face that made him look rather like a six-foot, seven-inch B. B. King.

  “Bullet!” I said.

  “Harry, where you been keeping yourself? I ain’t seen you up to the store in three months.”

  Bullet ran the Hi-Fi Gallery in the Clifton Plaza—a terrific place to browse, full of mellow sound and exotic components and a lot of laid-back young men and women who talked endlessly that special language of stereophiles while Bullet presided at the register like a cheerful black Buddha. I’d known him for better than fifteen years, ever since he’d been a tight end for the Bearcats and one of the few local talents who’d made it to the pros. He’d had seven years with the Lions, before he’d lost that battle with his belly for all time and been cut in training camp. He’d come back to Cincinnati after that, bought the stereo store with his nest egg, and grown cheerfully and loquaciously prosperous. He was always full of football stories and unsound advice. And I was very grateful for the company.

  “What you mopin’ around for?” he asked tartly. “You going to spoil your good looks. And then none of them ladies’ll want you.”

  “How’s business, Bullet?” I said to him.

  “Oh, it’s going.”

  “Not like the old days, huh? Pigskin glory.”

  “You ain’t going to believe this, Harry,” he said. “But I never liked football.”

  “I’ve heard this, Bullet.”

  “No you ain’t.” He picked up my Scotch and raised it to a waitress. “One more of these, honey. Straight up. I’m not kidding,” he said, turning back to me. “You know that shit they feed you—how if you’re black, it’s athletics or nothing? Well, in 1965 it was true. I had a choice to make, Harry. It was a football scholarship or ‘Nam. While nice white boys like you was trotting down to the allergist, I was earning my II-S by tackling dummies and pushing around blocking sleds.”