by Gene Wolfe
“That would have been Aladdin Blue.”
“That’s the name. Listen, Miss Hollander, you wouldn’t know where he picked up a paper rose, would you?”
I said I didn’t have any idea, but that you could buy them in novelty shops.
“Sure. Listen, your uncle was, ah …”
“Emotionally shaken or something. I think that’s what they say.” I gave Doc Rothschild a look.
“Right. Miss Hollander, we traced him back to the place he got loose from—”
(Sure you did. Aladdin Blue told you.)
“That was probably why he didn’t have a watch or a wallet on him, or much money. Sometimes a mugger gets sore when the victim doesn’t have a lot of money, and that might’ve been why he was shot. Just the same, we wondered about the rose.”
“It’s not against the law to have a phony rose, is it? I used to have one myself.”
There was a long pause. Then Detective Corning said, “The thing is that it was in his side jacket pocket. He was shot in the chest. The bullet stayed in him, and it stopped his heart right away, so there wasn’t a lot of bleeding. But this rose we got out of his pocket’s got bloodstains on it. Would you know anything about that, Miss Hollander?”
How Me and Blue Deduced
Maybe I ought to skip over leaving the hospital, but I’ll just hit it lightly. Except for my father, who wasn’t back from New York yet, the whole damn household came to get me. I couldn’t believe it. Bill pushed my wheelchair and lifted me into the backseat of the Caddy, Mrs. Maas fussed, and Elaine yelled and bossed. I never felt so important in my life.
What’s more, I don’t think I was ever so glad to see anyplace as I was to see my own funky little bedroom on the second floor. It was small, sure, and messy, you bet. The TV wouldn’t turn on and off or change channels unless I got out of bed and hopped over with my crutch. But that was probably good therapy for me, and there was my own phone beside my bed, and my own books and records and stuff. Heaven! It turned out Mrs. Maas had saved the paper for me—I may well be the nation’s leading Doonesbury fanatic—so I got to read all about it and find my own name on the injured list. Then, just when I’d finished that and the funnies and the lady who gives smart-ass advice, and had read all about the President and a couple of good fires, and was settling down to recipes and big-city politics, Mrs. Maas came up with the new paper, that day’s, only a little messed up with Elaine’s coffee stains. So naturally the old ones hit the floor and I dug into the BARTON BOMBING again.
And there was news! Yessir! Somebody’d sent the editors a letter claiming credit (that’s what they called it) for our own little disaster; and the editors, who I’ve got to admit usually know a good story when they see it, hadn’t just copied the words but had splashed a blow-up of the real thing over half of page five. Since the story (beginning page one, as they say) said it had come in the mail, my first idea was that it must’ve been written at least two weeks before the bomb. But no, “internal evidence” showed “clearly” that it had been done after the fact. I’d have liked to see the handwriting of somebody who’d set off a bomb in the middle of a crowd like that, and I’m sure the cops would’ve liked it too; but no such luck, the letter was typed. The funny thing, at least to me, was that it had been typed really well—a whole lot better than I could have done it myself. Naturally it was hard to be certain from a grainy newspaper photo, but I looked at every line as close as I could, and I couldn’t find a single mistake.
Here’s what it said:
To Whom It May Concern:
Our first attack at Barton was a complete success. Now bravely and cheerfully we will go on until the system that permits injustice is brought to it’s knees. We are not by any means out of high explosives, and what we have already accomplished has brought in several new members. What we have done is no crime at all to those who have suffered as we have. We will no longer be slaves, instead we will be free.
Army of Independence
Aha, a clue!
Pretty often I get the feeling from talking to other people that when they read mysteries they pick the detectives they like best by peculiarities. Nero Wolfe’s fat, three points; Sherlock Holmes shoots dope, that’s seven. I don’t. What I try to do is look at the way they find things out and solve their cases, and ask myself: Does that make sense? Would it really work outside a book?
And it seems to me that the best system I’ve ever read is just to look at the clues and think, now who would do that? If the murderer left his handkerchief behind, what kind of person would have that kind of handkerchief? Most men wouldn’t have a colored one, for instance, but there’s certain kinds that would. Some women’s handkerchiefs are just about as useful as a man’s, but a lot are only good for decorating your fingers when you’re pretending to cry. A polka-dot bandanna with some nice, light perfume on it? It’s not a gay cowboy, the killer is your own daring and talented author, Holly Hollander. Or somebody a lot like her.
So now I looked at the picture of that letter and tried to conjure up the person who wrote it. I would have liked to see the stationery, the watermark, and whether it was rag stock, but naturally I couldn’t. From the picture, it was plain white and eight and a half by eleven. Not hotel stationery, or anybody’s letterhead cut down, or drugstore paper with daisies and like that. School paper, like you buy to type your English themes, or office paper. The characters were so even it had to be an electric typewriter. The margins were wide, but the lines were single-spaced. I didn’t know about other schools, but at Barton High they wanted you to doublespace; it made it easier for the teachers to read and gave them room for spelling corrections and that kind of stuff.
Speaking of spelling, there was a goof in the letter: it’s instead of its. A dumb, careless kind of mistake from somebody who could spell independence and explosives and injustice. An electric typewriter with a dictionary or maybe a word book lying alongside it. Whoever had written that letter had looked up the hard words, but he wasn’t really a good speller or a grammatical writer. “We will no longer be slaves” was only weakened when he tacked “instead we will be free” onto the end.
“To whom it may concern” was kind of a boiler-plate phrase. Why didn’t he just address it to the paper? He was planning to send it to the paper, after all; and he must have addressed an envelope and licked a stamp, and so forth. It made me think of a letter of recommendation: To Whom It May Concern. Ms. Holly Hollander is a girl of excellent character who has never spent above two nights in jail … .
Maybe whoever wrote it worked in an employment office, or maybe he was used to writing what Mrs. Maas called “characters” for himself. “Bravely and cheerfully” my foot!
Then it hit me—for himself. Right! All of a sudden I was perfectly sure there was only one of him, and all his talk about “we” and the “Army of Independence” was so much smoke. I still couldn’t see his hands on the keyboard, much less his face—just the jumping typeball and the little book of forty thousand words spelled and divided. But he was all alone there, I knew that. No revolutionary committee had read his letter over. Nobody had suggested changes or simplifications or corrections. There was just him there in his little room, typing and underlining.
He underlined a lot—three words in just a few lines. It’s supposed to be for emphasis, but I’ve noticed that people do it when they want to be ironic—I just love the way she treats me—or what’s practically the same thing, when they want to convince somebody of something that isn’t really true—I just love your new skirt! Okay, I’d already decided that the bit about several new members sounded fakey. (How would they know what to join, anyway?) So it seemed pretty likely that his other underlinings marked places where he wanted to put us on, too. The “attack” hadn’t been a complete success then, something had gone wrong. And he didn’t really plan to do anything else. (Right here I’m underlining for emphasis!)
That second part was good news for sure, but what had gone wrong? If he hadn’t killed enough people
, and hurt enough, it would stand to reason he’d want to try again. But I’d already decided he wasn’t going to do that. So maybe what it was, was that he’d done more damage than he’d figured on; maybe he’d just wanted to scare everybody or something.
All that was okay, only when I got that far I was stuck. I looked and looked at that damn letter, and couldn’t come up with another thing. After a while, though, it hit me that a lot of other people had to be looking at it just like I was—detectives and policemen all over, mystery fans like me, even some mystery writers; and that one of those people would be Blue. So I dug his card out of my billfold and gave him a call.
“Did you see it?” I said. “I mean the bomb letter. It’s in today’s paper.”
“Yes, I’ve been studying it.”
Then I gave him all my deductions just the way I’ve written them down here, only maybe not so well organized. (You may have noticed that I’m usually better organized when I write than when I talk; when I talk I try to say it all at once.)
“I agree,” Blue said when I was finished.
“With all of it?”
“Yes. That is to say, I agree that all you’ve guessed is possible, though none of it is provable. We don’t really know, for example, that whoever wrote the letter was an expert typist. It’s conceivable that the writer carefully struck one key at a time, beginning again and again until at last a perfect copy was achieved. But it’s not likely. The most probable answer is the one you’ve given, and we should cling to it until there’s reason to doubt it.
“The business about ‘To Whom It May Concern’ seems quite a bit more chancy, although what you say is as convincing as any other possibility and more helpful than most; you must remember, however, that we don’t know the letter was mailed by the person who composed it. That’s conjecture, too, though again it’s sound conjecture. In addition, we don’t know that the copy mailed to the newspaper was the only copy sent out. Suppose that carbons were made, to be mailed to the police? Or suppose that the copy the newspaper received is a photostat? They don’t say that it is, and the article seems to imply that it is the original; but the article may be deceptive.”
Call me Practical Pig. “Isn’t there some way we can find out?”
“I have a friend at the paper—”
“I figured you would.”
“Who’s promised to call me back to clear up several points, including that one. When he does, I’d like to speak with you. I’ve turned up certain facts that I think may interest you. Is your father home yet?”
“’Fraid not. Maybe tomorrow.” I was hoping he would be, but the truth was I didn’t have the least idea. “Just the same, I’d like to see you.”
“You will,” he said, and hung up. I had put down the phone before it hit me that I’d told him all the stuff I’d figured out but he hadn’t told me any of his—just showed me how some things I’d said could be wrong, even if I was sure they weren’t. He hadn’t said when he might be along, either. Naturally he didn’t know, because he was waiting for his newspaper friend to call, but that didn’t make me any less mad. I sat up in bed turning the pages of that damned old paper till I’d convinced myself he wouldn’t come at all, and then I nearly cried.
Mrs. Maas brought up a tray with cocoa (I’m a cocoa addict) and a chop, and spinach and lyonnaise potatoes, and my absolute top favorite of all desserts, which is strawberry shortcake with a buttered beaten biscuit for the shortcake.
Then I did cry, and Mrs. Maas kissed my forehead like Glinda the Good and said, “There, there”; but she thought it was just my leg and so on. But all of a sudden I knew it was because I had remembered one time when Larry had picked up Megan and Les and me in his van and taken us to a greasy spoon on Highway 14. They’d had Cokes or Mr. Pibb or something, but Larry and I’d had cocoa, which he’d called “hot chocolate.”
Now Larry was dead, truly dead, rotting in a funeral parlor in a coffin with the top nailed down, and I would never be able to drink cocoa again without thinking of him a little bit, and I had never really cried for him before.
It felt good; it felt like there had been this round, hard, bitter thing down below my heart all this time, and the tears that really soaked into my sheet went down there somehow and melted it.
Pretty soon I heard a beater (that’s an old junker that rattles and rumbles) out front, and I knew that it would be Aladdin Blue. By the time he’d made it up the stairs I was scarfing my chop just as nice as you please.
He said, “How’s the invalid?” and I said, “What did you find out from your pal on the paper?”
“It was the typed original they got, not a xerographic copy or a carbon—that was the point you were interested in.”
“Do you think it was really terrorists? I guess that’s a dumb question, since every murderer’s a terrorist, more or less. Every murder scares us, anyway.”
“No,” Blue answered. “No, I don’t think this murderer is a terrorist, much less one of a secret band of terrorists—though I might be wrong. And, no, not every murderer is a terrorist. Most are not. A terrorist has as his chief aim the excitation of fear, usually for political or quasi-political reasons. If a bank robber shoots one teller to intimidate the rest, you could call him a terrorist, I suppose. But it’s only in one case out of a hundred that a bank robber does that; the other ninety-nine who shoot tellers do it because they themselves are frightened, with or without reason. They are terrorized, and not terrorists, even though their fears are the result of their own acts. Most murderers don’t even want to excite our fears—they would be far happier if they could get their victims out of the way without our noticing, which is why they often go to considerable lengths to conceal them, or to make us believe they died by accident or disease.”
“Whoever killed Larry Lief certainly didn’t do that.”
There was only one chair in my bedroom besides the vanity stool, a chintzy thing I never found very comfortable. Blue was in it now, his hands on the handle of his stick.
“On the contrary,” he said slowly, “in some sense that may have been exactly what Larry’s killer did. Terrorism is a sort of disease in our society, and we’re supposed to believe poor Larry died of it.”
“Is it the one who made those phone calls?”
Blue shook his head. “Larry may have been killed because of something that took place in Vietnam, or he may have been killed just because he happened to be in the wrong spot at the right time. But both those things can’t be true together. No, I don’t believe that the hand that directed that shell at him was the one that dialed those calls. I never have.”
“Shell?” I must have looked as wiped out as I felt.
“I should have told you sooner. The shrapnel they dug out of the casualties made it plain enough when they got a bit of it together—that’s what Sandoz was talking about when he said that he had evidence that showed there was no bomb in Pandora’s Box. Now his men have found the baseplate. Larry was killed—and you were injured—by the explosion of an artillery shell.”
How Blue Got That Way
“You’re crazy!” I said. “You are stark, staring nuts!”
“No, not at all.” Blue was smiling his littlest smile, one that’s mostly in his eyes. “You’ll find the story in tomorrow’s Tribune—my information comes from my friend there, not from the police; an enterprising reporter caught a leak at the ballistics lab, presumably.”
“Somebody shot at them—shot at us—with a cannon? That’s crazy!” As you may have noticed, I pride myself on originality. The truth was that I was still trying to take it in. Every time I got it past my ears, my head tossed it out.
“So it seems.”
“Then that would tie right in with Vietnam! Look, suppose Larry was in the artillery there, see? And he added a bunch of numbers wrong, so they aimed too low and killed somebody’s best friend. Now the other friend gets him back.”
Blue shook his head. “I don’t think so. I believe that I mentioned that they found the
baseplate. Do you know what that is?”
“What they put the gun on to fire it, I suppose.”
“You’re thinking of the baseplate of a mortar, a different thing with the same name. The baseplate of an artillery shell is a thick metal section that separates the explosive inside the shell from the gunpowder that will propel it. When the shell explodes, most of its casing shatters into the ragged and deadly scraps we call shrapnel—or when they come from an antiaircraft gun, flak. The base plate is too strong to fragment like that, however; it has to be, in order to prevent the firing of the gun from setting off the charge in the shell. If the baseplate can be found, an ordnance expert can usually determine exactly what type of shell it came from. This one was made for an artillery piece that to the best of my knowledge wasn’t used in Vietnam at all: a World War Two German eighty-eight.”
“That still doesn’t prove it had nothing to do with Vietnam,” I argued. “If there were some guys who wanted to kill Larry, they couldn’ve stolen the gun from a museum or something. Anyway, they sure couldn’t have brought their own gun back with them, and maybe they were willing to take anything they could get. Hell, they’d have to be.”
“If it’s any comfort to you, Lieutenant Sandoz appears to agree with you. He has a crew of men looking at possible sites for such a gun—it would have to have been within a mile or two of the school—and another team looking for the gun itself, in abandoned quarries and so forth.”
“And you’re not doing that.”
“Why should I?” Blue asked. “They have an army: deputies, state troopers, God knows what. If there’s a deserted spot that can be reached by road within range of that high school, they’ll find it. If the gun’s within a hundred miles of here and hasn’t already been melted down for scrap, they’ll find that.”
“Only you don’t think they will.”