Dead Letter (18 page)

I got up from the chair and walked over to the wall
hung with photographs. His face was everywhere—finger by his nose
and devilish little beard jutting out like a dagger. I studied one of
the pictures. It had been taken at a Christmas party. Lovingwell was
sitting at the head of the table. The festive party hat on his head
made him look like a mischievous elf. There was a blonde woman at his
side, also wearing a party-hat and gazing at him with mild amusement.
She was a striking-looking woman with a high-cheeked, triangular
face, puffed past its prime but still recognizably a smart, stylish
face.

"Who’s this?" I said to Miss Hemann.

She held a pair of half-frame glasses to her nose and
peered at the picture. "That’s Mrs. O’Hara."

"What kind of woman is she?" I asked her.

"Awful," Beth Hemann said and clapped a
hand to her mouth. I laughed. "I shouldn’t have said that,"
she said with another blush. "I have no right to say that."

"Oh, hell, Miss Hemann," I said. "I
won’t tell anyone."

She pulled sharply at her plain white blouse.
"Professor O’Hara won’t be back for the rest of the day. So
you see there’s nothing more I can do for you."

"Oh, Miss Hemann," I said, giving her a
wink. "Don’t say that, darling. There’s no telling what you
could do for me."

She smiled. "You’re full of blarney, Mr.
Stoner."

"Where does Mrs. O’Hara live, Miss Hemann? In
Clifton?"

She nodded and gave me an address on Bishop Street.

"Are you going to try to talk to Meg?" she
said.

I shrugged. "Sooner or later, someone’s going
to tell me something I want to hear. Why do you ask?"

"I don’t like her," she said plainly.
"And it would please me if she were involved in Professor
Lovingwell’s death."

You never really know about other people. What I had
thought was a shallow loyalty to her boss was beginning to look
something very much like love in this plain-spoken, plain-looking
young woman. It gave her character and a prettiness born of anger.
There was a shape under that drab white wrapper and, given the access
of real feeling, it began to swell attractively. She caught me
looking at her and, this time, she winked and bit rather charmingly
at her lower lip.

"You’re a surprising girl, Miss Hemann,"
I said.

"I like to think so."

"Is there some reason why you think Meg O’Hara
might be involved in Lovingwell’s death?"

"No," she said. "It just wouldn’t
surprise me, that’s all. She’s not a pleasant woman."

"You care a great deal for Professor O’Hara,
don’t you?"

She eyed me coolly. "That hoyden has made his
life a shambles. She’s ruined his marriage; she’s spoiled his
son; and now she’s taken his home."

"They’re divorced°?" I asked.

She nodded. "They’re about to be. Now I’ve
told you quite enough. And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t
repeat what I’ve said."

"It’ll be our
little secret," I promised her.

***

The O’Hara house on Bishop Street was one of the
half-dozen Frank Lloyd Wright originals scattered throughout the
city. This was one of his early designs—stolidly
nineteenth-centuryish, but still quite interesting. Beneath the
Victorian facade—the round, pillared porch, snow-filled
flowerboxes, and massive windows—you could see the
twentieth-century mind at work in bold curves and surprising planes.
The house made me think of Phidias or Rodin or whoever it was who had
said of statuary that the design is already there in the stone. Like
a half-carved block of marble, the genial, rambling home made a new
language of dead proprieties.

It couldn’t have been easy to give up a house like
that. It wouldn’t have been for me. But then O’Hara’s divorce
didn’t really interest me. Meg O’Hara interested me. At least I
was interested in what she had to say about Daryl Lovingwell.

She answered the door on the third knock. Blonde,
full in the face and upper body. Quite handsome, nevertheless, with a
thin crooked mouth like the beak of a tortoise. She was dressed out
of Saks—raw silk blouse open at the neck and loose, black slacks
that shook like jello when she moved her legs. She asked me what I
wanted in a hoarse voice that smelled of whiskey and Sen-Sen.

When I told her I was working for Sarah Lovingwell,
her puffy eyes plummeted to the welcome mat, as if I’d dropped
something untidy at her feet.

"I must look a mess," she said, fussing
with her hair. "C’mon in."

I followed her down the front hall to a bright blue
sitting room, furnished fussily in ivory orientals and nubby
off-white furniture. She seated me on a couch and walked through a
door into what must have been the kitchen. A few minutes later she
came back out with a silver coffee server on a silver tray. She
handed me a bone china demitasse and asked, "Sugar or cream?"
She was Daryl Lovingwell’s kind of girl, all right.

I told her I didn’t want sugar or cream, and she
nodded with approval. "You like it black," she said. "So
do I."

Meg O’Hara sat down opposite me on a wingback chair
and looked me over scrupulously. It was one of the few times in my
life that I felt like a woman was undressing me with her eyes. "I’ve
never seen a private detective before," she said curiously. "Are
they all as good-looking
as you?"

"Yes," I said.

She troubled her coffee with a tiny silver spoon and
made bedroom eyes at me. "You have a classically handsome face,
Mr. Stoner. A little bruised but handsome. Does it bother you that I
like the way you look?"

"No. I like the way I look, too."

"Since we’re agreed," she said, putting
the saucer down on a smoked-glass coffee table, "what say we
find out if beauty is skin deep?"

I grinned and thought of Sarah. "What say we
skip along to the cigarettes and small talk?"

"As you will," she said casually. "Although
I want you to know that I wasn’t kidding. Whiskey and fucking
aren’t laughing matters in this household."

"I wasn’t kidding, either. Let’s talk
first."

"About what?" she said.

"About you and Daryl Lovingwell."

She sat back in her chair with the look of a
professor who’s just been disappointed by one of his favorite
students. "Get out of here," she said.

"That was a quick romance, Mrs. O’Hara,"
I said. "Do you mind telling me why you want me to go?"

"Yes. I mind."

"Why don’t I tell you, then?" I said,
moving forward on the couch so I could get a better look at her eyes.
It wasn’t going to hurt to stir the waters a bit. With a woman of
her temper, there was no telling what might pop up. "You were
having an affair with Daryl Lovingwell. And he wanted to break it
off. He’d grown tired of you. But you didn’t want him to leave,
did you? The shooting on Tuesday could have been an accident. I’d
believe it."

I’d watched her face closely as I’d run through
my spiel. She’d showed interest when I’d spoken of the affair,
shifting her eyes slightly to the right as right-handed people will
do when they’re asked a question or are answering one. She was
asking herself how much I really knew. But when I got to the
accusation of murder, her eyes settled comfortably on mine and her
thin, twisted mouth relaxed in a loose, predatory smile. I hadn’t
struck home. I hadn’t even come close. And she knew I was bluffing.

"That’s a very interesting story," she
said, wetting her lips. "Now let me tell you one of my own.
Michael put you up to this. Michael or that twig of a woman he calls
a lover. There’s nothing he’d like better than to make people
think I was a criminal. Suspected murderers don’t generally fare
well in community property hearings, do they? Well, you go back to
Michael, old stick, and tell him your bluff didn’t work. He should
have known better than to think I could be scared by a faggot
detective."

"Trying to blacken your husband’s character
isn’t going to help your case before a judge, Mrs. O’Hara. Your
affair with Lovingwell is well documented."

"I don’t know where you’ve been getting your
information, beauty. But my affair with Daryl Lovingwell ended six
years ago. And I’ll tell you something else. The only reason
someone would have killed that man was money. That was all he was
interested in, that was all he ever thought about. You go find
somebody Daryl was scheming with, you go dig up some dirty plot that
involved thousands of dollars and some underhanded deal—you’ll
find your killer, all right. Now, get the hell back to Michael and
tell him he’ll have to do better than this. Who the hell are you,
anyway?"

"A faggot detective," I said, "working
for Sarah Lovingwell."

For a second time, Sarah’s name gave her pause. "I
have nothing against the girl," she said quickly. "Her
mother and I were close friends once."

Allowing me to see anything more than the bitchy,
temperamental side of her character had a curious effect on Meg
O’Hara. Her face turned bright red beneath the powder and she
pounded herself on the legs with clenched fists. It wasn’t
embarrassment; it was fury. She was enraged at herself for dropping
her guard, like a fighter who slaps his own head when he misses a
punch. She must have had a lot of enemies in her lifetime, I thought.

She caught me feeling sorry for her and jumped to her
feet. "Get the hell out of here!" she shouted. "Get
the hell out of my house!"

"It’s not yours yet, honey," I said.

"Get out!" she shrieked.

I walked down the hall and back out into the cold
December afternoon. I hadn’t really learned much—all Meg O’Hara
had done was confirm what Sarah had told me about her father’s
greed. But it was a confirmation. And when I added that greed to the
missing document and the way he’d been talking about Sarah and the
murder itself, it made the espionage idea seem more and more like a
good idea.
 

16

Before returning to the Delores, I drove south on
Vine to the Clifton Plaza—a flat, ugly line of shops fronted by a
huge parking lot—and pulled in beside Bullet’s hi-fi store.
Through the picture window I could see Bullet jawing at the register
with a customer. Behind them, in the showroom itself, Larry Soldi was
wiring a speaker into the console. I waited until Lurman had parked
in the rear of the lot before getting out of the Pinto.

"Harry!" Bullet said cheerfully as I walked
through the door. "Where you been? I’ve been looking for you
in the Bee all week."

"I’ve got some trouble, Bullet. I need to talk
to Larry."

"What am I?" he said. "Chopped liver?"

"This just isn’t something you can help me
with."

"Larry!" Bullet barked.

Soldi ambled out from the rear of the store—a
gaunt, chicken-necked, thirty-year-old white man with a lumpy,
cheerful face and the hang-dog posture of the hired man. That was
Larry’s fate—to play second fiddle throughout his life to the
more enterprising soloists like Bullet. He could have had it a lot
worse. Bullet was better than a decent employer. But in spite of the
fact that he had a good job and seemed happy in his work, Soldi
always struck me as a sad case. One of those proverbial types for
whom the Army had been the only moment in life that wasn’t tainted
by the past. I knew Larry enjoyed talking about the war, his voice
mellowed when he spoke of it, and the words spilled out 
energetically, instead of lumbering, as they usually did, out of his
throat. But casting him strictly in the role of loser was just an
unflattering bit of condescension on my part. It wasn’t Larry I
felt sorry for in that mood, but the supine and childish part of
myself that hated work and, maybe, the very idea of work itself.

I saluted him as he walked up to the register, and he
said, "Hey, Harry!"

"Hey, yourself."

"What can I do for you?" he said, tucking
his thumbs into his pants’ pockets.

"You ever heard of an ex-Marine named Lester
Grimes?"

He shook his head.

"Well, the guy’s a psychopath. A real
shoot-’em-up, gun-totin’ maniac. And I want to know how to defend
myself against him."

"You can call the cops," Bullet said,
reaching for the phone.

"No. I already have police protection. What I
need is a profile—a description of the way a gung-ho ex-Marine
might go about killing a civilian like me."

"What kind of training did he have?" Soldi
said and, already, his voice had taken on assurance.

"He was a weapons specialist."

"That’s bad. He’ll know how to use
automatics and, if he served in ’Nam, he’1l know about
booby-trapping, too."

"This guy fancies himself a cowboy," I
said.

Soldi laughed. "We didn’t see a lot of cowboys
in my outfit. Unless you can call the recon people cowboys."

"LURPs?" I said.

He nodded. "I only knew one. A guy named Frisco.
He’d been in ’Nam since sixty-six. He wore his hair long, like a
hippie’s. Had a gold earring in his ear. A leather headband. A
peace emblem on his fatigue jacket. He’d popped so much dex his
teeth had turned black. And I mean nobody told Frisco to shape up.
Nobody even came close enough to try. The dude always carried two
.45s on him, even in camp." Soldi shook his head. "Recon
guys were freaky, Harry. You must have seen a few of them, so you
know. Every night for months they’d dress up in tiger suits, paint
their faces, walk off the LZ and whoosh!—they’d be gone into the
jungle. They’d be out there in the bush all alone until morning.
Doing recon on VC base camps. And killing. Scarey, man. Real scarey.
A lot of our own troops used to look away when Frisco’d walk by,
because it was like looking at a living dead man, you know. Grunts
made jokes about it. Making the sign of the cross after Frisco’d
pass by and shit like that. But you can bet your ass they never
pulled that crap when he was looking. ’Cause he’d have killed
them on the spot and nobody higher up would have said a thing. I hate
to say it, but if the dude you’re talking about is anything like
Frisco, you’re in big trouble."