Dead Letter (26 page)

I could see that Clovis McPhail had been a hard woman
all of her life. Hard on her son. Probably hard on her husband. In a
household where everything was kept just so. It made me dislike her a
little. "He should have gone into a profession. I always told
him that. With a profession you know where you stand. You got your
feet on the ground. You got money coming in. He wouldn’t listen.
Just like his old man. He’d go off in a corner somewhere and sulk.
What kind of man . . ."

She gave me an abashed look.

"I know about Charley’s problem," I said
gently.

"He made me sick with it. His friends, too."

"Who were his friends?"

"Kids. Like him."

"Anyone in particular?"
 
She looked at me shrewdly. "What are you
driving at?"

"Charley was having a relationship with someone
at the University. The other party broke it off with him right before
he died. Do you have any idea who the other man was?"

"I might," she said.

It was becoming a game to her. She had something I
wanted and it was not in her nature to give things away for free. In
that she reminded me of Daryl Lovingwell. I thought about what she
might be after until it became obvious.

"It must be hard living here alone," I
said. "On a widow’s benefits."

"You don’t know the half of it. Lou didn’t
leave me a penny."

I looked around the room. "You could use a new
lamp. That one’s about done for."

"A new TV, too."

"What kind of TV were you thinking of?"

She hopped out of the chair. "I got the
catalogue up-stairs. Sometimes I read through it and circle things I
want to buy. I mean if I had the money."

"Why don’t you go get it?"

She smiled raffishly and scurried off. When she came
back, she had the mail-order catalogue in her hand. She had something
else, too. An old envelope. She handed them both to me.

"That," she said, pointing to the envelope,
"came the day Charley died. Take a look at it, if you want. If
you think it might help."

She was something, all right. A real hard-bitten
something.

I stuck the catalogue in my coat pocket and examined
the envelope. It was postmarked Cincinnati, Ohio, January 17, 1973.
There was no return address. Inside was a note typed on onion skin
paper. No watermark. "Charley," it read, Saying I’m sorry
that things haven’t worked out the way we thought they would is
miserably less than you deserve from me. You know I didn’t want
this to happen. He kept telling me it wouldn’t happen. Now I don’t
know what to do. As long as he has all the cards, I’ll just have to
do what he wants. Forgive me if you can. The letter was signed,
"Mike."

"He never saw this?" I said.

"No. He never saw it."

"Do you know who Mike is?"

She nodded. "O’Hara. The bastard came sucking
around here right after Charley died. Pretended he was paying a
condolence call. Lou believed him, but I knew better. He wanted the
letter back. But I’d be damned if I’d give it to him. He sends me
a few bucks every Christmas. Guess he thinks that’ll buy me off.
The way I look at it, the son-of-a-bitch owes me a lot more than that
for what he did to my son. You can see that from the letter."

I got up from the rocker. "Do you know what
Lovingwell wanted from your son? Why he gave Charley such a hard
time?"

"Letters," she said. "He made Charley
give him some letters. Like that one. Only worse."

"From O’Hara?"

"Yes. He didn’t want to do it, but my boy
Charley never was much on guts. And then Lovingwell told him
something that made Charley mad."

"Do you know what it was that made him angry?"

"Nope."

"Can I keep the letter?"

She looked at me slyly. "You got that catalogue
good and safe in your pocket?"

I patted my coat.

"Then I guess it’ll be all right," she
said.

But she thought better of it as I was leaving and
made me give her a business card and my word as a gentleman and a
scholar that I would hold up my end of the deal. I gave her both,
although I couldn’t help thinking, as I walked down to the car,
what poor credit the word of gentlemen and scholars made in the world
I’d uncovered.
 

24

And so I had a suspect for the first time in better
than a week. And a piece of evidence, to boot. It’s odd how these
things work. I’d gotten off on a wrong track, like Lurman had said
the night before. Perhaps because I’d never quite grasped—in
spite of all that I’d learned about him—just how singlemindedly
vicious Daryl Lovingwell had been. I wouldn’t make the same mistake
again. I’d gone off fishing for a clue or a lead. And I’d come up
with a dead boy who’d committed suicide like Claire Lovingwell and
with Michael O’Hara. Smiling Michael O’Hara, who so desperately
wanted the world to see him in disguise that he’d abandoned his
lover rather than brave public exposure. Now start being a detective,
Harry, I said to myself as I walked back down the snowy walk to the
car. You’ve got two dead people, a blackmailer, and a man who’s
vanity made him a perfect target for extortion. Put them all together
and see what you come up with.

It took us another hour to drive back to town,
through that chilly countryside shagged with snow. And fifteen more
minutes to wend our way up Ludlow to Bishop Street. I parked in front
of that handsome Frank Lloyd Wright house and sat quietly for a
moment on the car seat, thinking it out, deciding how best to
proceed.

"Do you think he’s in there?" Lurman said
to me.

"O’Hara?"

I shook my head. "They’re divorced. Or in the
process. And it’s not the kind of marriage that could be patched
up, even by the death of their son."

"Then why bother?"

"It’s not O’Hara I want to talk to," I
said. "Not yet. Not until I’m sure about why he was being
blackmailed."

"What’s the mystery?" Lurman said. "It’s
enough that Lovingwell was blackmailing him, isn’t it? And that
much is clear from the letter. You’ve got your motive. What you
really ought to be doing is exploding his alibi for Tuesday morning."

"He hasn’t got an alibi," I said.

"I thought he was supposed to be at the Faculty
Club, having lunch?"

"That’s what Beth Hemann said. And Beth Hemann
is in love with the bastard. It doesn’t make much difference
anyway. The Club’s off Jefferson on University grounds only a
half-mile from Middleton. He could have made it over there between
courses and still made it back in time for dessert."

"Then why not just turn it over to McMasters and
be done with it? We’ve got other problems to take care of.
Remember?"

I turned on the car seat and stared at him. "I’m
going to say this once, Ted. About a week ago, a man came into my
office and hired me to find something that didn’t exist. I’ve got
to know why he did that. And I don’t want you or McMasters or
anyone else telling me how to do my job.   You got that?"

"Take it easy, Harry," he said. "I’m
on your side."

I got out of the Pinto and walked through the snow up
to the big front door. There was a black wreath hung on the brass
knocker. I pressed the lighted bell and a few minutes later she
answered. She was drunk again. Much drunker than she’d been two
days before. Her face looked raw with grief and whiskey—shapeless
as a crushed hat and drained of all that crude energy that had made
it seem so smart and vigorous looking. She was wearing a dayrobe and
slippers.

"What is it?" she said. "What do you
want?"

"To talk," I said.

"No talk. Don’t have any talk left. My son—"

Her chin quivered violently and she slapped her right
hand across her mouth.

"I know about Sean," I said heavily.
"Tonight I’m going to try to do something about the man who
killed him."

Her eyes filled with tears. "Won’t help."

"I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for
Sarah. And for myself."

"Sarah?" She swallowed hard. "Is Sarah
all right?"

"I don’t know," I said. "She was
holding her own this morning. But she’s still in very bad shape.
That’s why I have to talk to you."

Meg O’Hara lowered her hand from her mouth and
pulled nervously at the neck of her robe. I began to feel a little
sick at heart. She wasn’t a sympathetic woman—she wasn’t the
type who courted sympathy. And maybe the tears and the drunk were
just for show. Maybe they were her way of working up to a grief that
she couldn’t really feel. If she were as much like Lovingwell as I
suspected, she couldn’t feel anything at all—outside of her own
needs. But seeing her rubbed raw like that made me suspicious of my
own motives. And for a second I was chilled by the thought that I
wasn’t showing much more humanity than the professor himself. That
I’d become greedy, like him—for a truth that wasn’t going to
satisfy my itch to explain him. Then I thought of the girl, alone in
that hospital room. And I went ahead with it.

"Sarah is going to be arrested for her father’s
murder unless I can prove she’s innocent. I need your help to prove
that."

"How?" she said. "What help?"

"You said that you were close friends with her
mother. I want you to tell me about Claire and your husband."

All of the liquorish grief left Meg O’Hara’s
face. "You think Michael killed Daryl?" She curled her lip
as if she would spit. "He didn’t have the guts. My husband’s
half-fag, Mr. Stoner. And I don’t mean rough trade, either."

"I know about that," I said. "I still
want to know about him and Claire Lovingwell."

She shivered against the wind and pulled the robe
tightly against her breast. "All right," she said. "I
owe the girl something. Come in."

We sat in the parlor again, on the sculpted couch.
Only this time there were no tea sets and bedroom eyes. No talk of
whiskey and love-making. Just that burned-out woman wrapped primly in
her dayrobe and the sound of her voice—vacant, tinged with grief,
recounting the distant past as if she were reading from an old,
melancholy book.

"We were very close friends, Claire and I.
Something alike. Only she didn’t have my talent for survival."
Meg O’Hara swept her hand across the twill of the sofa seat.

"Up until Saturday night, I thought her death
was the worst thing that had ever happened to me." She looked
into my face. "That’s why I took my fling with Daryl after she
died—to revenge myself on Michael for what he’d done to her."

I said, "What did he do?"

"He deserted her, Mr. Stoner," Meg O’Hara
said. "He deserted her when she needed him most. She and Michael
had been having an affair—or their version of one. I knew about it.
At that point I didn’t care."

"That was very civilized of you."

She laughed. "Would it have been more civilized
to live together and to pretend we still loved each other? I would
have done anything, sacrificed anything to keep her alive. And for
awhile I thought Michael was doing her good. He was very theatrical
about it, of course. She was his wounded Beatrice and he was going to
save her from the death of madness." Meg O’Hara curled her lip
again in disgust. "He was always posturing grandly in his
affairs—making them into historical romances, high school dramas
that he starred in and directed and produced. He had to be careful,
you see, had to make them suitably unreal or someone might have
realized what a talentless fake he was. At least that wasn’t much
of a problem with Claire. She was in such a bad way that he never had
to prove himself—sexually. I know for a fact that at the same time
he was courting her he was sodomizing a graduate student in the
Physics Department. My big, strong husband!"

"Charles McPhail," I said.

She looked surprised. "You know about that,
then?"

I nodded. "Why did your husband desert Claire
Lovingwell?"

"I don’t know," she said. "I don’t
know if he knew himself. He’d virtually taken charge of her
affairs—she’d even made him executor of her estate. Was
constantly attendant on her. And then he just stopped. She’d call
him, day and night. At first he’d make excuses for not seeing
her and then he didn’t even bother to answer the
phone.

A few weeks later, she killed herself."

"But she didn’t change her will?" I said.

She shook her head as people do when they’re no
longer listening to what’s being said. "He was still the
executor. She’d left it all to Sarah, with the provision that
Michael handle the investments and manage the money until Sarah was
of age." Meg O’Hara stared off into space.

"I’ve never forgiven him for what he did to
Claire. I think that’s why we . . ." She stopped short and
sloughed off her mood. "Oh, hell. We do what we do, don’t we?
I’ll tell you this, though. He didn’t kill Lovingwell. He just
isn’t man enough."