Dead Letter (13 page)

"It’s working, Sid," I said to him. "I’m
scared."

He shrugged. "I would be, too, Harry. You’re
in a tough spot. It doesn’t have to get tougher. You know that. All
you have to do is tell me what I want to know."

I swallowed hard. This was the point of departure.
After I said "no" once, it was all up to Sid. There were
other cops in the room and that made it even harder for him. They
knew we were friends, and they’d be watching him.

"I can’t do that," I told him. "I
have a legal obligation to my client to keep my mouth shut."

McMasters shook his head slightly. He was warning me
off.

"I don’t want to do this, Stoner," he
said. "But you’re not giving me any choice."

McMasters reached down to the floor with his left
hand, as if he’d dropped something beside him. I followed him with
my eyes. He straightened suddenly and brought the back of his right
hand up across the bottom of my jaw with a force that made my teeth
snap. I rocked backward on my feet and watched the shooters fill my
eyes.

"That’s just to show you, Harry," he said
as I wobbled in front of him. "This isn’t a joke. I’ve got a
man in the hospital with a bullet in his spine. So you are going to
tell me what I want to know. You’re going to tell me about
Lovingwell and about what he hired you to find out. Or things are
going to get very rough very fast. No more song-and-dance. No more
confidentiality crap. No more buddy-buddies."

"I can’t tell you that."

"The hell," he said.

Sid motioned to the two desk sergeants and both of
them ambled out of the shadows. McMasters pushed me back toward the
rear wall. It’s now or never, Harry, I said to myself.

"Wait a minute McMasters," I said.

He kept shoving.

"Wait. Goddamn it!"

"What?" he said.

"Maybe we can do some business."

"I’m listening."

"You want Grimes, right? I can give him to you."

McMasters knitted his brow and looked at me with
shrewd reserve. He hadn’t bitten yet. Maybe I should have taken a
few shots in the head before making the offer. But my damn skull was
still aching from that run in with the mugger, and I figured that
even a couple of blows might put me in the hospital for a week. Or
there was always the chance that, after a couple more punches, I
might lose my temper, throw a few punches of my own, and end up in
much deeper trouble. There was nothing to do but go ahead with it and
try to make it as convincing as I could.

"Listen to me, Sid. I can deliver Grimes to you.
The Lovingwell girl is going to try to patch things up with him.
Right now he thinks she betrayed him and that means he’s going to
try to kill her. She thinks she can arrange a meeting and get back in
his good graces. I’m supposed to be at the meeting, too. I’m
supposed to tell Grimes that Sarah had nothing to do with the bust."

McMasters snorted. "You aren’t that stupid,
Stoner. The son-of-a-bitch would kill you before you opened your
mouth."

"Not if you shoot him first."

McMasters thought it over. "Just when’s this
meeting supposed to take place?"

"In the next day or two. Grimes has gone
underground, but Sarah or one of her friends can get in touch with
him." I studied McMaster’s face and knew I had him. "It’ll
pay to let her go, Sid. It’s the only way you’re I going to get
Grimes."

"And what’s to keep her from going
underground,  too?" he said.

"Me. I’ll keep her in sight."

"She ain’t going to like you betraying her
again, Harry."

"Well," I said. "A lot of us have to
live with things we don’t like."
 

12

I wasn’t sure where I stood when McMasters said,
"You can go, Harry." So I decided to get some advice.

After cleaning up in the main floor washroom, I
walked across the lobby to a phone booth and called Jim Dugan, a
lawyer in the Riorley for whom I’d once done a considerable favor.
At the time I’d worked for him, Dugan was only a name on an office
door. No secretary, no dictaphone. Just plump, baby-faced Jim,
sitting behind a steel desk and gazing up at you with an invincible
optimism—as if yours was the case he’d been waiting for all day,
all month, all his years as a practicing attorney.

He didn’t smile at anybody, now. He didn’t have
to. He had always been a lip-chewer, a mama’s boy, and a bit of a
liar; his success had only given him the excuse to become himself.
But he was a crafty son-of-a-bitch, expert at remembering odd
statutes and at fashioning tax loopholes, which made him valuable to
the congressman from his district. Jim owed me one; and if I had ever
needed an acquaintance with political clout, now was the time.

"I’m in a real fix," I said to him after
I’d spent five minutes convincing his secretary that I was a
friend.

"One of my clients is a suspected felon, and the
cops are leaning on me. How far can I push the confidentiality line?"

"Have they sent the case to a grand jury yet?"

"I don’t think so. They don’t have enough
hard evidence. That’s why they’re leaning on me."

"No grand jury, no summons, Harry," Jim
said cheerfully. "It’s as simple as that. You don’t have
anything to worry about until you’re called to appear before a
panel."

"There are other ways they can screw me. Review
boards. Erroneous vag warrants. Parking tickets. You name it."

"How the hell did you get involved in something
like this? I thought you catered to a quieter trade. Paternity cases,
missing persons, minor thefts?"

"So did I, Jim," I said. "This whole
business has gone haywire."

"Well, I’m not sure what I can do for you,
buddy," he said.

"I know what you can do for me, buddy. You can
call that s.o.b. in the second district who uses you for a tax
shelter and get him to turn off the heat!"

"Hey, Harry," Jim said righteously.
"Congressman Giofranconi isn’t a switchboard. I can’t just
patch cords in and out of him. Not if I want to keep his business."

"Jim, I’m not the one who should be saying
this, but you owe me."

"O.K.," he said after a minute. "If it
gets bad, I’1l pull his string for you. But only if it gets bad,
Harry."

God bless pork barrel politics! I thought as I hung
up the phone.

It was half-past seven according to the clock hanging
above the Police Clerk’s counter on the other side of the lobby. I
walked over to the desk and pressed the service button.

"Can you tell me if a Miss Sarah Lovingwell has
posted bond or been released on writ this afternoon?" I asked
the clerk—a sour-looking, silver-haired old man in a stained print
shirt and black gaberdine slacks.

"The charge?"

"Murder."

He didn’t bat an eye, just ran his finger down a
work sheet until he came to Lovingwell, Sarah B. "Yeah. She was
sprung at five-ten. Habeus. "

"Thanks."

"Think nothing of it," he said drily.

Sarah’s release was a good sign. It had gone off on
schedule, which meant that McMasters had bought what I’d proposed.
At least until I could deliver Lester O. Grimes. After that . . .
well, there was always Congressman Giofranconi.

I stepped out of the courthouse into the cold evening
air. There was a light dusting of snow on the parkway, and
pedestrians were walking pigeon-toed along the sidewalks, skipping
over puddles and patches of ice. There’s a lesson here, Harry, I
said to myself. It’s bad weather
all over
town.

At nine-fifteen I pulled into the Lovingwell driveway
and got out of the Pinto. There was a light on the second floor.
Sarah’s bedroom light. I stared for a minute at the window. There
was no sign of expectation. No face pressed against the pane. Nobody
tripping eagerly downstairs to greet me. No front door thrown wide in
welcome.

Maybe she’s changed her mind again, I thought. Like
the petal-game—she trusts you, she trusts you not. Maybe you’ll
walk up there and it’ll be the "no peddlers" look and the
bum’s rush.

"Damn," I said to myself. I was actually
nervous. The way you can get at a party when you’re not sure of the
company, not sure you want to hear this one’s lies and that one’s
gossip. I might have stood in front of the Pinto until dawn if I
hadn’t seen the bedroom curtain flutter. It stirred me like a cry
for help. I walked quickly up to the door and knocked.

She opened it slowly. Her face was half-hidden by the
door, but what I could see of it told me that Sarah Lovingwell wasn’t
going to be tossing brickbats at me this Thursday evening. She wasn’t
going to be tossing anything at anyone. In the half-light of the hall
she looked wan and exhausted. She also looked very frightened.

"I wasn’t sure you were going to come
tonight," she said. Her speech was thick and slurred. "I
mean I wasn’t sure you were going to come at all."

"I said I would, didn’t I?"

She laughed freakishly, then shuddered. "People
don’t always do what they say." If she was high on something,
tripped out on soapers, I was in for a rough evening. Maybe even for
a quick trip to the emergency room at General. The tremor in her
movements, like an old
woman’s gait, scared me.

"I’ve been thinking," she said.

"Al1 alone?"

"How else do you think?"

"I meant why didn’t you ask a friend to come
over and stay with you?"

"Why?" she said. "To celebrate my
release'? To protect me from Les?" She looked at me with
dull-eyed contempt. "Or do you mean to mourn with me over poor
Papa?"

She waved her hand dismissively, the way she’d done
when I’d first spoken with her in the study on the day her father
had died. "I didn’t feel the need. And, besides, friends are
hard to come by tonight. At least, they are for me."

"Do you feel up to talking?"

"Have you given me a choice?"

"I guess not," I said.

"Then, come on. I want to show you something."
She turned from the door and walked tipsily upstairs. "I won’t
bite you," she said over her shoulder.

No, I thought. But I might bite you. Even stoned or
fatigued, Sarah was a good-looking young woman. Not beautiful, but
erotic in the prim promising way that certain convent girls can be
erotic. And I’d been working up to some kind of foolish, romantic
gesture for six lonely months. I tried not to think about it; but
when I walked into Sarah’s bedroom my arm brushed against her
breasts or she brushed against my arm, and when I looked at her face
I caught a trace of a shallow and quite deliberate smile.

The room was a shambles. Clothes, boxes, papers were
strewn everywhere. It looked as if the place had been searched with
an unfriendly hand. I sat down on the bed and stared at the mess on
the floor.

"Lose something?"

"In a way." Sarah walked to the closet—the
one in which I had found Lovingwell’s envelope—and picked up a
shoe box. "You want to know why I came home on Tuesday morning,
don’t you? Well, in a way, this is the reason." She carried
the box over to the bed and sat down beside me. "He’d taken it
from me, and I wanted to get it back before he destroyed it."

I studied Sarah’s face for a moment. "Before
we get into this, I think I better tell you that in a few minutes
you’re going to crash."

"I know," she said hoarsely. "I’m
not stoned, if that’s what you think. I just couldn’t sleep in
that cell. I couldn’t stop thinking about Les. When I got out, it
was like coming down off speed. I lost all my energy."

I wasn’t sure I trusted this giddy, exhausted
version of Sarah L. She was worn out, all right; and she looked as if
she hadn’t slept. But there was a movieland factitiousness about
the whole business—the unlit house, the disordered room, the dull,
ingenuous speech—that reminded me vaguely of the artificial way she
had spoken of her father on Wednesday afternoon. She just wasn’t
flighty enough, I suppose, for someone in the spot she was in. And
the smile she had shown me when I’d brushed against her had been as
calculated as Greenwich time. Sarah sensed what I was thinking.

"You really don’t trust me, do you?" she
said.

I didn’t answer her.

"Wel1, I guess I don’t blame you. That was a
lousy thing I said to you this afternoon. Especially since I found
out that you were telling me the truth. I mean about Sean."

"He had a hard time of it," I said.

"So did I. I’m not trying to put you off. I’m
just worn out."

Sarah picked up the shoe box and placed it on my lap.

"Now it’s yours," she said. "I
wonder how you’re going to like it?"

"What’s inside?"

"Mementos. Pictures of my mother." She
flipped the lid off the box and sorted through the pictures. "Look
at this."

She handed me a yellowed snapshot. It was a picture
of a long-faced, rather aristocratic-looking woman, standing before a
pond. The photo was of poor quality, but there was no mistaking the
resemblance between its subject and Sarah.