Dead Letter (30 page)

O’Hara nodded. "All he did was print TOP
SECRET on them and stick them in his safe. Those are what cost Claire
her fortune and Charley his life. Those are what he used for seven
years to degrade and manipulate me. I loved Charley," he said in
a whine that made me turn from his face.

I’d seen too many men die in the past week, seen
too many victims and too many persecutors. So many that the roles
didn’t make sense to me anymore. O’Hara didn’t make sense to
me. Whimpering over a man whose life he could have saved if he’d
been willing to face the truth about himself. He still couldn’t do
it. Just as he couldn’t do it the day before, when I’d almost
revealed it to Miss Hemann.

And suddenly I realized that that hard-earned vanity
was the only motive that would impell O’Hara to kill. Not for
money, not for revenge, not even for the memory of poor Charley
McPhail. He just didn’t have the guts, and that recognition chilled
me to the bone.

"How did you get them?" I said—not
wanting to hear it. "How did you get your hands on these
letters?"

O’Hara brushed the question away with his pistol.

"When I told him on Tuesday that it was over,
that I had the letters in my hands, he laughed. He said it didn’t
matter if I had the originals. He said he had photostats. He said
he’d told you all about me. He said if I didn’t cooperate with
him, he would have you prove that she’d stolen them and then expose
me."

"Then she really did take them," I said.

But he wasn’t listening. "I wanted to help
her, but what was I supposed to do? A man like me? In my position?
What would people think? What would Meg think? And Beth? And Sean—"
His voice broke.

This time I did feel sorry for him. For the part of
him that only wanted everything to be the way it had been when there
were no Lovingwells—father, mother or daughter—to threaten his
world.

She had stolen the document, after all. And
Lovingwell had hired me for precisely the reason he’d said he
had—to recover some papers his daughter had stolen from his safe.
Well, not precisely. There had been no doubt in his mind that she’d
taken them. It was what she planned to do with them that must have
bothered him. And that had been my job—to find out where she’d
secreted them. Those papers I was honor-bound not to look at or tell
anyone else about. That was how it was supposed to have y worked,
until he found out on Tuesday morning that she’d already handed
them back to O’Hara. Then, I suppose, I became just another prop, a
way of bullying O’Hara. Another part of the murder plan, like the
threatening letters in his deposit box and the faked evidence of the
robbery in the study and the nonsense about Sarah’s suicidal
tendencies. Faked so cleverly that when it came time to be rid of
Sarah L., there wouldn’t have been any problems. Lovingwell would
tell me that he’d recovered the papers on his own; I’d go my
merry way; O’Hara would proceed to murder Sarah; and nobody would
ever know what had taken place.

I looked over at O’Hara. His face was calm now.
"What did she bargain for in return for the letters, O’Hara?"
I said to him. "What did she want you to do?"

But he wasn’t listening. "I’ll never get
away with this," he said in a quite reasonable tone of voice.
"Not here. They’ll find out, won’t they, Mr. Stoner? Why
you’ve probably seen to it that they’ll find out."

I knew what was going to happen. I got out of the
chair and walked toward his desk. "Don’t," I said as
calmly as I could. "Don’t, please. It’s not worth it. He
wasn’t worth it."

But he still couldn’t hear me. A moment later, he
couldn’t hear anything at all.
 

28

I didn’t see Sarah Lovingwell for almost a month.
McMasters dropped the case against her when he saw the letters and
examined the trust fund account. I didn’t tell him what Sarah’s
role had been in securing those letters. Partly because I wasn’t
sure. Partly because, at that point, I just didn’t care. Daryl
Lovingwell was dead. O’Hara and his son were dead. Lurman,
Sturdevant, Lionelli. Lester Grimes. There had been enough death in
that lean, vicious man’s wake. He had hired me to protect his
daughter and to find the document she’d stolen from him. I’d done
both. I’d done my job. The only thing that stuck in my throat was
the fact that no one would ever know what a monster he’d been. No
one would ever know the evil he had planned. No one would ever know
how it had gone wrong. Daryl Lovingwell.

One Sunday afternoon, deep in February’s ice, with
the church bells ringing outside the windows, she’d come to my
apartment to pay me for what I’d done. It wasn’t hard to see that
she was hurt that I hadn’t visited her in the hospital or, later,
when she’d gone home.

After a long silence in which we’d looked at each
other in that tender, tentative way that old lovers look, she’d
asked me in her soft, musky voice why I had abandoned her.

I stared at that prim, pretty face and couldn’t
tell. And knew that I never would know. For just a second I wanted to
ask her if she had killed him. If she’d killed him that Tuesday
afternoon after O’Hara had left in a funk. Because O’Hara hadn’t
really confessed to anything but a miserable and helpless confusion.
But I didn’t ask her and I didn’t tell her that I knew about the
letters, either. I knew what she would say—that she hadn’t stolen
a government document. Which, I suppose, was technically true. Her
father had said she believed in equivocation. In a way, that’s what
I ended up saying in answer to her question—that she was just too
clever for me.

She smiled that inscrutable little smile and said,
"I’m truly sorry for that."

She walked to the door, looked back once, fondly, at
me and my little apartment, and walked out. That was the last time I
saw Sarah B(ernice) Lovingwell. The girl who didn’t look like she’d
caused the trouble.