Dead Letter (20 page)

When I walked back into the bedroom, Sarah was
wearing her scruples on her sleeve. But there was a little human
triumph mixed with the remorse. "He’ll meet with us," she
said simply.

"When?"

"Tonight. In the lot at Old Coney. You and I are
to come alone." Sarah stretched out on the bed and stared at the
ceiling. "I ought to feel worse than I do," she said
earnestly.

"The hair shirts are in the big bureau, second
drawer from the bottom."

She rolled on her side and smirked at me. "It’s
just that it was too easy. I thought he would be more principled than
he was, and now that it’s done I’m disappointed in him. He owed
it to himself and the movement to refuse me."

"Your father was right," I said with a
sigh. "He told me you could never do a thing halfway."

"Him." She waved her hand. "If it
wasn’t for him, none of this would have happened. No
picture-taking, no Cowboy, no FBI."

"No us, either," I said.

Sarah smiled. "Well, I hadn’t thought of
that," she confessed. "On the other hand, we might have met
anyway."

"But would we have made love, anyway?"

"It’s an interesting question." Sarah
rolled over to me, put her hands around my neck, and pressed her
forehead against mine. "How does it look from here?"

"Doubtful," I said.

"You’re not supposed to look," she said
with mock petulance. "You’re supposed to commune."

"Is that how the communists do it?"

Sarah butted me hard.

"Ow!" I said.

"Damn it," she said suddenly. "I’m
mad!"

"Well, take it out on someone else," I
said, rubbing my forehead.

"You know what I think—I think Father planned
this whole thing to get me in trouble with Lester."

"You want to hear something strange?" I
said. "I found out this morning that your papa told O’Hara
that he was worried about your mental health. Two days ago, Louis
Bidwell at Sloane told me dear old Dad had told him the same thing."

"I must have been acting crazier than I
thought."

I shook my head. "Maybe your father wanted
people to think you were crazy. Maybe that’s why he hired me."

"Because he thought I was crazy?"

"Crazy enough to steal a top-secret document."

"That damn thing again," she said.

"That damn thing may be the key to this whole
mess."

Sarah frowned and, for a second, all the playfulness
went out of her face. "Why can’t you let it alone, Harry?
Isn’t Les enough? Why don’t you just forget that thing?"

I said, "What would you think if I told you that
your father was a spy?"

Sarah gawked at me, then started to laugh. "Father?"
she said merrily. "A spy?"

"It fits with all the information I’ve been
able to gather."

"A spy!" Sarah roared.

"Look. Your father told at least two people he
thought you were crazy, then he hired me to keep an eye on you. In
the meantime, he was converting stocks and bonds into cash—in
short, acting like somebody preparing to make a quick getaway. This
morning, Meg O’Hara told me that she thought money would be at the
bottom of this business. And I think she might be right."

Sarah stopped laughing. "Explain your theory."

It took me a moment to collect my thoughts, because
in a way I was explaining the theory to myself, as well.

"Say your father had been surreptitiously
photographing documents and selling them for cash. Say someone, maybe
Bidwell, was catching on. Not to your father, but to whomever your
father was working with at the lab. In order to divert suspicion,
your father fakes a robbery."

"Fakes it!" Sarah said with astonishment.

"Yeah, I’m pretty sure it was faked. At the
time I examined the study I knew something was fishy—only at the
time I thought someone was setting your father up."

"Someone meaning me?"

"That’s the way it looked. But I didn’t know
your father then. He was an amazing man."

"Marvelous," Sarah said acidly.

"If I’m right, he showed real genius in
planting the original clues—the envelope in your closet, the prints
on the safe. They were perfect clues, and I mean that quite
literally. Perfectly unsmudged prints, perfect and perfectly
available evidence. They were so perfect that he knew they’d be
ambiguous and so perfectly ambiguous that he could play them anyway
he chose. Or anyway I chose. That’s the beauty of it. If I was too
dumb to smell a set-up, the clues pointed to you. If I was smart
enough to see an unknown hand behind their arrangement, they still
pointed to you. It took genius, all right. And a certain degree of
malevolence that still astonishes me, in spite of what I’ve learned
about your father’s  character.

If my theory is right, he set you up cold-bloodedly
to divert suspicion from himself. While the police and I were busy
trying to prove your guilt or innocence, he was preparing to skip the
country. Once he’d straightened out the financial side of it, I
suppose he would have called Bidwell about the document, reluctantly
confessed his suspicions, pointed out that he’d hired a man to look
into it, and said that he was going away for a few days to think the
matter out. A couple of days would have stretched to a couple of
months—while you were cooling off in the slammer—and by the time
the lie was unraveled, he’d have disappeared for good."

"And the document?"

"Maybe he planned to sell it, as a final coup
before leaving you holding the bag. Maybe that’s why he was killed
on Tuesday morning—by whomever he was planning to sell it to."

"That’s a gruesome theory, Harry," Sarah
said.

"Well, it’s the only one I can think of that
explains both your father’s behavior and Bidwell’s. He hired me
to keep an eye on you until he was ready to make his escape. At the
same time, I was an insurance policy—good p.r. in case anything
went wrong and he was found out. We’ll know for sure tomorrow.
Lurman is going to get your father’s security file from Sloane. If
he or one of his coworkers were suspected of espionage, it’ll show
up there."

"You’re a clever man," she said.

It sounded a little too "clever" to me,
too. Still, it was the best I could come up with. I said, "Let’s
just hope I’m a clever man who’s right."
 

17

It began to snow around five that afternoon. Big wet
flakes that stuck to the sidewalks and the streets. By a quarter of
eight, five inches were on the ground and the air was so thick and
white I couldn’t see twenty feet in front of me.

"It’s beautiful," Sarah said as we stood
in the lobby, waiting for Sturdevant to bring one of the black
Chevies around from the lot.

"For Grimes. Not for us." I turned to
Lurman and said, "You and Sturdevant have to stand clear until
we’ve finished talking with O’Hara. He might not see you in the
snow, but let’s play it safe anyway. You’ll let us off on Kellogg
and we’ll walk up the access road to the main parking lot. That’ll
give you time to park the car in the Downs lot and position
yourselves close to the rendezvous point. If there’s a commotion of
any kind, I don’t want  you guys so far away that you won’t
be able to lend a hand."

"Sean won’t betray us," Sarah said
confidently.

"Let’s hold that thought. As for you—"
I turned to Lionelli. "Stick around the Delores in case Grimes
tries the back door."

Lionelli nodded.

I took a breath. "O.K. I guess that’s
everything."

"You have a gun?" Lurman asked me.

"Yeah." I patted my overcoat.

The two agents started for the door.

"We’ll be out in a minute," I said. "I
want to talk to Sarah alone."

Lurman smiled and Lionelli leered.

"C’mon, Ed," Lurman pulled the other one
out the door.

I looked into Sarah’s face. She looked pale, tense,
and remarkably pretty in the overhead light.

"Well," I said heavily.

Sarah threw her arms around me and kissed me on the
lips.

"You’ll be O.K.?" I whispered to her.

"Fine."
"And
if there’s any trouble?"

"There won’t be."

I swallowed hard. "Then, let’s go."

I took her mittened hand and we walked out of the
lobby into the snow-filled street. Sturdevant pulled the Chevy up
beside the curb and we piled into the back seat. No one said a word
as we drove down Reading to Columbia Parkway and out along the river
to Kellogg Avenue.

Up until ten years ago, Coney Island was a
flourishing amusement park set in the lowlands on the north bank of
the Ohio. Then money men—some of them local—decided to build a
glass-and-plastic Disneyland east of the city. Kings Island went up
and old Coney was abandoned, except for the huge pool, which was made
into a municipal recreation spot. In the wintertime, the grounds were
completely deserted, which was why Sean O’Hara had picked them as a
rendezvous point. From the entrance on Kellogg Avenue where Lurman
had dropped us off, all Sarah and I could see of the park was a
latticework of the wire fencing and the big snowy parking lot in
front of it. Now and then, the wind blew the snow away and a huge
corner of building appeared through the haze, nosing out like the
prow of a ship through a fog, only to be swallowed up again in the
storm. The park was still there—all of it that couldn’t be moved
or sold or salvaged. The arcades, the malls, the big art deco
buildings where the dance bands used to play on hot summer evenings.
It made me melancholy to think about those times and oddly fearful,
as if Sarah and I were walking through the driving snow into a seedy
ghost town, still echoing with the voices of vendors and barkers and
the lilt of dance music.

Sarah was frightened, too. She held my hand tightly
in hers. And when the wind roared at us, as we picked our way through
the unplowed snow—she leaned against me and squeezed my arm. It was
a good two hundred yards up the access road to the lot itself. And it
wasn’t until we were almost on top of it that we saw the van,
parked against the cyclone fencing that surrounds the main arcade. I
looked back over my shoulder, trying to catch sight of Lurman or
Sturdevant. They should have had time to park the Chevy in the River
Downs lot and to make their way over the picket fence that separates
the race track from the Coney complex. But with the snow blowing so
hard, I couldn’t see either of them. Just the access road lined
with telephone poles and the hillside that fell away on either side
of it, dipping down and then back up to Kellogg Avenue. I looked back
at the van and I caught a whiff of the river, which runs so close
behind the amusement park that the whole mall is flooded several
times each spring. It smelled rank as death, even in the bitter wind;
and it sobered me up immediately. There were only two lights in the
lot—big old streetlamps that threw a dim yellow beam on the van and
on the snow around it. In the half light, I thought I could see the
outline of a man, sitting on the front scat. As we got closer, I
could see him more clearly, framed in the front window of the truck.

Sarah and I stopped about twenty yards from the van.
The wind was howling so loudly that I had to shout to make myself
heard.

"I’ll go up."

"No." She shook her head. "I will."

I looked around again, but it was hopeless in the
snow. I could barely see the Dodge, much loss Lurman, Sturdevant, or
rangy Lester Grimes.

"He’s expecting me, Harry," Sarah shouted
over the wind.

I said, "All right. But I’ll be right behind
you."

Sarah headed for the truck. She walked quickly up to
the driver’s side door, and I watched her peer through the window.
Then something happened to her. She fell against the door and I heard
her cry out: "Harry!"

I started to run. From out of nowhere, Lurman and
Sturdevant came charging across the lot, their breath hanging in
white clouds in front of them.

"Oh, God!" Sarah was shouting. "Oh,
God!"

I pulled her away from the window and propped her up
against the side of the truck. The snow was swirling around us like a
swarm of mosquitoes. I swiped at my eyes and peered through the van
window. There was a lacework of blood on the glass, like the web of
some red and deadly spider.

"Jesus," I whispered.

Lurman came up beside me.

"O’Hara?" he said.

"He’s inside."

Lurman leaned over my shoulder and looked into the
cab. He had an ugly, eager look on his all-American face. He was in
his element and I realized, as I sank away from the window and down
to where Sarah was huddled in the snow, how far out of my own I had
drifted. The only thing I could think of was getting the girl back to
the safety of the apartment.

"Sarah," I said to her. "We’ve got
to get out of here."

She didn’t move. The snow had covered her long
auburn hair—she was wimpled with it. I pulled her to her feet and
her flesh redounded against mine like an opposing force.