Dead Letter (29 page)

"Where’d they take him?" I asked one of
the agents."Christ Hospital," he said. "We heard you
dropped Grimes."

"I shot him," I said.

"Good work. He needed killing." He looked
closely at my face and said, "You did what you had to do."

He was a middle-aged man with a tired face and
blood-shot eyes. I’d like to think that he meant what he said. Not
because it was true, although it was as true as that kind of apology
can be. But because a larger part of me than I liked to admit didn’t
care whether it was true or not. I wasn’t feeling guilty about
Grimes, just numbed and disgusted and grateful it was done. That’s
what worried me about what the FBI man had said. Because if he didn’t
care and I didn’t either, then it was just too damn easy to kill a
man.

One of the cops drove me to Christ and dropped me at
the Emergency Room. They’d already put Lurman on ice. When one of
the residents asked me if I wanted to take a look at the body, I
asked him why.

He shrugged. "Some people like a last look. It
makes them feel like it’s over."

I made myself go down to the morgue and take a last
look at Lurman, who had been a decent man. But seeing his corpse only
made me feel sad and sorry, although that unsettling grief made me
think better of myself than I had an hour before.

I checked in on Sarah before going back to the
Delores. The duty nurse gave me the only good news of the day. She
was out of the coma. She was going to survive a nightmare that was
almost ended. All but the very last bit.

Sid McMasters drove me home at three in the morning.
He didn’t say anything until he got to the front door of the
Delores and then he said, "You did a good job."

"I’m not so sure," I said wearily. "What
does this mean about Sarah? Where does she stand?"

McMasters looked at me unhappily. "Harry, I’ve
tried to see it every way but the girl. And none of it works. We got
a court order to look into Lovingwell’s safety deposit box. We
cracked it last night, right before you and your FBI friends brought
the whole force to Linda Green’s apartment. You know what we found
inside?"

He handed me a slip of paper.

“
I’m going to hill you, " it said. “For
what you did to my mother. "

"There were dozens of them," McMasters
said.

I looked at the notepaper. "Anybody could have
written this."

"They were typed on her typewriter, Harry. And
when you take them and how she felt about her father and the fact
that she was on the scene at the time of the murder. . . her best bet
is to cop a plea. Insanity. I’d be willing to sit for it, and I’ve
never said that before in my life."

"She didn’t kill him, Sid."

"You keep saying that, Harry. But saying isn’t
proof."

"Lovingwell was blackmailing Michael O’Hara.
He’d been blackmailing him for seven years. O’Hara had motive and
opportunity."

"Can you prove it?" he said, perking up.

"After this morning I can. I may even get a
confession for you."

"Why don’t I just pick him up then?"

I shook my head. "He’s not going anywhere."

Only that wasn’t the reason. After all the lies,
after all the divagations, after that bloody night, I was owed the
chance to hear the truth about Lovingwell. I’d earned it. What was
more, I needed it. And not simply to save Sarah. But to reassure
myself. Putting an end to the Lovingwell case was truly putting an
end to "it."

"I’ll let you know, Sid. By noon."

He thought it over. "All right, Harry. We’ll
play it your way until noon. Then I want to know exactly what you’ve
got." He sighed heavily. "I guess you’ve earned that much
after what you did tonight."

I got out of the car and started for the lobby.

McMasters leaned across the seat and called me back.
"By the way, we found out where the suicide gun came from."

"Where?" I said.

"Lovingwell bought it three months ago. Right
about the time these notes started coming in."
 

27

At nine-thirty the next morning I parked the Pinto on
St. Clair and walked under the bare branches of the elms and oaks to
the Physics Building on the south side of the street. Miss H Hemann
wasn’t at her desk, but O’Hara was in his office—just as he
said he’d be. He asked me to close the door when I walked in and I
did. He looked ill in the gray morning light. His face was drawn and
there were great scorched circles under his eyes. A pile of letters
and documents was sitting on his desk.

"I’ve been sorting through some of my
mementos," he said, passing a hand over the loose papers. "It
may be my last opportunity."

He looked up at me. It wasn’t a plaintive look. I
didn’t feel any pity for him and he knew it. It was a look of
resentment, as if he held me responsible for McPhail and for
Lovingwell and for his son. It was a look I didn’t completely
understand. I told him again what I knew and what I suspected. He
plucked a letter from the pile on his desk.

"Daryl," he said absently. "How does
one explain Daryl? How does one account for that much hatred? For
that much malevolence? I’m a scientist, Stoner, and I can’t
answer the question, although I’ve tried. My God, I can show you,
by computation, why space has to be curved. I can debate with you how
far quantum physics may imply a deity in the universe. But Daryl . .
."

I didn’t say anything. I wanted to hear him say it
in his own way. I wanted to see it come together once and for all.
And for his own reasons, he wanted to say it, too. Perhaps because
he’d been holding it in for so damn long. He took a deep breath and
started to talk.

"In 1973 I became friends with Claire
Lovingwell, Daryl’s wife. She was in a very bad way and I felt
sorry for her. She’d been a handsome woman and very bright. I just
couldn’t stand to see her go down all alone. We became friends. She
confided in me. With my help she made arrangements to rewrite her
will. What would have gone to Daryl at her death was set aside in a
trust fund for her daughter Sarah. A trust over which Daryl had no
control. At least that was the way it was intended to work.

"Of course, at the time, I had no idea how
malevolent Daryl could be. His behavior toward Claire while vicious
was motivated by a sexual jealousy that was partly understandable.
And then she was prone to exaggeration in her mental state. Who knew
how much of what she said was true and how much was paranoid
delusion?

"So when Charley told me that Lovingwell had
approached him about our paper, I thought it was in retaliation for
what I’d done for Claire. A fit of pique and jealousy. I didn’t
think any more of it, then. But I grossly underestimated my man. A
serious error for a mathematician. The most serious error of my life.

"Daryl got to Charley. Using his powers as
chairman. And using innuendo and lies. He panicked the boy into
believing that I was betraying him sexually with Claire. In a moment
of fatal weakness he gave Lovingwell those damn letters. And that was
it—that was the end. He had me and there was nothing I could do."

I didn’t say what I was thinking. That he could
have been man enough to brave ridicule and save his friend. Probably
the thought had never occurred to him or, if it had, he’d dismissed
it with terror. So fragile and fundai mental was his vanity.

"What did Lovingwell blackmail you into doing?"
I asked him.

He took another deep breath and paused. I could see
him thinking it over. Nothing he’d said so far had implicated him
in Lovingwell’s murder. And he knew that. Nothing he’d said so
far had taken me an inch beyond what I already knew. He looked at me
closely and sighed—an exhausted, curious sigh. Then he looked back
at his desk. "You know it anyway. Let it be said that I admitted
to it, first.

"After poor Charley was driven to suicide—gotten
rid of, really, once he’d served his purpose—Daryl explained to
me precisely how my life would be lived and has been lived for the
past seven years. I was to be his creature, his Frankenstein. Over
and above the extortion money, any piece of blackmail or savagery,
any dirty job he wanted done, would fall to me. And you cannot
imagine how savage he could be. My first assignment, of course, was
Claire’s will. She’d rewritten it to put me in charge and left me
the discretionary powers to invest the monies as I saw fit. Once
Daryl gained control of those letters, the money was virtually his.

"Poor Claire. She’d wanted to cheat him out of
that satisfaction. She’d wanted to salvage something for herself
and for her daughter. But he won in the end. With my help, he won. By
the end of this year he would have gotten all of the trust fund that
could be gotten. All of it that wasn’t tied up somehow. You see,
that’s what worried him. Sarah wasn’t very conscientious when it
came to money. Daryl knew that. But even she would find out that
she’d been substantially robbed when the bank informed her that her
account showed a balance of zero.

Then there would have been an investigation and I
would have been exposed. And so would Daryl." O’Hara looked at
me sadly. "Something had to be done."

"What?" I said. "What was he going to
do?"

O’Hara turned his face away. "Can’t you
guess?" he said in a thick whisper.

I thought about the pictures Lovingwell had stolen
from Sarah’s room, about the rumors he’d spread about her
depressions, about the ornate house with all its treasures, each one
paid for in someone’s blood. And I knew. Knew so surely that it
disoriented me—a familiar disorientation that I finally identified
as the dark remainder of a very bad dream. An oedipal nightmare I had
wandered into, years away from my own childhood. "He was going
to kill her, wasn’t he?" I said, feeling it fully—the
ancient monstrousness of it. "The son-of-a-bitch was going to
kill her."

O’Hara nodded. "He’d been planning it for
months. I think, in a way, he’d been planning it since Claire’s
death."

"How?" I said. "How was he going to
kill her?"

"Her mother had been a suicide. Sarah’s death
would have been arranged to look like the same thing. Daryl had taken
steps to prepare for it. Purchased a gun. Stolen some pictures of
Claire and Sarah that he was going to plant on her body. Written
notes to himself. He’d even cashed in some of his stocks, to
refurbish her trust fund, in case anyone decided to look into it
after her death. Since she would have died without a will, it would
have all come back to him anyway. He told me the entire plan on
Tuesday afternoon of last week. He told it with characteristic glee."

"What was your role to be?"

O’Hara blushed. "The executioner, Mr. Stoner.
And, of course, afterwards one of the witnesses at the coroner’s
hearing."

"And what was my role? Why was I hired?"

O’Hara gave me a very odd look, as if I’d said
something he hadn’t expected me to say. Whatever it was, it made
him stop talking and lean back gravely in his desk chair. I didn’t
like his look. I didn’t like the whole aura of reappraisal.

"You don’t know why he hired you?" O’Hara
said. Then he laughed—a single bark of mordant amusement.

"I should have known."

O’Hara reached down to his desk drawer, opened it,
and pulled out a small-caliber revolver. I jumped up and he whipped
it at me like a teacher’s rule. "Just sit," he said
sternly.

I did what he said.

We must have sat there for a good five minutes—O’Hara
holding the gun on me and staring vacantly at my face. Past my face,
really, at something invisible to all the world but him alone.

"You really are a fool, Mr. Stoner," he
said abruptly.

But his face was still self-absorbed, his voice
distant and unreal. "I was right about you all along. I should
never have made the mistake of trying to kill you that night in the
parking lot. I wouldn’t have, you know, if you hadn’t come to me
so soon after Daryl’s death."

I gawked at him. "You? You tried to kill me that
night?"

He smiled and his eyes came back into focus on my
face.

"Why?" I said.

"Why, the document, of course, Mr. Stoner,"
he said with eerie amusement. "Don’t you remember the document
you were hired to find?"

"There was no document," I said uneasily.

"Oh, but there was. I have it right here."

He pulled a sheaf of papers from his desk and floated
them over to me. The words TOP SECRET SENSITIVE were printed at the
top of each page. I stared dully at the dry, onion-skin paper and
began to understand.

"You were supposed to know about these. Daryl
told me that you did. He said he’d told you all about me and that
you’d expose me if I didn’t cooperate with him."

O’Hara laughed—a laugh that made me shudder. "And
I believed him! Imagine that! After all these years, I believed him
when I finally had the upper hand."

"These are the love letters, aren’t they?"
I said, hefting the sheaf of papers in my hand. "The letters
from McPhail?"