by Gene Wolfe
My father said, “You’re ready to concede that I might be innocent? That’s good of you.”
Sandoz answered levelly, “Under the law, everyone’s assumed innocent until a court finds him guilty, Mr. Hollander.”
Blue lifted his stick to get their attention. “Perhaps I should explain. As Lieutenant Sandoz says, I called him this morning. I informed him that I had obtained a confession from the man who killed Larry Lief, Drexel K. Munroe, Edith Simmons, and Herbert Hollander the Third. I have—you’ll hear it in a moment. I also told him that it would be necessary for him to come here and bring Mr. Hollander with him, and that if he refused I would hold a press conference without him or any other representative of Pool County present, a conference to which I would invite the news departments of the Chicago TV stations as well as reporters from the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and the Daily Press. I warned him that if he failed to cooperate with me, it was likely that Mr. Hollander would file suit for false arrest as soon as he was released, as he surely would be.”
My father smiled. It seemed to me it was the first time I’d seen him smile in a long, long while. “You say the man’s confessed?”
“I’ll let you hear it for yourself,” Blue said; and then he looked over at Uncle Dee, and I felt like the bottom had dropped out of the world.
Sandoz said, “I don’t think I know you, Mr. Sinclair. Who are you?”
Uncle Dee cleared his throat. “I am a dealer in old and rare books. Mr. Hollander’s one of my customers. He has been for years.” He let it lie there.
“Go on.”
“A detective, I suppose one of your men, came just once to talk to me. I wasn’t at the Fair, you see—or rather I was, but I left early.”
Sandoz said, “Just go ahead and tell it your own way.” I felt like I was going nuts, but I could see he was right: keep ’em talking.
“I come to the Fair each year for the book sale. Several other dealers do as well, but I’ve priced the books myself and know exactly where the ones I wish to buy are located. I take what I want, pay, and leave; everyone knows I have no interest in antiques other than books. I realized, of course, that I’d be gone before my bomb went off.”
Elaine whispered, “This is incredible.”
Sandoz said, “I’ve got you placed now. Miss Hollander told us it was you that got her the cashiering job at the book sale.”
“That’s right.” Uncle Dee looked at me, then looked away. “I like Holly, and I wanted her to be where she would be safe. I was wrong about that, she got hurt anyway, and I’m sorry.”
Elaine, not whispering now, said, “De Witte, I can’t let you do this!”
“I loved Elaine, you see, Lieutenant. She wouldn’t have me, wouldn’t let me touch her, but that was all right. She was a married woman, and I could understand and admire a lady who wouldn’t betray her vows and her husband. Then I learned about Lief, and I thought I had a chance after all …”
I checked Molly out of the corner of my eye. She must have known already; she was taking it all right.
Sandoz said, “But you didn’t?”
Uncle Dee shook his head. “She laughed at me. Elaine, you mocked me, and that was too much. I decided to kill you and to kill him, to kill you and your lover together.”
Sandoz nodded like he had known all along. “So you put the bomb in the box. How’d you do that?”
“I came to this house often to show Harry books. One night when I knew that he and Elaine would be out, I came as though I had been invited. When the housekeeper told me they were gone, I said that Mr. Hollander was expecting me; she let me wait in his study, where we always talked. The box was there, on the table. I’d read about that type of lock in one of the books I’d found for Harry, and the tools I required were in the satchel in which I normally carry books. I picked the lock, and used the dud shell from his mantelpiece for the charge.”
“You had the trigger mechanism with you?”
“That’s correct. It was a simple affair, really—a small battery and an electrical switch I arranged so as to set off my blasting cap when the box was opened.”
“You’d planned all along to use the shell?”
Uncle Dee nodded. “Harry had told me about it a couple of times. He had been a young corporal, a supply clerk, in Italy during the war. His outfit hit the beach, and just after he got off the LST that shell tossed sand in his face. He said he had thrown himself flat afterward, and that he must have lain there a couple of minutes waiting for it to go off. Then he realized that if it hadn’t been a dud he would have been killed already, and stood up and went away to do whatever it was he was supposed to be doing.
“A day or so later, when things had quieted down somewhat—am I telling this right, Harry?—he discovered that the chain on which he wore his dogtags had broken. He went looking for them and found them where he had thrown himself down that first time. That reminded him of the shell, and he dug it up to look at. It was a foolish thing to do because it might have exploded, but he said he had the feeling that since it hadn’t gotten him when it had the chance, it never would.”
Sandoz said, “So this time you decided to give it a little help. You must have known that it would be traced back to him eventually.”
Uncle Dee nodded again. “He had her and Lief had her, but I couldn’t; I was going to get them both. Harry had packed that shell in his company’s supplies and trucked it all over Europe, that’s what he told me. If it had done what it was supposed to do the first time, perhaps I would have found Elaine. This time I was going to make certain it didn’t miss.”
Very softly Blue inquired, “Do you want to tell them about Herbert Hollander now?”
“I suppose I’d better.” Uncle Dee mopped his forehead; I could see his hand shake. “But first—Lieutenant, am I going to have to repeat all this again later?”
Sandoz nodded. “For a police stenographer, Mr. Sinclair. She’ll type it up and you’ll have to sign it.”
“Then I’ll try to keep it short. That same evening, when I put the bomb in the box, I got Harry’s gun from his desk drawer. He had shown it to me about a year ago when there was a rash of home invasions here and I advised him to get a dog. He said he didn’t need a dog, he had that, and showed me where he kept it. I thought that if either Elaine or Lief escaped the bomb I’d use it to kill them, then put it someplace where it would be linked to him. I felt sure the servants could identify it, and if they wouldn’t, I’d do it myself.
“My bomb worked, as you know. I was certain it would; I had tried out the mechanism with blasting caps several times in advance.” He glanced around at us when he said that, his smile only a sickly imitation of his old one. “Blasting caps aren’t much more powerful than the big firecrackers—salutes, they were called—that I used to shoot off as a boy. I tested the battery and switch in my basement, and I doubt that the people next door heard anything.
“So I was confident, you see—quite confident, when I came here. Then I realized that I had forgotten the black vinyl tape I had intended to use. I taped the cap to the shell with Scotch tape from Harry’s desk instead, and as it turned out that worked just fine.”
Sandoz said, “Except that Mrs. Hollander wasn’t killed.” Uncle Dee had always had a clean handkerchief in his breast pocket; now he was wadding it between his hands. “That’s right, she wasn’t touched. She’d left the platform before my bomb went off, and of course I couldn’t kill her afterward until Harry got back.”
“But you had the gun.”
“That’s right. I carried it with me everywhere, because I didn’t know when Harry would come home and I’d have a chance at Elaine. Something else had gone wrong as well, however; Holly had been injured. As I said before, I’d tried to arrange things so she wouldn’t be. I felt that the least I could do was visit her, bring her something to read in the hospital.”
“And you met Herbert Hollander in the parking lot?”
“Yes, and that destroyed my whole plan, or at least at the t
ime I thought it did.”
“Why’d you kill him, Mr. Sinclair?”
“I had to. Several times when Harry couldn’t come to see about him, I had gone in his place, as his deputy so to speak. Sometimes I’d taken Harry’s check to the sanatorium, and once or twice when I thought Bert wasn’t getting the treatment he should have had, I’d told Harry about it and relayed his instructions to the doctors there. Somehow that had given Bert the idea that I was the one who was keeping him locked up. He was insane, of course, though if you hadn’t been around him much he could seem quite normal. He had a knife, and I shot him. The next morning I came to this house; I knew Elaine had spent most of the night at the hospital and would sleep late, but I told the housekeeper I had to talk to her about straightening up at the school. As I had expected, the housekeeper wouldn’t wake her; but she let me wait again in Harry’s study, and I put back the gun.”
Elaine stood up, her violet eyes brimming with tears. “De Witte, I won’t let you do this. You’re a wonderful person—the best, the most unselfish man I’ve ever known. But I’m not going to let you destroy yourself. Lieutenant Sandoz, those are lies. De Witte is Harry’s friend, his best friend, and now he’s trying to save Harry, but it’s not right.”
Sandoz was up now, too, trying to get Elaine back into her chair. “Just let him tell his story, Mrs. Hollander. Hear him out.” Between them I saw my father’s face as if it were a photo in a frame; his mouth was open, but I don’t think he was saying anything.
“Lieutenant,” my mother said, “I saw my husband with that box open!”
How Blue Did the Job
All of a sudden it got so quiet in our living room you could hear yourself breathe.
Elaine dropped back into her chair and put her face in her hands. “I came into the study, and he was at the table. The box was open. He didn’t see me. There. It’s out. I said it.”
“Elaine!” It was my father. “My God, Elaine!”
Blue said, “Yes, Elaine. My God.” I’d never heard him use that tone before. Everybody looked at him, even her. “You saw your husband with Pandora’s Box open, and you didn’t ask why he had opened it? Why not? And by the way, what was in it?”
There were tears streaking my mother’s perfect little face; I don’t think she wanted to say anything, but after a minute she did. “Nothing. There was nothing in it when I saw it.”
“You didn’t see him put the German shell in it?”
“No, of course not. I wouldn’t have gone through with the drawing.”
“But you went through with it believing that the box was empty? Thinking the whole thing would end in an excruciating anticlimax?”
“I had to. There wasn’t anything else to do.”
Once I heard my father fire a man; it was the chauffeur we had before Bill, and my father had told him to clear out in just the tone he used now. What he said this time was, “Lieutenant, I never opened that box.”
“Mr. Hollander, I’m beginning to think you didn’t.”
Blue paid no attention to them. “There was everything else to do, Elaine. All you would have had to do—if you’d actually seen your husband with that box open, and the box was empty—was suggest to him that you find some interesting antique to put in it as a prize. For a hundred dollars you could have gotten some nineteenth-century books from De Witte Sinclair. You could have used an old gun, or some antique silver. Anything—anything, if you had really seen it open as you say.”
“Are you accusing me of having put the shell in that box?”
“Yes, I am,” Blue told her. “I can prove it. I will prove it.”
Sandoz snorted. “First Mr. Hollander, then Sinclair, and now Mrs. Hollander? Okay, let’s hear it.” He sounded skeptical; but I was watching his eyes, and they told Jake to get behind my mother. Jake did it, just a couple of steps over.
Blue said, “Mr. Sinclair’s confession was simply a trick, as you certainly understand by now. He and I arranged it over the telephone last night, and this morning he came to my place and we rehearsed it.”
Sandoz said, “He was running one hell of a risk.”
Blue nodded. “He really is Mr. Hollander’s best friend, you see. Even rich and powerful men sometimes have one or two real friends, though often they don’t know it. We took a few precautions, however; Mr. Sinclair can produce three witnesses, including myself, who will swear that we heard him express his intention to make a false confession this morning. And it any event a polygraph test would have cleared him.”
Sandoz grunted. “You claimed a minute ago that you could prove Mrs. Hollander made the bomb.” He was watching her and pretending not to. “If you can, why’d you need Sinclair?”
“Because I’m trying to do something you police never seem to. I’m trying to anticipate the trial.” Blue leaned back in his chair. It couldn’t have been noon yet, but he looked tired. “The wisest thing for Mrs. Hollander to do would probably be to confess and throw herself upon the mercy of the court. That is what I would advise her to do if I were still an attorney, as I once was, and if I had somehow been chosen to represent her; but I don’t believe she’ll do it. Despite all that fragile beauty, she’s a stubborn, not very shrewd fighter, and she’s accustomed to getting what she wants.”
Sandoz grunted again. “So?”
“To a great degree the success of her defense will depend on the support she receives from her husband, both in testimony and finance. Yesterday, when I went into Mr. Hollander’s study, I noticed that a German eighty-eight-millimeter artillery shell was missing from his mantel; I won’t bore you now by explaining how I knew that one had been there earlier. In conversation, I brought up the subject of artillery and waited for his reaction. There was none. It seemed clear he had no idea that the ‘bomb’ that exploded at the Fair had in fact been a shell. That hadn’t been on the news, remember, and he had returned only an hour or two before from New York.”
My father nodded. “You’re right, I didn’t know it then.”
“When I talked to him,” Blue continued, “he was eager that the murder of his brother should be avenged, which seemed quite natural. He was even more anxious, however, that the explosion at the Fair should not be investigated; since his wife had been deeply involved in the Fair and his daughter had been one of the casualties, that seemed unnatural indeed. If he did not, as it appeared he did not, know that his shell had been used to build the bomb, it seemed probable that he was protecting someone else whom he assumed to be guilty; it was not difficult to guess who that was, or to see that he felt confident that the bombing and his brother’s murder were unrelated.”
Blue glanced at my father, then went back to Sandoz. “When you told him about the shell, he involuntarily glanced up at the mantel, and his shock was apparent. He knew at that moment, and with certainty, who had planted that bomb; but he did not accuse her. He loved his wife, and he must have known of her relations with Lief and believed she had given herself to him, and killed him, because of some hold he had over her. I needed to make her do or say something that would show her husband clearly not only that she had killed those people, but that she had planned her crime so he would be blamed.”
My father said, “You did. Can you also tell me why she did it?”
“No,” Blue said. “But she can, and perhaps eventually she will. All I can say now is that it appears to me that Lief was not her primary target—that worked out too neatly. I think she contrived to have an affair with the man who would open the box, in other words, and not that she contrived that the man with whom she had an affair would open it. And certainly her target was not originally Herbert Hollander the Third; his death bears the earmarks of a spur-of-the-moment decision. But until she said she had seen you with the box open, she might have argued, for example, that she had killed Lief because he was threatening to reveal their relationship to you unless she would run away with him. If she had done that, would you have helped her?”
“I suppose I would. I would have done whate
ver lay in my power, I think.”
Elaine looked at him and saw that it was no good now, and looked away.
Molly’s twangy voice surprised us. “I was wishin’ a while ago I’d brought my gun to this, but I see it was the Good Lord’s provision. I’d have shot Mr. Sinclair—or maybe not, ’cause a man that’s been messed over by a bad woman has to be forgiven a lot. Miz Hollander, I didn’t hate you like I ought to have when I heard about those letters of yours, ‘cause Larry was just so handsome and good and I believed I knew how you’d felt. Now I know you didn’t ever love him. You killed him just for bait, and I’ll get you. I may have to wait till the law lets you go, but ’fore the world ends, you’re mine.”
Elaine couldn’t meet her eyes, and everybody was quiet for a minute. It was my father who broke it. “Go on, Mr. Blue.”
Blue leaned forward, looking from him to Molly, then over at Sandoz. “There were three plausible, but false, assumptions that tended to confuse things, I would say. The first may have impeded you more than it did me, Lieutenant. It was that the male voice that had threatened Larry over the telephone belonged to the person who contrived his death. Even when you decided that no vengeful veterans existed, I believe you thought those calls had been someone’s effort to throw any investigation off track.”
“And they weren’t?”
“No, they weren’t. Molly, do you want to explain now?” Molly shook her head and looked at me. I said, “Larry made those calls himself. Molly says she was never completely sure, but I think she knew and just didn’t let on. When she showed me her gun in the store—it was Larry’s really, one they kept under the counter in case of a holdup—it was so I wouldn’t guess she thought it was him. She says the voice told her some things it seemed like nobody but Larry would know. Were you onto him?”
Blue shook his head. “He came to me a month ago, brought by a mutual friend. I was interested in harassing calls, as I still am, so I poked around. By the time Larry was killed, I was considering the possibility that he had placed them himself, but I was far from sure. Now I see—or think I do—that he was tormented by guilt. If I’d exposed him, perhaps that would have provided punishment enough. There’s no way of knowing.”