Dead Letter (27 page)

It wasn’t until I walked
out the door that I realized she’d been defending him all along, as
if by making him look weak and indecisive she rendered him incapable
of murder. It was one of the oddest testaments to love that I’d
ever seen.

***

The next step was simple enough. Lurman handled it
with professional skill, once we’d gotten back to the Delores. A
few phone calls to local banks. A few strings pulled with glee, as if
he were showing me how an investigation ought to be handled. And by
five o’clock we knew for sure what I’d suspected as soon as I saw
the love letter. What I guess I should have known days before, when
Sarah had first mentioned the trust fund in the same breath with her
father’s unappeasable greed. He’d been blackmailing O’Hara, all
right. But it was Sarah’s ' money—or Claire’s—-that he’d
been after. He hadn’t been able to frighten his wife into willing
it to him, not with Michael O’Hara acting as her support. So he
very deftly knocked that support from under her and, in the samecoup,
managed to frighten O’Hara—a man who by all appearances was
easily frightened—into doing his dirty work for him. After prying
the love letters out of McPhail’s hands, he’d forced O’Hara to
abandon Claire Lovingwell; and after a few weeks of whispered
threats, she’d finally lost her nerve and killed herself. 
McPhail had been eliminated in the same way. And then it was just
Daryl and O’Hara and all that money.

"Apparently O’Hara would draw funds out of the
trust at regular intervals," Lurman said. "And within a
week to ten days, the same amount would show up in Lovingwell’s
account. They were bleeding her dry, Harry. Of course, the bank is
going to do a complete audit, now. But from the size of the sums
involved, she was almost broke and didn’t know it."

"It doesn’t pay to be a commie," I said
drily.

"It didn’t pay to be Lovingwell’s daughter,
that’s for sure," Lurman said. "Or anybody close to him."
He  rubbed his hands together. "So now you know."

"Now I know," I said. Only it didn’t feel
right. It didn’t feel a hundred percent. I had a motive, all right.
But O’Hara had had seven years of that same motive seven years to
brood over what he’d been forced to do to Charles McPhail and
Claire Lovingwell. What had made him decide that seven years and one
more day were just too much to bear? And why had Lovingwell hired me
in the first place? How did Sarah and I fit into the picture? Because
we had to fit, I knew that much. Daryl Lovingwell had been too damn
meticulous to leave anything to chance.

I pulled the love letter from my jacket pocket and
stared at it. "Wouldn’t you think," I said to Lurman,
"that a man as cautious as Lovingwell would have taken steps to
prevent O’Hara from retaliating against him?"

"He had those letters, Harry," Lurman said.
"I guess that was his protection."

"What if O’Hara managed to get his hands on
those letters?" I said.

"Then why would he need to shoot Lovingwell?"

Why, indeed? I said to myself. What would drive a man
with such a thin skin to risk murder? I got up from the recliner.
Only Michael O’Hara could tell me the answer to that. And I
intended that he would. Even if I had to blackmail him myself, even
if I had to dangle that last love letter over his head like a sword.
I glanced at my watch, which was showing twenty after five, and said,
"I’m going out again."

"The hell. You’ve got to be here to get that
call."

"I’ll be back in time," I said. "A
half-hour is all I’ll need."

"And if Grimes doesn’t want to give you that
half-hour, Harry?"

I walked over to the roll—top and pulled the magnum
from the top drawer. Lurman looked at it and shook his head.

"Too much weapon," he said with grave
authority.

"You’d be lucky to get off two shots."

"Not with you along to back me up, old boy."

He looked at his watch and said, "This is really
necessary, right?"

I nodded.

"And only a half-hour?"

"At most."

"All right," he said and got to his feet
with a groan.

"Where are we going this time?"

I pulled out the phone book, thumbed through it until
I came to O’Hara, Michael C., and said, "To Ohio Avenue. To
O’Hara’s home."

It was a tiny apartment off campus, in a building
full of tiny apartments. His wife hadn’t left him much—that was
obvious. And if Lovingwell had been putting on the squeeze, too, the
past seven years must have been very grim indeed for Michael O’Hara.
I knocked at the wooden door and Miss Hemann answered.

Something about my face or about the way I was
standing made her rock back on her feet and stare anxiously into my
eyes. "What is it?" she said. "What do you want?"

"I want to talk to O’Hara."

She glanced over her shoulder and said, "He’s
in a bad way now. Couldn’t this wait, Mr. Stoner? Couldn’t this
wait until his son is buried?"

I shook my head.

"Who is it Beth?" O’Hara called from the
living room.

"It’s Mr. Stoner," she said.

There was a dead silence. "Show him in,"
O’Hara said after a moment.

It was a dreary little flat. Sad enough under any
circumstances, but made especially sad by the grief that filled the
room. O’Hara was sitting in a baize armchair beside a coiled
radiator. There was a bottle of bourbon on the table beside him. The
room smelled of bourbon and of
heat.

"Mr. Stoner," he said without looking up at
me. "I wondered how long it would take you to make this little
call. I can’t say I approve of your timing. But then you’re not a
subtle man, are you?"

I didn’t know whether it was the grief talking or
whether it was something else. A premonition, perhaps, that his past
was finally catching up with him. I took the envelope out of my
pocket and O’Hara stared at it curiously, as if it were something
he recognized but couldn’t quite place.

"What is it?" he said. "A letter?"

I nodded. "From you to Charles McPhail."

"Ah!" he said quietly. "I should have
guessed."

Miss Hemann stared nervously at me, then at O’Hara.
"What is this, Michael? What’s this about?"

O’Hara looked up quickly. I could see from the
pained expression on his face that the girl didn’t know about
McPhail or about the other McPhails who had probably replaced him.
She didn’t know about the blackmail, either. And it mattered to
him. After all of the years of lying to himself and to the rest of
the world, it still mattered greatly to him that no one knew. I
suppose, finally, that it mattered to me, too. But not for his sake.
For hers.

"I’ll meet with you tomorrow morning,"
O’Hara said to me in his frigid departmental voice. "At my
office. We can discuss this matter then."

It was a peculiar bargain, seeing that I might not be
around the next morning to fulfill it—at least, if Grimes had his
way I wouldn’t. "I’m not sure that will do," I said to
him.

He nodded gravely. "I understand. Regardless of
what happens, I’ll go to the police. I give you my word on that. I
would have done so anyway." He glanced quickly at Beth Hemann
and said, "Please. One more day won’t make a difference to
anyone."

"All right," I said. "Tomorrow
morning. But understand that the girl is my only concern in this. And
that I will go to the police no matter what is said."

"I understand," O’Hara replied.

I didn’t like the bargain I’d struck. I’d
wanted to hear it all before I risked my life against Grimes. But
then I’d never championed the truth. In my spavined version of
knighthood I was not a Galahad. I was one of that lesser, more
impulsive clan—killed early in tournaments or in petty quarrels,
over a woman’s honor or dishonor. That didn’t matter either. Just
over a woman, I thought and laughed at myself. Because it wasn’t
O’Hara I was protecting. His vanity was too corrupt to survive
Daryl Lovingwell’s furious brand of realism. It was Beth Hemann I’d
been thinking of, the loyal Miss Hemann, who loved Michael O’Hara
in spite of his lacerating, self-disgusted manhood. I had seen too
many sad-eyed sufferers for love’s sake in the past week to want to
add another to the count.

So I walked out the door and down to the street,
where Lurman was waiting in the Pinto, and drove back to the Delores,
telling myself as I drove that I’d done the right thing.
 

25

Lurman and I got back to the Delores at six on the
dot. An hour later, Chico Robinson called.
"That
you, Stoner?" he said.

I said it was.

"Well listen tight, man. He was staying on the
Hill, but he split. Dude he was staying with say he might be in your
neighborhood tonight. Maybe pay you a visit, you dig?"

"Yeah."

"He’s gone to see a lady friend first. Chick
by the name of Linda Green. She lives on Euclid Street."

He gave me an address in Corryville, and I wrote it
down and handed it to Ted.

"You be quick and you might catch him there,"
Robinson said. "But you best be on your toes, dude. ’Cause
he’s got him a machine pistol and a sawed—off."

I didn’t say anything.

"You hear?"

"I heard."

Robinson hung up.

I told Lurman what Chico had said.

"We’ll get over there right away," he
said excitedly.

Lurman called down to the lot and assembled the rest
of his crew in my apartment. We didn’t have time to make elaborate
plans. He and I were to cover the front of the building. The other
six agents the rear and side doors. And that was it. Everyone seemed
comfortable with the set-up. Everyone but me.

"This guy’s armed to the teeth, Ted. And he
knows how to kill. Wouldn’t it be smarter to call in a SWAT team?"

It would have been smarter, all right. But it
wouldn’t have been politic. And I guess I knew that as soon as I’d
asked the question. The FBI doesn’t like to share their glories or
their mistakes with other agencies; it was really that simple,
although Lurman tried to make it seem more complicated.

"Euclid Street is
right on the border of the University community, Harry," he said
testily. "We call in an army and a lot of innocent kids might
get hurt. Especially if Grimes is as heavily armed as Robinson said
he was. Anyway I don’t want to have to bargain for any hostages. I
don’t want any action inside the building at all. We’ll take him
when he comes out. And we’ll take him clean. No more fuck-ups. No
more traps. No more Sturdevants and Lionellis. As soon as any of you
makes a positive I.D. and he’s out of the building, kill him."

***

At half-past six we piled into three black Chevys and
drove down Taft to Auburn and then north to Euclid Avenue. It was a
perfect evening. No snow this time. Nothing to obscure our vision. A
night just as cold and clear as glass. We pulled over across from
Linda Green’s brownstone apartment house at seven; and while the
six other agents took their positions around the building, Lurman and
I sat silently in the car. For the second time in three days I had
the eerie feeling that Ted had become someone else. Someone almost as
cool and dangerous as Grimes himself. His face was flushed and when
he spoke, it was with a sharp, conspiratorial inflection, as if we
were two kids playing games outside an abandoned house. He made me
nervous, and so did the old building, which was dotted with tall
windows that would make make ideal fire lanes if Grimes decided to
make a fight of it.

"Here’s the way it’s going to be," he
said. "Take a look at the building."

It was a three-story brownstone with a huge stone
stoop in front, fire escapes on either side, and those tall windows
arranged in ranks on each wall. A glass door above the stoop led to
an alcove lined with mailboxes and buzzers. Behind the alcove another
glass door led to a stairwell and to a hallway that extended to the
rear of the building. Looking through both doors I could almost see
to the end of the hall. Which meant that anyone coming down the
stairs would be fully visible from where we were sitting.

"I’ve got two men on the north side, two on
the south, and two behind the building. We’ve got the front. We’ve
also got the only view of the lobby. If he doesn’t come out the
front door, we’ll have to let the others know which way he’s
headed. And quickly." Lurman looked me over as if I were
standing in front of him on parade. "You’re in on this because
you wanted to be and because you deserve to be. But for chrissake,
don’t go being a hero. Just do what I say and we’ll both stand a
chance of getting out of this thing alive."

He pointed to a tall maple tree on the east side of
the stoop and said, "That’s your position. I’ll iind a spot
on the west side. I’ll have a walkie-talkie with me to alert the
other men in case he doesn’t come out the front. Now all I want you
to do is stay put until you see him coming out the door. When you’ve
made him, take that cannon of yours and shoot him with it. No
questions. No warning. Just shoot. And be careful of the crossfire,
because I’ll be shooting, too. Just aim carefully and make each
shot count. And if he does go down, keep on firing until you’re
sure he’s dead. Until you see his brains on the sidewalk. And don’t
touch his damn body. He may have booby-trapped his clothes and his
weapons. With this guy we just don’t know."