Pandora by Holly Hollander

How Sandoz Pulled a Gun

“Hey, wait a minute,” I said. “I saw them. I told you about that when you came to see me in the hospital.”

Sandoz shook his head. “You saw a car pull away from the curb, Miss Hollander, after you’d heard a story that scared you a little bit. Tell ten girls your age a ghost story and stick them in an old house, and at least three will see a ghost. All of them will hear something that might have been one.”

“But—”

“We’ve looked high and low for the place where these people might have had their cannon, and there isn’t any. What’s more conclusive, to me at least, is that we’ve talked over the phone with about twenty men who knew Lief in Vietnam. Some of them we got from Army records, and those gave us the names of the rest. None of them say there was anybody who hated him enough to kill him, and in an outfit like the Army that sort of thing gets around. He didn’t rob anybody, he didn’t take anybody’s woman, and he didn’t make a habit of shooting unarmed civilians. Can I ask what you’re grinning about, Mr. Blue?”

Blue nodded. “That German eighty-eight-millimeter gun. I never did believe in it, and I’m delighted to hear that it has been put away at last.”

I protested to Sandoz, “But you were the one who said it was an artillery shell!”

“I did, Miss Hollander, and it was. After I’d wasted a lot of good men’s time looking for the spot it had been fired from, I finally got it through my head that there’s a big difference between a common bullet—that reminds me of something I forgot, by the way, and I’ll get back to it—and a shell. A bullet has to be fired. Otherwise, it’s just a little hunk of lead that can’t hurt anybody. A shell doesn’t. It can blow up, even if it’s never seen the inside of a gun barrel.

“Let’s suppose, Miss Hollander, that somebody had a shell like that. Maybe he stole it from a museum, or maybe he just found it lying around somewhere. If he was a clever man with tools, it would be pretty easy to rig up a way to detonate it, probably with a dynamite cap—they aren’t hard to come by. If he wanted to be extra sure, he might even stick a little dab of some other explosive—gelignite, let’s say—between the cap and the shell. I called up the Hollander Safe and Lock plant down in Indiana, and do you know, they use dynamite caps in their lab down there, and gelignite, too, to see how hard a safecracker would have to work to get into one of their new models.”

“If my father had done what you’re saying, and if he has all this stuff in his company—I’m not going to believe that just because you said it—he wouldn’t have needed the shell at all.”

“That’s right, he wouldn’t have. He could have used plain gelignite and the cap. But that way he couldn’t have thrown us off with war stories. The way he did it, making the phone calls and using the shell, he had us chasing our tails. Probably he hoped we’d chase them forever—anyhow, that’s what I think now. Once I search this house, maybe I’ll know better.”

My father asked, “Are you finished?”

“Why no, Mr. Hollander. I haven’t even said most of what I wanted to. Mostly I’ve been answering your questions, and your daughter’s.” Sandoz swiveled a little in the desk chair.

“I was talking about looking for connections, you remember, and I showed why it was I thought the murder of your brother was no mistake. What I mean to say is that whoever killed him meant to kill him, and not somebody else, or just anybody. So I asked myself if there was some similarity, some connection, to hook up that killing with the ones at the high school. It surely looked like the person who was intended to die there was Lawrence Lief, because of the calls. I got that information from your daughter, and I thank her for it. Those calls were meant, maybe, to throw us off; but she didn’t mean to, I believe. She passed along her information in all innocence, and in the end it helped me quite a bit, because it eliminated that Munroe fellow. I didn’t have to worry about him anymore.

“All the same, there didn’t seem to be a connection between Lief and your brother. Naturally I thought of Miss Hollander, because she’d been hurt, too. But the bomb—I’m going to call it a bomb from here on—didn’t seem like it was meant for her. Her being wounded was kind of a freak, and Mr. Blue here, who was talking to her when it went off, wasn’t hurt at all. Just the same, she’d been there in that hospital and she was Herbert Hollander’s niece. There was no getting around that.

“About the same time I gave up on the cannon idea, it hit me that maybe the bomb was intended for somebody in addition to Lief—somebody who’d link up Lief and Herbert Hollander, if only I could figure out who it was. Whoever made the bomb knew that Lief would be the one to open the box. That had been announced. It wasn’t likely he knew Drexel Munroe would be on the platform with him, although it was possible, as I explained once to Miss Hollander. But he might have thought that somebody else would be on hand—somebody who really wasn’t there, and so didn’t get hurt. Who might that be?”

Sandoz stopped talking for a minute and looked around at my father and Aladdin Blue and me. His face was just as wooden as ever, but there were red sparks in his eyes; he could have been the Indian who scalped Custer. “Why, Mrs. Hollander, of course. She’d been up on that platform just a short time before, for the drawing. She’d only gotten down because with her and Munroe and Lief up there, there wasn’t room for Lief to work. If somebody hadn’t known how big the platform would be—for instance, if he was in New York building himself a good alibi when it was put up—he’d think she’d be up there sure. She was a woman, wasn’t she, and curious? He’d figure she’d stay there to see what was inside when Lief opened it.”

My father said, “All this is speculation.” His cigar had gone out, but I don’t think he knew it.

“Sure it is,” Sandoz admitted, “but look how good it hangs together, when nothing else will hang together at all. And we do have some evidence now, Mr. Hollander, which I’ll show to you in a minute.

“So Lief was killed and your brother was killed and maybe Mrs. Elaine Hollander was meant to get killed. And that box was right here in this room for almost a month before it went into the window at the First National. So far, so good.

“Miss Hollander here knew Lief, and Mrs. Elaine Hollander was her mother, and Herbert Hollander was her uncle. But why would she want to kill them? I hear she doesn’t get along with her mother too well, but that isn’t much of a reason. I didn’t think she could’ve picked the lock on that box, and I was pretty sure she couldn’t have rigged up a dynamite cap to set off an artillery shell, even if she could get hold of one. And on top of that, Mrs. Lief, and Megan Lief, who as you may or may not know was Lief’s sister, and old Mr. Lief, his father, all say that whoever made those calls about Vietnam was a man.

“That left you, Mr. Hollander. You’ve been the president of your company for nearly twenty years, and you don’t look to me like a man who’d hold down a job like that without learning everything there is to know about the business. In fact, some people I’ve talked to have told me you made a hobby of it, and since I’ve been here in your den I’ve been looking at the titles of your books, and I can see that they’re right. You could’ve gotten that box open before Lief did, and you could’ve rigged up a dynamite cap to set off an old artillery shell. Am I wrong?”

My father said, “You advised me that I was not required to reply to your questions. I don’t believe I’ll answer that one, Lieutenant.”

“I don’t blame you. In your position I don’t think I would either. But I’m not quite done yet. If what I’ve said fits the facts like I think it does, then there were three people meant to die. You must’ve known that others would be killed when your bomb went off, but it was those three you were after—two with the bomb, and one later. Those three were Lief, who you knew would be the one to open the box, your wife, who you thought would be standing right beside him when he opened it, and your brother—that’s the second assumption I mentioned a while back.”

“I had no reason to kill any of those people.” My father got out of his chair to get the big gold lighter from his desk and light his cigar again. You could see it had been a shock; but he was over it, fighting mad and cool as ice. I was proud of him.

“I think I can establish that you did, Mr. Hollander. Lief and your wife I’ll leave aside for a minute—I think that one’s pretty obvious anyway. To me the interesting one’s your brother Herbert, although it’s outside my jurisdiction. All these years you’ve been the head of your company, only you didn’t really own it at all. You see, we’ve checked around, and the majority of Hollander Safe and Lock’s stock belonged to your brother: fifty-two percent. It was held in trust for him by a court-appointed guardian, and that guardian was you. For years it must have seemed like there wasn’t any difference between you owning that stock and him owning it. You voted it for him and used part of the dividends to pay his bills at a fancy sanatorium, and banked the rest in the trust account. Sooner or later he’d kick off, and since he didn’t have a will and couldn’t make one that would stand up, why, as a matter of course the court would hand over everything to you, the brother who’d looked after him so well for such a long time.

“Then, right around the time you must’ve decided you were going to pay back Lief and your wife for what they’d been doing to you, your brother went over the wall. At first you must’ve hoped that in a few hours they’d have him back. Then it was in a few days. Then you must’ve hoped that he was dead somewhere, because you realized how dangerous to you and your position he was on the outside. I don’t know if he was really crazy or not, and I doubt if you do yourself. But he was sane enough, like I said a while back, that he could pass on the street and even talk to people. All he had to do was get hold of some hungry lawyer and tell his story. It’s one thing to keep a man in an asylum, and it’s another one, a hell of a lot different, to get him back in there once he’s on the outside and has some shyster to go to bat for him. You can just bet half the lawyers on Wacker would jump at the chance to represent somebody with that good a claim on fifty-two percent of Hollander Safe and Lock. They’d take his case on spec, hell yes they would, and loan him enough to get along on until it was settled.”

“You said you had some hard evidence. I want to see it.”

“Right now, Mr. Hollander,” Sandoz said.

He leaned back in the desk chair then as if he was tired. It hadn’t ever occurred to me that even a wooden man might get tired, but I suppose they do. Sandoz looked like he’d spent a long day hunting buffalo as he reached into his coat and pulled out three little envelopes. One was pink, one yellow, one blue.

“What I need you to understand, Mr. Hollander, is that the game’s over. Or that it’s changed into a different game, if you want to put it that way. It’s not a question of fooling us cops anymore. You lost that one. Now it’s up to your lawyer, and with your money you can afford a good one. Maybe you can make them think you were crazy, like your brother did. Even if you can’t, you won’t fry. You won’t even go to a maximum security prison like Pontiac. An executive like you? Prison won’t be much worse for you than what your brother had in that asylum.”

“I want to see what you have there,” my father said. “Those envelopes.”

“You have to understand that it’s over with,” Sandoz said again. “I know how it is—it must have been sitting on your chest ever since those two men died at the high school. Now’s the time to get it off. You probably think we’re your enemies, but we’re not. We’re just doing the job we’re paid to do, and as far as we’re concerned, as soon as you confess, it’ll be all over.”

“Damn it, what have you got there!”

Sandoz sighed and leaned forward. “Love letters,” he said. “Undated except for the postmarks, but two of those can be read, and they’re pretty fresh. They were written to Lief by a woman who signs herself ‘Your Elaine.’ She refers in one of them to her husband, and she calls him Harry. I understand that’s what your family calls you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“They’re real. Old Mr. Lief was going through his son’s clothes; he was planning on giving them to the Salvation Army. He found these in the pocket of a winter shirt in the back of his closet. Lief didn’t want his wife to come across them, I suppose. I can’t let you handle them, but you can look at the writing.” He held the pink envelope out so my father could see the address. “You know her handwriting, I would think. There must be plenty of samples around.”

“I want to see the text of those letters.”

“You’ll hear them in court. If I was to read them to you now, the D.A. would have my hide. I wouldn’t do it anyway, with your daughter here.” Sandoz put them back in his pocket. “You wanted to know what we had. Well, that’s what we have, and I believe a judge will think it’s good enough for a warrant.”

He paused and looked at each of us in turn. “Now let me think. I believe that’s almost everything, except about the shooting—I said I’d get back to that. We were talking, you’ll remember, about hit men. It was what we call a red herring, but I drug it in myself because I wondered if maybe you’d hired one to do the job on your brother, and I wanted to see how you acted when I talked about one. But I was going to say I didn’t think it had been a hit man, because they hardly ever shoot just once. They know, you see, how hard it is to kill a man with a pistol. Why, just a few years ago there was that man down south that puts out the skin magazine. The guy who shot him did the job with a fortyfour magnum, a gun that would snuff a grizzly bear, and he lived through it.

“Now I want to show you folks something. Mind if I borrow a pencil?”

Before my father could stop him, Sandoz pulled open the upper right-hand drawer of the desk and rummaged in it. When his hand came out again, he was holding a black automatic.

“I’d imagine,” he said, “that we’ll find this is the gun that killed your brother Herbert. You looked a little funny, Mr. Hollander, when I used the phone on this desk, so I thought I might find something. Is this it?”

“Of course not!”

I piped up. “I’ve seen that gun—it’s been in there for years. It’s not even a thirty-eight.”

My father gave me a look that made me feel good all over. “That’s right,” he said. “Bert was shot with a thirty-eight, wasn’t he? A policeman’s gun. That one’s a nine-millimeter; I brought it back from Germany. It even has Nazi markings.”

“Sure,” Sandoz said, holding the gun under the desk light. “Nine-millimeter Kurz. Somebody told me once that kurz means ‘short’ in German. Here in America we call that cartridge a three-eighty ACP—that stands for Automatic Colt Pistol—or a thirty-eight short. Same cartridge that killed your brother.”

My father put his face in his hands.