by Gene Wolfe
Blue shrugged. “At this point I don’t know what to think. Please notice that I never said I believed anything so fantastic occurred; I merely said that the police seem to. Yet they have evidence. Conceivably, that shell might have been thrown from some kind of catapult or dropped from a plane, but those ideas are as bad as the gun. Worse.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, and then I told him about the old lady’s house where we’d gone in for lemonade. “Naturally she’d notice if somebody shot a cannon in her front yard,” I finished, “but she must leave home sometimes, and come to think of it, she said she might come to the Fair this year. If she did, she’d have been gone, and I’m certain she was living there alone.”
Blue waved a hand and stood up. I think that may have been the first time I ever saw him pace, which is something he only does when he’s really upset. He goes up and down dragging his bad leg behind him and hitting the floor with his stick like he wants to kill it. I hate it. I hated it then, the first time. He makes me think of a cougar in a nature film I saw once; this cougar had pulled loose the trap that had caught it and it was trying to get away, to go somewhere far off in the woods where horrible things didn’t happen, and it was dragging that damned trap with it all the time. When I close my eyes, the thump of Blue’s stick makes me think maybe there really is a trap on his crippled leg, one that neither of us can see.
“I’ll grant that,” Blue said, still talking about the old lady’s being gone. “Certainly if she wasn’t out, various tricks could have been used to get her out of the house—burglars have developed a whole bagful of them, from a telephone call warning the victim of some imaginary natural disaster to theater tickets supposedly sent by a business contact. Even if she wasn’t away, she could have been drugged, or silenced by threats. It’s the gun itself I can’t accept. If it had been a rocket launcher or a recoilless rifle, it might be possible; but a weapon that size would have to be transported in a large truck, or towed behind one. Did you notice how you spoke of ‘guys,’ even though only a few minutes ago you told me you felt sure the killer had worked alone? That was because you realized instinctively that several people would be required to arrange something like this. A gun crew. The thing’s preposterous.”
Just then the phone by my bed rang. When I hung up, Blue was back in my chintz chair, smiling. “My father’s on his way home,” I told him.
“I’m delighted to hear it.”
“That was Bill. He took Elaine someplace and dropped her off. My father just called from O’Hare. He’s going to get a bite to eat there while Bill drives over to pick him up.”
“That shouldn’t take long,” Blue said. “An hour and a half at the outside, if they don’t get stuck in traffic.”
“You’ve been wanting to meet him, haven’t you?” My hands were already smoothing out the sheet, even though I knew it was silly.
“I’d like to get a retainer from him if I can.”
“It would be useful, wouldn’t it? Like the stuff you told Sandoz so he’d let you stay in my room at the hospital.”
Blue shook his head. “I need the money. The money would be useful, if you want to put it that way. I’ve been looking at your bookcases—Fleming, Chandler, MacDonald. You’re fond of mysteries.”
“I’ve got Poe and Van Dine and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle here on the other side,” I told him. “Historical grounding. And I have a soft spot for Ellery Queen, even if he’d be older than my father if he were real.”
Blue sniffed. “You ought to find a detective your own age. But I was going to quote Chandler to you, and I still will. He wrote, ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.’”
I interrupted to say, “You’ve read him too—harder than I did.”
“I’ve had more time. Chandler was concerned with honor and not with money—that word tarnished is an indirect reference to knightly armor. This though Marlowe was born in the Depression, when even such a man, honorable, intelligent, brave, and tough, might have a difficult time earning a living; and though Raymond Chandler was concerned with honor, Philip Marlowe was concerned about money. He had to be. If you’ve read those books with any insight, you know that he’s a creature of the thirties, and the earliest forties, before the Second World War broke the back of the crash of twenty-nine forever. The real Philip Marlowe died in nineteen forty-one, not on a battlefield but in a thousand defense plants.”
“You’re not a private eye.” I believe in getting right to the point. After all, if I didn’t my supply of enemies might run out.
“I’m not a private detective because I couldn’t possibly get a license. I can call myself a criminologist and offer my services as a consultant because I have a degree in criminology. I earned that degree in prison.”
“You did time?”
Blue nodded emphatically. I think he wanted to make sure I couldn’t say later that I hadn’t known. “Five years and some odd months. I should have told you sooner: you are consorting with a felon.”
“You used to be a lawyer.”
He looked surprised. “That’s correct. How did you know?”
“Just a hunch. When we went out to Garden Meadow, you were going to see somebody who’d been a judge. Later Sandoz said you looked like a lawyer, and just then you sounded like one.”
“I was disbarred, of course.” Blue leaned back in the chintz chair and closed his eyes, his stick lying across his lap. “The career I planned …”
For about as long as it takes to open a package of gum, everything got perfectly quiet. Downstairs someplace I could hear Mrs. Maas running the sweeper.
“I never wanted to go into politics,” Blue said at last. “Or to go on the bench. But I was going to be a bigger trial lawyer than F. Lee Bailey or Clarence Darrow. Now here I am.”
“Perry Mason!”
Blue opened his eyes and looked at me. “Just what do you mean by that?”
“I mean you’re as big a sucker for mysteries as I am. You wanted to be Perry Mason.”
“I suppose so.”
“Well, what happened? Tell me about it.”
“It isn’t very complicated. A certain man—a professional criminal—wanted me to defend him. I took the case, even though I felt sure he was guilty of worse crimes if he was innocent of the one he had been charged with. I needed the money, and after all everyone is entitled to counsel, guilty or innocent.
“At the trial I did the best I could for him, but it became increasingly clear that he would be convicted. He asked me to bribe the judge—not to find him not guilty, which would’ve been impossible anyway since it was a jury trial, but to give him a light sentence.”
“Why didn’t he do it himself?”
“He was out on bail, but he was being watched by the police—more and more closely as it became apparent that the verdict would go against him. The few associates he had whom he could have trusted with something of that sort were being watched as well, some because they were his associates and some for other reasons. He insisted that I do it. He was a very forceful man, strong physically and strong of will. Someone once said that all strong men are goodnatured—or that if they are not, the people around them are, which comes to the same thing.”
“So you did it?”
Blue shook his head, a very slight shake this time; I don’t think the end of that sharp nose moved half an inch. “Not then. I told him he would have to find someone else if he wanted to go through with it, and that if he did I didn’t want to know about it. And then that if he continued to try to force me into it, I would have to resign the case.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t just go out and hire himself a crooked lawyer.”
“There are never enough of those to meet the demand,” Blue said. “Besides, most of them aren’t as crooked as people think. They are small crooks, who might hint to a juror’s wife that her husband would soon have a better job if things went well. This was serious. It involved a judge who needed money, an
d a great deal of cash in unmarked bills.
“Then too, Holly, you have to understand that most crooked lawyers aren’t very good lawyers. That’s why they’re crooked, basically—they can’t earn much of a living otherwise. I was a good lawyer, or at least I thought I was, and my client thought so too; he wanted me for his crooked lawyer. That’s one way in which lawyers are made crooked, you see. Once I had tendered that bribe, he would have me in his pocket for the rest of my life. I would have to do whatever I could to pull him out of any legal difficulty he got into, because if he thought I had not done enough and he went to prison, he would tell; then the judge and I would both have been finished.”
“But you said no.”
“Yes, I told him no. Two or three nights later—I forget just how long it was—I received a telephone call. It was a woman’s voice. The woman said she had information relating to another case of mine. She would not come to my apartment, but she offered to meet me in an all-night drugstore not far from where I lived. As I was walking toward the drugstore, a man in a raincoat came toward me. When we were close, he opened his raincoat.” Blue paused, and the little smile came back. “I remember that I wondered for an instant whether he was a flasher—whether he intended to expose himself. What he actually had beneath his raincoat wasn’t an erection but a sawed-off shotgun. He fired at my legs, and the next thing I knew I was lying facedown on the sidewalk, bleeding.”
“I dig it,” I said.
“Yes, you’ve been there yourself, haven’t you? The judge granted a continuance, of course, and my client came to visit me in the hospital. He was very friendly. He told me that he had not wanted to do what he had, but that if I refused to do as I was told he would kill me. And it suddenly came to me that the whole system of the law, which I had studied and supported, had done nothing and would do nothing to protect me from this man. As soon as I was able to hobble about, I went to see the judge.”
“And?”
“He wouldn’t take it. It was that simple. By that time he had found the racehorse thing—though I didn’t know that at the time—which was far safer and got him all the money he required. He told me to come back with the cash, and when I did there were two FBI agents in the next room videotaping everything. He was a federal judge; I should have told you that. My client went to prison, and so did I. So did the judge himself, about two years later.”
“That was the judge you went to see at Garden Meadow, then. You said he’d been in jail.”
Blue nodded. “He feels he owes me something, because he turned me in when he was acting dishonestly himself. I don’t agree, but I value his friendship.
“At any rate, all that is another story; I set out to tell you about my studies. It’s possible to do college work in most of our prisons, and I did. I knew I would need a new profession when I was released, and the only things I could really learn where I was were penology and criminology. Anything else would have been a matter of acquiring a theoretical background without practical experience. By devoting my studies to criminology, I turned my prison time to my own benefit, if you like.”
I asked him how it had felt, majoring in criminology while he was surrounded by criminals, and we talked about that till my father came.
How My Father Got Smart
It was really hell when my father came home, because I wanted to jump up and run out and kiss him, and I couldn’t. I heard the Caddy’s tires crunch the gravel, then the front door rattle, then the deep growl of his voice when he said hello to Mrs. Maas, and finally the scrape of his shoes on the stairs, and all that time I had to sit there like a dummy.
Then the door opened, and there he was. I yelled, “Daddy!” and held out my arms and he came over and gave me a squeeze, and just for a second there I caught the spicy smell of his aftershave. He looked like he always had, only maybe a little more tired and worried.
Aladdin Blue was starting to stand up to shake hands, so my father said, “No, no. Keep your seat.” But Blue got up just the same and they shook.
“Mr. Blue is a criminologist,” I said.
“I know. Mr. Blue called me at the Plaza, I believe.” My father looked at Blue. When he doesn’t want you to, you can’t ever tell whether he likes what he sees. “You aren’t associated with the police?”
“No,” Blue said. “As I told you then, I’m associated with the crime. I was at the Fair, chatting with your daughter, when the explosion occurred.”
“I know,” my father said again. “Your leg …”
“That’s an old injury.”
I said, “He was shot by gangsters,” which I still think was a diplomatic thing to say under the circumstances, although Blue gave me a look that would have set fire to a pile of bricks.
“You weren’t injured by the blast, Mr. Blue?”
“I was lucky. Your daughter was sitting by a window, and wasn’t equally lucky. I was also stupid. I ran—as near as I can come to running—out of the building without realizing she had been hurt. A shard of glass wounded her; she can tell you about it.”
“I’m sure she will, but I’m keeping you standing.” My father turned to me. “Holly, I see some crutches in the corner. Can you walk?”
“A little,” I said.
“How did you get upstairs?”
“Bill carried me.”
“If Bill could carry you up, I can carry you down. I want to continue this in my study, where Mr. Blue and I can sit down, and I can offer him a good cigar and a drink. I’d like a drink myself.”
The way it turned out, I hobbled on my crutches—aluminum jobs Elaine had rented at the hospital—as far as the top of the stairs, and my father picked me up there and carried me down and through the foyer, with Blue limping on ahead of us to open the study door.
I mentioned the study when I told about going in there to have a look at the letter from Garden Meadow, but I didn’t tell too much about it. It wasn’t a big room as rooms in our place went, although I’m sure that in lots of nice homes it would be the biggest room in the house. About fifteen by twenty, maybe. The door was at one end, and there was a bow window looking out onto some japonica and grass and other stuff (I don’t know what you’re supposed to call it) at the other. On the right wall was a big fieldstone fireplace with white birch logs stacked beside it. Sometimes my father had a fire there in the winter. The walls were paneled with some kind of nearly black wood—it was American walnut, I think—that I liked. There was no light in the ceiling, so it seemed kind of dark and cozy in there even with the desk light and both floor lamps on. Besides the desk, there were bookcases, a big library table, a coffee table, a wet bar, a little brown leather sofa (which was where my father set me down) and brown leather easy chairs.
“Drink?” my father asked Blue.
Blue nodded and said, “Whatever you’re having,” which meant he got Chivas and soda. I got a gin rickey minus the gin, which was what I always got when my father mixed drinks. I didn’t get offered a cigar (I would have taken it) and Blue waved his away. I wondered if he knew it was a Ruiz y Blanco, made by people who skipped out of Cuba when Castro took over.
“You don’t object to my smoking, I hope?”
Blue shook his head, and my father lit up. I thought about Lieutenant Sandoz then, because both of them turned their cigars to get the fire even.
“When I spoke to you by telephone, I told you everything I knew about the case at the time,” Blue said, “but there’ve been several interesting developments since.”
“The bombing, you mean.”
Blue nodded.
“I’m not concerned with the bombing, Mr. Blue. I tried to make that clear earlier.”
Blue glanced at me. “Your daughter was one of the victims, Mr. Hollander.” It was the first time he’d called my father anything. I got the feeling he’d come to some kind of decision when he said that.
“I know it, and unless you have children of your own you’ll never understand how much I regret that. But Holly was hurt as anyone else might h
ave been hurt; in fact, as a good many others actually were. If these radicals had put a bomb on an airplane instead, and I had been killed with two hundred other passengers, I wouldn’t expect my family or my friends to discover just which lunatic had built the bomb or who had checked the fatal suitcase on board. That’s badly put, but perhaps you see what I mean.”
Blue nodded again. “I believe I do.”
“The crime I’m concerned about, the crime that has brought me back at an exceedingly inconvenient time, is the murder of my brother Bert.”
“I ought to have expressed my sympathy sooner,” Blue said. “In any event, I extend it now. I can’t resist adding, however, that your brother’s murder is one of the developments to which I referred.”
My father’s eyebrows went up. I bet he looks that way when somebody asks for a raise. “You believe the two are connected, Mr. Blue?”
“They appear to be, yes.”
I must have made some sort of a noise, sucked air, maybe, because they both looked at me and I felt dumb. Then my father said, “I admit that I probably don’t know as much about this as you do. Not only because I lack your training, but because you have been on the spot and I haven’t. In my business, I’ve found it’s the man on the spot whose opinions can be relied upon. But from what I do know, those events seem completely unrelated. My daughter was injured by some fanatic’s bomb, while Bert was—”
He broke off and wiped his forehead. “Good Lord! I don’t even know how he died. Joan called from the office and told me he’d been murdered in some parking lot. What happened? Was he shot? Stabbed?”
I put in, “On TV they said he’d been shot with a thirty-eight.”
My father looked relieved, as if knowing how his brother had died made it easier somehow. Maybe it did.
Blue added, “He was shot only once, in the chest, and died almost instantly. He can hardly have known what was happening. Someone—presumably his murderer—dragged his body about fifteen feet to conceal it in shrubbery.”
“A mugger?”
“No. The police thought so at first, because there was no watch and no wallet. I was able to demonstrate to them that it was much more probable that those things were never present to begin with. Your brother—as we both know—had escaped from a private mental hospital.”