Pandora by Holly Hollander

How I Bailed Out

That much I’ve given you blow-by-blow because I think you ought to have it, but I’m going to spare you a lot of the rest. Just a few minutes after Lieutenant Sandoz pulled the gun out of my father’s desk, another cop came in with the search warrant, and he and Sandoz and the one called Jake started really searching in earnest. Up in Elaine’s bedroom they found a box of mix-and-match stationery—pink, yellow, and blue, just like the letters Mr. Lief had found. Also green, which I guess she hadn’t gotten around to using yet.

You know, people are crazy, and I mean particularly me. It hadn’t really come home to me when Sandoz showed those letters to my father, but it did when Jake came pounding down the front stairs with that box of stationery. It wasn’t even good stuff, just cheap writing paper like you might buy in the Ben Franklin in Barton for maybe a buck seventyfive; and it meant Elaine and Larry had been checking into motels, or maybe doing it in the back of Larry’s van or on that couch in our basement. It made me feel sick; I thought about my father and how he was nuts over Elaine and had been for as long as I could remember, and about Molly and how she was nuts over Larry and believed he was this untarnished knight or something. I hated Elaine then. I hated her for being such a lightweight, so damned good-looking with nothing inside to back it up. I hated her for being my mother, and I hated her for marrying my father. If she’d just let him set her up in an apartment someplace and give her fur coats and diamond bracelets, I wouldn’t have been where I was or anywhere, and that would have been just fine with me.

I think this is one of the things real, pro mystery writers aren’t supposed to say, but I’m going to say it anyhow, and I learned it that day: murderers aren’t any different from you and me. If I ever get really, really mad or really, really greedy, and especially if I get both together, I could murder somebody. So could you. That day, if somebody had tossed me that little Nazi automatic I could have knocked off Elaine when she walked through the door into the study. Which she did.

I was watching her like a hawk—a hawk with a broken wing. When she found out what was going on she turned pink under her powder, and then white; and when she caught on that they were just damned near certain to arrest my father, she fell on her knees and got him by the legs and said, “I’m sorry, Harry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” over and over again until Mrs. Maas came and got her on her feet again and led her away, I guess to lie down somewhere. Just about then Jake came down again, and this time he had two letters from Larry to Elaine. He said they had been under a jewelry box in her vanity.

Sandoz showed them to my father. “Is this how you knew? Did you find them before we did?”

My father shook his head, but he wouldn’t say anything.

And that was about it. Naturally I was stuck on that sofa and couldn’t see anything except what went on in the study. At the time that didn’t bother me, but afterward I wished I could have gone around and watched. It might have been interesting. I know that the other cop, the one that had brought the warrant, spent a lot of time in my father’s shop; and Sandoz spent a lot there in the study, reading papers and even pulling down books and riffling the pages; but the only funny thing he found wasn’t a slip of paper, or even what you could call small. He got down on his knees with a penlight and looked under my sofa, and then stuck his arm in, and what he pulled out was a couple of round, black iron weights with handles on the top. They didn’t seem to mean anything, and after he’d looked at them he pushed them back again.

When the cops were finished and the whole place was a mess, Sandoz went over to my father, coughed, and said, “You are under arrest, Mr. Hollander. Before we ask you any questions, you must understand what your rights are. You have the right to remain silent. You are not required to say anything to us at any time or to answer any questions. Anything you say can be used against you in court. You have the right to talk to a lawyer, and to have him with you during questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer and want one—” (So help me, he said that.) “—a lawyer will be provided for you. If you want to answer questions without a lawyer, you still have the right to stop at any time. You also have the right to stop answering at any time until you talk to a lawyer.”

After that, my father and the three cops went away. They didn’t put handcuffs on him, but maybe I would have felt better if they had.

When we heard the front door close, Blue stood up and gave me his handkerchief. I’d been using the hem of my nightie, and I guess it was getting pretty wet. Blue’s handkerchief was just a cheap cotton job that had been washed a lot, but it was clean. When I’d gotten calmed down a little I asked if he still had my father’s check in his pocket.

“No,” he said. “I have a Hollander Safe and Lock Company check, signed by the chief operating officer of the Hollander Safe and Lock Company.”

“It’s his check, and you know it. Couldn’t you have done something?”

“I did what I could,” Blue said.

“Like hell.”

“No, Holly. What would you have wanted me to do? Argue in his behalf? As soon as I began, Sandoz would have forced me to leave—if necessary by having one of his subordinates arrest me on some trivial charge. As it was, he permitted me to remain. Most policemen originally became policemen because of a desire to show off—to strut in uniform, gun on hip. Most never quite outgrow it, and occasionally that can be employed to advantage. Lieutenant Sandoz wanted me, the criminologist, to realize what a clever detective he is.”

“So now you do.”

“Thanks to my silence, I know the case against your father, yes.”

“Do you think he killed Larry and all those people?”

“Do you?”

I shook my head.

“Are you sure, or are you just being loyal to him?”

“I wouldn’t be very loyal, would I, if I said I wasn’t sure.”

“As for me, I’m not certain what I believe.” Blue stood up again, lifting himself on his cane the way he always did. “When I entered this room, I was, I admit—or almost certain, at least. That was the real reason I asked for a company check. It would have been less than ethical for me to have accepted a retainer from your father, as an individual, when I strongly suspected he had built that bomb. I was even more suspicious when he agreed to such a large one. Now I don’t know.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “That was before Sandoz showed us those love letters. In fact, it was before he ever came in and started his song and dance.”

“Of course.”

I wiped my nose. “So what made you think my father was the one? Had you figured out all that stuff Sandoz told us?”

Blue looked mad. “I’d thought of most of it, and rejected a lot of it. It had nothing to do with my decision. Look at the mantel over that fireplace and tell me what you see there.”

“A picture of Elaine; a picture of my father and Elaine—you don’t want me to describe the clothes in those pictures, do you? A map. That’s on the rocks behind the mantel, really—”

“A map of what?”

“A map of Europe, with a red line from Italy to France and up into Germany, the way my father went. A German officer’s hat that he makes Mrs. Maas clean with one of the attachments to the vacuum cleaner. Oh, and a fancy dagger. You don’t notice that because it lies down flat. Was that what you wanted?”

“Specifically, a Nazi SS dagger; its blade is engraved with the rather fatuous sentiment, ‘Meine Ehre heist treue’—my honor commands me to be faithful. The Germans who fought for Hitler felt they were defending the right, difficult though that is for us to appreciate.”

I said, “I don’t understand why the dagger’s important.”

“It isn’t. Or then again, perhaps it is, depending on how one looks at these things. You might say that it’s no more and no less significant than the cap. Lieutenant Sandoz laid stress on the importance of similarities in solving seemingly unrelated crimes. Perhaps he should have considered that both the shell that exploded at the high school and the pistol he found in your father’s desk came from Germany, and in fact from Nazi Germany.”

“You didn’t know about the pistol when you came in here. Or did you?”

Blue shook his head. “But I knew about the shell, so when I saw the officer’s cap I crossed the room to have a look at it while your father was getting you settled on that sofa. I saw the SS dagger then, and I saw something else as well. You must have been in this room many times. Haven’t you noticed by now that something’s missing from the mantel?”

“No, I’ve never paid that much attention to that stuff.”

“You’re protecting your father, so I can hardly expect you to tell me; but that mantel shows quite clearly where the shell was removed from it.”

“Are you talking about dust? I came in here one time and saw where Pandora’s Box had been sitting on the library table, because Mrs. Maas hadn’t dusted it yet. Only if you think she hasn’t dusted in here since the bomb went off, you’re batty. If that was true, I’d see dust all over, and I don’t.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Blue said. “It seems clear that your father telephoned and notified his family that he would be returning from New York—he would have to do it if he wanted to be sure his chauffeur would be free to meet him at the airport. When the word came, your Mrs. Maas would have taken good care to clean this room, as she obviously has. But when an object rests for years in one position on dark wood, the wood beneath it will always be darker than that around it; it has been protected from the light, which bleaches the exposed surface to some extent. A good deal of sunlight presumably comes through that large window for ten hours or more on many days. Eighty-eight millimeters is approximately three and half inches, which is what I estimated the dark spot at the end of the mantel to be. A man’s thumb is roughly an inch across, in case you didn’t know, and that fact is sometimes—please excuse the expression—a handy one.”

“This doesn’t mean a thing to you, does it? Just a cute little problem.”

Blue sighed and leaned a little more weight on his cane; I got the feeling that his leg was bothering him. “Certainly it doesn’t mean as much to me as it does to you. One of the things we all have to learn eventually is that our personal problems are not the personal problems of others. But I like you, and I don’t want to see you hurt. Also, I’d like to earn the check in my pocket; I need the money badly, and though I’ll deposit this as soon as I can and use the funds to stave off the worst of my financial difficulties, I probably won’t see any more unless I earn it. If I sound facetious, it’s because I’m not doing very well, and I must try, at times, to keep my own spirits up.”

“You’re a regular wizard,” I told him bitterly. “With you on the case my father’ll hang in a week.”

“Although this state has restored the death penalty,” Blue said, “it does the job by electrocution. For practical purposes, however, your father’s risk of execution is nil, as Lieutenant Sandoz pointed out. Wealthy, middle-aged white men do not go to the chair.” Blue limped over to the door. “Now I must be on my way. I wish that I could carry you back up to your room, but I can’t. If you like, I’ll ask Mrs. Maas to send the chauffeur in to you before I go.”

“Mr. Blue—”

He stopped and looked back at me.

“Take me with.”

“Are you serious?”

“Only for a couple of hours. Until dinner, okay? Then I’ll go home, I promise. I have to get away from her.”

“Your mother?” Blue was staring at me like he was trying to look right through me.

“As long as I was bitching at you it was all right, then when you went to leave it wiped me out. I’m going to have to be here with her, and every time I see her or hear her talking I’m going to think about what she did with Larry and what she did to my father—I need a little time to get my head straight. Please? She won’t even notice, and if she does she won’t give a damn.” All of a sudden I understood, or thought I did, why Elaine had never cared about me, and I added, “I’m like him.”

“You can’t go dressed as you are.”

“In the closet up in my room, you’ll find about a dozen blue shirts and three or four wraparound jean skirts. Bring one of each.”

“That’s all you’ll need?”

“That’s all I could get on. Underpants wouldn’t go over the bandages and stuff. Bring a bandanna, too, please. Top dresser drawer, right side. I’d better have a bandanna.”

I sat there and listened to him thump up the stairs, and about five minutes later thump back down.