Dead Letter (16 page)

"Sometimes," she said breathlessly. "Not
often. Does it matter?"

I laughed again and slapped her on the rump. "Not
at the moment."

She grinned and pulled my
head down to her lips.

***

Sarah was sitting up in bed, Indian-style, her long
auburn hair covering her shoulders and the tops of her breasts.
Looking at that hard, talented body, I felt like making love to her
again.

"Jesus," she said, wide-eyed. "Don’t
you ever get tired?"

"Someday, Sarah," I said, skimming my
fingertips through her hair and over her breasts, "I’ll tell
you about the last few months. Then, you’ll know why I’m not
tired at this moment."

She leaned over and kissed me through her hair. "Do
you want to make love again?" she whispered.

"I do," I said. "But we’ve got to
stop."

She giggled. "Good. Because I’m tired as
hell."

While I showered, Sarah made a second breakfast in
the kitchen. The smells of bacon and toast drifting through the
rooms, the sound of her puttering over the stove, opening and
shutting closets, learning where things were, almost moved me to
tears. I sat down on the john after I got out of the shower and
thought about Kate. That’s where Sarah found me.

"Coffee?" She passed a cup through the
crack in the door and peeked in after it. "Hey!" she said,
when she saw me sitting, dripping wet, on the toilet. "No
towel?"

I stood up and she looked up and down my body and
smiled. "You’ve got nothing to worry about." She put the
cup down on the sink and kissed me on the lips.

"You’ll get wet," I said.

She threw her head back and laughed. "I don’t
care."

She nuzzled against my chest until her face was
slick. "I like the way you smell," she said. "And
taste." She ran a sandpapery tongue down my belly, then looked
up mischievously.

"We can discuss how I taste later. I’ve got to
get dressed right now."

She made a disappointed face. "All right. But
hurry up. I don’t want breakfast to go cold, too."

In the living room, Sarah pretended to moon over me.
She looked nineteen in the morning light. It made me feel a little
guilty for shtupping her an hour before.

"Why were you sad just now?" she said as
she poured me a cup of coffee.

"I was thinking about someone I know," I
said.

"A girl?"

I nodded.

"You still love her?" Sarah asked. "Is
that it?"

"You cry when you come. With me, it’s the
smell of coffee."

"You know I was right—I do like you," she
said with something like an air of discovery. "For a capitalist
pig, you’re a decent man. And a good fuck, too."

I looked amusedly at Sarah. "And you’ve had so
much experience?

"You’d be surprised."

"Sean?"

"Jealous, again?"

"Curious," I said. "Te1l me about
him."

"There’s not much to tell," she said.
"We’ve been friends since we were kids. We used to play around
with each other—experiment. We still sleep together. But since he’s
gone radical, he’s become militant and monogamous. He doesn’t
like ‘his’ lady sleeping with other men. He claims that since the
Black Muslim women don’t do it, I shouldn’t either. As a gesture
of solidarity." She laughed. "The truth is he’s plain
jealous of anybody who looks at me."

"What kind of radical is he?"

"The same kind as I am. A communist. Think of
it,"

Sarah said mysteriously. "You slept with a
communist Spy."

"Are you?"

She laughed lightly. "Is that what Father told
you?"

"He wasn’t sure where your politics had led
you."

"Politically, I’m a Marxist, but I’m not
overly doctrinaire about it. I believe in international communism
wherever and however it springs up. Does that bother you?"

"Only when you proselytize. When Sean followed
me the day before yesterday, he had company. A thin, black guy with
light skin and a goatee."

"Chico," she said. "Chico Robinson. He
hangs around the club once and awhile. Chico’s a bad dude. He’s a
Cobra."

"What’s a Cobra?"

"It’s a special cadre of the Muslims. The
Friends have been doing some work with their Avondale chapter,
helping them distribute free milk and lunches to neighborhood kids.
Chico and Sean became buddies during the operation. They’re very
tight now. Chico doesn’t think much of me. He says I’m soft on
discipline."

"And the Cobra business?"

"They’re a Muslim sect. I don’t know how
much of the trash you hear on the streets can be trusted, but the
Cobras are said to be enforcers. There’s no question that Chico is
a mean little man."

"O.K.," I said. "Let’s backtrack a
little. Two days ago, I was taking pictures of people going in and
coming out of the club."

"Why were you doing that?"

"Well, at the time, I thought you were involved
in the theft of your father’s document. I took the photos to get a
notion of the people you were friendly with. I even had the police
run makes on the snapshots to see if a real communist spy popped up."

"You did that‘?" she said angrily.

"Easy, Sarah. I was just doing my job."

"Well, it’s a lousy job." She got up from
the table and walked into the tiny kitchen. "They knew you were
out there," she said after a moment.

"Who?"

"Les and the Weather people. They hang out at
the club sometimes. In the back."

"How did they know?"

"Les got a phone call in the club house. Someone
must have spotted you from the street."

"What do Weather people do to dumb detectives
who take their pictures?"

"They wanted to shoot you. At least, Les did.
That’s the reason I’m in trouble now. Somehow Les got it in his
head that you were a federal agent. Don’t ask me how, because I
don’t know. Anyway, I talked him out of the idea; then he saw you
coming out of my house the other day; and when the cops showed up
that afternoon, he assumed I’d been lying to him all along."

"That’s not very good logic," I said.

"Les is not a logical man."

"What kind of man is he?"

"Tough," she said. "He’s been
underground for five . years, ever since he shot a school
superintendent in L.A. Four months ago he drifted into the club. And
he’s been in and out ever since. He’s close to the Weather people
and some of the more militant radicals like Sean. They treat him like
a hero because of the L.A. thing. But they’re afraid of him, too.
He can be a very scarey guy."

"How does he feel about you?"

"He used to trust me," she said with heavy
irony.

"What happens if you can’t get in touch with
him or if he won’t listen."

"Les is a little crazy, Harry," Sarah said.
"Something happened to him during the war. He doesn’t talk
about it, but Sean knows. When he gets an idea in his head, when he
thinks someone’s against him or the movement, he just . . ."
Sarah walked down the hall to the bedroom. "I’d better get in
touch with Sean. I’d better find out where we stand."

"We?" I said.

"I guess so, Stoner," she said. Sarah
brushed the hair back from her face and smiled. "I guess it is
we from now until this is over. That is, unless you still have any
doubts about whether I stole that document and shot poor Papa."

Doubts I had. But not
about whether or not she’d killed her father.

***

While Sarah made her phone calls in the bedroom, I
flipped on the Globemaster to one of the few stations that wasn’t
broadcasting Christmas cheer. With a Brahms quartet playing behind
me, I sat back on my Easyboy recliner ($199.95 at Shillito’s) and
did some more speculating about Lovingwell and his document.

Ever since Wednesday morning I’d been expecting one
of Bidwell’s charges to pay Sarah a call. The security man would
have been polite and businesslike. "Your father checked a
top-secret document out of our archives on Saturday afternoon. He was
scheduled to return it in two weeks. We’re terribly sorry that he’s
dead, etc. But it’s our little secret and we want it back."

So, I asked myself, as I sat in a comfortable chair
listening to Brahms and staring through the frosty window at the blue
morning sky, how come that hadn’t happened? How come Bidwell never
even mentioned the document? How come no one cared about it but me?

When you can’t answer a question it sometimes helps
to rephrase it. So, I asked again, how come no one knows about the
document but me? Well, I knew why the police, the FBI and Louis
Bidwell didn’t know about the missing document. Lovingwell hadn’t
told them it was missing. He’d told me. And for various reasons, I
hadn’t told anyone but Sarah, who’d claimed she didn’t know
about it, either. It’s embarrassing to keep a secret that no one
else is interested in. It’s like holding the bag on a snipe hunt or
being sent out for a left-handed wrench. It makes you feel foolish,
angry, and bitter.

Why would Bidwell delay the recovery of a top-secret
document? I asked myself. He could have overlooked it—a remote
chance but possible. He could have been waiting a decent interval to
ask about it, out of respect for Sarah and the dead man—also
remote. He could have sent someone to the Lovingwell home on
Wednesday when Sarah had been taken off to jail—less remote but
probably impossible, given the fact that he could have subpoenaed her
when she was in custody. Or he could have had a real son to conceal
his knowledge of the document, which was very possible. Although it
didn’t seem likely, Lovingwell could have been suspected of
espionage; or Sarah could have been under suspicion. Or there was
always the chance—the one I myself had proposed to the
Professor—that someone else at Sloane (Sarah’s erstwhile
accomplice) was being investigated and that discussion of the missing
document would have jeopardized that investigation. What made the
possibility of espionage doubly intriguing was Lovingwell’s murder.
There had been talk of security leaks at Sloane and of some trouble
the Professor might have been. If he had been meeting with an
accomplice on Tuesday afternoon, an accomplice who had some reason to
mistrust or to hate or to be done with Daryl Lovingwell, then the
killing could be tied to the missing papers. Given the picture Sarah
had painted of him, the scenario seemed quite possible. Only, if that
were the case, then there was no obvious reason why Lovingwell should
have hired me in the first place. And I didn’t want to force the
facts to fit Sarah’s portrait of her father simply because I was
attracted to her.

It wouldn’t have done any good at that point to ask
Bidwell point-blank about the espionage business. He’d give me the
same story whether he were lying or telling the truth; and then there
would follow that nasty little moment I’d been postponing for
several days when the question of how I knew about missing secret
papers would be raised. Maybe with a vengeance. So, Bidwell was out.
At least temporarily. But if I could get my hands on Lovingwell’s
security file, I could find out part of what I wanted to know. The
other part, the vexing question of why I’d been hired, could wait
until I settled the espionage issue and the murder itself. That is,
unless solving the two somehow resolved the other, which wasn’t as
comforting a possibility as I might have wished. Hell, we all want
things neat. Only in this instance, neatness and symmetry would bring
me full circle back to that discomfiting possibility that I thought
I’d talked myself out of ten minutes before. The universal law of
neatness said that Sarah was intimately involved in her father’s
death and in the disappearance of the document, that our
heart-to-heart talk was nothing more than a warm breeze, and that
when it had passed the cold, ineluctable climate of hatred and
revenge would reassert itself. Sarah herself startled me out of my
reverie by tapping me on the arm. From the look on her face, I could
see that something had gone very wrong.

"What is it‘?" I said. "Did you get
in touch with Sean?"

"He’s scared, Harry. Les has gone underground
again." She sat down on the arm of my chair and tried not to
look frightened. "Sean says Les told him that he didn’t want
to talk, that he’s going to kill me."

"Why?" I said. "Why won’t he talk?"

She shook her head very slowly. "He’s crazy,
Harry. He’s really crazy."

I took her hand and she gave me a quick, unhappy
smile. "He’s going to do it, Harry. I know him. He’s going
to kill me."

"No, he’s not."

I patted her hand and walked over to the phone and
dialed McMaster’s office.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"We need some reinforcements, Sarah. I’m going
to get Sid to arrange FBI surveillance."

"FBI!" she said with horror. "My God,
he’ll really think I’ve betrayed him now."

"What do you mean really?" I said to her.
"Do you want him to kill you?"