Pandora by Holly Hollander

How Elaine Let the Cat Out of the Bag

My bum-leg driving rattled Molly so much we had to stop halfway so I could slide over and she could walk around. After that her driving rattled me. She was one of those haywagon drivers who think the engine may bolt and jerk the wheel out of their hands. Also she liked to come to a complete stop before making a turn, which rattled the drivers in the cars behind us who didn’t know her turn signal meant she was about to hit the brakes that hard. By the time we got to my place—I should really say my father’s—I was ready to get out and walk, bum leg and all.

It was nearly a quarter to eleven, and Blue and Uncle Dee had beaten us. Their cars were out front, and they were in the living room talking to Elaine, Uncle Dee perched on the edge of his chair looking tense, Blue sitting about the way he usually did, with his hands on the handle of his stick.

“Oh, it’s you, Holly,” Elaine said. “You should be in bed.” Uncle Dee and Blue stood up.

I performed introductions. “This is Mrs. Lief. She was Larry’s wife.” I honestly didn’t know if Larry’s father or the cops had told Molly about the letters yet. If the cops hadn’t, they were bound to soon; but damned if I was going to do it and light a crisis. “Molly, this is my mother, Elaine. De Witte Sinclair. Aladdin Blue.”

“We’ve met,” Blue said. “Hello, Molly.”

Uncle Dee said, “Charmed, Mrs. Lief,” and inclined his head in a little bow.

Elaine had nothing to spare for Molly. “Holly, your friend Mr. Blue has already telephoned the police, he says. Now he’s threatening to call the television news people. You know Jane Dalton had a television crew in her house about the garden tour, and she says it was terrible.”

Uncle Dee said, “I don’t believe they’ll be coming, Elaine. At least, I hope not.”

Since Elaine wouldn’t offer her a seat, I put Molly on the sofa with me.

“I won’t let them in,” Elaine declared. “Not unless they tell me everything they intend to do first.” Her purse was on the coffee table in front of her, and she got out her compact to check herself over for the cameras. “Does anyone know exactly how their makeup differs? Do they make up women, too, or is it just a matter of powdering the men?”

The chimes sang their little tune.

“Holly, could you—oh, no, of course you can’t. I don’t know where Mrs. Maas has gotten to. I hate to answer my own door. De Witte … ?”

Uncle Dee stood up again, which didn’t take a lot of effort since he’d damn near been standing up when he was sitting down. “I’m not sure this is appropriate, Elaine, but since you asked.”

He went out into the hall, and in a minute my father came in, with Sandoz in front of him and Jake and Uncle Dee behind him. No cuffs. Sandoz looked around at us, nodding to Elaine and Molly and me, and giving Blue a hard stare.

Blue said, “The gentleman who opened the door for you is De Witte Sinclair. Mr. Sinclair, Lieutenant Sandoz.”

Sandoz nodded, not offering his hand and not bothering to introduce Jake.

My father asked, “May I sit down? I’d like the pleasure of sitting in my own house again.”

“Sure,” Sandoz said. “Go ahead.” My father put one of the occasional chairs next to Elaine’s, and she took his hand; Jake went over to stand beside him.

Elaine said, “I’m not certain I understand what’s going on here.”

“As far as we’re concerned, it’s not too complicated, Mrs. Hollander,” Sandoz told her. “Mr. Blue there called me about an hour ago. On the phone he indicated he had positive proof that your husband is innocent. I told him then—and I’m telling him again now—that if that’s the case, all he has to do is turn it over to me. He wouldn’t come to our headquarters to discuss the matter, so we came here. If he’s wasting our time, we’ll soon find out. If he has what he says he has, we don’t want to hold an innocent man any longer than necessary.”

My father said, “You’re ready to concede that I might be innocent? That’s good of you.”

Sandoz answered levelly, “Under the law, everyone’s assumed innocent until a court finds him guilty, Mr. Hollander.”

Blue lifted his stick to get their attention. “Perhaps I should explain. As Lieutenant Sandoz says, I called him this morning. I informed him that I had obtained a confession from the man who killed Larry Lief, Drexel K. Munroe, Edith Simmons, and Herbert Hollander the Third. I have—you’ll hear it in a moment. I also told him that it would be necessary for him to come here and bring Mr. Hollander with him, and that if he refused I would hold a press conference without him or any other representative of Pool County present, a conference to which I would invite the news departments of the Chicago TV stations as well as reporters from the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and the Daily Press. I warned him that if he failed to cooperate with me, it was likely that Mr. Hollander would file suit for false arrest as soon as he was released, as he surely would be.”

My father smiled. It seemed to me it was the first time I’d seen him smile in a long, long while. “You say the man’s confessed?”

“I’ll let you hear it for yourself,” Blue said; and then he looked over at Uncle Dee, and I felt like the bottom had dropped out of the world.

Sandoz said, “I don’t think I know you, Mr. Sinclair. Who are you?”

Uncle Dee cleared his throat. “I am a dealer in old and rare books. Mr. Hollander’s one of my customers. He has been for years.” He let it lie there.

“Go on.”

“A detective, I suppose one of your men, came just once to talk to me. I wasn’t at the Fair, you see—or rather I was, but I left early.”

Sandoz said, “Just go ahead and tell it your own way.” I felt like I was going nuts, but I could see he was right: keep ’em talking.

“I come to the Fair each year for the book sale. Several other dealers do as well, but I’ve priced the books myself and know exactly where the ones I wish to buy are located. I take what I want, pay, and leave; everyone knows I have no interest in antiques other than books. I realized, of course, that I’d be gone before my bomb went off.”

Elaine whispered, “This is incredible.”

Sandoz said, “I’ve got you placed now. Miss Hollander told us it was you that got her the cashiering job at the book sale.”

“That’s right.” Uncle Dee looked at me, then looked away. “I like Holly, and I wanted her to be where she would be safe. I was wrong about that, she got hurt anyway, and I’m sorry.”

Elaine, not whispering now, said, “De Witte, I can’t let you do this!”

“I loved Elaine, you see, Lieutenant. She wouldn’t have me, wouldn’t let me touch her, but that was all right. She was a married woman, and I could understand and admire a lady who wouldn’t betray her vows and her husband. Then I learned about Lief, and I thought I had a chance after all …”

I checked Molly out of the corner of my eye. She must have known already; she was taking it all right.

Sandoz said, “But you didn’t?”

Uncle Dee shook his head. “She laughed at me. Elaine, you mocked me, and that was too much. I decided to kill you and to kill him, to kill you and your lover together.”

Sandoz nodded like he had known all along. “So you put the bomb in the box. How’d you do that?”

“I came to this house often to show Harry books. One night when I knew that he and Elaine would be out, I came as though I had been invited. When the housekeeper told me they were gone, I said that Mr. Hollander was expecting me; she let me wait in his study, where we always talked. The box was there, on the table. I’d read about that type of lock in one of the books I’d found for Harry, and the tools I required were in the satchel in which I normally carry books. I picked the lock, and used the dud shell from his mantelpiece for the charge.”

“You had the trigger mechanism with you?”

“That’s correct. It was a simple affair, really—a small battery and an electrical switch I arranged so as to set off my blasting cap when the box was opened.”

“You’d planned all along to use the shell?”

Uncle Dee nodded. “Harry had told me about it a couple of times. He had been a young corporal, a supply clerk, in Italy during the war. His outfit hit the beach, and just after he got off the LST that shell tossed sand in his face. He said he had thrown himself flat afterward, and that he must have lain there a couple of minutes waiting for it to go off. Then he realized that if it hadn’t been a dud he would have been killed already, and stood up and went away to do whatever it was he was supposed to be doing.

“A day or so later, when things had quieted down somewhat—am I telling this right, Harry?—he discovered that the chain on which he wore his dogtags had broken. He went looking for them and found them where he had thrown himself down that first time. That reminded him of the shell, and he dug it up to look at. It was a foolish thing to do because it might have exploded, but he said he had the feeling that since it hadn’t gotten him when it had the chance, it never would.”

Sandoz said, “So this time you decided to give it a little help. You must have known that it would be traced back to him eventually.”

Uncle Dee nodded again. “He had her and Lief had her, but I couldn’t; I was going to get them both. Harry had packed that shell in his company’s supplies and trucked it all over Europe, that’s what he told me. If it had done what it was supposed to do the first time, perhaps I would have found Elaine. This time I was going to make certain it didn’t miss.”

Very softly Blue inquired, “Do you want to tell them about Herbert Hollander now?”

“I suppose I’d better.” Uncle Dee mopped his forehead; I could see his hand shake. “But first—Lieutenant, am I going to have to repeat all this again later?”

Sandoz nodded. “For a police stenographer, Mr. Sinclair. She’ll type it up and you’ll have to sign it.”

“Then I’ll try to keep it short. That same evening, when I put the bomb in the box, I got Harry’s gun from his desk drawer. He had shown it to me about a year ago when there was a rash of home invasions here and I advised him to get a dog. He said he didn’t need a dog, he had that, and showed me where he kept it. I thought that if either Elaine or Lief escaped the bomb I’d use it to kill them, then put it someplace where it would be linked to him. I felt sure the servants could identify it, and if they wouldn’t, I’d do it myself.

“My bomb worked, as you know. I was certain it would; I had tried out the mechanism with blasting caps several times in advance.” He glanced around at us when he said that, his smile only a sickly imitation of his old one. “Blasting caps aren’t much more powerful than the big firecrackers—salutes, they were called—that I used to shoot off as a boy. I tested the battery and switch in my basement, and I doubt that the people next door heard anything.

“So I was confident, you see—quite confident, when I came here. Then I realized that I had forgotten the black vinyl tape I had intended to use. I taped the cap to the shell with Scotch tape from Harry’s desk instead, and as it turned out that worked just fine.”

Sandoz said, “Except that Mrs. Hollander wasn’t killed.” Uncle Dee had always had a clean handkerchief in his breast pocket; now he was wadding it between his hands. “That’s right, she wasn’t touched. She’d left the platform before my bomb went off, and of course I couldn’t kill her afterward until Harry got back.”

“But you had the gun.”

“That’s right. I carried it with me everywhere, because I didn’t know when Harry would come home and I’d have a chance at Elaine. Something else had gone wrong as well, however; Holly had been injured. As I said before, I’d tried to arrange things so she wouldn’t be. I felt that the least I could do was visit her, bring her something to read in the hospital.”

“And you met Herbert Hollander in the parking lot?”

“Yes, and that destroyed my whole plan, or at least at the time I thought it did.”

“Why’d you kill him, Mr. Sinclair?”

“I had to. Several times when Harry couldn’t come to see about him, I had gone in his place, as his deputy so to speak. Sometimes I’d taken Harry’s check to the sanatorium, and once or twice when I thought Bert wasn’t getting the treatment he should have had, I’d told Harry about it and relayed his instructions to the doctors there. Somehow that had given Bert the idea that I was the one who was keeping him locked up. He was insane, of course, though if you hadn’t been around him much he could seem quite normal. He had a knife, and I shot him. The next morning I came to this house; I knew Elaine had spent most of the night at the hospital and would sleep late, but I told the housekeeper I had to talk to her about straightening up at the school. As I had expected, the housekeeper wouldn’t wake her; but she let me wait again in Harry’s study, and I put back the gun.”

Elaine stood up, her violet eyes brimming with tears. “De Witte, I won’t let you do this. You’re a wonderful person—the best, the most unselfish man I’ve ever known. But I’m not going to let you destroy yourself. Lieutenant Sandoz, those are lies. De Witte is Harry’s friend, his best friend, and now he’s trying to save Harry, but it’s not right.”

Sandoz was up now, too, trying to get Elaine back into her chair. “Just let him tell his story, Mrs. Hollander. Hear him out.” Between them I saw my father’s face as if it were a photo in a frame; his mouth was open, but I don’t think he was saying anything.

“Lieutenant,” my mother said, “I saw my husband with that box open!”