Dead Letter (8 page)

"Murdered?" she said with what seemed like
genuine surprise. "Who says he was murdered? How do you know
that? The police haven’t told me that."

"I was just with the police," I told her.
"It kind of blows your theory about why he killed himself. Or
was that a fib, too? Like the alibi?"

"What do you want?" she said in an ugly
voice. "Money? Is that it?"

"I’m getting sick and tired of people treating
me like low-life because of my job," I said angrily. "I
came here to help you, because I promised your father I would. And
what I want is to find out what happened to that document and what
happened to him."

"I don’t care what happened to him. Whether he
committed suicide or not, he deserved to die."

I shook my head. "Are you sure we’re talking
about the same man? Amiable, eccentric Daryl Lovingwell?"

Sarah Lovingwell smiled for the first time since I’d
met her. It wasn’t a pleasant smile, but it was a damn sight better
than the dark looks I’d been getting up to that point.

"I feel like Cary Grant in North by Northwest.
Remember the scene when he says, 'Forgive me. But who are those
people living in your house?’ I think I’m owed an explanation?"

She shook her head.

"A cup of coffee?"

"All right," she said. "But that’s
all."

As Sarah and I walked through the living room and
down a narrow hall to the kitchen, I was taken again by the elegance
of Lovingwell’s home. If houses tell you anything about their
owners—and they invariably do—this one spoke clearly of a man who
loved luxury. It spoke of old money glittering in a hundred different
knickknacks —crystal animals, glazed porcelain statuary, the sorts
of things you see advertised in the back of architectural magazines
and wonder who on earth ever buys. Daryl Lovingwell had bought them.
The brocade loveseats with inlaid burl, the silver tea sets, the
bronze baskets and dull pewter ornaments. I spent a moment admiring a
Swiss clock I had seen advertised for years in The New Yorker, while
Sarah looked impatiently at the dial.

"He had fine taste, your father," I said to
her.

"He grew up with money," she said with
almost clinical dispassion. "He liked it the way other people
secretly despise things. To him, it was a deep, ugly obsession."
The kitchen was big and white and comfortable. We sat at a butcher
block table set in a small, glassed-in alcove that looked out on a
rolling lawn which swept up to a huge, leafless oak and then down to
a hedge of rosebushes. Sarah said nothing. Her hands played at the
coffee cup, at the spoon. Her prim, pretty face was restless and
self-absorbed.

"Do you want to tell me why O’Hara lied to the
police?" I said to her.

She shook her head slightly. "What makes you
think he was lying?"

"Because he was following me in your car at 1:00
P.M.

He and a black kid in a salt-and-pepper beanie. And I
think you can tell me why."

She looked uneasily out the window toward the oak.

"He planted that in 1949. The year he got his
appointment here."

"Why do you always talk about him in that tone
of voice—as if he were a character in a book?"

A spark of amusement lit Sarah’s blue eyes. "You’re
a smart fellow, aren’t you? I thought detectives were supposed to
be plodding, dim-witted types. Muscles with speech."

"That’s the second time you haven’t answered
my questions."

"And who are you to ask me questions?" she
flared. "Just because my father hired you to do a job for him
doesn’t give you the right to harass me and grill me like I was
some derelict in a police line-up."

"There was a murder committed in this house,"
I said, "and a theft. You may think the police fit your
description of a detective, but don’t count on it. They’re going
to find out that the O’Hara boy is lying. And they’re going to
find out, from Bidwell, that a government document is missing.
They’re going to find out you’re a communist, too. And the whole
world knows how you felt about your father. One fine day those dumb
cops are going to plod their way right up to your door."

"I didn’t kill him," she said serenely.
"And I don’t know anything about a government document."

"That may be true. But that’s not going to
stop the police from investigating you and your friends of nature."

Sarah Lovingwell eyed me distrustfully. "Why do
you care what the police do to me?"

"I told you before. I promised your father I
would look after you."

"That’s very noble," she scoffed.

"It’s not," I said. "Your father
left me in a tight spot. Technically, I’m withholding evidence
right now. For all I know, evidence that would help the police tie up
this case or help the FBI stop an important secret from falling into
the wrong hands."

"Communist hands?" she mocked.

"Look, I’m apolitical. You can start as many
revolutions as you want, once I’m in the clear on this thing."

"We don’t start revolutions. The people do."

"Fine," I said. "You tell the people
it’s all right with Harry, once this case is settled. All I’m
asking for is a little pre-revolutionary cooperation."

"What kind of cooperation?"

"Now we’re getting somewhere. I want you to
hire me."

"For What?"

"Let’s say . . . to look into your father’s
death."

"I’ve already told you, I don’t care who
killed my father."

"Well, pretend he was someone close to you,"
I said.

"Someone you liked. That way I have a legal
justification for not telling the cops about the document."

"And what do I get out of this°!" Sarah
asked me.

"You get me out of your hair." She glared
at me. "It’s the only way," I said to her. "It’s
me or me. Take your pick."
 

8

By the time I left for Sloane, Sarah and r I had
fashioned an uneasy truce. She agreed to hire me to investigate her
father’s murder; and I agreed to stay out of her affairs. Just how
that last neat trick was going to work I didn’t know. She wasn’t
happy about the arrangement either. But then annoying someone isn’t
the surest way to earn their trust.

I couldn’t get a handle on Sarah Lovingwell. She
was a smart, attractive, self-assured young woman; and she was
carrying around the sort of grudge that most folks take a lifetime to
work up to—a genuine hatred so implacable that it can’t be
explained. You have to be hurt beyond forgiveness to reach that
plateau of anger. And for the life of me, I couldn’t see how
dapper, Shavian Daryl Lovingwell could have fathered such a hate.

I was about to step out the door when one of the
biggest young men I’d ever seen in my life came striding up the
front lawn. He must have been six-foot nine if he was an inch—he
had a good half foot on me. But if you can believe it, it wasn’t
his size that startled me. You’ve probably seen, in grocery stores
and shopping centers, children, six or seven years old, running
around in cowboy suits—fancy checked shirts with western piping,
blue jeans with a runner down the leg and bunting at the cuff, big
leather belts with silver-metal buckles, furry white vests,
ten-gallon Stetsons, and cap guns with mother-of-pearl handles. If
you left out the guns and the holsters, that’s exactly how this
giant was dressed.

"Howdy ’pard," he boomed in a voice that
would have made a good bass in a barbershop quartet. He swept the big
hat off _ with a flourish and smiled. "Lester O. Grimes,"
he said daintily. "Friends call me ‘Cowboy.

"No kiddin’?" I said. "Stoner. Harry
Stoner."

"Is the lady of the house home?" Lester
asked.

"Miss Sarah!" I called through the door.
"You have a caller."

Sarah came to the door. "Hi, Les," she
said. "I’ll be with you in a minute."

The Cowboy gave her an "aw, shucks" grin
and crooked one foot behind the other. His pointed boots were
embossed leather and lethal-looking.

"Y’all from hereabouts?" he drawled.

"Hereabouts is a pretty big place. I’m from
Cincinnati, yeah. You?"

"Bloody Basin, Arizona," he said proudly.
"It’s a mite south of Flagstaff?

"You’re pretty far east, aren’t you? For a
cowboy?"

"I’ve been doin’ a bit of travelin’ since
I got out of the service. I come up to Ohio last year."

"To work?" I said.

"In a way. Y’all a friend of Sarah’s?"

I thought it over for a moment. "You could say
that. I’m working for her. I’m a private detective."

"Na!" he said, like I’d just told him I
had kin in Bloody Basin. "When I was in ’Nam, I knew a fella
who wanted to be a private detective. A nosier man I never met.
Always stickin’ hisself in places he didn’t belong."

Lester O. Grimes settled back on his bootheels and
stared at me with a kind of wry displeasure. "You even look like
this fella."

"Coincidence," I said and started for the
car.

"No," he said decisively and pushed me back
with one paw. "I wouldn’t call it no coincidence."

"O.K.," I said. "Tell me about him."

"Not much to tell. It got so that this fella
wouldn’t leave us alone. And there are times when a man has to have
his privacy. So we taught him a lesson."

"Yeah?" I said.

"We killed him," Lester O. Grimes said
softly.

"You killed him," I said flatly. "That’s
a mighty hard lesson to forget, isn’t it'? Good thing I’m not in
that guy’s shoes."

Grimes laughed heartily. "I’ll say. He was
practically begging us to finish him at the end." Cowboy made a
disgusted face. "Don’t like to see that in a man."

"Does this story have a moral?"

Grimes scratched innocently at his blonde forelock.

"Yeah. I guess you could say it does. Y’see
life’s kind of like the Army. You got your job to do and your
buddy’s got his job to do. And people like ol’ Roger—that was
his name—who insist on messin’ where they don’t belong—asking
questions, talking to cops, taking pictures, maybe—they’re just
bound and determined to find themselves some trouble. Yessir! And
they always do."

"What did you say you did in the Army, Lester?"

"Oh, I wasn’t in the Army. I was in the Corps.
What they call a weapons specialist. Master Gunnery Sergeant. They’re
some good ol’ boys in the Corps," Lester O. Grimes said.
"Yessir, I’d still be in there if they’d of had me."

"Well, nice talking to you."

"My pleasure,"
he said as I walked past him.

* * *

On the way out to Batavia, which is a small community
about thirty miles northeast of Cincinnati, I kept trying to picture
Lester O. Grimes in a gray overcoat and a green ski mask. But it was
like trying to jam a size fourteen foot into a size nine shoe. He
wouldn’t fit; but his message would. When people start shooting at
you and threatening your life, it’s hard to miss the point. I’d
blundered into something big, nasty, and very private; and the Cowboy
and his three-gunned buddy weren’t going to let me lose my way
again. No sir. They sure weren’t.

I was contemplating what that big, nasty, private
something might be when I spotted the huge A-shaped administration
building of Sloane Labs rising above the pine trees. Like the Gateway
Arch in St. Louis or the Mormon Memorial in D.C., Sloane is one of
those structures that takes you by surprise. Sixteen stories high,
all polished aluminum and tinted glass, it looks vaguely like a pair
of enormous hands clasped in prayer. Beside the building, a great
circular hillock, like an Indian burial mound, formed a large
circuit, maybe four miles in circumference. And inside this raised
oval, I swear, was planted a park, with deer and one hirsute buffalo
roaming through the snow-draped pines.

I turned off the highway onto a paved access road
that led to the main building. There was a guardhouse about the size
of a tollbooth a hundred yards down the road. I gave the guard my
name and he waved me toward the visitor’s lot. It was a short walk
from there to the main concourse, down an avenue planted with
leafless ginkos. The lobby, an enormous arena, was planted with
ginkos, too, and with a dozen other varieties of ornamental plants
and flowering shrubs. They’d regulated the temperature and humidity
inside the building so that most of the trees were still in bloom. I
half expected to find the receptionist camped on a picnic blanket.
Instead she was sitting in a round metal booth at the end of one of
the garden trails that wove through the little forest. She had a
dreamy, contented look on her face; and she smiled  happily at
me as I approached her.

"Welcome to Sloane," she said with good
cheer.

"You’re Mr. Stoner, aren’t you? Mr. Bidwell
will be down in a moment."

I sat down on a sofa, set like a park bench in a
square of earth, and listened to the soft music that was being piped
in from somewhere above the arbor. There was something a little
scarey about this artificial paradise. Maybe it was the thinness of
the deception—as if all the trees and grass, the courtesy to
nature, could disguise the daily work of atom-smashing and nuclear
experiment. Or, maybe, it was the dreamy look on that receptionist’s
face and the thought that, if you stared long enough and in the right
light, those trees and shrubs might actually come to seem like a real
forest, the great A-shaped building like a towering herbarium, the
four-mile accelerator like a mere pen for the bison and the deer. To
me, the place had the shallow charm of a wax museum, only it was
nature here preserved on exhibit—as posed and caricatured as a
tableau out of history.