Pandora by Holly Hollander

How Lieutenant Sandoz Named the killer

Okay, it’s time to come clean—I’m psychic. You remember when I watched my father firing up his cigar, and it reminded me of Lieutenant Sandoz of the Pool County Cops? Well, at that very moment the real Sandoz must have been on his way to our house. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Astral bodies, life after death, and all that stuff. There are people selling articles to the supermarket tabloids on the strength of a lot less.

And just in case you’re still not convinced, when Sandoz introduced himself and sat down in my father’s study—taking the last chair, I might add, so that the benighted shlepper with him had to stand—he turned down my father’s offer of a good cigar and lit one of his own, a stogie made in New Jersey by refugees from Appalachia, by the smell of it.

“My housekeeper says you’re looking for my wife,” my father said. “She’s out shopping, I think.”

Sandoz nodded. “We’d like to speak with Mrs. Hollander, yes.”

“I certainly hope you’re not such a fool as to think that Mrs. Hollander has …” My father let it hang there.

“Killed somebody?” Sandoz didn’t smile—not even the tiny turning of his mouth that he probably called a smile. He wasn’t being funny and he wasn’t being cute, or at least he didn’t want us to think he was.

“I wasn’t going to go nearly that far. Been involved in any serious illegality.”

“No,” Sandoz said. Then, “Maybe you might want to get your daughter and your man Blue out of here.”

“You wish to speak to me in confidence?”

Sandoz shook his head. “Maybe you want to speak to me in confidence.”

“If this concerns the murder of my brother, I’d like his niece, and Mr. Blue, to hear whatever is said.”

“No, this concerns the death of Lawrence L. Lief of Barton. There are two others involved, too. Mr. Drexel K. Munroe and Mrs. Edith A. Simmons—”

(So one of us wounded had finally died.)

“—but specifically and particularly Mr. Lawrence L. Lief.”

“In that case, it doesn’t concern me or my family, as I was just explaining to Mr. Blue. I don’t want to discuss it, except over a dinner table.”

There was a long pause. Then Sandoz said, “Mr. Hollander, I would like your permission to search this house.”

Blue put in, “Have you got a warrant?”

Lieutenant Sandoz swung his wooden puss toward him. “If I had a warrant, I wouldn’t have to ask permission; you know that. I’m asking Mr. Hollander to permit a search of these premises, to show that he’s dealing in good faith with the police.”

My father said, “I’m not anxious to show any kind of faith to the police—good or bad. At this point, I owe nothing to the police, and I suggest to you that if the police were to spend half the energy they put into molesting reputable people into searching for the radicals who killed Larry Lief and the thug who murdered my brother, nothing more would be required.”

Sandoz lifted his shoulders. “You refuse.”

“Absolutely.”

“All right. We’ll have to go to a judge for a warrant now, and it’s better if we can tell the judge we asked and permission was denied. I’d like to use your phone, but if you want to be a bastard about it, Jake will go out to the car and radio someone, and they’ll phone. You want to be a bastard?”

“There’s a telephone in the hall,” my father said. “You can use that.”

“There’s one here, too. It’s closer.”

If I’d had my brain going, I would have reached over and grabbed the phone cord and pulled the phone off the desk so he’d have had to get up and bend over to get it. It wouldn’t have accomplished anything, but it would have made me feel better. Only I didn’t. I got caught flat-footed (if you can get caught flat-footed when your feet aren’t in working order) and Sandoz had the phone before I thought of it. He pushed buttons for a number that must have rung three or four times. Then he said, “He’s here … . Yeah, back from New York. Tell them … . He won’t do it … . That’s right, tell Dugan we asked, and he says no dice … .” He listened for a while longer, then grunted and hung up. “We’ll have a man out here with a warrant in about an hour.”

My father said, “I doubt that. But whether it’s true or not, in the meantime you can leave my house. I believe I’m within my rights in ordering the police off private property.”

Sandoz nodded. “If we don’t have a warrant, that’s right. But, Mr. Hollander, I have a good deal to say that you might find interesting.”

“I don’t—”

“And if we leave, you’re coming with us. Jake and I are going to talk to you in one place or another, if you understand what I mean.”

“You would arrest me?”

“Not unless we had to. First we’d ask you come down, as any citizen might do, to give evidence to the police. If you decided to be a bastard …” Sandoz shrugged again.

My father said, “If I give evidence at this point, it will be with my attorney present.”

“I figured that. You’ve heard of the Miranda decision, Mr. Hollander?”

“I’ve heard the term, yes—I think on some television show. I know nothing about the details.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to. It’s been my experience—I know Mr. Blue there is an expert and maybe he’ll want to argue with me—but it’s been my experience as a plain country cop that one big difference between a pro and an amateur is that the pro does his homework. Most pros aren’t smart—a smart man doesn’t take up crime as a career unless there’s special circumstances. Lots of times the amateurs are. Not long ago, just to give you an example, we got a kid who’d raped and strangled three college girls, and he turned out to be an honor student at Pool County College. We got him because before he killed the third one he took her to some disco joint. You ask yourself, why would a smart kid like him do a dumb thing like that?”

Sandoz blew a thick stream of smoke out of each nostril and looked around at us. “I think it was because he just couldn’t imagine that we’d ever get onto him enough to go around with his picture and her picture. He thought that we’d never get close to him. A pro would have said to himself, what if they get onto me? A pro knows about Miranda and all the rest of it—better, sometimes, than we do.

“What Miranda does is make us read you a whole bunch of rights when we arrest you. I don’t mean you specifically, Mr. Hollander—whoever we might have to arrest. We’ve got to tell them they don’t have to answer, and they’ve got the right to a lawyer, and so forth. Now I want to be as open with you as I can, so I’m telling you all these things even though you’re not under arrest yet. If you want to hear it, I’ll also tell you why I think I may have to place you under arrest.”

My father said, “I want to hear it.” He looked grim.

“That’s fine. You see, I want to show you we’re not being unreasonable. We’re not out to get you, we’re out to get the perpetrator. If that happens to be you—and personally I think it does—then that’s your fault and not ours. So far this is all hypothetical.”

“If you have something to say, say it.”

“Sure, and I’ll make it as short as I can. To begin with, everything depends on two assumptions I’ve made. If either of them’s wrong, everything falls through. Maybe one is wrong. Maybe they both are. The first one is that the two crimes are connected, which is to say that the explosion at the school in Barton is tied to the shooting of Herbert Hollander the Third.”

“I don’t agree with that.”

“Well, I think it’s true just the same, and maybe if I tell you why, you’ll agree with me. In police work, Mr. Hollander, we’re always looking for similarities. A man that breaks into groceries, for instance, usually does it again and again. If you’ve got two burglaries, and one’s at the A and P and the other’s at a Jewel, you usually find that the same guy did them both. You see what I mean. So I’ve been looking at these killings and trying to match things up. Let’s look at the second one first, because it’s so much simpler. Herbert Hollander the Third was killed, and there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that he was the guy the killer meant to get. The shooting took place at night, sure, but that parking lot was lit up pretty good—we checked it out. The murderer was close, too, when he fired, and he was looking at your brother Herbert head on. When Cain killed Abel with the rock, he probably didn’t see him much better.”

Sandoz waited to give my father a chance to say something. When he didn’t, he went on. “One thing I’ve thought about was whether maybe—just maybe—Herbert Hollander was mistaken for his brother, George Henry Hollander.”

“If I killed him myself, that’s hardly possible, is it?”

Sandoz nodded, being fair. “That’s what I thought, too. But I’d already turned it down for a couple of other reasons. Nobody who knew you could have mistaken your brother for you in that lot. He was an older man, and a taller man, and a slimmer man. Your hair’s gray; his was white, and he wasn’t wearing a hat. If anybody made that mistake, it would have to be somebody who didn’t know you—a hit man working from a verbal description or maybe a picture. Well, there are a dozen real pros operating out of Chicago who’ll give you a nice slick job for the price of a new car, and lights in a parking lot wouldn’t even slow those boys down—I’ve known them to blow away their man in the middle of one of those expense-account restaurants, with a roomful of customers and waiters watching. What I couldn’t figure out is why one would be hanging around the parking lot waiting to shoot your brother by mistake. When that guy got hit that I told you about, the guy in the restaurant, it was because somebody’d fingered him. Who fingered you? Nobody, if you were really in New York like you said you were.”

“I was.”

“I hope so, Mr. Hollander. You have somebody with you? We think your brother was shot between one-thirty and two-thirty in the morning. That estimate’s from the coroner’s office, based on their examination of the corpse. That would be two-thirty to three-thirty in New York.”

“No, I had nobody with me. I was asleep in my room in the hotel.”

“Uh huh. I kind of thought you might say that. You know, Mr. Hollander, it’s a wonderful age we live in. These days it only takes a couple of hours to fly from New York to Chicago, and a couple more to fly back. Suppose a man said good night to his business associates at eleven P.M. New York time and went up to his room. Why, at eleven-thirty he could sneak out of the hotel, and by twelve-thirty he could be at some airport easy—not much traffic at that time of night. By two-thirty—this is still New York time—he’d be in Chicago. If he had his business finished by three-thirty, New York time, he’d be back at his hotel before seven. There’s not many people up and around in the average hotel at six or six-thirty. He’d probably be able to catch a few hours’ sleep, even, on the planes, and in his hotel room before he had to show his face somewhere. He’d look a little tired of course—circles under the eyes and so on—but people would probably expect that, if he’d been working hard and they knew his little daughter, his only child, had just been hurt.

“Then too, there’s the business about the hospital parking lot. That looks bad, like I said, for a hit man. But it looks just fine for a relative. Herbert Hollander had jumped the wall at the funny farm, but he wasn’t so crazy us cops didn’t have a hard time laying hands on him. He could walk down a street, and he could talk to people, and nobody’d know he was supposed to be in an institution. Suppose he called his brother in New York. Asking for help, maybe.”

My father shook his head. “He didn’t.”

“I’m just supposing. Like I told you, so far this is all hypothetical.

“Well, what would be more natural than for the brother to say, ‘I’m just now leaving for Chicago to see about Holly. Meet me in the parking lot—not in the lobby, where they might spot you and send you back—and I’ll give you the money for a ticket to Tahiti.’ Or whatever it was his brother had said he wanted.” Sandoz spread his big, hard-looking brown hands. “You see what I mean? It falls into place pretty good.

“So it was Herbert Hollander that got killed, and it was him that was meant to be killed. All right, how about the other killing, the cannon shell that exploded at Barton High?”

“Cannon shell?” My father’s face was so tight it seemed like somebody was standing behind him pulling at the skin.

Sandoz drew on his cigar. “Didn’t you think we knew about that? Yes, sir, an old shell from a German Army gun. We know who was killed when it went off, but I asked myself there, too, if they were meant to be killed. Mrs. Simmons was farther away than several people that haven’t died, so I think we can forget about her. We’ve dug around a bit on Mr. Munroe without coming up with a better-thanaverage reason somebody’d want him dead.”

I said, “What about the guys from Vietnam who were out to get Larry, you dumb S.O.B.?”

Sandoz looked at me and smiled a little. “That’s a good question, Miss Hollander, and to tell the truth I don’t even much mind the way you asked it. These days it’s kind of nice to find out there are still kids around who get upset when somebody calls their old man a murderer. I can’t tell you anything about those guys from Vietnam, except that they’re so hard to locate that I’m beginning to wonder if they’re real at all.”