Dead Letter (23 page)

A few seconds later, Bullet and Chico Robinson came
out the door. We walked quietly through the snow up to the gas
station where I’d left my car. A man in a ski mask walked past us.
He made me think of the night, four days before, when the gunman had
tried to kill me in the Delores lot. In reaction to the rush of fear,
I made my voice steady and subdued.

"Are you willing to help?" I asked
Robinson. He I didn’t answer.

We got to my car and piled in. Bullet in back,
Robinson on the seat beside me.

"You’re a powerful fool comin’ down here
like this," Robinson said, staring at me the way the gas jockeys
had stared. "What you think? You can just walk into this place
and nobody be watchin’ you? Look over there."

He pointed through the windshield at an old Chevrolet
coasting down Central Avenue.

"That’s one of our patrol cars, man. They seen
you way back on McMillan when you started followin’ me. Cobras in
that car got them shotguns on the front seat. Po—lice goin’ to
carry magnums, we goin’ to be prepared. And there are ten more of
them cars out on the streets. I knew where you was the moment I got
back to the hall."

"Can you find Grimes that fast?" I asked
him.

"If I wanted to, J ack," he said, "I
could find Jimmy-fuckin’-Hoffa."

I didn’t know how to make the pitch. In a way it
had already been made. Either he felt strongly enough about O’Hara’s
death to cooperate or he didn’t. Banging the drum was just going to
offend him.

"Well, where do you stand?" I said again.

"Grimes don’t mean nothin’ to me. Just
another crazy white fucker."

"I don’t want you to kill him. I want you to
find him."

"The girl," he said. "She dead, too?"

I shook my head.

He got out of the car, slammed the door and walked
off down the street. I started to call after him when Bullet clapped
me on the arm.

"J ust leave it alone, Harry," he said.
 

20

I sat in the Pinto with Bullet for another five
minutes, trying to calm down. I was embarrassed with myself for
having been afraid in the pool hall. Embarrassed and a little
ashamed, because I knew if they hadn’t been black kids I wouldn’t
have felt so out-manned. I wanted to apologize to somebody; but
Bullet didn’t look as if he was in a receptive mood. His heart, or
a large part of it, was with those tough kids in the pool hall and,
as he got out of the car, he said to me: "Harry, as big as you
are, you’d never make it as a nigger. Not for one lonely day."

Lurman wasn’t back yet when I got to the apartment.
I made myself some lunch, then called the hospital again and got the
same report delivered in the same impatient voice, like a prerecorded
message. "She’s improved, sir. But she’s still on the
critical list."

"Has she recovered consciousness, yet?"

The nurse put her hand over the phone. "No,"
she said when she came back on the line. She’s still in a coma."

"I see."

"That’s not unusual," she said in a
kinder voice. "Not in cases like this."

I thanked her and hung up.

It was odd. The night before, when it had all come
apart so terribly, I’d wanted to hear the truth without any
humanity, as nakedly and as fatally as it could be put. That Sunday
morning, when it was all coming back together, I wanted to be coddled
like a sick man, to be pranked and lied to and made to feel better.
I’d begun to think of her as alive again, that was the difference.
Where the night before I could only think of her as dead. At
half-past three, Lurman came in. He plopped down across from me at
the coffee table and took a bite of my
sandwich.

"You talk to Bidwell?" I said.

He shook his head. "But I did talk to Bidwell’s
aide, Terry Mize."

"And?"

"And Lovingwell wasn’t under suspicion of
anything. Neither was Sarah or anyone else at Sloane."

I sat back on the chair as if I’d been punched. "No
one was suspected?"

"Nope." Lurman ate the rest of my sandwich.
"I’ll tell you another thing. Lovingwell never checked any
top-secret document out of the lab either."

"What!"

At first I didn’t think I’d heard him right. But
when I asked him again and he repeated it again, I began to suffer a
sickening and familiar sense of dislocation.

"He didn’t even have a security clearance,"
Lurman said. "He wasn’t working with classified material, so
he didn’t need one."

"There wasn’t any document," I said
blankly. Not even hearing myself. Just mouthing the words.

"No document."

"Then why the hell did he hire me!" I
almost shouted. "What the hell is going on here?"

Lurman laughed nervously. "Take it easy, Harry."

"My ass."

I got up from the table and stalked into the bedroom
and plunked myself down on the bed.

Of course, it made sense. Bidwell wouldn’t have
been concerned about a document that didn’t exist. Nobody would be.
I laughed wretchedly. Only that wasn’t true. Lovingwell had been
concerned. He’d hired me to recover the goddamn thing! There was no
way around that little contradiction except to ignore it. Well, there
was. But it took me about ten minutes to find the path.

I began by trying to remember everything that
Lovingwell and I had said to each other about the document, from the
moment he’d showed up at my office until the day he’d died. The
thing was he’d never really told me what the document was about.
All he’d done was describe a bunch of papers that looked like
top-secret material. Material I was honor-bound not to examine or
tell anyone else about.

Lying about the contents of some lost papers seemed
like child’s play to the man Sarah had described. But if he’d
been lying about the document, where did that leave me? Had he really
lost something that merely looked like secret papers, something he
didn’t want anyone to know about, not even the detective he’d
hired to recover it? Or had the whole thing been a lie? And if so,
why had he lied? What had he stood to gain by implicating his
daughter in the theft of nonexistent secret papers?

It wouldn’t come clear, like looking at something
in front of your nose through a fixed-focus lens. I wasn’t standing
far enough back. I wasn’t seeing all there was to be seen of the
Lovingwell case. At that moment I wondered if I ever would.

"You’re taking this kind of hard, aren’t
you?" Lurman called from the living room.

I got up from the bed and walked back to the sofa. "I
don’t like being used," I said. "Especially when I don’t
know what I’m being used for."

Lurman shrugged. "These things happen. You get
off on a wrong scent and it’s hard to get right again. After the
spy business petered out, I did some checking up on Lovingwell at the
University. Most of the people I talked to seemed to think he was a
harmless eccentric. Do you know who Charles McPhail is?"

"I’ve heard the name," I said. "Why?"

"No reason. One of the assistant deans I talked
to mentioned him, that’s all. He was apparently the only black spot
on Lovingwell’s official record. Some kid he’d given a hard time
to about seven years ago."

"It’s funny they’d remember his name."
"Not so funny," Lurman said. "The kid went loco and
ended up killing himself in Daniels Hall."

"Did they say why?"

Lurman shook his head.

***

Daniels Hall is a large, red-brick dormitory on
Jefferson about half a block from campus. Charles McPhai1 had roomed
there for two years, according to the woman in charge of the dorm,
before cutting his wrists in his third floor room on the 17th of
January 1973. The resident adviser remembered his case well.

"He was a very quiet boy," she said.
"Introspective the way many of our students are. And quite
meticulous, the way many of them should be. He was, I should say, a
model student. Extremely hard-working and absolutely absorbed in his
studies."

"Which were?"

"He was in astrophysics, I believe." She
checked the card she’d drawn from an old metal file. "Yes. He
was a third-year graduate student in the Physics Department at the
time of his death."

"Do you have a picture of him?" I said.

She handed me the card. A tiny snapshot was glued to
the corner. Charles McPhai1 had been a rather ascetic-looking young
man. Pretty rather than handsome. With a faraway look in his eyes.

"Do you have any idea why he killed himself?"
I asked her.

"People always have ideas, Mr. Stoner," she
said.

"Suicides are like vacuums. Human nature abhors
them and rushes in to explain what it can’t abide. He didn’t want
to live—that’s probably the only explanation."

I had the feeling that the woman, whose name was
Castle, was only too familiar with the tidal-like despairs of unhappy
undergraduates.

"Did he leave a note‘?"

She nodded. "He said he was sorry."

I looked out the window at the leafless trees along
Jefferson. "Was there an investigation?"

"Yes," she said. "The coroner held an
inquest. The verdict was suicide. There was no mystery about it."

"Did his death have anything to do with
Professor Daryl Lovingwell?"

"Tangentially," she said. "I didn’t
know Professor Lovingwell, but he had a reputation for being very
hard-nosed with his students. There was apparently some dispute
between him, Professor O’Hara, and the McPhail boy. And Professor
Lovingwell took a hard line."

"Do you know the nature of the dispute?"

"I do not," she said. "You might ask
Felicia Earle in the Department of English. I believe she was the
Physics Department secretary at the time of Charles’s death. I
think she and her husband were friends of the boy."

I thanked her and walked out of her little office to
the dormitory lobby where Lurman was waiting. "Did you find
anything?"

"I don’t know," I said to him. "I
found a dead boy who committed suicide about the same time as Sarah’s
mother. I don’t know if that qualifies as 'anything' or not. I’ll
find out more on Monday when I talk to a girl named Felicia Earle."

"We better get back to your place," he
said, staring at the street. The sun was going down and there were
heavy clouds moving in from the northwest.

I said what he was thinking. "Do you think he’ll
try tonight?"

Lurman looked at me and
said, "Who knows?"

***

It was a very tense evening. Up until twelve I kept
hoping that Chico Robinson would call. When he didn’t, I settled in
for the siege. Lurman sent out for some Chinese food, and he and I
sat on the living room floor eating it and jumping at every footstep
from the hall.

"There are men outside the apartment," he
said.

"There were last night, too."

He didn’t say anything.

We finished the chow mein and left the plates on the
floor. The FBI had tossed the apartment the evening before to make
sure that Grimes hadn’t left me any party favors; so the plates
didn’t make a difference. I stared at the room and thought of Sarah
and then of Kate.

"You ever been married, Lurman?" I said.

"Can’t see it." He’d made a space for
himself on the couch and was leafing through an old hi-fi magazine.
"Jesus Christ, this equipment is expensive."

"I almost got married a couple of times," I
said, brooding over the shambles my apartment and my life had become
in the past few days.

"Yeah?" He tossed the magazine on the
floor. "What’s it feel like?"

"You’re not terribly interested in this, are
you?"

He threw up his hands like a boxer parrying a
combination. "Hey, it’s your place! You want to talk about
marriage, go right ahead."

"Thanks."

"I almost got married once myself. Right before
I went off to co1lege."

"Where was that?" I said.

"Georgetown. I’m from D.C. She was my high
school sweetheart. That was true love," Lurman said wistfully.
"Once you know what you’re doing, once you know what it costs,
it gets old."

"What happened?"

"She ditched me," he said. "What
happened with you?"

"I don’t know," I said woefully.

"Women," Lurman said.

There was a very loud noise in the hall. Lurman lept
to his feet. The pistol was in his hand before I’d gotten out of my
chair.

"Stay away from the door," he said in a
low, nervous voice.

I backed against the wall and waited.

Somebody knocked on the front door.

"Ted?" a voice called from the hall. "It’s
Jesperson."

Lurman let out a sigh of relief and I unclenched my
fists. They felt as if I’d been doing exercises with rubber balls.
I walked over to the door and opened it. Jesperson, short, squat,
with thin black hair that looked like it was pencilled on his skull,
was standing outside.