Pandora by Holly Hollander

How My Father Got Smart

It was really hell when my father came home, because I wanted to jump up and run out and kiss him, and I couldn’t. I heard the Caddy’s tires crunch the gravel, then the front door rattle, then the deep growl of his voice when he said hello to Mrs. Maas, and finally the scrape of his shoes on the stairs, and all that time I had to sit there like a dummy.

Then the door opened, and there he was. I yelled, “Daddy!” and held out my arms and he came over and gave me a squeeze, and just for a second there I caught the spicy smell of his aftershave. He looked like he always had, only maybe a little more tired and worried.

Aladdin Blue was starting to stand up to shake hands, so my father said, “No, no. Keep your seat.” But Blue got up just the same and they shook.

“Mr. Blue is a criminologist,” I said.

“I know. Mr. Blue called me at the Plaza, I believe.” My father looked at Blue. When he doesn’t want you to, you can’t ever tell whether he likes what he sees. “You aren’t associated with the police?”

“No,” Blue said. “As I told you then, I’m associated with the crime. I was at the Fair, chatting with your daughter, when the explosion occurred.”

“I know,” my father said again. “Your leg …”

“That’s an old injury.”

I said, “He was shot by gangsters,” which I still think was a diplomatic thing to say under the circumstances, although Blue gave me a look that would have set fire to a pile of bricks.

“You weren’t injured by the blast, Mr. Blue?”

“I was lucky. Your daughter was sitting by a window, and wasn’t equally lucky. I was also stupid. I ran—as near as I can come to running—out of the building without realizing she had been hurt. A shard of glass wounded her; she can tell you about it.”

“I’m sure she will, but I’m keeping you standing.” My father turned to me. “Holly, I see some crutches in the corner. Can you walk?”

“A little,” I said.

“How did you get upstairs?”

“Bill carried me.”

“If Bill could carry you up, I can carry you down. I want to continue this in my study, where Mr. Blue and I can sit down, and I can offer him a good cigar and a drink. I’d like a drink myself.”

The way it turned out, I hobbled on my crutches—aluminum jobs Elaine had rented at the hospital—as far as the top of the stairs, and my father picked me up there and carried me down and through the foyer, with Blue limping on ahead of us to open the study door.

I mentioned the study when I told about going in there to have a look at the letter from Garden Meadow, but I didn’t tell too much about it. It wasn’t a big room as rooms in our place went, although I’m sure that in lots of nice homes it would be the biggest room in the house. About fifteen by twenty, maybe. The door was at one end, and there was a bow window looking out onto some japonica and grass and other stuff (I don’t know what you’re supposed to call it) at the other. On the right wall was a big fieldstone fireplace with white birch logs stacked beside it. Sometimes my father had a fire there in the winter. The walls were paneled with some kind of nearly black wood—it was American walnut, I think—that I liked. There was no light in the ceiling, so it seemed kind of dark and cozy in there even with the desk light and both floor lamps on. Besides the desk, there were bookcases, a big library table, a coffee table, a wet bar, a little brown leather sofa (which was where my father set me down) and brown leather easy chairs.

“Drink?” my father asked Blue.

Blue nodded and said, “Whatever you’re having,” which meant he got Chivas and soda. I got a gin rickey minus the gin, which was what I always got when my father mixed drinks. I didn’t get offered a cigar (I would have taken it) and Blue waved his away. I wondered if he knew it was a Ruiz y Blanco, made by people who skipped out of Cuba when Castro took over.

“You don’t object to my smoking, I hope?”

Blue shook his head, and my father lit up. I thought about Lieutenant Sandoz then, because both of them turned their cigars to get the fire even.

“When I spoke to you by telephone, I told you everything I knew about the case at the time,” Blue said, “but there’ve been several interesting developments since.”

“The bombing, you mean.”

Blue nodded.

“I’m not concerned with the bombing, Mr. Blue. I tried to make that clear earlier.”

Blue glanced at me. “Your daughter was one of the victims, Mr. Hollander.” It was the first time he’d called my father anything. I got the feeling he’d come to some kind of decision when he said that.

“I know it, and unless you have children of your own you’ll never understand how much I regret that. But Holly was hurt as anyone else might have been hurt; in fact, as a good many others actually were. If these radicals had put a bomb on an airplane instead, and I had been killed with two hundred other passengers, I wouldn’t expect my family or my friends to discover just which lunatic had built the bomb or who had checked the fatal suitcase on board. That’s badly put, but perhaps you see what I mean.”

Blue nodded again. “I believe I do.”

“The crime I’m concerned about, the crime that has brought me back at an exceedingly inconvenient time, is the murder of my brother Bert.”

“I ought to have expressed my sympathy sooner,” Blue said. “In any event, I extend it now. I can’t resist adding, however, that your brother’s murder is one of the developments to which I referred.”

My father’s eyebrows went up. I bet he looks that way when somebody asks for a raise. “You believe the two are connected, Mr. Blue?”

“They appear to be, yes.”

I must have made some sort of a noise, sucked air, maybe, because they both looked at me and I felt dumb. Then my father said, “I admit that I probably don’t know as much about this as you do. Not only because I lack your training, but because you have been on the spot and I haven’t. In my business, I’ve found it’s the man on the spot whose opinions can be relied upon. But from what I do know, those events seem completely unrelated. My daughter was injured by some fanatic’s bomb, while Bert was—”

He broke off and wiped his forehead. “Good Lord! I don’t even know how he died. Joan called from the office and told me he’d been murdered in some parking lot. What happened? Was he shot? Stabbed?”

I put in, “On TV they said he’d been shot with a thirty-eight.”

My father looked relieved, as if knowing how his brother had died made it easier somehow. Maybe it did.

Blue added, “He was shot only once, in the chest, and died almost instantly. He can hardly have known what was happening. Someone—presumably his murderer—dragged his body about fifteen feet to conceal it in shrubbery.”

“A mugger?”

“No. The police thought so at first, because there was no watch and no wallet. I was able to demonstrate to them that it was much more probable that those things were never present to begin with. Your brother—as we both know—had escaped from a private mental hospital.”

My father gave me a Look, and I signaled back no good and hard.

Blue said, “I sometimes visit a friend at the same hospital, Mr. Hollander. I met your brother several times, and recognized his name at once when I heard it over the police shortwave. The point I wanted to make is that most patients there don’t bother to wear watches—I’ve verified this with my friend—and have no reason to carry wallets. They are not permitted currency, and whatever identification they may have is locked away.”

“A mugger couldn’t have known that.”

Blue nodded. “Of course not. But when a mugger kills his victim it is usually by accident—he strikes him on the head, and in the excitement of the moment strikes too hard. Or the victim resists and is stabbed in the melee. One seldom hears of a mugger who shoots his victims in cold blood so he can loot the corpse afterward, and it would seem to be a poorly thought-out technique. Pistols are noisy.”

My father drew on his cigar; he was looking at the ceiling. “Bert might have rushed him just the same. Bert was like that. Suppose this mugger drew his gun—”

“Technically,” Blue interrupted, “that word gun indicates an artillery piece. Let’s call it a pistol.”

If my father knew that an artillery shell had exploded at the Fair, he sure didn’t let on. For a minute there I thought he was going to get angry because Blue was quibbling; then he smiled. “That’s right. How did it go? ‘This is my rifle, and this is my gun. This’s for shooting, this other’s for fun.’”

The smile turned to a grin when he looked at me. “I won’t explain that, Holly. G.I. poetry.”

“You’re correct, of course,” Blue went on. “It’s possible a mugger approached your brother in that parking lot, pointed a pistol at him and demanded his money, and your brother tried to take his weapon from him. I don’t believe it, but it is barely possible.”

“Why don’t you believe it, Mr. Blue?”

“There are at least three reasons. The first is that your brother appears to have been shot while standing fully erect. If he had died while rushing at his assailant, the bullet would have entered his chest an an angle; a man bends forward when he runs or leaps at his enemy.”

“You’ve seen his body?”

Blue nodded.

“Suppose he had grasped the other man’s arm. The two of them might have been wrestling for the pistol.”

“In that case, there would have been severe powder burns around the wound. There were powder burns, but they were light, indicating that the muzzle of the weapon was at least a foot away from him when it was fired.”

My father got quiet for a minute or two, then he said, “All right, you said you had three reasons. What’s the second?”

Blue shook his head. “You won’t like it.”

“I want to hear it.”

“Aside from a few coins, only one object was found in your brother’s pockets. It was a bloodstained paper rose.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand. What’s the significance of that?”

“When I was talking with your daughter just before the bomb went off, she was wearing a red flower in her hair. When I saw her after the explosion, her hair was disheveled and the flower was gone. Your brother had come to that room, looking for her, once. He must have come again—perhaps hours, but perhaps only minutes, after the explosion. He found that flower, recognized it, and picked it up. He learned where she had been taken.”

“In other words, he was on his way to see her when he was killed. I’d assumed that.”

“I do not assume it,” Blue said, “but it seems clear to me that your daughter’s injury and your brother’s death are linked, and that eliminates simple robbery as a motive.”

“And your third reason?”

“Because you don’t believe it yourself, Mr. Hollander. Your daughter was injured, as I informed you by telephone. She was still alive, and thus in need of whatever comfort you might have provided her. You were involved in an important business matter and did not come. Then your brother was killed. He is beyond all human aid, yet you came at once.”

“I had intended to come anyway,” my father said. “By last night matters in New York appeared a good deal less urgent than I had thought earlier.”

“One of the first things you said when we entered this room was, ‘The crime I am concerned about, the crime that has brought me back at an exceedingly inconvenient time, is the murder of my brother Bert.’”

“You have a good memory.”

Blue nodded. “Yes, I do. You don’t deny you said that?”

“I’m sure I did, or something like it. You’re right, of course; I was testing the water. You’ve offered your services as a criminologist, Mr. Blue. Very well, I accept—I want you to investigate the death of my brother.”

Blue shut up for a minute; then he said, “We criminologists don’t make investigations, Mr. Hollander; if we did, we would be private investigators. We study crime, and criminals. On one condition, I will undertake such a study of the death of Herbert Hollander the Third.”

“The law intrudes on everything today, doesn’t it. What’s your condition?”

“That I be retained as a consultant by the Hollander Safe and Lock Company Incorporated, and not by you as an individual. You understand, I’m sure, that the association with your company may be professionally advantageous to me.”

“I was about to suggest it myself. This way we can write it off as a business expense. How much?” My father was getting a pad of Hollander Safe & Lock checks out of his desk.

“Five thousand,” Blue said. “That will get us started.”

My father paused. He always did, whether it was sixty-five bucks for a shirt or sixty-five thousand for a new bracelet for Elaine. “All right,” he said. “It will be worth it if you can clear this thing up.” And there was no way to tell whether he would have called it off at six or gone into five figures.

As he passed the check over, there was a familiar tap on the door. I sang out, “What is it, Mrs. Maas?” and she said, “Tell Mr. Hollander there are some policemen here looking for Mrs. Hollander.”