Dead Letter

by Jonathan Valin

  “Just leave it alone, Harry,” he said.

  20

  I SAT in the Pinto with Bullet for another five minutes, trying to calm down. I was embarrassed with myself for having been afraid in the pool hall. Embarrassed and a little ashamed, because I knew if they hadn’t been black kids I wouldn’t have felt so outmanned. I wanted to apologize to somebody; but Bullet didn’t look as if he was in a receptive mood. His heart, or a large part of it, was with those tough kids in the pool hall and, as he got out of the car, he said to me: “Harry, as big as you are, you’d never make it as a nigger. Not for one lonely day.”

  ******

  Lurman wasn’t back yet when I got to the apartment.

  I made myself some lunch, then called the hospital again and got the same report delivered in the same impatient voice, like a prerecorded message. “She’s improved, sir. But she’s still on the critical list.”

  “Has she recovered consciousness, yet?”

  The nurse put her hand over the phone. “No,” she said when she came back on the line. “She’s still in a coma.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s not unusual,” she said in a kinder voice. “Not in cases like this.”

  I thanked her and hung up.

  It was odd. The night before, when it had all come apart so terribly, I’d wanted to hear the truth without any humanity, as nakedly and as fatally as it could be put. That Sunday morning, when it was all coming back together, I wanted to be coddled like a sick man, to be pranked and lied to and made to feel better. I’d begun to think of her as alive again, that was the difference. Where the night before I could only think of her as dead.

  At half-past three, Lurman came in. He plopped down across from me at the coffee table and took a bite of my sandwich.

  “You talk to Bidwell?” I said.

  He shook his head. “But I did talk to Bidwell’s aide, Terry Mize.”

  “And?”

  “And Lovingwell wasn’t under suspicion of anything. Neither was Sarah or anyone else at Sloane.”

  I sat back on the chair as if I’d been punched. “No one was suspected?”

  “Nope.” Lurman ate the rest of my sandwich. “I’ll tell you another thing. Lovingwell never checked any top-secret document out of the lab either.”

  “What!”

  At first I didn’t think I’d heard him right. But when I asked him again and he repeated it again, I began to suffer a sickening and familiar sense of dislocation.

  “He didn’t even have a security clearance,” Lurman said. “He wasn’t working with classified material, so he didn’t need one.”

  “There wasn’t any document,” I said blankly. Not even hearing myself. Just mouthing the words.

  “No document.”

  “Then why the hell did he hire me!” I almost shouted. “What the hell is going on here?”

  Lurman laughed nervously. “Take it easy, Harry.”

  “My ass.”

  I got up from the table and stalked into the bedroom and plunked myself down on the bed.

  Of course, it made sense. Bidwell wouldn’t have been concerned about a document that didn’t exist. Nobody would be.

  I laughed wretchedly. Only that wasn’t true. Lovingwell had been concerned. He’d hired me to recover the goddamn thing! There was no way around that little contradiction except to ignore it. Well, there was. But it took me about ten minutes to find the path.

  I began by trying to remember everything that Lovingwell and I had said to each other about the document, from the moment he’d showed up at my office until the day he’d died. The thing was he’d never really told me what the document was about. All he’d done was describe a bunch of papers that looked like top-secret material. Material I was honor-bound not to examine or tell anyone else about.

  Lying about the contents of some lost papers seemed like child’s play to the man Sarah had described. But if he’d been lying about the document, where did that leave me? Had he really lost something that merely looked like secret papers, something he didn’t want anyone to know about, not even the detective he’d hired to recover it? Or had the whole thing been a lie? And if so, why had he lied? What had he stood to gain by implicating his daughter in the theft of nonexistent secret papers?

  It wouldn’t come clear, like looking at something in front of your nose through a fixed-focus lens. I wasn’t standing far enough back. I wasn’t seeing all there was to be seen of the Lovingwell case. At that moment I wondered if I ever would.

  “You’re taking this kind of hard, aren’t you?” Lurman called from the living room.

  I got up from the bed and walked back to the sofa. “I don’t like being used,” I said. “Especially when I don’t know what I’m being used for.”

  Lurman shrugged. “These things happen. You get off on a wrong scent and it’s hard to get right again. After the spy business petered out, I did some checking up on Lovingwell at the University. Most of the people I talked to seemed to think he was a harmless eccentric. Do you know who Charles McPhail is?”

  “I’ve heard the name,” I said. “Why?”

  “No reason. One of the assistant deans I talked to mentioned him, that’s all. He was apparently the only black spot on Lovingwell’s official record. Some kid he’d given a hard time to about seven years ago.”

  “It’s funny they’d remember his name.”

  “Not so funny,” Lurman said. “The kid went loco and ended up killing himself in Daniels Hall.”

  “Did they say why?”

  Lurman shook his head.

  ******

  Daniels Hall is a large, red-brick dormitory on Jefferson about half a block from campus. Charles McPhail had roomed there for two years, according to the woman in charge of the dorm, before cutting his wrists in his third floor room on the 17th of January 1973. The resident adviser remembered his case well.

  “He was a very quiet boy,” she said. “Introspective the way many of our students are. And quite meticulous, the way many of them should be. He was, I should say, a model student. Extremely hard-working and absolutely absorbed in his studies.”

  “Which were?”

  “He was in astrophysics, I believe.” She checked the card she’d drawn from an old metal file. “Yes. He was a third-year graduate student in the Physics Department at the time of his death.”

  “Do you have a picture of him?” I said.

  She handed me the card. A tiny snapshot was glued to the corner. Charles McPhail had been a rather ascetic-looking young man. Pretty rather than handsome. With a faraway look in his eyes.

  “Do you have any idea why he killed himself?” I asked her.

  “People always have ideas, Mr. Stoner,” she said. “Suicides are like vacuums. Human nature abhors them and rushes in to explain what it can’t abide. He didn’t want to live—that’s probably the only explanation.”

  I had the feeling that the woman, whose name was Castle, was only too familiar with the tidal-like despairs of unhappy undergraduates.

  “Did he leave a note?”

  She nodded. “He said he was sorry.”

  I looked out the window at the leafless trees along Jefferson. “Was there an investigation?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The coroner held an inquest. The verdict was suicide. There was no mystery about it.”

  “Did his death have anything to do with Professor Daryl Lovingwell?”

  “Tangentially,” she said. “I didn’t know Professor Lovingwell, but he had a reputation for being very hard-nosed with his students. There was apparently some dispute between him, Professor O’Hara, and the McPhail boy. And Professor Lovingwell took a hard line.”

  “Do you know the nature of the dispute?”

  “I do not,” she said. “You might ask Felicia Earle in the Department of English. I believe she was the Physics Department secretary at the time of Charles’s death. I think she and her husband were friends of the boy.”

  I thanked her and walked out of her
little office to the dormitory lobby where Lurman was waiting. “Did you find anything?”

  “I don’t know,” I said to him. “I found a dead boy who committed suicide about the same time as Sarah’s mother. I don’t know if that qualifies as ‘anything’ or not. I’ll find out more on Monday when I talk to a girl named Felicia Earle.”

  “We better get back to your place,” he said, staring at the street. The sun was going down and there were heavy clouds moving in from the northwest.

  I said what he was thinking. “Do you think he’ll try tonight?”

  Lurman looked at me and said, “Who knows?”

  ******

  It was a very tense evening. Up until twelve I kept hoping that Chico Robinson would call. When he didn’t, I settled in for the siege. Lurman sent out for some Chinese food, and he and I sat on the living room floor eating it and jumping at every footstep from the hall.

  “There are men outside the apartment,” he said.

  “There were last night, too.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  We finished the chow mein and left the plates on the floor. The FBI had tossed the apartment the evening before to make sure that Grimes hadn’t left me any party favors; so the plates didn’t make a difference. I stared at the room and thought of Sarah and then of Kate.

  “You ever been married, Lurman?” I said.

  “Can’t see it.” He’d made a space for himself on the couch and was leafing through an old hi-fi magazine. “Jesus Christ, this equipment is expensive.”

  “I almost got married a couple of times,” I said, brooding over the shambles my apartment and my life had become in the past few days.

  “Yeah?” He tossed the magazine on the floor. “What’s it feel like?”

  “You’re not terribly interested in this, are you?”

  He threw up his hands like a boxer parrying a combination. “Hey, it’s your place! You want to talk about marriage, go right ahead.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I almost got married once myself. Right before I went off to college.”

  “Where was that?” I said.

  “Georgetown. I’m from D.C. She was my high school sweetheart. That was true love,” Lurman said wistfully. “Once you know what you’re doing, once you know what it costs, it gets old.”

  “What happened?”

  “She ditched me,’’ he said. “What happened with you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said woefully.

  “Women,” Lurman said.

  There was a very loud noise in the hall. Lurman leapt to his feet. The pistol was in his hand before I’d gotten out of my chair.

  “Stay away from the door,” he said in a low, nervous voice.

  I backed against the wall and waited.

  Somebody knocked on the front door.

  “Ted?” a voice called from the hall. “It’s Jesperson.”

  Lurman let out a sigh of relief and I unclenched my fists. They felt as if I’d been doing exercises with rubber balls. I walked over to the door and opened it.

  Jesperson, short, squat, with thin black hair that looked like it was pencilled on his skull, was standing outside. “There’s a guy in the lobby says he wants to talk with Stoner.”

  “What’s he look like?” I asked him.

  “A big black dude. Must weigh three hundred pounds.”

  “That’ll be Bullet Riley,” I said to Lurman. “The man who helped me out this afternoon.”

  Lurman pocketed his pistol as if it were a briar pipe and said, “Show the man up, Russ.”

  A few minutes later, Bullet walked into the room. He looked ruffled and angry. As he cleared the door he glanced back over his shoulder, as if he weren’t quite sure that the smaller man wasn’t standing in his shadow.

  “Man,” he said. “I can’t say I think much of your friends.”

  “Not nice guys like yours?” I said.

  “It ain’t funny, Harry. One of those crackers ‘bout blew my head off down there.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Riley,” Lurman said. “We’re all a little edgy after last night.”

  “That’s Agent Lurman, Bullet,” I said, nodding at Ted. “My protection.”

  “Charmed,” Bullet said.

  We settled down again in the living room; and, after a bit of idle talk about stereos and booze, Bullet cleared his throat and made motions that meant he had something important to say to me. In private.

  “Is this pantomine about Chico Robinson?” I said.

  He gave me a sour look and nodded.

  “Might as well come out with it, then,” I said to him. “Lurman’s going to hear it, anyway.”

  “All right. He ain’t found Grimes yet. But he’s got him a lead. Some junkie in east Walnut Hills who used to be O’Hara’s pal in the days of love and peace. Chico thinks he might be able to pin your man down for you by tomorrow night.”

  “Swell,” I said. “Will you be relaying the word?”

  “He’ll call here. After six tomorrow. Whether he’s found Grimes or not.”

  “I’ll be in,” I said to him.

  21

  FIRST THING in the morning I had Lurman drive me up to the University so that I could ask some more questions about Charles McPhail. I wasn’t quite sure why I wanted to ask the questions. But with the spy business a dead letter, I needed another angle, and Charley McPhail’s death seemed like the most promising possibility. Suicides like Claire Lovingwell’s and the McPhail boy’s leave very bad memories. Sometimes they leave survivors like Sarah, too. Survivors who live in hate.

  I stopped at Christ before going on to campus, to check on the girl. They wouldn’t let me see her, save from behind that window on the sixth floor. And that was one view I never intended to see again. So I told the duty nurse I’d try to get back later in the day and, with Lurman in tow, drove up McMillan to Clifton Avenue and the University complex. I parked on campus, dropped Lurman off at the Student Union, and told him I’d pick him up in an hour. It was a bright blue morning and the sun was shining ferociously on the snowy walks. By the time I got to McMicken Hall, I was squinting from the glare.

  Up the wide staircase, on the second floor, was the English Department office. Just a cubbyhole, racked with mailboxes and partitioned off by a short wooden counter. Behind the counter sat Felicia Earle, a short, olive-skinned woman of about thirty, with the bland, abstracted face and long, coal-black hair of a postcard madonna.

  Once we’d settled in a rather stuffy coffee room across the hall from her office, she began to tell me the story of her life in a voice as smoky as a slice of provolone. She’d not had a good time of it for the past few years, and it showed in her dress. A sweater out at the elbow, a blue blouse stained red on the breast, torn stockings, drab un-ironed skirt. In my experience people who don’t care how they look are either very idealistic or very angry. As it turned out, Fell Earle was a little of both.

  “I want to explain why I’m willing to gossip with you about Charley McPhail,” she said, staring down at the dark wood table we were sitting at. “You probably think it’s because I liked Charley. But that’s not all of it. Look around you, Mr. Stoner. And tell me what you see.”

  I surveyed the room. It was an ornate, rather tired place, lined with dusty portraits of chairmen and alumni and the kind of sprung furniture you sometimes see in the lobbies of second-rate hotels. It looked rather like a smoking room in a men’s club that had seen better days. I told her that and she frowned at the tabletop.

  “I see an enormous case of arrested development,” she said. “A sanctuary where a lot of frightened people hide from all those terrifying things that come with grown-up life. Things like regular hours, supervised work, a two-week vacation that goes like your twenties, the kind of noisy decisions that drown out the whisper of nouns and the rubbing together of two adjectives. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “In a way I do. But what makes you think this place is any different from the rest of the world
?”

  “Oh, but it isn’t!” she said. “That’s what’s so sad. Here we are, putatively surrounded by the best and brightest minds in the city. And as minds go, they’re mostly what they pretend to be. It’s how they act when their thinking caps are off that offends me so deeply. I’ve been around this university for ten years, financing my own and my husband’s education; so I know whereof I speak. And please believe me, what I’m going to say about Daryl Lovingwell could be said with equal justice about any of the lamed men who populate this institution. They don’t make very good human beings, scholars. They don’t have it in them to care for anything but themselves and their work. What I’m trying to say is that Lovingwell was no worse a bastard than any of his colleagues, just a more conspicuous one. And if you start thinking of what he did to Charley as a special case, you’d be dead wrong.”

  “When did you work for him?”

  “Seven years ago, when he was chairman of the Physics Department. I believe it was seven years ago. At this point it’s rather hard to keep all of my time straight. Have you ever done secretarial work, Mr. Stoner?” She looked at me for the first time since we’d sat down in the coffee room. “You see you don’t look up when you type. Just down and to your right.” She laughed bitterly. “Like directions to a john. Down and to your right. I guess that sounds self-pitying, but I do have a point to make. You hear a lot of crap when you work in a departmental office. And most of it you hear while hunched over a typewriter with one ear to the dictaphone. Then there’s a lot of posturing and preening, a lot of the stiff upper lip thing in the office that makes much of the conversation sound like what you might hear at a lady’s tea. They don’t really go after each other with razors until they’re liquored up or locked in a meeting or in each other’s studies. The point is that what I’m going to say can’t be documented. That’s the reason for this preamble. I can’t prove a thing. I can only tell you what I believe on the basis of ten year’s experience.”

  Fell Earle was a conscientious girl. I liked that. Ready talkers rarely make good sense. I prefer the ones who have thought things out. In a way, I prefer the ones with grudges, too. Anger makes a nice focal point, that is, if it’s been studied on like a textbook and if it’s accessible like Fell Earle’s was. I told her that I appreciated her candor and asked her what she’d thought of Daryl Lovingwell.