Pandora by Holly Hollander

by Gene Wolfe

  I think this is one of the things real, pro mystery writers aren’t supposed to say, but I’m going to say it anyhow, and I learned it that day: murderers aren’t any different from you and me. If I ever get really, really mad or really, really greedy, and especially if I get both together, I could murder somebody. So could you. That day, if somebody had tossed me that little Nazi automatic I could have knocked off Elaine when she walked through the door into the study. Which she did.

  I was watching her like a hawk—a hawk with a broken wing. When she found out what was going on she turned pink under her powder, and then white; and when she caught on that they were just damned near certain to arrest my father, she fell on her knees and got him by the legs and said, “I’m sorry, Harry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” over and over again until Mrs. Maas came and got her on her feet again and led her away, I guess to lie down somewhere. Just about then Jake came down again, and this time he had two letters from Larry to Elaine. He said they had been under a jewelry box in her vanity.

  Sandoz showed them to my father. “Is this how you knew? Did you find them before we did?”

  My father shook his head, but he wouldn’t say anything.

  And that was about it. Naturally I was stuck on that sofa and couldn’t see anything except what went on in the study. At the time that didn’t bother me, but afterward I wished I could have gone around and watched. It might have been interesting. I know that the other cop, the one that had brought the warrant, spent a lot of time in my father’s shop; and Sandoz spent a lot there in the study, reading papers and even pulling down books and riffling the pages; but the only funny thing he found wasn’t a slip of paper, or even what you could call small. He got down on his knees with a penlight and looked under my sofa, and then stuck his arm in, and what he pulled out was a couple of round, black iron weights with handles on the top. They didn’t seem to mean anything, and after he’d looked at them he pushed them back again.

  When the cops were finished and the whole place was a mess, Sandoz went over to my father, coughed, and said, “You are under arrest, Mr. Hollander. Before we ask you any questions, you must understand what your rights are. You have the right to remain silent. You are not required to say anything to us at any time or to answer any questions. Anything you say can be used against you in court. You have the right to talk to a lawyer, and to have him with you during questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer and want one—” (So help me, he said that.) “—a lawyer will be provided for you. If you want to answer questions without a lawyer, you still have the right to stop at any time. You also have the right to stop answering at any time until you talk to a lawyer.”

  After that, my father and the three cops went away. They didn’t put handcuffs on him, but maybe I would have felt better if they had.

  When we heard the front door close, Blue stood up and gave me his handkerchief. I’d been using the hem of my nightie, and I guess it was getting pretty wet. Blue’s handkerchief was just a cheap cotton job that had been washed a lot, but it was clean. When I’d gotten calmed down a little I asked if he still had my father’s check in his pocket.

  “No,” he said. “I have a Hollander Safe and Lock Company check, signed by the chief operating officer of the Hollander Safe and Lock Company.”

  “It’s his check, and you know it. Couldn’t you have done something?”

  “I did what I could,” Blue said.

  “Like hell.”

  “No, Holly. What would you have wanted me to do? Argue in his behalf? As soon as I began, Sandoz would have forced me to leave—if necessary by having one of his subordinates arrest me on some trivial charge. As it was, he permitted me to remain. Most policemen originally became policemen because of a desire to show off—to strut in uniform, gun on hip. Most never quite outgrow it, and occasionally that can be employed to advantage. Lieutenant Sandoz wanted me, the criminologist, to realize what a clever detective he is.”

  “So now you do.”

  “Thanks to my silence, I know the case against your father, yes.”

  “Do you think he killed Larry and all those people?”

  “Do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Are you sure, or are you just being loyal to him?”

  “I wouldn’t be very loyal, would I, if I said I wasn’t sure.”

  “As for me, I’m not certain what I believe.” Blue stood up again, lifting himself on his cane the way he always did. “When I entered this room, I was, I admit—or almost certain, at least. That was the real reason I asked for a company check. It would have been less than ethical for me to have accepted a retainer from your father, as an individual, when I strongly suspected he had built that bomb. I was even more suspicious when he agreed to such a large one. Now I don’t know.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “That was before Sandoz showed us those love letters. In fact, it was before he ever came in and started his song and dance.”

  “Of course.”

  I wiped my nose. “So what made you think my father was the one? Had you figured out all that stuff Sandoz told us?”

  Blue looked mad. “I’d thought of most of it, and rejected a lot of it. It had nothing to do with my decision. Look at the mantel over that fireplace and tell me what you see there.”

  “A picture of Elaine; a picture of my father and Elaine—you don’t want me to describe the clothes in those pictures, do you? A map. That’s on the rocks behind the mantel, really—”

  “A map of what?”

  “A map of Europe, with a red line from Italy to France and up into Germany, the way my father went. A German officer’s hat that he makes Mrs. Maas clean with one of the attachments to the vacuum cleaner. Oh, and a fancy dagger. You don’t notice that because it lies down flat. Was that what you wanted?”

  “Specifically, a Nazi SS dagger; its blade is engraved with the rather fatuous sentiment, ‘Meine Ehre heist treue’—my honor commands me to be faithful. The Germans who fought for Hitler felt they were defending the right, difficult though that is for us to appreciate.”

  I said, “I don’t understand why the dagger’s important.”

  “It isn’t. Or then again, perhaps it is, depending on how one looks at these things. You might say that it’s no more and no less significant than the cap. Lieutenant Sandoz laid stress on the importance of similarities in solving seemingly unrelated crimes. Perhaps he should have considered that both the shell that exploded at the high school and the pistol he found in your father’s desk came from Germany, and in fact from Nazi Germany.”

  “You didn’t know about the pistol when you came in here. Or did you?”

  Blue shook his head. “But I knew about the shell, so when I saw the officer’s cap I crossed the room to have a look at it while your father was getting you settled on that sofa. I saw the SS dagger then, and I saw something else as well. You must have been in this room many times. Haven’t you noticed by now that something’s missing from the mantel?”

  “No, I’ve never paid that much attention to that stuff.”

  “You’re protecting your father, so I can hardly expect you to tell me; but that mantel shows quite clearly where the shell was removed from it.”

  “Are you talking about dust? I came in here one time and saw where Pandora’s Box had been sitting on the library table, because Mrs. Maas hadn’t dusted it yet. Only if you think she hasn’t dusted in here since the bomb went off, you’re batty. If that was true, I’d see dust all over, and I don’t.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Blue said. “It seems clear that your father telephoned and notified his family that he would be returning from New York—he would have to do it if he wanted to be sure his chauffeur would be free to meet him at the airport. When the word came, your Mrs. Maas would have taken good care to clean this room, as she obviously has. But when an object rests for years in one position on dark wood, the wood beneath it will always be darker than that around it; it has been protected from the light, which bleach
es the exposed surface to some extent. A good deal of sunlight presumably comes through that large window for ten hours or more on many days. Eighty-eight millimeters is approximately three and half inches, which is what I estimated the dark spot at the end of the mantel to be. A man’s thumb is roughly an inch across, in case you didn’t know, and that fact is sometimes—please excuse the expression—a handy one.”

  “This doesn’t mean a thing to you, does it? Just a cute little problem.”

  Blue sighed and leaned a little more weight on his cane; I got the feeling that his leg was bothering him. “Certainly it doesn’t mean as much to me as it does to you. One of the things we all have to learn eventually is that our personal problems are not the personal problems of others. But I like you, and I don’t want to see you hurt. Also, I’d like to earn the check in my pocket; I need the money badly, and though I’ll deposit this as soon as I can and use the funds to stave off the worst of my financial difficulties, I probably won’t see any more unless I earn it. If I sound facetious, it’s because I’m not doing very well, and I must try, at times, to keep my own spirits up.”

  “You’re a regular wizard,” I told him bitterly. “With you on the case my father’ll hang in a week.”

  “Although this state has restored the death penalty,” Blue said, “it does the job by electrocution. For practical purposes, however, your father’s risk of execution is nil, as Lieutenant Sandoz pointed out. Wealthy, middle-aged white men do not go to the chair.” Blue limped over to the door. “Now I must be on my way. I wish that I could carry you back up to your room, but I can’t. If you like, I’ll ask Mrs. Maas to send the chauffeur in to you before I go.”

  “Mr. Blue—”

  He stopped and looked back at me.

  “Take me with.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Only for a couple of hours. Until dinner, okay? Then I’ll go home, I promise. I have to get away from her.”

  “Your mother?” Blue was staring at me like he was trying to look right through me.

  “As long as I was bitching at you it was all right, then when you went to leave it wiped me out. I’m going to have to be here with her, and every time I see her or hear her talking I’m going to think about what she did with Larry and what she did to my father—I need a little time to get my head straight. Please? She won’t even notice, and if she does she won’t give a damn.” All of a sudden I understood, or thought I did, why Elaine had never cared about me, and I added, “I’m like him.”

  “You can’t go dressed as you are.”

  “In the closet up in my room, you’ll find about a dozen blue shirts and three or four wraparound jean skirts. Bring one of each.”

  “That’s all you’ll need?”

  “That’s all I could get on. Underpants wouldn’t go over the bandages and stuff. Bring a bandanna, too, please. Top dresser drawer, right side. I’d better have a bandanna.”

  I sat there and listened to him thump up the stairs, and about five minutes later thump back down.

  How I Was Entertained at Blue’s

  So there I was, sitting beside Blue in his old Rambler, my bad leg stuck straight out in front of me, holding on to my aluminum crutches. “What a beater!” I said.

  And he said, “She’s got almost two hundred thousand miles on her, and she still runs like a top.”

  Well, it takes all kinds.

  The upholstery was shot, and I got the feeling that every time we hit a pothole we left behind a little red cloud of body rust; but once you realized that most of the racket was coming from a hole in the pipe, the engine didn’t sound so bad. It was a regular three-on-the-tree automatic, so Blue could prop his bum leg up on the doghouse and drive with his good one. Seeing him do it made me wonder if I could do the same thing. I said, “Hey, what has two heads, four arms, and two legs?”

  He had been thinking and gave me a Look, but after a minute he said, “You must be feeling better. I give up. What?”

  “Us.”

  “Do you know the riddle of the sphinx? That would make it five.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t. I ought to read more mythology, I guess.”

  Blue was quiet then until we’d left the private road and got almost to Barton. Then he said, “So should I.”

  “I thought you did already. A lot.”

  “Not as much as I should. Do you know, I left behind those books I bought at the book sale? I’d paid you for them, hadn’t I?”

  “I don’t suppose there’s much chance of getting them now.”

  “No. Fortunately, I read them first. Or at least, I read the parts I was most interested in.”

  We swung right at the corner of Main and Half, then veered off onto Barton Road past the Cow House (which is a big, fancy restaurant), and a couple of car dealers. On the other side of the nature preserve we swung onto a side road, then onto another and then onto another, with the land getting hillier and hillier all the way. Most of it was covered with thick woods; I suppose those trees had been cut down once to let cattle graze, but the last guy to cut them had probably never seen a car. Pretty soon we were off pavement altogether, jolting along a double strip of dust.

  “You ought to get a Jeep,” I told Blue.

  “It’s going to take quite a few more five-thousand-dollar checks before I’m able to think about that,” he said. “But I want you to notice we have a private road, too.”

  “And a country place.”

  “Yes. Actually, it’s amazing how much of the life of the rich is merely a glamourized counterfeit of the life of the poor. Did you know that penthouses were originally built to house the janitors who cleaned the buildings upon which they stood? That was in the days before elevators. The richest people lived on the ground floor so they didn’t have to climb stairs.”

  We went around a sharp curve too fast, then down into a dark little gulch, then, all of a sudden, out of the trees and into a sunny clearing.

  An old, old farmhouse stood there, with hollyhocks around it and purple morning glories climbing up the front porch. The house was two stories high, with turrets that didn’t match and a steep roof that was green with moss; the rest had been white once, but so much paint was gone that it was pale gray.

  “I bet it’s haunted,” I said.

  “It is,” Blue admitted as he climbed out of the car. “If you were to stay overnight, we’d find out whether the ghosts liked you. They’re rather a nice crowd, really. Good country people.”

  “Dead country people.” I wasn’t sure he was kidding me.

  “Aren’t we all.” He helped me get out, and I thought of the time I’d helped him get up into the CW&N car. A guy about twenty, with a tangled beard and hair to match, was standing in the doorway like he was waiting for us. I didn’t know his name, but I remembered having seen him around Barton. “This is Muddy Brooks,” Blue said. “Muddy, this is Holly.”

  Muddy nodded and smiled; he’d lost a couple of teeth. I looked at Blue, and Blue said, “Mrs. Maas. Muddy does most of our cooking and keeps the place swept out.”

  “I see.”

  “Muddy, Holly will be here until about dark. Do we have anything to eat?”

  “Bread,” Muddy said. “I baked today. Coffee. There’s some of that apple butter left, and I could check the snares.”

  “Do it, please, and ask Tick to bring in some firewood, if you see him. We’ll have a fire tonight.”

  We went on into what I guess had been the parlor in the old days. It was a big room with windows pretty near solid around two sides, so that there was a lot of light in spite of the morning glories. There was a fireplace in it with lots of ashes, an old flattop desk that might have been a teacher’s once, with a radio on it and a swivel chair behind it, and about six other chairs; as far as I could see, the swivel was the only chair that wasn’t busted some way. Blue put me in a nice carved-oak morris that was perfectly okay except that the cushions didn’t belong to it and the stick that was supposed to let you move the back up and d
own was gone and a three-foot piece of copper tubing was doing the job instead.

  “Do you want your foot up on something?” Blue asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That would be great.”

  He shoved over a green plastic hassock that had sprung a leak, and Muddy came in carrying chipped white mugs that looked like they’d been ripped off from a diner. The coffee was hot and black, very strong and very, very bad.

  “You said you wanted to get your head straight,” Blue told me. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Listen, I guess, if I feel like talking.”

  “I can’t stay around—I have errands to run. I’ll be back this evening, though, and I’ll listen then. All right?”

  “All right.”

  “You’ll be safe here; I don’t want you worry about that. If you need anything, yell. Muddy or Tick will get it if we have it.”

  “All right,” I said again. “Who’s Tick?”

  “Tick is Bill. He’s crabby, but don’t worry about it. You won’t be able to make friends with him, so don’t bother to try; but his meanness is all talk, and he doesn’t talk much.”

  “These guys work for you? Tick and Muddy?”

  Blue shrugged. “You can put it that way if you want. Or you could just say they live with me; legally I own this place, and a lot of the Hollander Safe and Lock Company’s five thousand is going to take care of back taxes on it. Or you can say we’re a commune of three; when you don’t have money, it doesn’t matter what your economic system is. Now I have to go.”

  Only he didn’t—at least, not right away. He went farther back in the house somewhere. I could hear, faintly but clearly (because that house was one of the quietest places I’ve ever been in), his dialing a phone. I couldn’t make out what he said; there was another phone over on the flattop desk, and I had to fight the temptation to hobble over and listen.

  After a while he came back, and I asked, “Something you didn’t want me to hear?”

  Blue shook his head. “When I deal with people, I’m often forced to promise that what they say—even their communicating with me at all—will be held confidential. I try to keep that promise.”