Dead Letter (15 page)

I shuddered a little. "Yes, he did."

"Oh, that was one of his favorites. The humble
man caught in a world he didn’t understand and forced to labor at a
job he despised. He was so clever with other people. He had an
unerring sense of what they expected of him. And he would play it
their way so well that, after awhile, it didn’t seem to be their
way but his own. It was like a game to him and the stakes were
trust."

"Why?" I asked her. "Why would he do
that?"

"Hate," she said. "Especially after
Mother’s infidelity, he had a boundless contempt for other people
and a greed for what was precious to them. He would talk about how
stupid this one was. How easy it would be to steal his grant, his
job, his wife. When he was like that, it was as if he were talking
about killing people, about taking their souls from them. He didn’t
speak that way often. But when he did, in that quaint well-mannered
voice . . . it was terrifying."

Sarah looked at me shrewdly. "It’s hard to
believe, isn’t it?"

"Almost impossible," I said.

"But isn’t evil always like that? Banal,
innocuous-seeming? Daryl Lovingwell just added a little paint, a bit
of superficial flash. At heart he was a killer. A sociopath with an
inexhaustible sense of having been wronged. Perhaps he had been. In
spite of the money, he had had a hard life. Bad childhood. Bad
marriage. Bad daughter," she said with a tremor in her voice.
"But that doesn’t justify . . . his hate. I don’t know how
that could be justified. Or explained. I don’t why he killed my
mother. Or why he hated me. Perhaps that’s why I stuck around
waiting for an answer. Or a resolution."

Neither of us said a word for a second. There didn’t
seem to be anything left to say, because she hadn’t described a
man, she’d described a demon, a vice—something smooth, dark, and
inexplicable. Men weren’t like that, even bad men. And I’d seen
enough bad men to know. Yet there was no question that she believed
in what she’d said. I’d wanted to believe her, too, for the
simple reason that I liked her. But her description was too vague,
too uncompromising, too full of smoke. It was a I piece of personal
mythology—a legend built of years of loveless resentment. And like
any legend, whatever truth it contained was hidden away in a nimbus
of fears and wishes. I didn’t tell her that. I didn’t know how.

Instead I asked a detective’s question—one that
had an answer. "Can you prove it? What you said about your
mother?"

She shrugged. "How do you prove that someone has
been driven insane? It’s such common mischief, isn’t it? Husbands
hating wives, wives hating husbands? Madness seeping in like damp. I
know this much; he was poisoning her. Perhaps not physically, but
mentally. One night when she was frightened she brought me into her
bedroom to stay with her. I was fifteen at the time. It was the year
before she died. She held me in her arms and said, 'Listen.' At first
I didn’t hear it. It was so soft and soothing. But what it was
saying—" Sarah shivered. "Awful things," she said.

"He was whispering to her through the walls—the
way children do before they sleep. Talking so reasonably about what
he was going to do with her money, about all the things he would buy.
If only she’d cooperate, he said. There are pills on the
nightstand. There’s a bread knife in the pantry, fastened on a
magnet beneath the china cabinet. I sharpened it today. In the
silverware drawer, a steak knife. In the bathroom, razor blades.
Iodine. If only she’d cooperate.

"Now do you understand why I despised him? He’d
been doing that to her for years. For years out of greed and hatred
he’d been torturing her to death."

Sarah sat back on the couch and stared forlornly at
the sheaf of photographs. "I would have killed him myself," 
she said, "if I wasn’t such a coward."

"Who did kill him, Sarah?"

"I don’t know."

"But you were there," I said. "You’ve
admitted that you went back to your house around noon."

"I didn’t go all the way up the street,"
she said. "I changed my mind before I got to the house."

"Why?"

"Because he was there. I saw his car in the
driveway and decided it wasn’t worth a confrontation. He would have
lied to me, anyway. I decided to wait until he was gone to search the
house for the photographs; so I went back to the club. Then around
one Miss Hemann called me up. She seemed so hysterical—I just
went."

I sat back on the couch and tried to decide what to
make of what Sarah had told me. There had been so many
inconsistencies in Daryl Lovingwell’s behavior—and in the reports
of his behavior—that, sooner or later, I would have begun to think
of him as a guilty party. I think I already had begun to do that,
though as guilty of what I still wasn’t sure. Perhaps, in light of
her chilling monologue, simply of having made Sarah’s life
miserable. In any event, it was time to start turning some of my
"intuition" to account. To start taking Sarah (and, to a
lesser degree, Rose Weinberg) seriously. It was either that or a
return to the ambivalence I’d felt since the start of the case. And
from Sarah’s description, Daryl Lovingwell was not a man one ought
to have felt ambivalent about. Time to take sides, Harry, I said to
myself. At least, provisionally. Time to start thinking of the
Professor as a man who had more than a little to hide. And to see
what could be made of his inconsistencies if I assumed, for the
moment, that Sarah had been telling the truth. "That was the
second phone call you got that morning," I said to her, talking
it out. "The first one was from your father. What did he want?"

"He wanted to know when I was coming home that
afternoon."

"I thought you two left each other notes about
that sort of thing."

"We did.""What did you write that
morning? Can you remember?"

"I think I told him that I’d be at the club
until twelve. And then I’d be coming home before the rally at the
museum."

"But you didn’t go all the way home, did you?"

"No. Like I said, I chickened out when I saw his
car."

"So, your father called at—"

"Eleven-forty."

"Not to find out when you’d be coming home. He
already knew that. But to find out if you’d be coming home."

"Yes, I guess that’s true."

"And then he left his office in a rush and asked
Miss Hemann not to forward any calls. What does that sound like to
you?"

Sarah looked at me cunningly. "Like he was
expecting somebody at the house and didn’t want me around."

"That’s what it looks like," I said. "And
it wasn’t me he was expecting, so it could have been someone else
who had a reason for not wanting to be seen by you. Why would one of
your father’s associates not want you to see him?"

"Maybe it was a woman," Sarah said quickly.
"Wouldn’t that be something? If Father had been carrying on an
affair behind my back!"

"We’ve got to be more certain than that if
we’re going to keep you out of prison."

Sarah smiled at me with pleasure. "Then I passed
the test?" she said. "You believed what I told you about
Father."

I said, "I believe that you didn’t kill him."

"Why?"

"Because I have to believe someone." Which
was the absolute truth. I told her. I picked up my cup and walked
into the kitchen. "We have two goals now. First, we have to find
out who did kill your father—that is, if you don’t want to take
the fall for his death. And second, we have to stay alive to fulfill
our first goal; and that means eliminating Lester Grimes."

"What do you mean ‘eliminating’?" Sarah
said with horror.

"Come over here, Sarah." I took her by the
wrist and pulled her to the front window. "You see that gray
Plymouth parked across from the lobby?"
 

She nodded.
"That’s an
unmarked police car. The men in that car have been assigned to tail
you. The only reason you’re out of jail at all is that I managed to
convince Sid McMasters that you could be more useful to him outside
than in."

"What do you mean, 'useful'?"

"McMasters wants Grimes," I said simply.

"So, that’s it," she said. "And what
makes you think I’ll go along with this?"

"I don’t know that you will," I said. "I
only expect you to think about it. Grimes is bent on revenging
himself against you and me. Nothing I say is going to change that.
And nothing you want to believe in is going to change that, either.
If you want to stay alive, you’re going to have to think about it."

"He’s my friend." she said between her
teeth.

"He’s also a psychopathic killer. And no
number of principles, good or bad, are going to rule him or convince
him of your innocence. He thinks you’re a class traitor, Sarah. And
he’s going to execute you."

Sarah blew air out of her mouth and nodded a kind of
concession. "I’ll think about it," she said.
 

14

Sarah didn’t feel much like talking to me for the
next ten minutes. She sat on the sofa with her chin on her hands and
stared at the room the way animals sometimes stare at the bars of
their cages. I made a fresh pot of coffee in the kitchen and told
myself that it wasn’t my fault, that if you play with men like
Grimes you’re liable to get hurt. But it didn’t make me feel
happier. I liked the girl. After what she’d told me that morning, I
liked her enough not to want to make her life any more painful than
it had already been. Which may have been a sneaky way of saying that
I wanted out. Or, maybe, that I wanted to make it all better. A
friend used to tell me the two were one.

I brought the coffee pot into the living room and set
it down on an end table. After a time, Sarah got up and flopped down
across from me. I pushed a cup of coffee toward her and she prodded
it with a forefinger as if it were alive and dangerous.

"What now?" she said unhappily.

"I’m working for you, ma’am. You tell me."

She worked her jaw noiselessly and looked at me
sideways, so that for a moment she looked like a ma’am from
Avignon. "What the hell," she said and clapped her hands
together. "I can’t fight everybody."

I wasn’t so sure of that and told her so. Which
pleased her."

I guess I better call Sean and find out whether Les
has been in touch with him," she said. "I guess I’d
better find out where I stand."

She looked at me with a trace of confusion in her
blue eyes. "This doesn’t mean I’m going to go along with the
deal you’ve arranged. I haven’t committed any crimes, yet. I’m
not going to compromise myself pointlessly."

"I understand."

"And don’t patronize me," she said. "You
may not understand it, but my politics are important to me. So are my
friends. I wouldn’t have survived childhood if it weren’t for
Sean."

"You two are close?" I asked.

She smiled to herself—a very assured smile. "Would
that make a difference to you?"

I hadn’t really thought about it, save in passing.
Partly because I was out of practice and partly because I hadn’t
made up my mind about whether or not I was ready to take that kind of
chance again. On the surface it seemed too hopelessly complicated by
old wounds and new animosities, by distrusts and betrayals. Now it
occurred to me, as I watched her smiling that uncanny, Sarah-like
smile, that it might make a difference to me. The trouble was I had
the uneasy feeling that I could never be completely sure that it
would make the same difference to her. Which made me think of Kate,
and the letters that weren’t being answered.

"What are you thinking about?" she said
with a lively grin.

"You don’t want to know what I’m thinking
about."

"But I do," she said, toying with the top
button of her shirt.

"Cut it out, Sarah."

She looked me over for a second, top to toe. I was a
little afraid she was about to ask me my sign. "It wouldn’t be
hard to like you," she said speculatively.

"We’d never get along, but it wouldn’t be
hard to like you."

She sat back in her chair and pondered it like a
proposition. "I think I do like you."

"Give it a minute more," I said.
"Something’ll come to you."

She laughed and pushed back from the coffee table.

"C’mon," she said, standing up. "I
want to test out an old adage."

"Which is?"

"Politics make strange bedfellows."

It was my turn to laugh. "You are the strangest
damn girl! Just ten minutes ago you wanted to kill me."

"Ten minutes ago I’d forgotten what you did
for me last night. Of course, if you aren’t interested . . ."
Her voice trailed off and she spun on her heel like an actress making
a well-timed exit. Well, Harry? I said to myself. Are you interested?
Or are you going to keep on waiting for Kate to call? Oddly enough,
it only took me a second to decide.

I caught her by the hand and pulled her down beside
me on the armchair. She smelled sweetly of sweat and denim. "Sarah,"
I said, looking into her eyes. "Do you ever stop acting?"