Pandora by Holly Hollander

How Blue Did the Job

All of a sudden it got so quiet in our living room you could hear yourself breathe.

Elaine dropped back into her chair and put her face in her hands. “I came into the study, and he was at the table. The box was open. He didn’t see me. There. It’s out. I said it.”

“Elaine!” It was my father. “My God, Elaine!”

Blue said, “Yes, Elaine. My God.” I’d never heard him use that tone before. Everybody looked at him, even her. “You saw your husband with Pandora’s Box open, and you didn’t ask why he had opened it? Why not? And by the way, what was in it?”

There were tears streaking my mother’s perfect little face; I don’t think she wanted to say anything, but after a minute she did. “Nothing. There was nothing in it when I saw it.”

“You didn’t see him put the German shell in it?”

“No, of course not. I wouldn’t have gone through with the drawing.”

“But you went through with it believing that the box was empty? Thinking the whole thing would end in an excruciating anticlimax?”

“I had to. There wasn’t anything else to do.”

Once I heard my father fire a man; it was the chauffeur we had before Bill, and my father had told him to clear out in just the tone he used now. What he said this time was, “Lieutenant, I never opened that box.”

“Mr. Hollander, I’m beginning to think you didn’t.”

Blue paid no attention to them. “There was everything else to do, Elaine. All you would have had to do—if you’d actually seen your husband with that box open, and the box was empty—was suggest to him that you find some interesting antique to put in it as a prize. For a hundred dollars you could have gotten some nineteenth-century books from De Witte Sinclair. You could have used an old gun, or some antique silver. Anything—anything, if you had really seen it open as you say.”

“Are you accusing me of having put the shell in that box?”

“Yes, I am,” Blue told her. “I can prove it. I will prove it.”

Sandoz snorted. “First Mr. Hollander, then Sinclair, and now Mrs. Hollander? Okay, let’s hear it.” He sounded skeptical; but I was watching his eyes, and they told Jake to get behind my mother. Jake did it, just a couple of steps over.

Blue said, “Mr. Sinclair’s confession was simply a trick, as you certainly understand by now. He and I arranged it over the telephone last night, and this morning he came to my place and we rehearsed it.”

Sandoz said, “He was running one hell of a risk.”

Blue nodded. “He really is Mr. Hollander’s best friend, you see. Even rich and powerful men sometimes have one or two real friends, though often they don’t know it. We took a few precautions, however; Mr. Sinclair can produce three witnesses, including myself, who will swear that we heard him express his intention to make a false confession this morning. And it any event a polygraph test would have cleared him.”

Sandoz grunted. “You claimed a minute ago that you could prove Mrs. Hollander made the bomb.” He was watching her and pretending not to. “If you can, why’d you need Sinclair?”

“Because I’m trying to do something you police never seem to. I’m trying to anticipate the trial.” Blue leaned back in his chair. It couldn’t have been noon yet, but he looked tired. “The wisest thing for Mrs. Hollander to do would probably be to confess and throw herself upon the mercy of the court. That is what I would advise her to do if I were still an attorney, as I once was, and if I had somehow been chosen to represent her; but I don’t believe she’ll do it. Despite all that fragile beauty, she’s a stubborn, not very shrewd fighter, and she’s accustomed to getting what she wants.”

Sandoz grunted again. “So?”

“To a great degree the success of her defense will depend on the support she receives from her husband, both in testimony and finance. Yesterday, when I went into Mr. Hollander’s study, I noticed that a German eighty-eight-millimeter artillery shell was missing from his mantel; I won’t bore you now by explaining how I knew that one had been there earlier. In conversation, I brought up the subject of artillery and waited for his reaction. There was none. It seemed clear he had no idea that the ‘bomb’ that exploded at the Fair had in fact been a shell. That hadn’t been on the news, remember, and he had returned only an hour or two before from New York.”

My father nodded. “You’re right, I didn’t know it then.”

“When I talked to him,” Blue continued, “he was eager that the murder of his brother should be avenged, which seemed quite natural. He was even more anxious, however, that the explosion at the Fair should not be investigated; since his wife had been deeply involved in the Fair and his daughter had been one of the casualties, that seemed unnatural indeed. If he did not, as it appeared he did not, know that his shell had been used to build the bomb, it seemed probable that he was protecting someone else whom he assumed to be guilty; it was not difficult to guess who that was, or to see that he felt confident that the bombing and his brother’s murder were unrelated.”

Blue glanced at my father, then went back to Sandoz. “When you told him about the shell, he involuntarily glanced up at the mantel, and his shock was apparent. He knew at that moment, and with certainty, who had planted that bomb; but he did not accuse her. He loved his wife, and he must have known of her relations with Lief and believed she had given herself to him, and killed him, because of some hold he had over her. I needed to make her do or say something that would show her husband clearly not only that she had killed those people, but that she had planned her crime so he would be blamed.”

My father said, “You did. Can you also tell me why she did it?”

“No,” Blue said. “But she can, and perhaps eventually she will. All I can say now is that it appears to me that Lief was not her primary target—that worked out too neatly. I think she contrived to have an affair with the man who would open the box, in other words, and not that she contrived that the man with whom she had an affair would open it. And certainly her target was not originally Herbert Hollander the Third; his death bears the earmarks of a spur-of-the-moment decision. But until she said she had seen you with the box open, she might have argued, for example, that she had killed Lief because he was threatening to reveal their relationship to you unless she would run away with him. If she had done that, would you have helped her?”

“I suppose I would. I would have done whatever lay in my power, I think.”

Elaine looked at him and saw that it was no good now, and looked away.

Molly’s twangy voice surprised us. “I was wishin’ a while ago I’d brought my gun to this, but I see it was the Good Lord’s provision. I’d have shot Mr. Sinclair—or maybe not, ’cause a man that’s been messed over by a bad woman has to be forgiven a lot. Miz Hollander, I didn’t hate you like I ought to have when I heard about those letters of yours, ‘cause Larry was just so handsome and good and I believed I knew how you’d felt. Now I know you didn’t ever love him. You killed him just for bait, and I’ll get you. I may have to wait till the law lets you go, but ’fore the world ends, you’re mine.”

Elaine couldn’t meet her eyes, and everybody was quiet for a minute. It was my father who broke it. “Go on, Mr. Blue.”

Blue leaned forward, looking from him to Molly, then over at Sandoz. “There were three plausible, but false, assumptions that tended to confuse things, I would say. The first may have impeded you more than it did me, Lieutenant. It was that the male voice that had threatened Larry over the telephone belonged to the person who contrived his death. Even when you decided that no vengeful veterans existed, I believe you thought those calls had been someone’s effort to throw any investigation off track.”

“And they weren’t?”

“No, they weren’t. Molly, do you want to explain now?” Molly shook her head and looked at me. I said, “Larry made those calls himself. Molly says she was never completely sure, but I think she knew and just didn’t let on. When she showed me her gun in the store—it was Larry’s really, one they kept under the counter in case of a holdup—it was so I wouldn’t guess she thought it was him. She says the voice told her some things it seemed like nobody but Larry would know. Were you onto him?”

Blue shook his head. “He came to me a month ago, brought by a mutual friend. I was interested in harassing calls, as I still am, so I poked around. By the time Larry was killed, I was considering the possibility that he had placed them himself, but I was far from sure. Now I see—or think I do—that he was tormented by guilt. If I’d exposed him, perhaps that would have provided punishment enough. There’s no way of knowing.”

“What’d he do?” I asked. When I saw how Molly was looking at me, I added, “I mean, I know it’s none of my business …”

Blue said, “It is your business, actually. It’s everyone’s. I have no idea what Larry did, but I doubt that he did anything worse than many hundreds of others. There are no good wars, and Vietnam was a particularly bad one; many of its combatants wore civilian clothes, and much of the fighting took place in densely populated areas. If you desire speculation, mine would be that Larry believed that what he was doing was right, at first. And that by the time he’d changed his mind he’d been given, or was about to get, his commission. A month is a long time in war, and he may have gone on for months acting much as he had before, all the while becoming increasingly certain that he was morally a criminal. A protracted period during which a man acts against his conscience can produce severe psychic stress, though it is invisible at the time. Eventually, of course, he resigned that commission and left the service.”

“You’re telling us he brought back his own shell,” my father said, “as I did.” He looked old, I thought.

Sandoz cleared his throat. “You were talking about three wrong assumptions, and even if you were too polite to say I made them all, I’d like to know what the others were.”

“I was led astray by the other two myself,” Blue admitted. “One was that some sort of mechanism had to have been assembled to detonate the shell; that seemed to point to Lief and suicide, or to Mr. Hollander, who has an elaborate shop in the basement of this house and is reported to be a clever mechanic. It was a day and more after the explosion before it occurred to me that even before someone had put a bomb in it, Pandora’s could have been no ordinary box. A long, long time ago, someone had taken the trouble to have that word, Pandora, lettered on its lid in gold leaf. Last night I escorted Holly home and helped her up the stairs, to the best of my ability. And as I was going out, it struck me that the collection of books on vaults and locks in Mr. Hollander’s study might include references to such a box.”

“I should have thought of that myself,” Sandoz said. “Did it?”

My father said, “Yes, it does, and I would imagine from what Mr. Blue has said that he found at least one of them.”

Sandoz looked at him. “You knew about it, then?” “Certainly.”

“Did you tell your wife what you knew?”

My father shook his head. “Why should I? The Pandoras were harmless, and as I saw it I’d only have been spoiling her fun.” He paused, and I thought he was waiting for her to say something; she didn’t, so he went on. “They belong to a class of gadgets called alarm boxes, and were made about a hundred years ago in fair numbers by an outfit called the Dependable Manufacturing Company. They came equipped with a good lock—by which I mean with a lock that was good by the standards of the period, before the introduction of pin tumblers—but they had a second line of defense, which is why we call them alarm boxes. In the Pandoras, it consisted of a spring-wound motor that rang a bell and fired a blank cartridge unless a secret catch on one side was pressed before the box was opened.”

Blue said, “The people who built those boxes weren’t out to create a murder weapon. The unrifled barrel that held the blank cartridge was not, as you might assume, directed toward the face of the unauthorized opener. It pointed toward the back of the box. The most common method of clearing what was a battlefield of unexploded shells is to detonate them by shooting them from a safe distance with a rifle. Mr. Hollander, who appears to have seen a good deal of action in World War II, may have mentioned that to his wife.” Blue looked at Elaine. “Did he?”

Sandoz said, “So all she had to do was put a real bullet in the barrel.”

“Yes, and position the shell so the bullet would strike it. No expert mechanic was required for either, of course. Holly here has a twenty-two rifle—I saw it in a corner of her bedroom—and everyone seems to have known about Mr. Hollander’s PPK; a man who is often away and keeps a gun for protection generally tells his wife where to find it in any case. It’s quite possible there are other guns in this house as well. Presumably there is one that uses ammunition that could be made to fit the Pandora’s chamber. You were patient while I aired my speculations about Larry Lief. Do you want to hear a few more?”

“Shoot,” Sandoz said. I don’t think he was trying to be funny.

“I don’t believe Mrs. Hollander was at all sure the shell would explode. If it had not, it would have served her purpose nearly as well. The world would have thought her husband had tried to kill her lover, and I imagine she would have persuaded her husband that her lover had arranged that it should.”

“Hey!” I said. “Do you remember that I said the letter in the paper showed that the bomb did more than it was meant to?”

Blue nodded, and Sandoz asked him, “She wrote that?” “I think so. If you haven’t found the machine it was typed on—”

“We haven’t.”

“—and you’ve examined any that may be here, I’d suggest you look at those in the Chicago offices of the Hollander Safe and Lock Company, and particularly the one used by Mr. Hollander’s secretary. On two occasions he told me he thought the bombing was the work of terrorists, although even the first time he must have suspected otherwise. No doubt he made the same remark to his wife by telephone from New York, and she—knowing by then of the calls the Liefs had received, which had been publicized by television news—wanted to make it look as though he was blowing smoke in the eyes of the police. Actually the letter struck me as having been written by a woman; thus it was a confirmation of the theory I had already formed.”

“Before you get off onto that,” I said, “what was the third wrong assumption?”

“That Pandora’s box could only have been opened by someone skilled in picking locks.”

Uncle Dee smiled. “Which I, by the way, am not.” It was his real one, back home again.

“Eventually I did a little more research on Pandora’s story—something I ought to have done much earlier. I told Holly one version shortly before the bomb went off. There is another, in which Pandora is given a box full of evils and told to guard it, but opens it out of curiosity. That one, of course, must have been what the Dependable Manufacturing Company had in mind, and its moral is that women are insatiably curious. I might mention in passing that I myself am more curious than any woman I have ever met.

“When I read the story, I realized how unlikely it was that Mrs. Hollander should have such a box, and offer it as a prize, without knowing what it contained. No doubt she could have had her husband open it in advance; but if she had, he would surely have guessed later that it was she who had arranged for his war souvenir to be in it and for the blank gun to be loaded. He did in any event, as we know, but that was certainly something she would have sought to avoid. She might have had the man she had made her lover, Larry Lief, open it; but if the shell failed to explode, or he survived the blast, or—as would have been quite possible—he had leaked the secret, she would again have been in great danger.”

Sandoz said, “You’re going to tell me she opened it herself with a hairpin.”

Blue shook his head. “She opened it herself with the key. The conviction we all had that Pandora’s box was locked, and, as it were, sealed, when she bought it rested upon her unsupported statement. Her statement was a lie. The box’s alarm mechanism had been exhibited and explained to her before she purchased the box, and the key accompanied it. I doubt that you’ll find it; once she had closed the box and relocked it, the key was merely a danger, and a key is an easy thing to dispose of.”

Elaine said, “There wasn’t any key!”

“Yes, there was,” Blue told her. “Yesterday I located the shop where you bought the box, and had a conversation with its owner.” He took one of those mini-cassette recorders out of the side pocket of his jacket. “Do you want to hear it?”

“No,” Elaine said. She looked at us—my father, Blue and Sandoz and Uncle Dee, Molly and me. “I think this is the point at which I’m supposed to dash upstairs and blow out my brains with Holly’s little rifle.”

Behind her chair, Jake rumbled, “No you don’t, lady.” “That’s right. No, I don’t. I’m going to get help, and we’re going to fight this.”

Hearing her I felt funny. It was the kind of thing I might have said myself.