by Gene Wolfe
My father gave me a Look, and I signaled back no good and hard.
Blue said, “I sometimes visit a friend at the same hospital, Mr. Hollander. I met your brother several times, and recognized his name at once when I heard it over the police shortwave. The point I wanted to make is that most patients there don’t bother to wear watches—I’ve verified this with my friend—and have no reason to carry wallets. They are not permitted currency, and whatever identification they may have is locked away.”
“A mugger couldn’t have known that.”
Blue nodded. “Of course not. But when a mugger kills his victim it is usually by accident—he strikes him on the head, and in the excitement of the moment strikes too hard. Or the victim resists and is stabbed in the melee. One seldom hears of a mugger who shoots his victims in cold blood so he can loot the corpse afterward, and it would seem to be a poorly thought-out technique. Pistols are noisy.”
My father drew on his cigar; he was looking at the ceiling. “Bert might have rushed him just the same. Bert was like that. Suppose this mugger drew his gun—”
“Technically,” Blue interrupted, “that word gun indicates an artillery piece. Let’s call it a pistol.”
If my father knew that an artillery shell had exploded at the Fair, he sure didn’t let on. For a minute there I thought he was going to get angry because Blue was quibbling; then he smiled. “That’s right. How did it go? ‘This is my rifle, and this is my gun. This’s for shooting, this other’s for fun.’”
The smile turned to a grin when he looked at me. “I won’t explain that, Holly. G.I. poetry.”
“You’re correct, of course,” Blue went on. “It’s possible a mugger approached your brother in that parking lot, pointed a pistol at him and demanded his money, and your brother tried to take his weapon from him. I don’t believe it, but it is barely possible.”
“Why don’t you believe it, Mr. Blue?”
“There are at least three reasons. The first is that your brother appears to have been shot while standing fully erect. If he had died while rushing at his assailant, the bullet would have entered his chest an an angle; a man bends forward when he runs or leaps at his enemy.”
“You’ve seen his body?”
Blue nodded.
“Suppose he had grasped the other man’s arm. The two of them might have been wrestling for the pistol.”
“In that case, there would have been severe powder burns around the wound. There were powder burns, but they were light, indicating that the muzzle of the weapon was at least a foot away from him when it was fired.”
My father got quiet for a minute or two, then he said, “All right, you said you had three reasons. What’s the second?”
Blue shook his head. “You won’t like it.”
“I want to hear it.”
“Aside from a few coins, only one object was found in your brother’s pockets. It was a bloodstained paper rose.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand. What’s the significance of that?”
“When I was talking with your daughter just before the bomb went off, she was wearing a red flower in her hair. When I saw her after the explosion, her hair was disheveled and the flower was gone. Your brother had come to that room, looking for her, once. He must have come again—perhaps hours, but perhaps only minutes, after the explosion. He found that flower, recognized it, and picked it up. He learned where she had been taken.”
“In other words, he was on his way to see her when he was killed. I’d assumed that.”
“I do not assume it,” Blue said, “but it seems clear to me that your daughter’s injury and your brother’s death are linked, and that eliminates simple robbery as a motive.”
“And your third reason?”
“Because you don’t believe it yourself, Mr. Hollander. Your daughter was injured, as I informed you by telephone. She was still alive, and thus in need of whatever comfort you might have provided her. You were involved in an important business matter and did not come. Then your brother was killed. He is beyond all human aid, yet you came at once.”
“I had intended to come anyway,” my father said. “By last night matters in New York appeared a good deal less urgent than I had thought earlier.”
“One of the first things you said when we entered this room was, ‘The crime I am concerned about, the crime that has brought me back at an exceedingly inconvenient time, is the murder of my brother Bert.’”
“You have a good memory.”
Blue nodded. “Yes, I do. You don’t deny you said that?”
“I’m sure I did, or something like it. You’re right, of course; I was testing the water. You’ve offered your services as a criminologist, Mr. Blue. Very well, I accept—I want you to investigate the death of my brother.”
Blue shut up for a minute; then he said, “We criminologists don’t make investigations, Mr. Hollander; if we did, we would be private investigators. We study crime, and criminals. On one condition, I will undertake such a study of the death of Herbert Hollander the Third.”
“The law intrudes on everything today, doesn’t it. What’s your condition?”
“That I be retained as a consultant by the Hollander Safe and Lock Company Incorporated, and not by you as an individual. You understand, I’m sure, that the association with your company may be professionally advantageous to me.”
“I was about to suggest it myself. This way we can write it off as a business expense. How much?” My father was getting a pad of Hollander Safe & Lock checks out of his desk.
“Five thousand,” Blue said. “That will get us started.”
My father paused. He always did, whether it was sixty-five bucks for a shirt or sixty-five thousand for a new bracelet for Elaine. “All right,” he said. “It will be worth it if you can clear this thing up.” And there was no way to tell whether he would have called it off at six or gone into five figures.
As he passed the check over, there was a familiar tap on the door. I sang out, “What is it, Mrs. Maas?” and she said, “Tell Mr. Hollander there are some policemen here looking for Mrs. Hollander.”
How Lieutenant Sandoz Named the killer
Okay, it’s time to come clean—I’m psychic. You remember when I watched my father firing up his cigar, and it reminded me of Lieutenant Sandoz of the Pool County Cops? Well, at that very moment the real Sandoz must have been on his way to our house. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Astral bodies, life after death, and all that stuff. There are people selling articles to the supermarket tabloids on the strength of a lot less.
And just in case you’re still not convinced, when Sandoz introduced himself and sat down in my father’s study—taking the last chair, I might add, so that the benighted shlepper with him had to stand—he turned down my father’s offer of a good cigar and lit one of his own, a stogie made in New Jersey by refugees from Appalachia, by the smell of it.
“My housekeeper says you’re looking for my wife,” my father said. “She’s out shopping, I think.”
Sandoz nodded. “We’d like to speak with Mrs. Hollander, yes.”
“I certainly hope you’re not such a fool as to think that Mrs. Hollander has …” My father let it hang there.
“Killed somebody?” Sandoz didn’t smile—not even the tiny turning of his mouth that he probably called a smile. He wasn’t being funny and he wasn’t being cute, or at least he didn’t want us to think he was.
“I wasn’t going to go nearly that far. Been involved in any serious illegality.”
“No,” Sandoz said. Then, “Maybe you might want to get your daughter and your man Blue out of here.”
“You wish to speak to me in confidence?”
Sandoz shook his head. “Maybe you want to speak to me in confidence.”
“If this concerns the murder of my brother, I’d like his niece, and Mr. Blue, to hear whatever is said.”
“No, this concerns the death of Lawrence L. Lief of Barton. There are two others involved, too. Mr. Drex
el K. Munroe and Mrs. Edith A. Simmons—”
(So one of us wounded had finally died.)
“—but specifically and particularly Mr. Lawrence L. Lief.”
“In that case, it doesn’t concern me or my family, as I was just explaining to Mr. Blue. I don’t want to discuss it, except over a dinner table.”
There was a long pause. Then Sandoz said, “Mr. Hollander, I would like your permission to search this house.”
Blue put in, “Have you got a warrant?”
Lieutenant Sandoz swung his wooden puss toward him. “If I had a warrant, I wouldn’t have to ask permission; you know that. I’m asking Mr. Hollander to permit a search of these premises, to show that he’s dealing in good faith with the police.”
My father said, “I’m not anxious to show any kind of faith to the police—good or bad. At this point, I owe nothing to the police, and I suggest to you that if the police were to spend half the energy they put into molesting reputable people into searching for the radicals who killed Larry Lief and the thug who murdered my brother, nothing more would be required.”
Sandoz lifted his shoulders. “You refuse.”
“Absolutely.”
“All right. We’ll have to go to a judge for a warrant now, and it’s better if we can tell the judge we asked and permission was denied. I’d like to use your phone, but if you want to be a bastard about it, Jake will go out to the car and radio someone, and they’ll phone. You want to be a bastard?”
“There’s a telephone in the hall,” my father said. “You can use that.”
“There’s one here, too. It’s closer.”
If I’d had my brain going, I would have reached over and grabbed the phone cord and pulled the phone off the desk so he’d have had to get up and bend over to get it. It wouldn’t have accomplished anything, but it would have made me feel better. Only I didn’t. I got caught flat-footed (if you can get caught flat-footed when your feet aren’t in working order) and Sandoz had the phone before I thought of it. He pushed buttons for a number that must have rung three or four times. Then he said, “He’s here … . Yeah, back from New York. Tell them … . He won’t do it … . That’s right, tell Dugan we asked, and he says no dice … .” He listened for a while longer, then grunted and hung up. “We’ll have a man out here with a warrant in about an hour.”
My father said, “I doubt that. But whether it’s true or not, in the meantime you can leave my house. I believe I’m within my rights in ordering the police off private property.”
Sandoz nodded. “If we don’t have a warrant, that’s right. But, Mr. Hollander, I have a good deal to say that you might find interesting.”
“I don’t—”
“And if we leave, you’re coming with us. Jake and I are going to talk to you in one place or another, if you understand what I mean.”
“You would arrest me?”
“Not unless we had to. First we’d ask you come down, as any citizen might do, to give evidence to the police. If you decided to be a bastard …” Sandoz shrugged again.
My father said, “If I give evidence at this point, it will be with my attorney present.”
“I figured that. You’ve heard of the Miranda decision, Mr. Hollander?”
“I’ve heard the term, yes—I think on some television show. I know nothing about the details.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to. It’s been my experience—I know Mr. Blue there is an expert and maybe he’ll want to argue with me—but it’s been my experience as a plain country cop that one big difference between a pro and an amateur is that the pro does his homework. Most pros aren’t smart—a smart man doesn’t take up crime as a career unless there’s special circumstances. Lots of times the amateurs are. Not long ago, just to give you an example, we got a kid who’d raped and strangled three college girls, and he turned out to be an honor student at Pool County College. We got him because before he killed the third one he took her to some disco joint. You ask yourself, why would a smart kid like him do a dumb thing like that?”
Sandoz blew a thick stream of smoke out of each nostril and looked around at us. “I think it was because he just couldn’t imagine that we’d ever get onto him enough to go around with his picture and her picture. He thought that we’d never get close to him. A pro would have said to himself, what if they get onto me? A pro knows about Miranda and all the rest of it—better, sometimes, than we do.
“What Miranda does is make us read you a whole bunch of rights when we arrest you. I don’t mean you specifically, Mr. Hollander—whoever we might have to arrest. We’ve got to tell them they don’t have to answer, and they’ve got the right to a lawyer, and so forth. Now I want to be as open with you as I can, so I’m telling you all these things even though you’re not under arrest yet. If you want to hear it, I’ll also tell you why I think I may have to place you under arrest.”
My father said, “I want to hear it.” He looked grim.
“That’s fine. You see, I want to show you we’re not being unreasonable. We’re not out to get you, we’re out to get the perpetrator. If that happens to be you—and personally I think it does—then that’s your fault and not ours. So far this is all hypothetical.”
“If you have something to say, say it.”
“Sure, and I’ll make it as short as I can. To begin with, everything depends on two assumptions I’ve made. If either of them’s wrong, everything falls through. Maybe one is wrong. Maybe they both are. The first one is that the two crimes are connected, which is to say that the explosion at the school in Barton is tied to the shooting of Herbert Hollander the Third.”
“I don’t agree with that.”
“Well, I think it’s true just the same, and maybe if I tell you why, you’ll agree with me. In police work, Mr. Hollander, we’re always looking for similarities. A man that breaks into groceries, for instance, usually does it again and again. If you’ve got two burglaries, and one’s at the A and P and the other’s at a Jewel, you usually find that the same guy did them both. You see what I mean. So I’ve been looking at these killings and trying to match things up. Let’s look at the second one first, because it’s so much simpler. Herbert Hollander the Third was killed, and there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that he was the guy the killer meant to get. The shooting took place at night, sure, but that parking lot was lit up pretty good—we checked it out. The murderer was close, too, when he fired, and he was looking at your brother Herbert head on. When Cain killed Abel with the rock, he probably didn’t see him much better.”
Sandoz waited to give my father a chance to say something. When he didn’t, he went on. “One thing I’ve thought about was whether maybe—just maybe—Herbert Hollander was mistaken for his brother, George Henry Hollander.”
“If I killed him myself, that’s hardly possible, is it?”
Sandoz nodded, being fair. “That’s what I thought, too. But I’d already turned it down for a couple of other reasons. Nobody who knew you could have mistaken your brother for you in that lot. He was an older man, and a taller man, and a slimmer man. Your hair’s gray; his was white, and he wasn’t wearing a hat. If anybody made that mistake, it would have to be somebody who didn’t know you—a hit man working from a verbal description or maybe a picture. Well, there are a dozen real pros operating out of Chicago who’ll give you a nice slick job for the price of a new car, and lights in a parking lot wouldn’t even slow those boys down—I’ve known them to blow away their man in the middle of one of those expense-account restaurants, with a roomful of customers and waiters watching. What I couldn’t figure out is why one would be hanging around the parking lot waiting to shoot your brother by mistake. When that guy got hit that I told you about, the guy in the restaurant, it was because somebody’d fingered him. Who fingered you? Nobody, if you were really in New York like you said you were.”
“I was.”
“I hope so, Mr. Hollander. You have somebody with you? We think your brother was shot between one-thirty and two-thirty in th
e morning. That estimate’s from the coroner’s office, based on their examination of the corpse. That would be two-thirty to three-thirty in New York.”
“No, I had nobody with me. I was asleep in my room in the hotel.”
“Uh huh. I kind of thought you might say that. You know, Mr. Hollander, it’s a wonderful age we live in. These days it only takes a couple of hours to fly from New York to Chicago, and a couple more to fly back. Suppose a man said good night to his business associates at eleven P.M. New York time and went up to his room. Why, at eleven-thirty he could sneak out of the hotel, and by twelve-thirty he could be at some airport easy—not much traffic at that time of night. By two-thirty—this is still New York time—he’d be in Chicago. If he had his business finished by three-thirty, New York time, he’d be back at his hotel before seven. There’s not many people up and around in the average hotel at six or six-thirty. He’d probably be able to catch a few hours’ sleep, even, on the planes, and in his hotel room before he had to show his face somewhere. He’d look a little tired of course—circles under the eyes and so on—but people would probably expect that, if he’d been working hard and they knew his little daughter, his only child, had just been hurt.
“Then too, there’s the business about the hospital parking lot. That looks bad, like I said, for a hit man. But it looks just fine for a relative. Herbert Hollander had jumped the wall at the funny farm, but he wasn’t so crazy us cops didn’t have a hard time laying hands on him. He could walk down a street, and he could talk to people, and nobody’d know he was supposed to be in an institution. Suppose he called his brother in New York. Asking for help, maybe.”
My father shook his head. “He didn’t.”
“I’m just supposing. Like I told you, so far this is all hypothetical.
“Well, what would be more natural than for the brother to say, ‘I’m just now leaving for Chicago to see about Holly. Meet me in the parking lot—not in the lobby, where they might spot you and send you back—and I’ll give you the money for a ticket to Tahiti.’ Or whatever it was his brother had said he wanted.” Sandoz spread his big, hard-looking brown hands. “You see what I mean? It falls into place pretty good.