Dead Letter

by Jonathan Valin

  “0h, Christ,” I said softly. “Is he badly hurt?”

  “He’s dead, Harry. We aren’t sure, yet, but it looks like he may have killed himself with a handgun.”

  ******

  It had happened to me before. Not often, but it had happened. I’d lost a client to suicide or to some stupid piece of violence, because in my business a good half of the people who come to me should have gone to a psychiatrist instead. The paranoid ones, tormented by creatures of conscience. And the bullies, looking for someone to hurt or to do their hurting for them. It had happened. But never so unexpectedly, so completely without warning. Lovingwell just hadn’t seemed the type.

  And, of course, what are you supposed to do? Pack it in and pretend that you don’t care why a gentle, rather eccentric soul decided to kill himself? And even if you could do that, which I couldn’t, what about the daughter and the untidy little secret the dead man entrusted to you? What do you do with it—after what it had cost him? Do you go to the cops or to the FBI, which is precisely what he didn’t want to do himself? Do you turn it over to someone else? Probate it like another piece of property—one leather couch, one portrait of Madame Récamier, and, oh yes, one missing document that the Professor didn’t want the world to know was missing?

  Or do you get on with the business at hand? And add to it a bonus item—free, gratis, compliments of Harry the Sentimentalist? One dead man and the reasons why he died, to be produced along with a missing document that he may have died for.

  It’s hard to explain. In a way you have to be a bodyguard or a cop to understand the peculiar loyalties you feel to your charge. And when that charge dies, even by his own hand, you have to understand the mute, oddly professional grief a cop or a bodyguard feels. As if life itself were part of the job and death an outrageous violation of your contract. A personal failure. An insult to the profession. And since it’s your job, what you do well, you simply can’t leave it at that. At least, I couldn’t.

  I went into that little cubicle that the realty company calls a kitchen, fixed myself a cup of coffee, and gave myself about half an hour to calm down. Then I walked out to the car and drove through the snow to the Physics Building on St. Clair—a great gray smokestack of a building with a crenellated top. In the afternoon light it looked like a lonely, abandoned battlement towering above Burnet Woods. The Professor’s ivory tower. It was my first stop. And if I were lucky, I might find out why that secretary had sounded so grimly abstracted when I’d called at noon. Stop two would be the Lovingwell home. And if I were lucky again, the cops would have finished by the time I got there and I would have Sarah Lovingwell to myself.

  5

  THE SECRETARY of the Physics Department, Beth Hemann, was a thin, red-headed young woman with the pale, trembly, earnest face of a convent girl—one who had taken what the sisters had to say to heart. She still dressed for the schoolroom—tartan plaid skirt and plain white blouse. There might have been a smudge of lipstick on her lips and a touch of henna in her hair, but they seemed to mark the limits of her daring. The calendar on her desk listed the feast days in red.

  The office in which we sat—she at her desk and me in a wooden chair across from her—was surprisingly old-fashioned, considering the streamlined exterior of the physics complex. The whitewashed walls were crowded with photographs of past chairmen and of departmental functionaries. The furniture was varnished oak—that spartan wood that breaks the undergraduate heart. With the exception of a 3-M copier humming mournfully in a corner, it was an absolutely lifeless place. And the red-haired girl looked very small and lonely in its center.

  “This day has been unbelievable,” she confided. “I hope to God I never see another one like it. Poor Professor Lovingwell. Poor, poor man.”

  “When I spoke to you at noon,” I said to her. “You told me he’d been called home.”

  “Yes,” she said absently. “I didn’t know, then. He’d gotten a phone call at eleven-thirty from Mr. Bidwell at Sloane. All the in-coming calls are routed through the office, so I’m sure it was Mr. Bidwell calling. Then Professor Lovingwell came down here to ask if Professor O’Hara was in. Professor O’Hara’s the Chairman of the Department. I said he’d gone to the Faculty Club for lunch. The Professor told me he had a phone call to make and left.”

  “Do you know whom he called?” I said.

  “No. We don’t have anything to do with outgoing calls. But he looked very upset when he came back to the office. It scared me the way he looked.”

  “How?”

  She tugged nervously at the collars of her white blouse and said, “I remember thinking he looked as if someone had died. I even asked him if anything had happened. Any family trouble.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He just said he would be going home for an hour or so and not to forward his calls.”

  “But you forwarded mine.”

  Beth Hemann ducked her head rather prettily. “I was worried. I thought someone should contact him. I even phoned his daughter.”

  “When was that?”

  “At...” she looked at a yellow tablet on her desk. “At twelve-fifty. I made a schedule for the police. They asked me to.”

  She looked up at me expectantly and I began to think that she was a little glad of the attention. That this rather dull process of question-and-answer was a relief to her after the shock of Lovingwell’s death. That she actually savored it—as if it were her modest way of flirting. It made me like her.

  “What did Sarah say?” I said with a smile.

  “She said she’d go right home and look after him,” Miss Hemann said. “Twenty minutes later a policeman came in. It’s just been unbelievable.”

  “Do you think I could talk to your boss a moment?” I asked her.

  She made a concerned face, and I understood that her boss had had a trying afternoon and that, like most good secretaries, she wanted to spare him any additional worry.

  “I’ll be gentle,” I said and she laughed.

  “All right, I’ll ask him.”

  She got up from behind her desk, smoothed her skirt, walked over to the office door, and knocked once on the frosted glass insert.

  “Yes?” a hearty baritone voice called out.

  “A gentleman to see, you, Professor. It’s about Professor Lovingwell.”

  “O.K. Show him in.”

  Michael O’Hara was sitting behind his desk and, when I walked in, he got to his feet and threw a huge smile my way, as if that were his version of a handshake. A tall robust man of fifty with a square, sallow Irish face, he looked more like a high school gym coach than a physics professor—all hail-fellow good cheer. But even at a first look, there was something phoney about his heartiness and his fund-raiser’s grin. Maybe I just had trouble believing that anybody could be that cheerful without being a predator at heart. His office was large and nondescript, except for a wooden crucifix propped on the desk.

  “So, how can I help you?” O’Hara said.

  I sat down across from him and said, “You could begin by telling me if you know why Professor Lovingwell tried to get in touch with you this morning.”

  “Ah, Daryl,” O’Hara said mildly. “What is your interest in this business? You’re not working with the police, are you?”

  “No,” I said. “I was working for Professor Lovingwell.”

  “Doing what?” he said pleasantly.

  “Investigating a private matter.”

  O’Hara snorted in disbelief. “He hired you—a private detective?”

  I nodded.

  “That was Daryl,” he said, still smiling. “He was one of the oddest men I ever knew.”

  Smiling Michael O’Hara was beginning to get on my nerves. “Could you answer my question?” I asked him.

  “Sure,” he said affably and hunched forward in his chair. “I could tell you lots of interesting stories. But I’m not going to.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Because the man is dead. And whatever
job you were hired to carry out died with him. You have no business asking me questions about Daryl Lovingwell.”

  He’d tried to say it with an impersonal scorn—the way he might browbeat a student or a teaching assistant. But some genuine anger had colored his voice. When I asked him what he had against private detectives, he started to smile again.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I just don’t believe in telling stories about a dead man who happened to be a colleague. I’ll tell you this much. He wasn’t a happy man. I don’t think he ever enjoyed his work, which was odd because he was very good at it.”

  “You think that’s why he killed himself?”

  “Oh, God, Mr. Stoner, how do I know? Why does anyone kill himself? It’s an irrational thing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

  I walked back out to the secretary’s desk and told Beth Hemann that her boss was a difficult man.

  She pinked and said defiantly, “He’s a fine man. He’s just had a terrible afternoon. He was close to Professor Lovingwell and he’s not happy with the publicity about his death. The police and the newspaper people have been pestering him since the body was discovered. Come back in a few days. I’m sure he’ll be more cooperative then.”

  ******

  Two squad cars were parked in front of the Lovingwell house when I drove up Middleton at four that afternoon. A camera crew was scurrying across the snowy lawn, and several other cars—including Sarah’s tan V.W., Sean O’Hara’s blue Dodge van, and Lovingwell’s Jaguar—were lined up in the driveway. The place was busy, which was going to make my job difficult. I thought about going back to the Delores—O’Hara wouldn’t be following me any more—and calling on the Lovingwell girl later in the evening. Only that wasn’t going to make the questions I wanted her to answer any easier to ask; and then there was no guarantee she’d be willing to talk to me after a long, terrible day with the police and the reporters. I wasn’t sure how to handle it. I wasn’t sure how much Sarah knew about me and about what I’d been hired to investigate. Staring at that fine burgher’s home, I realized that I wasn’t sure of anything yet. Who was allied to whom? Who was a friend, who an enemy? Lovingwell’s suicide had set the whole problem topsy-turvy, and it was like looking at a chessboard that somebody had bumped into in the middle game—pieces scattered everywhere and no clues about how to set them back up.

  Well, one clue. Something had gone very wrong early in the day. So wrong that Lovingwell had killed himself. It was a big, vague clue, obscured by lots of mysterious doings—the theft of the document, the phone call from Bidwell, the second call, Sean O’Hara and his black friend. The police were probably on to most of it; but I had one advantage over them. I had been in on the case from the start and I knew what they did not—that Sarah Lovingwell was somehow involved.

  I started up the walk to the front door when a police guard stepped off the porch and asked to see my I.D. I told him to call Sergeant McMasters outside. Five minutes later, Sid came out.

  “Hello, Harry,” he said.

  “Sid. Can I talk to you?”

  He tipped his fedora back on his head and ran a hand through his stiff red hair. Sid has the face of a prize doll at a county fair: carrot-topped, chubby-cheeked, with dull, unblinking blue eyes that are the only true indicators of his character—which is a cop’s blend of thug and deadpan comic. I’d known him for about ten years and was as close to being his friend as any civilian could be, although you never know when a veteran cop’s going to decide that you’re one of them.

  “I can use the break,” he said. “It’s messy in there. The daughter’s all upset and the lab boys haven’t quite finished. What’s your interest in this thing, anyway?”

  “Lovingwell hired me to look into a burglary that occurred over the weekend.”

  “Yeah? Why didn’t he call us?”

  “It was a personal thing. He didn’t want to call the law in if he could get the items back without a fuss.”

  “What was stolen?”

  “Some papers from his safe. Nothing you’d be interested in.”

  McMasters looked at me cagily. “You sure about that, Harry?”

  “Sid,” I said. “Would I lie to an old friend like you?”

  “I hope not, Harry, because I wouldn’t like it if you did,” he said. “Not a bit. In fact, I’d hate it.”

  “I’m just an innocent bystander in this thing,” I told him. “I came by to pay my respects and see if Miss Lovingwell wanted me to keep investigating the theft.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you know why he did it?”

  “He didn’t leave a note,” McMasters said, “if that’s what you mean. From what we can piece together so far, he’d been depressed about his work. The security man out at Sloane, Louis Bidwell, phoned him this afternoon. We’re not sure right now—those federal boys are like clams—but Lovingwell may have been in some trouble at the lab. They have been having a problem with security leaks out there or so I’ve been told. Anyway, he called his daughter after talking to Bidwell, then went home and shot himself. She claims he wasn’t upset on the phone, that it was just a routine call about when she was coming home today.”

  “Could I talk to her?”

  “It’s O.K. with me, if it’s O.K. with her.”

  We walked past a knot of plainclothesmen into the living room, where Sarah Lovingwell was sitting on the buff leather couch. Sean O’Hara sat next to her holding her hand. From the expression on her face, he could have been holding a tree limb. O’Hara’s eyes lit when he saw me, just a brief flare like an ember exploding in a dead fire; then his face went cold again.

  “Miss Lovingwell?” McMasters said. “Harry Stoner wants to talk to you.”

  She didn’t look up.

  “I was working for your father, Miss Lovingwell. I wonder if I could talk to you for a minute?”

  ”She’s in shock, man. Can’t you see she’s in shock?” It was O’Hara.

  “I’m all right,” Sarah Lovingwell said hoarsely. Her voice surprised me. It was deep and smoky, not at all like her father’s Cambridge drawl. “You said your name is Stoner?” She blinked a few times as if she were awakening from a bad dream. “I’ll talk to you.” She got up from the couch. O’Hara stood beside her but she brushed him back. “It’s O.K., Sean.” He glanced at me nervously and sat down. “Let’s go in the study. They’re done in there, aren’t they?” she asked McMasters.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  We walked into the study, and Sarah closed the sliding panel door behind us. There was a chalk outline on the rug by the door with a dark wine-colored stain next to the head. I stepped around the outline as gingerly as if the body were still lying there. When I turned around, Sarah was staring vacantly at the marks on the rug.

  “Don’t look at it,” I said. “We can go to another room.”

  “No,” she said, waving her hand as if she were calming a child. “I want to get used to it. When my mother died, I almost lost my mind. I saw her dead in the hospital, but...it was different when I saw her in the coffin.” She laughed bitterly. “What movie is it where the man looks at his wife in the coffin and says, ‘What have they done to her face? She never looked like that’? That’s how it was. I’d seen her dead, but I hadn’t accepted it. And when I saw her in the box—she’d never looked like that. So...” She fluttered her hand again. “I want to get used to it this time. I want to know he’s dead. That way, when I look at the thing in the coffin, I’ll know it’s really over.”

  “Why did he do it, Miss Lovingwell? I talked to him just last night and he didn’t seem to be particularly depressed then.”

  “No, I’m sure he was charming. He could be very charming in his odd way. He prided himself on his eccentricities of look and dress, though he claimed he didn’t. Why did he kill himself?” she said in a voice that was not quite under control. “To punish me.”

  “Does that surprise you?” Sarah Lovingwell said after a moment.

  “Very much.”


  “You think I’m hysterical, don’t you? In shock?” She gave me a cold, frank look. “My father hated me. I hated him. It’s not a pleasant fact, but it’s true.”

  “You hated him because of what he did? Because of his job?”

  “Oh, no. I didn’t like it. But there were far better reasons to hate Daryl Lovingwell.”

  I shook my head. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

  “Surely. I wouldn’t sit on that one though. Blood.”

  I walked over to the window seat and sat down on the cushion. “Do you know why your father hired me?” I asked the girl.

  “No,” she said without a trace of hesitation. I studied her face. It wore an ingenuous look, the look of someone awaiting an explanation. I began to feel very odd.

  “Your father hired me to find out whether you’d stolen a government document from his safe. That safe,” I said, pointing to the wall.

  “And why would I have stolen this document?”

  “He said that you were a Marxist and that you hated his work.”

  “Both are true statements.”

  “Look,” I said. “I’m very confused. Let me ask you bluntly, did you steal a government document from your father’s safe?”

  “No,” she said.

  I took a deep breath. “I want to be clear about this. I promised your father that I wouldn’t turn this over to the FBI until I was sure that you weren’t involved or until I’d recovered the document. If I go to the police now with what I know, you could be in a great deal of trouble.”

  “Oh,” she said mildly. “So you’re suppressing evidence to protect me?”

  “No, I’m living up to a bargain I made with a dead man who claimed that he loved you.”

  Sarah laughed with genuine amusement. “Did he claim that?” she said curiously. “Did he really claim that? Oh, Papa, what a strange man you are.” She stopped laughing and stared at me again with that same icy candor. “I hated my father,” she hissed. “And I’m glad he’s dead. He thought he could kill me by doing this”—she pointed to the floor—“obscenity. But I’m stronger than he thought and I’ll survive. Is that all?”