Dead Letter (11 page)

He tossed the empty wallet at my feet and slugged me
so hard on the back of the head that my forehead slammed into the car
window. I slid down the side of the Pinto and onto the pavement.

Something inside my head seemed to be moving as
lamely as a broken limb. "Ow," I groaned. How come you’re
not blacked out? I thought. I reached for the door handle and started
to pull myself up. And then that thing moved again inside my head.
Whoah, I told myself. Best wait a bit. I lay back down on the
pavement and watched the night sky go in and out of focus. It’s a
judgment, I thought miserably.

"Hey!" a voice called from across the
street. "Hey! Are you O.K.?"

"Wonderful," I said.

"Mister?" the voice repeated.

"You want to give me a hand?" I yelled. And
the thing inside my head moved half an inch. I heard footsteps, then
two pairs of hands grabbed my arms.

"Easy, for chrissake," I said.

"What happened?"

"I cut myself shaving. What’s it look like? I
got mugged."

"You want us to call the cops?"

"No. Just get me to my feet."

They lifted me up. I was too dizzy to stand, so I
slumped back against the car door and stared goofily at the two boys,
college kids, who had helped me out. "Man, you got a bruise on
your forehead," one of them said. "You want us to call an
ambulance?"

I touched at the back of my head. "No. I’ll be
all right."

"You could have a concussion, mister. You ought
to see a doctor."

"I said I’d be all right."

The boys looked uncertainly at each other. "O.K.,
Frank," one of them said. "The man knows what he wants.
Let’s split."

As they walked off down the sidewalk, I thought, "The
mugger was right—I ought to find another line of work."

I opened the door and sat
down on the car seat and stared at the pavement. My wallet was lying
between my feet. I bent down and picked it up and stared for a minute
at the photostat of my license. Some detective.

***

It was after two when I got back to the Delores. That
thing in my head had stopped wobbling; and all I felt was a kind of
lassitude that made it hard for me to keep my eyes open. Judging by
the fist fights I’d gotten into in the Army and as a P.I., I
figured the two kids had been right. I probably did have a mild
concussion. I guess the only reason I hadn’t gone to the hospital
was that the mugger had hurt my pride worse than he’d hurt my head.

I made it to the apartment without being slugged or I
shot at. And I made it into the bedroom without passing out. That
seemed like enough to hope for out of one
night.

I fell asleep as soon as I hit the mattress and slept
long into the morning; and when I woke, I felt as if someone had
braided cornrows in my skull. Around eleven I found the energy to get
out of bed and check the messages on the answerphone. There was only
one and it was terse:

"This is Sarah
Lovingwell. I have to see you."

***

Once they’d talked to Rose Weinberg, the cops
hadn’t wasted any time with Sean O’Hara. Before releasing him,
they’d worked on the boy until he admitted he’d been lying about
Sarah’s alibi. McMasters filled me in on the rest as I waited in
the courthouse coffee shop for Sarah Lovingwell to be brought down to
the visitor’s room on the fourth floor.

"Now he claims he was following you from noon to
one," McMasters said. "He claims Grimes spotted you taking
pictures on Tuesday morning. Grimes thought you were a federal snoop.
According to O’Hara, Grimes wanted to kill you on the spot."

"Why didn’t he?" I asked him.

"Sarah Lovingwell talked him out of it,"
Sid said.

"Grimes is a psycho, Harry. He was eased out of
the Marine Corps, after shooting up a hamlet full of friendlies. A
newspaperman got wind of it and then something happened to the
newspaperman. The brass had no choice but to give Grimes the boot. No
formal charges were ever pressed against him. They liked Lester
Grimes in the Marine Corps. We had a helluva time getting this much
out of them.

"Sarah Lovingwell must have pulled a thorn out
of his boot, because O’Hara claims that Grimes would listen to her
advice. Only that’s all changed since last night. O’Hara says
Grimes believes that Sarah set him up. And Grimes is a vindictive
son-of-a-bitch. O’Hara is afraid that he’ll come gunning for the
girl."

"And me?"

"Oh, you’re on his list, too. Right up near
the top, according to O’Hara."

"How come O’Hara suddenly got so talkative?"

McMasters smiled humorlessly. "He’s a
snot-nosed kid, Harry. And we were in no mood to mess around last
night."

"You worked him over?"

"Wake up and smell the coffee," McMasters
said with disgust.

"So why was Grimes worried about federal cops?"

"O’Hara wouldn’t say. But those pictures you
gave us tell part of the story. And when we busted the club last
night, we found a regular armory in the back office. Pistols,
grenades, the works."

"You think Lovingwell’s death is tied to this
business?"

"We don’t know. If we can trace the murder
weapon to the cache we found on Calhoun Street, we’ll be in a
better position to say. Right now, we have no idea where the gun came
from."

I said, "How much do you have on Sarah
Lovingwell?"

"We’ve got a motive," McMasters said.
"And we’ve got a witness who can place her near the scene at
twelve on Tuesday. The girl claims she didn’t go all the way up to
the house, that when she saw her father’s car in the driveway she
turned around and went back to the club. But even if she’s telling
the truth and she didn’t do the I killing herself, she probably
knows who did. The lab puts the time of death between twelve and
twelve-thirty, and that would be right about the time that Sarah was
moseying up to the door. We’ve also got the fact that she lied to
us about being with O’Hara."

I frowned at McMasters. "You don’t have a
shred of hard evidence. Any lawyer in his right mind would have her
out on habeas by this afternoon."

"That’s true," he said. "She
probably will get bailed out tonight. But then we haven’t talked to
you, yet, Harry."

I pointed innocently at my chest.

"Yeah, you," McMasters said. "You must
think I’m an idiot. I’ve got eyes and half a brain. You’ve been
holding out on me from the start. And I told you—I don’t like
that. You knew the O’Hara kid was lying. You knew he wasn’t with
the girl between noon and one. You had to know, because the jerk-off
was following you home."

I’d realized it was there all along; but this was
the first time I actually felt the ice beneath my feet.

"All right," I said carefully. "Say I
did know. I’m still working for the girl."

"The hell. She hates your guts. She thinks it
was you who set her and the O’Hara kid up."

"Then why does she want to see me?"

McMasters shrugged. "All I know is that after
you’re done talking with her, you’ve got an appointment to talk
with me. We want to know why she killed her father. And you can tell
us."

"Suppose I don’t?"

"Then I’ll throw you in jail, Harry."

"On what charge?"

"Something’ll come
to me," McMasters said.

***

I waited for another twenty minutes in a big, drab
ante-room on the eighth floor. The place was as tense and cheerless
as a hospital emergency room. Two dozen sad cases waited along with
me—nervous, dispirited fathers, mothers, kinfolk. I was vaguely
conscious of a pecking order among the old hands. The sort of thing
you see at welfare offices—the poor abusing the poor with a
heartless gusto. One woman in particular, graying, with large crooked
teeth and the cold black eyes of a Negro tough, seemed to be holding
court in her corner of the room. But I was too preoccupied with Sarah
Lovingwell to pay her much attention, even when she turned to another
old hand sitting beside her and said: "That man there has him
some trouble."

I laughed to myself. What trouble? There wasn’t
going to be any trouble. I’d just walk into the visitor’s room
and tell Sarah L. that I was quitting the case, that I was going to
break my word to her father and tell the police about the document. I
didn’t like it, but McMasters wasn’t giving me any other choice.

"Shit," I said under my breath.

The old woman in the corner cackled. She thought she
was getting to me.

Why the hell had Sarah called me anyway? Judging from
what McMasters had said, probably to blow off a little steam. To turn
the knife. Or maybe she had phoned me before the previous night’s
fiasco. There was no way to tell from my shoddy answerphone what time
a call came in. Maybe there had been something she’d wanted to tell
me after that curious, desultory interview on Wednesday afternoon.
After I’d blackmailed her into hiring me in the first place.

"Shit," I said again. And the old woman
laughed.

It really wasn’t very nice, what I was going to do.
Extorting Sarah’s compliance and then reneging on the agreement as
soon as the going got rough. On the other hand, Harry, I told myself,
the girl is suspected of murder, of killing the man that you’re
trying to protect. And Rose Weinberg notwithstanding, Sarah had a
motive and she’d been on the scene at the time of the crime. She
was a little crazy, to boot. Her own father had feared she might do
him violence. It was just self-indulgence, just posturing to pretend
that she was an innocent who was being unjustly betrayed.

It would have been self-indulgence, all right, if I’d
believed what I was saying to myself. Only I didn’t believe that
she’d killed her father. I’d told Rose Weinberg I’d remain
impartial until the police forced me to take sides. But that was a
lie. And she’d known it was a lie. Like Mrs. Weinberg, my intuition
said that Sarah Lovingwell was not a killer and that her father was
not the man he’d seemed to be. Why in hell hadn’t he told me that
his daughter hated him? It wasn’t a pleasant thing to confess to a
stranger, but neither was the fact that he’d suspected his daughter
was a thief. He’d hinted urbanely that he and Sarah had had their
little disagreements, like every other father and daughter in the
world. But if there was one thing that was indisputable about the
Lovingwell case, it was the fact that they were not an ordinary
father and daughter. Why, then, had he disguised Sarah’s hatred for
him?

An armed guard walked out of the visitor’s room and
a bell rang. The people in the anteroom lined up before a table and
submitted docilely to a search of their coats and handbags. Play it
by ear, I decided as I waited to be frisked. Which was just a tired
way of saying that the Lovingwells were still a problem that I
couldn’t solve. The cops patted me down, and I stepped through the
door into the visitor’s area.

I started down a hall to the main reception room—a
big, barren box posted with guards and divided in half by a long
wooden table, on either side of which prisoners and their kin sat
talking.

"Your name Stoner?" a guard asked me.

"Yeah."

"This way."

He took me by the arm and guided me away from the
main hall down a narrow corridor lined with private rooms—cubicles
that lawyers used when they wanted to consult with their clients.
Since I wasn’t a lawyer, the exception struck me as odd. Odd until
I walked into the
room itself.

It was four-square and as uninspired as a child’s
wooden block, and along the length of the wall opposite the door a
mirror ran from corner to corner. I laughed when I saw myself
reflected in it. McMasters wasn’t taking any chances. There was
probably a microphone, too, hidden under the steel table or under one
of the two desk chairs that were parked beneath it.

"Testing, testing," I shouted into the
tabletop. "Can you hear all right, Sid?"

I gave the finger to whoever was standing behind the
mirror and sat down at the table.

A minute later Sarah Lovingwell walked in.

I’d expected her to look angry when she saw me; I
was even prepared to get slapped. But I could see at once that that
wasn’t going to happen. In her drab prison uniform she looked like
a bewildered, overworked waitress. And when she saw my face—a
familiar face—she almost smiled. Unless you’ve been locked in a
cell, you can’t really appreciate the luxury of an open door or the
solace of companionship or the pleasure of simple choice. That
half-smile faded almost immediately and was replaced by a tough,
unfriendly frown.

"Ah," I said. "That's the Sarah I’ve
come to know."

"I’m going to skip the name calling," she
said coldly.

"I called you because I need your help. Your
meddling has gotten me into a great deal of trouble and you’re the
only person who can get me out of it."

"You want me to prove that you didn’t kill
your father?" I said.