As I walked off the porch I could hear her asking her husband who it was who had written that poem about the householder who rakes up a severed hand.
******
I was angry when I walked back to the Lovingwell house. If I had found a stone to kick, I would have sent it flying right through some burgher’s picture window. The night was alive with gossip. In every living room of every house in Clifton, someone was talking about Sarah Lovingwell. And by morning the newspapers would have the story, too. Everyone in greater Cincinnati would know, or think they knew, a little bit about Daryl Lovingwell’s death. Everyone but me.
The police would start getting anonymous tips. Some less reluctant, less neighborly Rose Weinberg would recall seeing Sarah walking down Middleton at noon on Tuesday. Bidwell would read the morning Enquirer and decide that here was where chivalry must end. He or somebody at Sloane would remember the missing document (if there wasn’t some dogged little federal cop tailing me already). And the Cincinnati police would put two and two together and ask me to check the figures. That’s where you’re going to wind up, Harry, I told myself. As a police accountant. And poor misunderstood Sarah L. will get twenty to life. And you’ll get a suspension and a light jail sentence. If you’re lucky.
If you’re not lucky, you’ll get a felony murder charge, a criminal espionage charge. Withholding evidence. Abetting a felon. Demonstrating carelessness, sentimentality, and self-destructive impulses. Or, maybe, Lester Grimes will do some addition of his own and invite you to step out into the dusty streets for an old-fashioned shootout. I pressed my coat pocket impulsively. It was there, like a lump of scrap beneath the cloth. But it won’t do you any good, Harry, I told myself. Not unless you shoot first. And you’re far too fair-minded a gent for that.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t admit that I might have been wrong about one of the Lovingwells. Like the joke goes, I may be crazy but I’m not stupid. I knew I could be wrong about any number of things. What made me so damn mad was that I still didn’t know what right and wrong meant in this affair. Worse, I had the awful feeling that, if it happened the next day that another mild-mannered, sensible-seeming Lovingwell came to me with an oath on his lips and love, like a chocolate stain, on his sleeve, I would probably do the same things and end up in the same spot. What it comes down to in the end is that you hope for the things that you don’t get out of life; and I’m so constructed that a doomed love, no matter how doomed, wins my chips every time.
I jerked the car door open, threw myself down on the seat and stared blankly at the Lovingwell house. You couldn’t see door or window or gable. Just a black mass, a little darker than the night sky. Goddamn it! I said to myself, I want to find something out! I don’t care what it is. I was sick of holding it all in my head, like those chess problems I used to try to solve when I was pretending to be Philip Marlowe. Ten moves and I’d forget who I was, where I was, and what I was doing. The hell with it, I told myself. Tomorrow we go to the police. Let them take care of Sarah Lovingwell. She never wanted your help anyway. And as for Lovingwell père...like Rose Weinberg had said, he was past caring.
10
I DROVE up to the Bee and had a steak and a Scotch, a Scotch and another Scotch. I shot the bull with a couple of friends and actually found myself flirting with a blonde schoolgirl who looked vaguely like Kate. She wasn’t having any, so I drifted back to the bar. I thought maybe Bullet would show up; but he didn’t. And by one o’clock in the morning, I was too loaded to care. I dropped by the schoolgirl’s table on my way out, to give her one last try.
“Think I’ll take you home with me,” I said to her.
“Think again,” she snapped.
I was still thinking when I found my car, parked beneath the winter skeleton of a maple tree on Telford. “Big deal college girl,” I said as I fiddled with the door.
Something cold and metallic brushed against my cheek.
I didn’t even have to look. Not on a dark sidestreet, on a moonless December night. “It’s in my pants pocket,” I said. “Right rear. I’ve only got twenty bucks, but it’s yours if you want it.”
I heard the guy laugh softly. Then I heard him cock the piece. The hair on my arms and on the back of my neck stood on end. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Don’t shoot me, buddy. Take the money!”
“I got your permission?” a wry Negro voice returned. He shoved me against the car. “Don’t even think about moving.”
I spread-eagled against the car door while the gunman picked my pants pocket. He took the wallet out. “Says you’re a private detective,” he said and laughed. “You best find you a different line of work.”
He tossed the empty wallet at my feet and slugged me so hard on the back of the head that my forehead slammed into the car window. I slid down the side of the Pinto and onto the pavement.
Something inside my head seemed to be moving as lamely as a broken limb. “Ow,” I groaned. How come you’re not blacked out? I thought. I reached for the door handle and started to pull myself up. And then that thing moved again inside my head. Whoah, I told myself. Best wait a bit. I lay back down on the pavement and watched the night sky go in and out of focus. It’s a judgment, I thought miserably.
“Hey!” a voice called from across the street. “Hey! Are you O.K.?”
“Wonderful,” I said.
“Mister?” the voice repeated.
“You want to give me a hand?” I yelled. And the thing inside my head moved half an inch.
I heard footsteps, then two pairs of hands grabbed my arms.
“Easy, for chrissake,” I said.
“What happened?”
“I cut myself shaving. What’s it look like? I got mugged.”
“You want us to call the cops?”
“No. Just get me to my feet.”
They lifted me up. I was too dizzy to stand, so I slumped back against the car door and stared goofily at the two boys, college kids, who had helped me out.
“Man, you got a bruise on your forehead,” one of them said. “You want us to call an ambulance?”
I touched at the back of my head. “No. I’ll be all right.”
“You could have a concussion, mister. You ought to see a doctor.”
“I said I’d be all right.”
The boys looked uncertainly at each other. “O.K., Frank,” one of them said. “The man knows what he wants. Let’s split.”
As they walked off down the sidewalk, I thought, “The mugger was right—I ought to find another line of work.” I opened the door and sat down on the car seat and stared at the pavement. My wallet was lying between my feet. I bent down and picked it up and stared for a minute at the photostat of my license. Some detective.
******
It was after two when I got back to the Delores. That thing in my head had stopped wobbling; and all I felt was a kind of lassitude that made it hard for me to keep my eyes open. Judging by the fist fights I’d gotten into in the Army and as a P.I., I figured the two kids had been right. I probably did have a mild concussion. I guess the only reason I hadn’t gone to the hospital was that the mugger had hurt my pride worse than he’d hurt my head.
I made it to the apartment without being slugged or shot at. And I made it into the bedroom without passing out. That seemed like enough to hope for out of one night.
I fell asleep as soon as I hit the mattress and slept long into the morning; and when I woke, I felt as if someone had braided cornrows in my skull. Around eleven I found the energy to get out of bed and check the messages on the answerphone. There was only one and it was terse: “This is Sarah Lovingwell. I have to see you.”
******
Once they’d talked to Rose Weinberg, the cops hadn’t wasted any time with Sean O’Hara. Before releasing him, they’d worked on the boy until he admitted he’d been lying about Sarah’s alibi. McMasters filled me in on the rest as I waited in the courthouse coffee shop for Sarah Lovingwell to be brought down to the visitor’s room on the fourth floor.
“Why didn’t he?” I asked him.
“Sarah Lovingwell talked him out of it,” Sid said. “Grimes is a psycho, Harry. He was eased out of the Marine Corps, after shooting up a hamlet full of friendlies. A newspaperman got wind of it and then something happened to the newspaperman. The brass had no choice but to give Grimes the boot. No formal charges were ever pressed against him. They liked Lester Grimes in the Marine Corps. We had a helluva time getting this much out of them.
“Sarah Lovingwell must have pulled a thorn out of his boot, because O’Hara claims that Grimes would listen to her advice. Only that’s all changed since last night. O’Hara says Grimes believes that Sarah set him up. And Grimes is a vindictive son-of-a-bitch. O’Hara is afraid that he’ll come gunning for the girl.”
“And me?”
“Oh, you’re on his list, too. Right up near the top, according to O’Hara.”
“How come O’Hara suddenly got so talkative?”
McMasters smiled humorlessly. “He’s a snot-nosed kid, Harry. And we were in no mood to mess around last night.”
“You worked him over?”
“Wake up and smell the coffee,” McMasters said with disgust.
“So why was Grimes worried about federal cops?”
“O’Hara wouldn’t say. But those pictures you gave us tell part of the story. And when we busted the club last night, we found a regular armory in the back office. Pistols, grenades, the works.”
“You think Lovingwell’s death is tied to this business?”
“We don’t know. If we can trace the murder weapon to the cache we found on Calhoun Street, we’ll be in a better position to say. Right now, we have no idea where the gun came from.”
I said, “How much do you have on Sarah Lovingwell?”
“We’ve got a motive,” McMasters said. “And we’ve got a witness who can place her near the scene at twelve on Tuesday. The girl claims she didn’t go all the way up to the house, that when she saw her father’s car in the driveway she turned around and went back to the club. But even if she’s telling the truth and she didn’t do the killing herself, she probably knows who did. The lab puts the time of death between twelve and twelve-thirty, and that would be right about the time that Sarah was moseying up to the door. We’ve also got the fact that she lied to us about being with O’Hara.”
I frowned at McMasters. “You don’t have a shred of hard evidence. Any lawyer in his right mind would have her out on habeus by this afternoon.”
“That’s true,” he said. “She probably will get bailed out tonight. But then we haven’t talked to you, yet, Harry.”
I pointed innocently at my chest.
“Yeah, you,” McMasters said. “You must think I’m an idiot. I’ve got eyes and half a brain. You’ve been holding out on me from the start. And I told you—I don’t like that. You knew the O’Hara kid was lying. You knew he wasn’t with the girl between noon and one. You had to know, because the jerk-off was following you home.”
I’d realized it was there all along; but this was the first time I actually felt the ice beneath my feet.
“All right,” I said carefully. “Say I did know. I’m still working for the girl.”
“The hell. She hates your guts. She thinks it was you who set her and the O’Hara kid up.”
“Then why does she want to see me?”
McMasters shrugged. “All I know is that after you’re done talking with her, you’ve got an appointment to talk with me. We want to know why she killed her father. And you can tell us.”
“Suppose I don’t?”
“Then I’ll throw you in jail, Harry.”
“On what charge?”
”Something’ll come to me,” McMasters said.
******
I waited for another twenty minutes in a big, drab anteroom on the eighth floor. The place was as tense and cheerless as a hospital emergency room. Two dozen sad cases waited along with me—nervous, dispirited fathers, mothers, kinfolk. I was vaguely conscious of a pecking order among the old hands. The sort of thing you see at welfare offices—the poor abusing the poor with a heartless gusto. One woman in particular, graying, with large crooked teeth and the cold black eyes of a Negro tough, seemed to be holding court in her corner of the room. But I was too preoccupied with Sarah Lovingwell to pay her much attention, even when she turned to another old hand sitting beside her and said: “That man there has him some trouble.”
I laughed to myself. What trouble? There wasn’t going to be any trouble. I’d just walk into the visitor’s room and tell Sarah L. that I was quitting the case, that I was going to break my word to her father and tell the police about the document. I didn’t like it, but McMasters wasn’t giving me any other choice.
“Shit,” I said under my breath.
The old woman in the corner cackled. She thought she was getting to me.
Why the hell had Sarah called me anyway? Judging from what McMasters had said, probably to blow off a little steam. To turn the knife. Or maybe she had phoned me before the previous night’s fiasco. There was no way to tell from my shoddy answerphone what time a call came in. Maybe there had been something she’d wanted to tell me after that curious, desultory interview on Wednesday afternoon. After I’d blackmailed her into hiring me in the first place.
“Shit,” I said again. And the old woman laughed.
It really wasn’t very nice, what I was going to do. Extorting Sarah’s compliance and then reneging on the agreement as soon as the going got rough. On the other hand, Harry, I told myself, the girl is suspected of murder, of killing the man that you’re trying to protect. And Rose Weinberg notwithstanding, Sarah had a motive and she’d been on the scene at the time of the crime. She was a little crazy, to boot. Her own father had feared she might do him violence. It was just self-indulgence, just posturing to pretend that she was an innocent who was being unjustly betrayed.
It would have been self-indulgence, all right, if I’d believed what I was saying to myself. Only I didn’t believe that she’d killed her father. I’d told Rose Weinberg I’d remain impartial until the police forced me to take sides. But that was a lie. And she’d known it was a lie. Like Mrs. Weinberg, my intuition said that Sarah Lovingwell was not a killer and that her father was not the man he’d seemed to be. Why in hell hadn’t he told me that his daughter hated him? It wasn’t a pleasant thing to confess to a stranger, but neither was the fact that he’d suspected his daughter was a thief. He’d hinted urbanely that he and Sarah had had their little disagreements, like every other father and daughter in the world. But if there was one thing that was indisputable about the Lovingwell case, it was the fact that they were not an ordinary father and daughter. Why, then, had he disguised Sarah’s hatred for him?
An armed guard walked out of the visitor’s room and a bell rang. The people in the anteroom lined up before a table and submitted docilely to a search of their coats and handbags. Play it by ear, I decided as I waited to be frisked. Which was just a tired way of saying that the Lovingwells were still a problem that I couldn’t solve. The cops patted me down, and I stepped through the door into the visitor’s area.
I started down a hall to the main reception room—a big, barren box posted with guards and divided in half by a long wooden table, on either side of which prisoners and their kin sat talking.
“Your name Stoner?” a guard asked me.
“Yeah.”
“This way.”
He took me by the arm and guided me away from the main hall down a narrow corridor lined with private rooms—cubicles that lawyers used when they wanted to consult with their clients. Since I wasn’t a lawyer, the exception struck me as odd. Odd until I walked into the room itself.
It was four-square and as uninspired
as a child’s wooden block, and along the length of the wall opposite the door a mirror ran from corner to corner. I laughed when I saw myself reflected in it. McMasters wasn’t taking any chances. There was probably a microphone, too, hidden under the steel table or under one of the two desk chairs that were parked beneath it.
“Testing, testing,” I shouted into the tabletop. “Can you hear all right, Sid?”
I gave the finger to whoever was standing behind the mirror and sat down at the table.
A minute later Sarah Lovingwell walked in.
I’d expected her to look angry when she saw me; I was even prepared to get slapped. But I could see at once that that wasn’t going to happen. In her drab prison uniform she looked like a bewildered, overworked waitress. And when she saw my face—a familiar face—she almost smiled. Unless you’ve been locked in a cell, you can’t really appreciate the luxury of an open door or the solace of companionship or the pleasure of simple choice. That half-smile faded almost immediately and was replaced by a tough, unfriendly frown.
“Ah,” I said. “That’s the Sarah I’ve come to know.”
“I’m going to skip the name calling,” she said coldly. “I called you because I need your help. Your meddling has gotten me into a great deal of trouble and you’re the only person who can get me out of it.”
“You want me to prove that you didn’t kill your father?” I said.
“No.”
“What, then?”
“My lawyer is going to post bond this afternoon. Unless I can convince Les that I had nothing to do with what happened last night, he’ll kill me.”
“You want me to act as a bodyguard?”
Sarah shook her head. “I want you to tell Les that it was your fault, that I had nothing to do with the bust.”
I laughed hollowly, pushed back my chair, and got to my feet.
Dead Letter Page 8