Dead Letter (2 page)

After a few seconds, he got the door open and we
walked into a tiled hall, decorated elegantly with a cherrywood pew
and a lacquered Chinese cabinet. "I’ll take your coat,"
he said. While he was hanging it up, I took a closer look around.
There wasn’t any question that Daryl Lovingwell had some money of
his own. What I could see of the house was furnished expensively and
well. The living room alone—all buff calf and Persian blue and
glossy burl—looked like a page out of Architectural Digest. Only ar
more masculine than their usual fare and, if possible, little more
expensive. Peering into that room was like peering through the door
of a treasure house—it made me want to turn away and rub my eyes.

"So," Lovingwell said, "where do you
wish to begin?"

"Let’s look at the safe first. Then at Sarah’s
room."

He gave me another of those sad, astonished looks—as
if to say, "how could I get myself into this"—and led me
down the hall to the study.

The wall safe in Lovingwell’s wainscoted study was
concealed behind a small portrait of Madame Recamier. It was not an
elaborate set-up—a Mosler with a dial lock and a handle release.
There were no signs that the lock had been tampered with—no drill
holes, no damage.

Which wasn’t at all good. I’d been hoping to
clear the theft up quickly, hoping that I’d come in and find file
marks on the tumblers. Then I could have told Lovingwell in good
conscience that the theft was probably the work of a professional
thief. Only that wasn’t going to happen. From the condition of the
safe and of the study, the robbery had all the earmarks of an inside
job. Which led me to step two—what they call in the P.I. handbooks
the "all-important" interview.

I sat down on a leather captain’s chair for the
"all-important," took a notebook out of my pocket to give
me something to do with my hands, and began to ask those pert
schoolboy questions that seem humdrum when you ask them and humdrum
when you think back on them, unless you’re very lucky and happen to
ask the right ones.

"Who else knew about the safe," I said to
Lovingwell.

"Any number of people knew where it was, if
that’s what you mean. Only I knew the combination." He sat
down across from me on the corner of a huge mahogany desk and smiled
ruefully. "Of course, that can’t be true, can it? Somebody
else obviously knew the combination or I wouldn’t be in this
pickle."

"There are many ways to open a lock, Professor,"
I said. "Knowing the combination in advance is just the easiest.
Was the safe open or shut when you discovered the theft?"

"Just as you see it," he said. "I
opened it on Sunday morning to begin revision of the document and
discovered that the damn thing was gone. I told myself I must have
forgotten it or mislaid it at the lab. It’s amazing the kind of
lies you’ll entertain when you’re desperate. I put the document
in the safe, all right. I put it in on Saturday evening when I came
home from Sloane."

"Are you in the habit of taking papers home with
you from the lab?"

"Oh my, no. As you might guess, they don’t
encourage that sort of thing."

"Since the morning that you opened the safe, has
anyone but you touched the tumblers?"

"Not that I know of."

"No maid? No housekeeper?"

Lovingwell began to laugh. "Do you think my
daughter would permit me to hire a maid?"

"She permits you to own this house," I
said.

"If it’s any comfort, Sarah shares your point
of view, the degree that she spends as little time as she can here."

"Was she here this weekend? On Saturday
evening?" .

"No," he said. "She was not here in
the evening. She came in on Sunday morning and stayed through the
afternoon. She goes on excursions quite often since she’s become
involved with the ecology movement. She belongs a little club with a
storefront office on Calhoun Street. The Friends of Nature. They take
hikes and travel to parks. This afternoon, for instance, they’ve
scheduled a trip to Whitewater Lake."

"She tells you where she’s going?"

"We leave each other notes," Lovingwell
said.

He opened the top drawer of the desk and pulled out a
slip of paper. "This is our Saturday correspondence. I have
Sunday’s, too. I thought they might be of importance, so I kept
them."

I looked at the slip marked Saturday, December 13,
1980:

FATHER: Sloane in afternoon. Home at 7:00.
SARAH: Miami forest in morning. Clifton in
afternoon. Don’t expect me home tonight.

"She’s no longer a child, you know,"
Lovingwell said a little defensively. "She’s twenty-four years
old. When she says she won’t be home for the evening, I don’t
interrogate her."

"She has a boyfriend?"

"More than one, I think," he said
delicately.

"Does one of them have a beard and drive a blue
Dodge van?"

"That would be Sean O’Hara. He’s the son of
a colleague. Why do you ask?"

"No reason, really," I said. "I saw
him pick up your daughter and I was curious. It comes from the job or
maybe the job comes from it. I’ve never been able to figure that
out."

"That interests me," Lovingwell said.
"Because I’ve never been able to figure out why I do what I
do, either. Occupations are a little like childhoods, aren’t they?
They seem to be the most banal and incomprehensible parts of our
lives. Do you know that I don’t even like what I do! Isn’t that
remarkable? All this fuss about my work and I don’t even care for
it. It’s my daughter whom I care for. If I wasn’t in so bloody
deep, if there weren’t so many people and so much money dependent
on me, I’d quit and go hiking with Sarah. There’s a lot of that
sort of thing in my soul. You see, I don’t really like to sit in a
room, solving dry little puzzles." He smiled at me pleasantly.

"Your job must be a bit like that, Mr. Stoner."

I smiled back at him. "Not so dry, I’m afraid.
If it were only a puzzle, if people weren’t involved . . ."

"I’m offended," he said. "If you
think what I do doesn’t involve people, why would I need your
services?"

"True enough."

"Sarah is my only child. She’s the only thing
in the world I care about. This is a very human problem, believe me.
I want you to save my life, Mr. Stoner. I want you to save Sarah. Can
you do it?"

Could I do it? Could I rescue someone in love? I
looked up at the Professor’s long, shavian face and shook my head.
Under different circumstances we might have sat together in that
plush, monied room and had a doleful chat about what we would and
wouldn’t do for love. But I was on his time; and I didn’t know
him well enough; and anyway I’d had that chat some ten thousand
times that fall and winter after Kate Davis had left me for Berkeley
and two years of graduate work in sociology.

"I’m not in the saviour business," I said
a little bitterly. "At least, I like to think I’m not. But
things may not be as bad as they seem." I took another quick
look around the handsome room. "Something’s not right here. I
mean beyond the obvious fact of the theft. And frankly I haven’t
got enough information to figure it out."

He sat back on the desk and peered at me warily, as
if weren’t quite sure he wanted to hear what I was about say. "You
can’t help me, then?"

"I didn’t say that. I don’t know yet if I
can help you or not. All I can tell you now is that something isn’t
right here.

He stroked the side of his nose with a single finger
and his gray eyes lost their cautious look. "Explain," he
said. And for a moment I felt as if I were in the classroom with the
good Professor at its head. Staring directly into my face, with that
finger beside his nose, he looked, for all the world, like a
character out of a Dickens novel. I figured he was listening with his
head now, as well as with his heart. So I made it as simple and
complete as I could.

"Let’s assume for the moment that your
daughter did commit the crime. Let’s say she came back to the house
on Saturday night, after you’d gone to sleep, opened the safe, took
the document, went back to Calhoun Street or wherever she was
staying, then came home again on Sunday morning as if nothing had
happened. For the time being that seems like the most probable
hypothesis. The safe shows no sign of damage, which means that
whoever opened it either knew the combination or picked the lock.
Lock-picking is an art that takes years to master; so unless this
crime was the work of a professional burglar—and I’m not ready to
rule that out completely—it was certainly an inside job. Which is
your daughter. Your daughter had a motive or, at least, you’ve said
she had. Since I don’t know what the document is about, I don’t
know how it relates to her politics. But I’ll take your word that
it does. Now, here’s the problem:

"Even if your daughter found the combination to
the safe, even if she had sufficient motive to burgle her own house,
why would she do it last Saturday night? How could she possibly know
you were going to bring top-secret papers home with you on that
evening? Unless you dropped a hint, either on the phone or in
conversation, that you were planning to revise your papers on Sunday
morning—"

He shook his head and said, "That’s hardly
something one would ‘hint’ about, is it?"

"Then she couldn’t have known it would be
there. Not without somebody’s help—somebody at Sloane or the
University. Somebody who can keep an eye on your research."

"A spy?" Lovingwell said incredulously.

I said, "That’s one possibility."

"And the other?"

"That Sarah wasn’t looking for the document at
all."

Lovingwell lifted his finger from his nose and gawked
at me. "But that’s crazy."

"Suppose there was something else in the safe,
something Sarah wanted to get her hands on. And suppose, by sheer
accident, on the night she’d chosen to crack the safe, she also
found a top-secret document along with whatever she was originally
after. Stranger things have happened, believe me."

"There was nothing in the safe," he said
firmly. "Nothing outside the document that would have been of
the slightest interest to Sarah."

"All right," I said. "Let’s go with
the first theory, that she was working with an accomplice. Maybe the
safe can help us with that. I’m going to try to lift some latent
prints off the lock."

"Do you want me to open the safe, then?"

"No." I took a brush and a bottle of powder
from the fingerprint kit and walked over to Madame Récamier—courtesan
who was so beautiful and mysterious that a color was named after her,
which, when you think about is about as rare a compliment as a man
could pay a woman. I turned her face gently to the wall and began to
dust the tumblers.

"I’m going to need your fingerprints, too,
Professor," I said over my shoulder.

He said, "Fine."

* * *

Lifting a print is a little like trying to pick up a
penny while you’re wearing gloves. It took me ten minutes to get
the first one onto the rubber stopper. There were two others on the
lock but, judging from their location, they belonged to the same
hand. Lovingwell watched me as I worked, peering over my shoulder
with the sort of blank uncertainty with which he’d watch a mechanic
repair his car. Toward the end of the job his presence began to
bother me, but not because he was looking on. I liked Lovingwell in a
mild way. I liked his accent. I liked his eccentric looks and the
candor he’d shown about his job and about his daughter. I liked him
enough that I didn’t like what I was finding out from the safe.
There was one set of prints on the tumbler and one on the handle.
Just one. No smudges. No other prints anywhere on the safe. And
that’s what I didn’t like. They were crystal clear prints, fresh
as dew. Perfect and perfectly impossible.

"Are you sure no one has cleaned the safe in the
last two days?" I asked Lovingwell as I packed up the kit.

"Lord, you’re a suspicious fellow. I told you,
no. But why do you ask?"

I looked back at the Mosler and said, "There are
prints on here. Perfectly preserved. I don’t know whose prints they
are at this point. I’m not even sure I want to know."

"Well, I’m no detective," he said. "But
it seems to me those prints would be a boon in helping you solve the
case."

I shook my head.

"And why not?"

"This thing should be covered with latents. Even
if the burglar wore gloves, your prints would still be all over the
safe. Try to open a lock without shifting your hand and you’ll see
what I mean. Every time you revolve the dial, you grasp the tumbler
in a new spot. There are only one set of prints on this safe. And
they’re perfect."

Lovingwell pulled sharply at his beard and gave me a
bewildered look. "What does that mean?"

"It means that someone took some pains to wipe
off the safe and whoever did it must have done it between the time
you last closed the safe and now."

"Why would anyone do that?"