Dead Letter

by Jonathan Valin

  “The next year Mother had an affair. Of course I was too young to understand what all the fuss was about. All the shouting and the fighting. But I could feel the hatred in the air like you can feel a storm blowing up. You wouldn’t have thought he would have cared—about that kind of betrayal. But he did. You see, it wasn’t just the money for him. It was everything he touched or could put his hands on. He wanted it all. Like some kind of crazy-Midas, who liked having the golden touch. She was his property, as much as the house or her farm. He might have given her away, but he’d never let her choose for herself.

  “In 1965 Mother had her first nervous breakdown. She had had another affair and it ended badly. She heard voices, hallucinated, said that Father was poisoning her. Of course everyone in the university community was terribly upset.” Sarah laughed. “They get upset about those things in academia because so many of them have nervous breakdowns themselves. It’s like seeing the handwriting on the wall. When Mother got out of the hospital she looked dreadful. I thought it was a symptom of her illness, like a rash with chickenpox. That it would go away when she got better. I didn’t really know what a nervous breakdown was, then.

  “But, of course, she didn’t get better. Not in that house where he never said a word to her. And she never was the same after that first hospitalization. She wouldn’t eat, she slept badly and cried constantly. She had two more nervous breakdowns in the next three years. And each time she suffered the same hallucinations, had the same delusion about Father poisoning her.

  “No one believed her. How could they? All you had to do was look at Father to know that he was incapable of something so downright improper. He was so smart, so well-bred, so candid, and so reliable. Did he tell you he hated his job?” Sarah asked. “That if he had been born thirty years later he would have been a hippie? That there was a lot of that sort of thing in his soul?”

  I shuddered a little. “Yes, he did.”

  “Oh, that was one of his favorites. The humble man caught in a world he didn’t understand and forced to labor at a job he despised. He was so clever with other people. He had an unerring sense of what they expected of him. And he would play it their way so well that, after awhile, it didn’t seem to be their way but his own. It was like a game to him and the stakes were trust.”

  “Why?” I asked her. “Why would he do that?”

  “Hate,” she said, “Especially after Mother’s infidelity, he had a boundless contempt for other people and a greed for what was precious to them. He would talk about how stupid this one was. How easy it would be to steal his grant, his job, his wife. When he was like that, it was as if he were talking about killing people, about taking their souls from them. He didn’t speak that way often. But when he did, in that quaint well-mannered voice...it was terrifying.” Sarah looked at me shrewdly. “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?”

  “Almost impossible,” I said.

  “But isn’t evil always like that? Banal, innocuous-seeming? Daryl Lovingwell just added a little paint, a bit of superficial flash. At heart he was a killer. A sociopath with an inexhaustible sense of having been wronged. Perhaps he had been. In spite of the money, he had had a hard life. Bad childhood. Bad marriage. Bad daughter,” she said with a tremor in her voice. “But that doesn’t justify...his hate. I don’t know how that could be justified. Or explained. I don’t why he killed my mother. Or why he hated me. Perhaps that’s why I stuck around—waiting for an answer. Or a resolution.”

  Neither of us said a word for a second. There didn’t seem to be anything left to say, because she hadn’t described a man, she’d described a demon, a vice—something smooth, dark, and inexplicable. Men weren’t like that, even bad men. And I’d seen enough bad men to know. Yet there was no question that she believed in what she’d said. I’d wanted to believe her, too, for the simple reason that I liked her. But her description was too vague, too uncompromising, too full of smoke. It was a piece of personal mythology—a legend built of years of loveless resentment. And like any legend, whatever truth it contained was hidden away in a nimbus of fears and wishes. I didn’t tell her that. I didn’t know how. Instead I asked a detective’s question—one that had an answer. “Can you prove it? What you said about your mother?”

  She shrugged. “How do you prove that someone has been driven insane? It’s such common mischief, isn’t it? Husbands hating wives, wives hating husbands? Madness seeping in like damp. I know this much; he was poisoning her. Perhaps not physically, but mentally. One night when she was frightened she brought me into her bedroom to stay with her. I was fifteen at the time. It was the year before she died. She held me in her arms and said, ‘Listen.’ At first I didn’t hear it. It was so soft and soothing. But what it was saying—” Sarah shivered. “Awful things,” she said. “He was whispering to her through the walls—the way children do before they sleep. Talking so reasonably about what he was going to do with her money, about all the things he would buy. If only she’d cooperate, he said. There are pills on the nightstand. There’s a bread knife in the pantry, fastened on a magnet beneath the china cabinet. I sharpened it today. In the silverware drawer, a steak knife. In the bathroom, razor blades. Iodine. If only she’d cooperate.

  “Now do you understand why I despised him? He’d been doing that to her for years. For years out of greed and hatred he’d been torturing her to death.”

  Sarah sat back on the couch and stared forlornly at the sheaf of photographs. “I would have killed him myself,” she said, “if I wasn’t such a coward.”

  “Who did kill him, Sarah?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you were there,” I said. “You’ve admitted that you went back to your house around noon.”

  “I didn’t go all the way up the street,” she said. “I changed my mind before I got to the house.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was there. I saw his car in the driveway and decided it wasn’t worth a confrontation. He would have lied to me, anyway. I decided to wait until he was gone to search the house for the photographs; so I went back to the club. Then around one Miss Hemann called me up. She seemed so hysterical—I just went.”

  I sat back on the couch and tried to decide what to make of what Sarah had told me. There had been so many inconsistencies in Daryl Lovingwell’s behavior—and in the reports of his behavior—that, sooner or later, I would have begun to think of him as a guilty party. I think I already had begun to do that, though as guilty of what I still wasn’t sure. Perhaps, in light of her chilling monologue, simply of having made Sarah’s life miserable. In any event, it was time to start turning some of my “intuition” to account. To start taking Sarah (and, to a lesser degree, Rose Weinberg) seriously. It was either that or a return to the ambivalence I’d felt since the start of the case. And from Sarah’s description, Daryl Lovingwell was not a man one ought to have felt ambivalent about. Time to take sides, Harry, I said to myself. At least, provisionally. Time to start thinking of the Professor as a man who had more than a little to hide. And to see what could be made of his inconsistencies if I assumed, for the moment, that Sarah had been telling the truth. “That was the second phone call you got that morning,” I said to her, talking it out. “The first one was from your father. What did he want?”

  “He wanted to know when I was coming home that afternoon.”

  “I thought you two left each other notes about that sort of thing.”

  “We did.”

  “What did you write that morning? Can you remember?”

  “I think I told him that I’d be at the club until twelve. And then I’d be coming home before the rally at the museum.”

  “But you didn’t go all the way home, did you?”

  “No. Like I said, I chickened out when I saw his car.”

  “So, your father called at—”

  “Eleven-forty.”

  “Not to find out when you’d be coming home. He already knew that. But to find out if you’d be coming home.”

&n
bsp; “Yes, I guess that’s true.”

  “And then he left his office in a rush and asked Miss Hemann not to forward any calls. What does that sound like to you?”

  Sarah looked at me cunningly. “Like he was expecting somebody at the house and didn’t want me around.”

  “That’s what it looks like,” I said. “And it wasn’t me he was expecting, so it could have been someone else who had a reason for not wanting to be seen by you. Why would one of your father’s associates not want you to see him?”

  “Maybe it was a woman,” Sarah said quickly. “Wouldn’t that be something? If Father had been carrying on an affair behind my back!”

  “We’ve got to be more certain than that if we’re going to keep you out of prison.”

  Sarah smiled at me with pleasure. “Then I passed the test?” she said. “You believed what I told you about Father.”

  I said, “I believe that you didn’t kill him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have to believe someone.” Which was the absolute truth. I told her. I picked up my cup and walked into the kitchen. “We have two goals now. First, we have to find out who did kill your father—that is, if you don’t want to take the fall for his death. And second, we have to stay alive to fulfill our first goal; and that means eliminating Lester Grimes.”

  “What do you mean ‘eliminating’?” Sarah said with horror.

  “Come over here, Sarah.” I took her by the wrist and pulled her to the front window. “You see that gray Plymouth parked across from the lobby?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s an unmarked police car. The men in that car have been assigned to tail you. The only reason you’re out of jail at all is that I managed to convince Sid McMasters that you could be more useful to him outside than in.”

  “What do you mean, ‘useful’?”

  “McMasters wants Grimes,” I said simply.

  “So, that’s it,” she said. “And what makes you think I’ll go along with this?”

  “I don’t know that you will,” I said. “I only expect you to think about it. Grimes is bent on revenging him self against you and me. Nothing I say is going to change that. And nothing you want to believe in is going to change that, either. If you want to stay alive, you’re going to have to think about it.”

  “He’s my friend,” she said between her teeth.

  “He’s also a psychopathic killer. And no number of principles, good or bad, are going to rule him or convince him of your innocence. He thinks you’re a class traitor, Sarah. And he’s going to execute you.”

  Sarah blew air out of her mouth and nodded a kind of concession. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  14

  SARAH DIDN’T feel much like talking to me for the next ten minutes. She sat on the sofa with her chin on her hands and stared at the room the way animals sometimes stare at the bars of their cages. I made a fresh pot of coffee in the kitchen and told myself that it wasn’t my fault, that if you play with men like Grimes you’re liable to get hurt. But it didn’t make me feel happier. I liked the girl. After what she’d told me that morning, I liked her enough not to want to make her life any more painful than it had already been. Which may have been a sneaky way of saying that I wanted out. Or, maybe, that I wanted to make it all better. A friend used to tell me the two were one.

  I brought the coffee pot into the living room and set it down on an end table. After a time, Sarah got up and flopped down across from me. I pushed a cup of coffee toward her and she prodded it with a forefinger as if it were alive and dangerous.

  “What now?” she said unhappily.

  “I’m working for you, ma’am. You tell me.”

  She worked her jaw noiselessly and looked at me sideways, so that for a moment she looked like a ma’am from Avignon. “What the hell,” she said and clapped her hands together. “I can’t fight everybody.”

  I wasn’t so sure of that and told her so. Which pleased her.

  “I guess I better call Sean and find out whether Les has been in touch with him,” she said. “I guess I’d better find out where I stand.” She looked at me with a trace of confusion in her blue eyes. “This doesn’t mean I’m going to go along with the deal you’ve arranged. I haven’t committed any crimes, yet. I’m not going to compromise myself pointlessly.”

  “I understand.”

  “And don’t patronize me,” she said. “You may not understand it, but my politics are important to me. So are my friends. I wouldn’t have survived childhood if it weren’t for Sean.”

  “You two are close?” I asked.

  She smiled to herself—a very assured smile. “Would that make a difference to you?”

  I hadn’t really thought about it, save in passing. Partly because I was out of practice and partly because I hadn’t made up my mind about whether or not I was ready to take that kind of chance again. On the surface it seemed too hopelessly complicated by old wounds and new animosities, by distrusts and betrayals. Now it occurred to me, as I watched her smiling that uncanny, Sarah-like smile, that it might make a difference to me. The trouble was I had the uneasy feeling that I could never be completely sure that it would make the same difference to her. Which made me think of Kate, and the letters that weren’t being answered.

  “What are you thinking about?” she said with a lively grin.

  “You don’t want to know what I’m thinking about.”

  “But I do,” she said, toying with the top button of her shirt.

  “Cut it out, Sarah.”

  She looked me over for a second, top to toe. I was a little afraid she was about to ask me my sign. “It wouldn’t be hard to like you,” she said speculatively. “We’d never get along, but it wouldn’t be hard to like you.”

  She sat back in her chair and pondered it like a proposition. “I think I do like you.”

  “Give it a minute more,” I said. “Something’ll come to you.”

  She laughed and pushed back from the coffee table. “C’mon,” she said, standing up. “I want to test out an old adage.”

  “Which is?”

  “Politics make strange bedfellows.”

  It was my turn to laugh. “You are the strangest damn girl! Just ten minutes ago you wanted to kill me.”

  “Ten minutes ago I’d forgotten what you did for me last night. Of course, if you aren’t interested...” Her voice trailed off and she spun on her heel like an actress making a well-timed exit. Well, Harry? I said to myself. Are you interested? Or are you going to keep on waiting for Kate to call? Oddly enough, it only took me a second to decide.

  I caught her by the hand and pulled her down beside me on the armchair. She smelled sweetly of sweat and denim. “Sarah,” I said, looking into her eyes. “Do you ever stop acting?”

  “Sometimes,” she said breathlessly. “Not often. Does it matter?”

  I laughed again and slapped her on the rump. “Not at the moment.”

  She grinned and pulled my head down to her lips.

  ******

  Sarah was sitting up in bed, Indian-style, her long auburn hair covering her shoulders and the tops of her breasts. Looking at that hard, talented body, I felt like making love to her again.

  “Jesus,” she said, wide-eyed. “Don’t you ever get tired?”

  “Someday, Sarah,” I said, skimming my fingertips through her hair and over her breasts, “I’ll tell you about the last few months. Then, you’ll know why I’m not tired at this moment.”

  She leaned over and kissed me through her hair. “Do you want to make love again?” she whispered.

  “I do,” I said. “But we’ve got to stop.”

  She giggled. “Good. Because I’m tired as hell.”

  While I showered, Sarah made a second breakfast in the kitchen. The smells of bacon and toast drifting through the rooms, the sound of her puttering over the stove, opening and shutting closets, learning where things were, almost moved me to tears. I sat down on the john after I got out of the shower and
thought about Kate. That’s where Sarah found me.

  “Coffee?” She passed a cup through the crack in the door and peeked in after it. “Hey!” she said, when she saw me sitting, dripping wet, on the toilet. “No towel?”

  I stood up and she looked up and down my body and smiled. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.” She put the cup down on the sink and kissed me on the lips.

  “You’ll get wet,” I said.

  She threw her head back and laughed. “I don’t care.” She nuzzled against my chest until her face was slick. “I like the way you smell,” she said. “And taste.” She ran a sandpapery tongue down my belly, then looked up mischievously.

  “We can discuss how I taste later. I’ve got to get dressed right now.”

  She made a disappointed face. “All right. But hurry up. I don’t want breakfast to go cold, too.”

  In the living room, Sarah pretended to moon over me. She looked nineteen in the morning light. It made me feel a little guilty for shtupping her an hour before.

  “Why were you sad just now?” she said as she poured me a cup of coffee.

  “I was thinking about someone I know,” I said.

  “A girl?”

  I nodded.

  “You still love her?” Sarah asked. “Is that it?”

  “You cry when you come. With me, it’s the smell of coffee.”

  “You know I was right—I do like you,” she said with something like an air of discovery. “For a capitalist pig, you’re a decent man. And a good fuck, too.”

  I looked amusedly at Sarah. “And you’ve had so much experience.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Sean?”

  “Jealous, again?”