Dead Letter

by Jonathan Valin

  “On the day of his death,” I said, “Lovingwell tried to get in touch with you before phoning his daughter. Can you think of a reason why he’d be so anxious to talk?”

  “I can think of half a dozen reasons. We went to a faculty party on Sunday and he bent my ear for an hour or so about his work and about Sarah.”

  “What about Sarah?”

  “He was worried about her,” O’Hara said. “He was afraid she was slipping off into depression. You know her mother was a depressive. I suppose he saw some of the same symptoms in Sarah. I think it frightened him. But then it was always hard to tell what Daryl really thought about anything.” O’Hara seemed to study my face for a second. When he couldn’t find what he was looking for, he stared dully at the papers on his desk. “We never hit it off, Daryl and I. He objected to my, shall we say, athleticism. And his quirks always struck me as posed.” He looked back up at me and smiled like a jackal. “You say you’ve spent a few days investigating him? I worked with the man for eight years and never understood him. I don’t know if he understood himself. He was a little mad, Daryl Lovingwell.”

  “You and he had a dispute some years ago?”

  O’Hara glared at me, as if I were pushing his good spirits just a bit too far. “The McPhail business is a dead letter. It was only a disagreement over the status of a graduate student. A sad, goodhearted young man. Daryl was unhappy about the outcome, and I’d be lying if I said that academic politics can’t get vicious at times. But there was no bad blood between us afterward. At least, no blood that hadn’t been bad before.”

  I thought about what McMasters had told me—about Lovingwell’s financial arrangements—and said, “You don’t think he would have left the department because of this McPhail business, do you?”

  “I told you,” he said, coloring. “That was seven years ago. Anyway, Daryl had an endowed chair. He would never have left this department.”

  “One last question?” I said.

  “It’ll have to be brief,” he said. “I have a meeting to get to.”

  “The night that Lovingwell talked to you about Sarah, did he mention anything about some missing papers?”

  “No.” O’Hara got up from his desk and I followed him out of his office. “He mentioned no papers to me,” he said as he opened the outer door. “Just Sarah. And now you’ll have to excuse me.”

  He walked briskly down the hall.

  ******

  “He doesn’t seem to like my company,” I said to Miss Hemann who was bent over her typewriter.

  “That’s hardly fair, is it?” she said without looking up. “I did tell you he had an appointment.” She stopped typing and eyed me curiously. “Why are you asking him all these things, anyway?”

  It was a very good question, for which I didn’t have a good answer. And for some reason I wanted to give her a good answer. “It’s the job,” I said a bit helplessly and then felt embarrassed for having said it.

  I sat down on a chair beside the desk and smiled foolishly at her. “It’s not just idle curiosity, believe me.”

  “Oh, I believe you,” she said. “But you sound as if you could use some proof yourself.”

  “It hasn’t been my brightest week.”

  “It hasn’t been much of a week for any of us,” she said drily.

  I leaned back in the chair and stared at the photographs hanging on the wall across from me. “Do you have any idea what Professor Lovingwell wanted to talk over with your boss on Tuesday morning?” I asked her.

  “Lord, no,” she said. “It could have been anything.”

  I thought of what Sarah had told me and said, “Could it have been about the chairman’s wife?”

  Beth Hemann blushed bright red. “What in the world do you mean?”

  “When people bring the world into it,” I said, “they usually know what is meant.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said stiffly. “If anything, Professor Lovingwell probably wanted to talk about his own family. He’d been having problems with his daughter, you know.”

  Who didn’t? I said to myself. Who hadn’t he told about Sarah? The pattern was unsettling me. First Bidwell at Sloane. Then O’Hara. And Miss Hemann. And you, too, Harry, I told myself. You, too. In a certain light all our conversations about his daughter could be viewed as admonitory and solicitous. Her impetuousness, her drugs, her communism, her hatred of his work. They all contributed to a picture of a rather desperate and misguided girl. One who could easily steal a document or be made to look as if she had. He hadn’t really lied to me—not in any obvious details. But when I thought it over, I realized how much of my original reaction to Sarah had been shaped by comparison to the portrait Lovingwell had drawn. Only I also realized that a lot of my suspicion had been inspired by the portrait Sarah had drawn of him.

  Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if you could know in advance just who was grinding which ax. And why.

  I got up from the chair and walked over to the wall hung with photographs. His face was everywhere—finger by his nose and devilish little beard jutting out like a dagger. I studied one of the pictures. It had been taken at a Christmas party. Lovingwell was sitting at the head of the table. The festive party hat on his head made him look like a mischievous elf. There was a blonde woman at his side, also wearing a party-hat and gazing at him with mild amusement. She was a striking-looking woman with a high-cheeked, triangular face, puffed past its prime but still recognizably a smart, stylish face.

  “Who’s this?” I said to Miss Hemann.

  She held a pair of half-frame glasses to her nose and peered at the picture. “That’s Mrs. O’Hara.”

  “What kind of woman is she?” I asked her.

  “Awful,” Beth Hemann said and clapped a hand to her mouth.

  I laughed.

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” she said with another blush. “I have no right to say that.”

  “Oh, hell, Miss Hemann,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone.”

  She pulled sharply at her plain white blouse. “Professor O’Hara won’t be back for the rest of the day. So you see there’s nothing more I can do for you.”

  “Oh, Miss Hemann,” I said, giving her a wink. “Don’t say that, darling. There’s no telling what you could do for me.”

  She smiled. “You’re full of blarney, Mr. Stoner.”

  “Where does Mrs. O’Hara live, Miss Hemann? In Clifton?”

  She nodded and gave me an address on Bishop Street. “Are you going to try to talk to Meg?” she said.

  I shrugged. “Sooner or later, someone’s going to tell me something I want to hear. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t like her,” she said plainly. “And it would please me if she were involved in Professor Lovingwell’s death.”

  You never really know about other people. What I had thought was a shallow loyalty to her boss was beginning to look something very much like love in this plain-spoken, plain-looking young woman. It gave her character and a prettiness born of anger. There was a shape under that drab white wrapper and, given the access of real feeling, it began to swell attractively.

  She caught me looking at her and, this time, she winked and bit rather charmingly at her lower lip.

  “You’re a surprising girl, Miss Hemann,” I said.

  “I like to think so.”

  “Is there some reason why you think Meg O’Hara might be involved in Lovingwell’s death?”

  “No,” she said. “It just wouldn’t surprise me, that’s all. She’s not a pleasant woman.”

  “You care a great deal for Professor O’Hara, don’t you?”

  She eyed me coolly. “That hoyden has made his life a shambles. She’s ruined his marriage; she’s spoiled his son; and now she’s taken his home.”

  “They’re divorced?” I asked.

  She nodded. “They’re about to be. Now I’ve told you quite enough. And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t repeat what I’ve said.”

  “It’ll be
our little secret,” I promised her.

  The O’Hara house on Bishop Street was one of the half-dozen Frank Lloyd Wright originals scattered throughout the city. This was one of his early designs—stolidly nineteenth-centuryish, but still quite interesting. Beneath the Victorian facade—the round, pillared porch, snow-filled flowerboxes, and massive windows—you could see the twentieth-century mind at work in bold curves and surprising planes. The house made me think of Phidias or Rodin or whoever it was who had said of statuary that the design is already there in the stone. Like a half-carved block of marble, the genial, rambling home made a new language of dead proprieties.

  It couldn’t have been easy to give up a house like that. It wouldn’t have been for me. But then O’Hara’s divorce didn’t really interest me. Meg O’Hara interested me. At least I was interested in what she had to say about Daryl Lovingwell.

  She answered the door on the third knock. Blonde, full in the face and upper body. Quite handsome, nevertheless, with a thin crooked mouth like the beak of a tortoise. She was dressed out of Saks—raw silk blouse open at the neck and loose, black slacks that shook like jello when she moved her legs. She asked me what I wanted in a hoarse voice that smelled of whiskey and Sen-Sen. When I told her I was working for Sarah Lovingwell, her puffy eyes plummeted to the welcome mat, as if I’d dropped something untidy at her feet.

  “I must look a mess,” she said, fussing with her hair. “C’mon in.”

  I followed her down the front hall to a bright blue sitting room, furnished fussily in ivory orientals and nubby off-white furniture. She seated me on a couch and walked through a door into what must have been the kitchen. A few minutes later she came back out with a silver coffee server on a silver tray. She handed me a bone china demitasse and asked, “Sugar or cream?” She was Daryl Lovingwell’s kind of girl, all right.

  I told her I didn’t want sugar or cream, and she nodded with approval. “You like it black,” she said. “So do I.”

  Meg O’Hara sat down opposite me on a wingback chair and looked me over scrupulously. It was one of the few times in my life that I felt like a woman was undressing me with her eyes. “I’ve never seen a private detective before,” she said curiously. “Are they all as good-looking as you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She troubled her coffee with a tiny silver spoon and made bedroom eyes at me. “You have a classically handsome face, Mr. Stoner. A little bruised but handsome. Does it bother you that I like the way you look?”

  “No. I like the way I look, too.”

  “Since we’re agreed,” she said, putting the saucer down on a smoked-glass coffee table, “what say we find out if beauty is skin deep?”

  I grinned and thought of Sarah. “What say we skip along to the cigarettes and small talk?”

  “As you will,” she said casually. “Although I want you to know that I wasn’t kidding. Whiskey and fucking aren’t laughing matters in this household.”

  “I wasn’t kidding, either. Let’s talk first.”

  “About what?” she said.

  “About you and Daryl Lovingwell.”

  She sat back in her chair with the look of a professor who’s just been disappointed by one of his favorite students. “Get out of here,” she said.

  “That was a quick romance, Mrs. O’Hara,” I said. “Do you mind telling me why you want me to go?”

  “Yes. I mind.

  “Why don’t I tell you, then?” I said, moving forward on the couch so I could get a better look at her eyes. It wasn’t going to hurt to stir the waters a bit. With a woman of her temper, there was no telling what might pop up. “You were having an affair with Daryl Lovingwell. And he wanted to break it off. He’d grown tired of you. But you didn’t want him to leave, did you? The shooting on Tuesday could have been an accident. I’d believe it.”

  I’d watched her face closely as I’d run through my spiel. She’d showed interest when I’d spoken of the affair, shifting her eyes slightly to the right as right-handed people will do when they’re asked a question or are answering one. She was asking herself how much I really knew. But when I got to the accusation of murder, her eyes settled comfortably on mine and her thin, twisted mouth relaxed in a loose, predatory smile. I hadn’t struck home. I hadn’t even come close. And she knew I was bluffing.

  “That’s a very interesting story,” she said, wetting her lips. “Now let me tell you one of my own. Michael put you up to this. Michael or that twig of a woman he calls a lover. There’s nothing he’d like better than to make people think I was a criminal. Suspected murderers don’t generally fare well in community property hearings, do they? Well, you go back to Michael, old stick, and tell him your bluff didn’t work. He should have known better than to think I could be scared by a faggot detective.”

  “Trying to blacken your husband’s character isn’t going to help your case before a judge, Mrs. O’Hara. Your affair with Lovingwell is well-documented.”

  “I don’t know where you’ve been getting your information, beauty. But my affair with Daryl Lovingwell ended six years ago. And I’ll tell you something else. The only reason someone would have killed that man was money. That was all he was interested in, that was all he ever thought about. You go find somebody Daryl was scheming with, you go dig up some dirty plot that involved thousands of dollars and some underhanded deal—you’ll find your killer, all right. Now, get the hell back to Michael and tell him he’ll have to do better than this. Who the hell are you, anyway?”

  “A faggot detective,” I said, “working for Sarah Lovingwell.”

  For a second time, Sarah’s name gave her pause. “I have nothing against the girl,” she said quickly. “Her mother and I were close friends once.”

  Allowing me to see anything more than the bitchy, temperamental side of her character had a curious effect on Meg O’Hara. Her face turned bright red beneath the powder and she pounded herself on the legs with clenched fists. It wasn’t embarrassment; it was fury. She was enraged at herself for dropping her guard, like a fighter who slaps his own head when he misses a punch. She must have had a lot of enemies in her lifetime, I thought.

  She caught me feeling sorry for her and jumped to her feet. “Get the hell out of here!” she shouted. “Get the hell out of my house!”

  “It’s not yours yet, honey,” I said.

  “Get out!” she shrieked.

  I walked down the hall and back out into the cold December afternoon. I hadn’t really learned much—all Meg O’Hara had done was confirm what Sarah had told me about her father’s greed. But it was a confirmation. And when I added that greed to the missing document and the way he’d been talking about Sarah and the murder itself, it made the espionage idea seem more and more like a good idea.

  16

  BEFORE RETURNING to the Delores, I drove south on Vine to the Clifton Plaza—a flat, ugly line of shops fronted by a huge parking lot—and pulled in beside Bullet’s hi-fi store. Through the picture window I could see Bullet jawing at the register with a customer. Behind them, in the showroom itself, Larry Soldi was wiring a speaker into the console. I waited until Lurman had parked in the rear of the lot before getting out of the Pinto.

  “Harry!” Bullet said cheerfully as I walked through the door. “Where you been? I’ve been looking for you in the Bee all week.”

  “I’ve got some trouble, Bullet. I need to talk to Larry.”

  “What am I?” he said. “Chopped liver?”

  “This just isn’t something you can help me with.”

  “Larry!” Bullet barked.

  Soldi ambled out from the rear of the store—a gaunt, chicken-necked, thirty-year-old white man with a lumpy, cheerful face and the hang-dog posture of the hired man. That was Larry’s fate—to play second fiddle throughout his life to the more enterprising soloists like Bullet. He could have had it a lot worse. Bullet was better than a decent employer. But in spite of the fact that he had a good job and seemed happy in his work, Soldi always struck me as a sad case
. One of those proverbial types for whom the Army had been the only moment in life that wasn’t tainted by the past. I knew Larry enjoyed talking about the war, his voice mellowed when he spoke of it, and the words spilled out energetically, instead of lumbering, as they usually did, out of his throat. But casting him strictly in the role of loser was just an unflattering bit of condescension on my part. It wasn’t Larry I felt sorry for in that mood, but the supine and childish part of myself that hated work and, maybe, the very idea of work itself.

  I saluted him as he walked up to the register, and he said, “Hey, Harry!”

  “Hey, yourself.”

  “What can I do for you?” he said, tucking his thumbs into his pants’ pockets.

  “You ever heard of an ex-Marine named Lester Grimes?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, the guy’s a psychopath. A real shoot-’em-up, gun-totin’ maniac. And I want to know how to defend myself against him.”

  “You can call the cops,” Bullet said, reaching for the phone.

  “No. I already have police protection. What I need is a profile—a description of the way a gung-ho ex-Marine might go about killing a civilian like me.”

  “What kind of training did he have?” Soldi said and, already, his voice had taken on assurance.

  “He was a weapons specialist.”

  “That’s bad. He’ll know how to use automatics and, if he served in ‘Nam, he’ll know about booby-trapping, too.”

  “This guy fancies himself a cowboy,” I said.

  Soldi laughed. “We didn’t see a lot of cowboys in my outfit. Unless you can call the recon people cowboys.”

  “LURPs?” I said.

  He nodded. “I only knew one. A guy named Frisco. He’d been in ‘Nam since sixty-six. He wore his hair long, like a hippie’s. Had a gold earring in his ear. A leather headband. A peace emblem on his fatigue jacket. He’d popped so much dex his teeth had turned black. And I mean nobody told Frisco to shape up. Nobody even came close enough to try. The dude always carried two .45s on him, even in camp.” Soldi shook his head. “Recon guys were freaky, Harry. You must have seen a few of them, so you know. Every night for months they’d dress up in tiger suits, paint their faces, walk off the LZ and—whoosh!—they’d be gone into the jungle. They’d be out there in the bush all alone until morning. Doing recon on VC base camps. And killing. Scary, man. Real scary. A lot of our own troops used to look away when Frisco’d walk by, because it was like looking at a living dead man, you know. Grunts made jokes about it. Making the sign of the cross after Frisco’d pass by and shit like that. But you can bet your ass they never pulled that crap when he was looking. ‘Cause he’d have killed them on the spot and nobody higher up would have said a thing. I hate to say it, but if the dude you’re talking about is anything like Frisco, you’re in big trouble.”