Dead Letter

by Jonathan Valin

  “Curious,” I said. “Tell me about him.”

  “There’s not much to tell,” she said. “We’ve been friends since we were kids. We used to play around with each other—experiment. We still sleep together. But since he’s gone radical, he’s become militant and monogamous. He doesn’t like ‘his’ lady sleeping with other men. He claims that since the Black Muslim women don’t do it, I shouldn’t either. As a gesture of solidarity.” She laughed. “The truth is he’s plain jealous of anybody who looks at me.”

  “What kind of radical is he?”

  “The same kind as I am. A communist. Think of it,” Sarah said mysteriously. “You slept with a communist spy.”

  “Are you?”

  She laughed lightly. “Is that what Father told you?”

  “He wasn’t sure where your politics had led you.”

  “Politically, I’m a Marxist, but I’m not overly doctrinaire about it. I believe in international communism wherever and however it springs up. Does that bother you?”

  “Only when you proselytize. When Sean followed me the day before yesterday, he had company. A thin, black guy with light skin and a goatee.”

  “Chico,” she said. “Chico Robinson. He hangs around the club once and awhile. Chico’s a bad dude. He’s a Cobra.”

  “What’s a Cobra?”

  “It’s a special cadre of the Muslims. The Friends have been doing some work with their Avondale chapter, helping them distribute free milk and lunches to neighborhood kids. Chico and Sean became buddies during the operation. They’re very tight now. Chico doesn’t think much of me. He says I’m soft on discipline.”

  “And the Cobra business?”

  “They’re a Muslim sect. I don’t know how much of the trash you hear on the streets can be trusted, but the Cobras are said to be enforcers. There’s no question that Chico is a mean little man.”

  “O.K.,” I said. “Let’s backtrack a little. Two days ago, I was taking pictures of people going in and coming out of the club.”

  “Why were you doing that?”

  “Well, at the time, I thought you were involved in the theft of your father’s document. I took the photos to get a notion of the people you were friendly with. I even had the police run makes on the snapshots to see if a real communist spy popped up.”

  “You did that?” she said angrily.

  “Easy, Sarah. I was just doing my job.”

  “Well, it’s a lousy job.” She got up from the table and walked into the tiny kitchen. “They knew you were out there,” she said after a moment.

  “Who?”

  ”Les and the Weather people. They hang out at the club sometimes. In the back.”

  “How did they know?”

  ”Les got a phone call in the club house. Someone must have spotted you from the street.”

  “What do Weather people do to dumb detectives who take their pictures?”

  “They wanted to shoot you. At least, Les did. That’s the reason I’m in trouble now. Somehow Les got it in his head that you were a federal agent. Don’t ask me how, because I don’t know. Anyway, I talked him out of the idea; then he saw you coming out of my house the other day; and when the cops showed up that afternoon, he assumed I’d been lying to him all along.”

  “That’s not very good logic,” I said.

  “Les is not a logical man.”

  “What kind of man is he?”

  “Tough,” she said. “He’s been underground for five years, ever since he shot a school superintendent in L.A. Four months ago he drifted into the club. And he’s been in and out ever since. He’s close to the Weather people and some of the more militant radicals like Sean. They treat him like a hero because of the L.A. thing. But they’re afraid of him, too. He can be a very scary guy.”

  “How does he feel about you?”

  “He used to trust me,” she said with heavy irony.

  “What happens if you can’t get in touch with him or if he won’t listen.”

  “Les is a little crazy, Harry,” Sarah said. “Something happened to him during the war. He doesn’t talk about it, but Sean knows. When he gets an idea in his head, when he thinks someone’s against him or the movement, he just...” Sarah walked down the hall to the bedroom. “I’d better get in touch with Sean. I’d better find out where we stand.”

  “We?” I said.

  “I guess so, Stoner,” she said. Sarah brushed the hair back from her face and smiled. “I guess it is we from now until this is over. That is, unless you still have any doubts about whether I stole that document and shot poor Papa.”

  Doubts I had. But not about whether or not she’d killed her father.

  ******

  While Sarah made her phone calls in the bedroom, I flipped on the Globemaster to one of the few stations that wasn’t broadcasting Christmas cheer. With a Brahms quartet playing behind me, I sat back on my Easy boy recliner ($199.95 at Shillito’s) and did some more speculating about Lovingwell and his document.

  Ever since Wednesday morning I’d been expecting one of Bidwell’s charges to pay Sarah a call. The security man would have been polite and businesslike. “Your father checked a top-secret document out of our archives on Saturday afternoon. He was scheduled to return it in two weeks. We’re terribly sorry that he’s dead, etc. But it’s our little secret and we want it back.”

  So, I asked myself, as I sat in a comfortable chair listening to Brahms and staring through the frosty window at the blue morning sky, how come that hadn’t happened? How come Bidwell never even mentioned the document? How come no one cared about it but me?

  When you can’t answer a question it sometimes helps to rephrase it. So, I asked again, how come no one knows about the document but me? Well, I knew why the police, the FBI and Louis Bidwell didn’t know about the missing document. Lovingwell hadn’t told them it was missing. He’d told me. And for various reasons, I hadn’t told anyone but Sarah, who’d claimed she didn’t know about it, either. It’s embarrassing to keep a secret that no one else is interested in. It’s like holding the bag on a snipe hunt or being sent out for a left-handed wrench. It makes you feel foolish, angry, and bitter.

  Why would Bidwell delay the recovery of a top-secret document? I asked myself. He could have overlooked it—a remote chance but possible. He could have been waiting a decent interval to ask about it, out of respect for Sarah and the dead man—also remote. He could have sent someone to the Lovingwell home on Wednesday when Sarah had been taken off to jail—less remote but probably impossible, given the fact that he could have subpoenaed her when she was in custody. Or he could have had a reason to conceal his knowledge of the document, which was very possible. Although it didn’t seem likely, Lovingwell could have been suspected of espionage; or Sarah could have been under suspicion. Or there was always the chance—the one I myself had proposed to the Professor—that someone else at Sloane (Sarah’s erstwhile accomplice) was being investigated and that discussion of the missing document would have jeopardized that investigation. What made the possibility of espionage doubly intriguing was Lovingwell’s murder. There had been talk of security leaks at Sloane and of some trouble the Professor might have been. If he had been meeting with an accomplice on Tuesday afternoon, an accomplice who had some reason to mistrust or to hate or to be done with Daryl Lovingwell, then the killing could be tied to the missing papers. Given the picture Sarah had painted of him, the scenario seemed quite possible. Only, if that were the case, then there was no obvious reason why Lovingwell should have hired me in the first place. And I didn’t want to force the facts to fit Sarah’s portrait of her father simply because I was attracted to her.

  It wouldn’t have done any good at that point to ask Bidwell point-blank about the espionage business. He’d give me the same story whether he were lying or telling the truth; and then there would follow that nasty little moment I’d been postponing for several days when the question of how I knew about missing secret papers would be raised. Maybe with a vengeance. So, B
idwell was out. At least temporarily. But if I could get my hands on Lovingwell’s security file, I could find out part of what I wanted to know. The other part, the vexing question of why I’d been hired, could wait until I settled the espionage issue and the murder itself. That is, unless solving the two somehow resolved the other, which wasn’t as comforting a possibility as I might have wished. Hell, we all want things neat. Only in this instance, neatness and symmetry would bring me full circle back to that discomfiting possibility that I thought I’d talked myself out of ten minutes before. The universal law of neatness said that Sarah was intimately involved in her father’s death and in the disappearance of the document, that our heart-to-heart talk was nothing more than a warm breeze, and that when it had passed the cold, ineluctable climate of hatred and revenge would reassert itself.

  Sarah herself startled me out of my reverie by tapping me on the arm. From the look on her face, I could see that something had gone very wrong.

  “What is it?” I said. “Did you get in touch with Sean?”

  “He’s scared, Harry. Les has gone underground again.” She sat down on the arm of my chair and tried not to look frightened. “Sean says Les told him that he didn’t want to talk, that he’s going to kill me.”

  “Why?” I said. “Why won’t he talk?”

  She shook her head very slowly. “He’s crazy, Harry. He’s really crazy.”

  I took her hand and she gave me a quick, unhappy smile. “He’s going to do it, Harry. I know him. He’s going to kill me.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  I patted her hand and walked over to the phone and dialed McMaster’s office.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “We need some reinforcements, Sarah. I’m going to get Sid to arrange FBI surveillance.”

  “FBI!” she said with horror. “My God, he’ll really think I’ve betrayed him now.”

  “What do you mean really? I said to her. “Do you want him to kill you?”

  She shook her head again.

  “Then we’ve got to have help.”

  “The FBI,” Sarah said with astonishment. “I don’t believe this is happening!”

  ******

  McMasters wasn’t pleased with what I told him, either.

  “That kind of blows our deal, doesn’t it, Harry? I mean if the girl can’t get in touch with him, why shouldn’t I just put both of you back in jail?”

  “For one thing, she’s innocent,” I said. “And for another Grimes wants to kill her. If you want him, you’ll keep her on the outside.”

  “I’ll think it over,” he said.

  McMasters thought it over and called back fifteen minutes later to tell me that the protection had been arranged. “They’re already at your place.”

  “Am I supposed to contact them?”

  “No. Just let things happen.”

  “Act normal, huh?”

  “Your shadow is an agent named Ted Lurman. He’s about six-foot, thirty-five years old, blonde hair. He’ll be wearing a blue pin-stripe suit and he’ll have sunglasses on.”

  “In December?”

  “You tell me, Harry. He’s supposed to be in the lobby of the Delores right now. Two other guys, dressed as phone company repairmen, will be coming to the apartment to look after the girl.”

  “O.K.,” I said. “I guess that’ll have to do. Is there anything you want to tell me about the Lovingwell case?”

  He laughed. “You’ve got brass. All right, we did uncover a couple of odd things. Over the last few months, Lovingwell had been reorganizing his finances. Converting bonds, selling off stocks. Withdrawing funds from his savings account at Central Trust. He may have been planning a trip of some kind; but we can’t connect it up with the murder.”

  “Maybe he was afraid of someone,” I said, thinking of that suppositious accomplice. “Maybe he was planning to get out.”

  “We thought of that. That fellow O’Hara hasn’t been too cooperative—especially after we roughed up his kid. But it seems that he and Lovingwell had some sort of grudge match going on, only it dates back a lot of years.”

  “What about?”

  “You ask a lot of questions for a guy harboring a suspected felon. By the way, the lab has finished with Lovingwell’s body. The girl can claim it any time she wants.”

  “I’ll tell her,” I said.

  While I finished getting dressed, Sarah called her Friends of Nature again.

  “What’s the word?” I said when I came back into the living room.

  “Sean can’t get in touch with him until tonight.” Sarah looked at me anxiously. “Maybe it’s a good thing you called the FBI. Are you going out?”

  “I’m going to talk to Michael O’Hara. Beth Hemann, the department secretary, told me that your father wanted to speak to him on Tuesday morning. I’d like to know why. What do you think of O’Hara, by the way?”

  Sarah gave me one of her odd, disconcerting looks. But then she was a master of them. “He was good to my mother before she died. She made him executor of her estate and my trust fund. She liked him.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “He’s all right,” she said without enthusiasm. “He’s run by his wife—or at least he used to be before they separated—and I don’t care much for her. I had the feeling that she was involved with my father at one time.”

  “Recently?” I said with interest.

  Sarah shook her head. “Years ago. Do you want me to come with you to see Mike?”

  I thought about Lurman and said, “No. You’ll be safe here. Two FBI men dressed as telephone repairmen will come up when I leave. I’ll talk to O’Hara, then I’ll come back and we can all sit down and plot a little strategy.”

  “How long are we going to have to put up with this?”

  “Until it’s over,” I told her.

  15

  LURMAN WAS leaning against a drooping tree in the tiny lobby. He was trying to look inconspicuous in his pin-stripe suit and dark green sunglasses, but he’d only succeeded in looking decent and uncomfortable. When I walked past him, out the front door of the Delores, he counted ten and followed.

  There was snow on the pavement from the previous day’s storm; and, on Burnet, a woman in a maroon Buick was spinning her wheels in the slush. From the side she looked like a small-town widow—thin, thin-lipped, with a stern irreproachable face. But when she turned my way, she gave me such a pathetic frown that I walked out into the street and started shoving the rear of her car. I almost laughed when I caught sight of Lurman, vacillating in an access of indecision between the lobby and the sidewalk. If he was the FBI’s idea of discretion, I was in for an embarrassing afternoon. The woman’s car finally broke free of the ice. She waved at me through the rear window and I could see her tight little mouth form the sentence: “God bless you!” After she’d driven off, weaving through the slush and coughing blue exhaust into the morning air, I crooked a finger at hapless Lurman and started down the side stairs that led to the parking lot. Lurman walked very deliberately to a black Chevrolet parked in front of the Delores and stood by the door. He patted the hood a couple of times, in case I hadn’t gotten the message.

  Once I got the Pinto started, I puttered around to the front of the building, where Lurman pulled out behind me. As we drove away, I could see two telephone repairmen getting out of a second black Chevy. The FBI! I thought.

  Because of the snow it took me almost ten minutes to get to Clifton. I kept Lurman in my rearview mirror all the way. We passed McMicken Hall, looking stately in its mantle of snow, crossed Riddle, and headed east down St. Clair. I parked in the underground lot below the Physics Building and waited in the Pinto until Lurman had found a place of his own. I was making jokes about him, but deep-down I was happy to have an armed escort.

  Lurman followed me at a decent distance into the Physics Building and down the big, whitewashed hallway to O’Hara’s office. When he saw me knock at the department door, he stopped at a marble water fountain and pr
etended to take a drink.

  “Hello,” Miss Hemann said as I walked up to her desk. “He’s on his way to a meeting with the Chancellor, but he might have a few minutes to spare.”

  “What makes you so sure I didn’t come to talk to you?”

  She threw her hand at me and laughed. “Mr. Stoner,” she said playfully. “Shall I tell him you’re here?”

  “Please.”

  She went into the inner office and came back out a second later. “You can go in,” she said.

  O’Hara was looking spry and outdoorsy in an open-collared flannel shirt.

  “Mr. Stoner!” he boomed. “How’s the detective business?”

  “Right now, not so good.”

  “Sorry to hear it,” he said. “But don’t despair. Being a mathematician I dabble in statistics and I’d be willing to bet that there’s some dirty little crime being committed right now with your name on it.”

  “Thanks, but I’m booked up. The Lovingwell murder, for instance.”

  “Are there no policemen? No courts? No grand juries?”

  “I was kind of hoping we could skip the sarcasm this trip and talk about your friend.”

  “What friend?”

  “You know. That colleague you wouldn’t tell any stories about—out of respect.”

  O’Hara looked at me shrewdly. “Daryl and I didn’t get along. It’s common knowledge. That doesn’t mean I’m going to reveal his private life to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that comes in off the street.”

  “This Harry’s been hired by Sarah Lovingwell to look into her father’s death.”

  O’Hara leaned back in his chair. “Is that right? I’ve always been fond of Sarah. It’s rather a miracle that she survived in one piece, given her father’s personality.”

  I started to say something about his own offspring but let it pass. “Over the last few days I’ve learned a good deal about Daryl Lovingwell. Most of it contradictory. On the surface he seemed to be a charming and intelligent man.”

  “He was that, certainly. It’s odd how eccentricities can border on neurosis. Much of Daryl’s character was poised like that. He sometimes reminded me of a very ornate, highly polished mirror. Brilliant on the surface, but if you scratched through the mica...there was a very dark side underneath.”