Dead Letter Read Online Free PDF

the tabletop. "It
doesn’t look very good for me, does it? I mean if someone should,
shall we say, 'blow the whistle'?"
    "No," I said. "Not so good."
    "I can’t believe it," he said. "I
just can’t believe that Sarah would do this to me."
    "It doesn’t have to be Sarah," I said
without much conviction. "After all, she hasn’t reported you
to the FBI, yet. Or turned the papers over to Mother Jones. We could
still be reeling in a red herring. Think back—was there any time
this morning or this afternoon that you put your hand to the safe
without opening it?"
    Lovingwell nodded. "It slipped my mind but this
morning before I went to work I stopped to look at the safe. Just to
look at it, the way a patron might look at a wallspot from which a
painting had been stolen. I think I ’d put my hand to the tumbler
when Sarah called to me
from the study door."
    "What did she want?"
    "Nothing, really. Just to know if she could
borrow a few dollars."
    It didn’t have to mean anything and I told him so.
    "I hope you’re right," the Professor
said. "Because this thing is beginning to frighten me. If it
isn’t resolved soon, I’m afraid I’ll lose my nerve."
    "You’1l be all right," I told him. "I’ll
start tailing Sarah in the morning. If she doesn’t lead me to the
document or to her accomplice in a few days, we’ll turn the case
over to the FBI."
    "Only if she’s in the clear," Lovingwell
said. "And remember—she’s not to know that I’m having her
. . . instigated."
 
    4
    Calhoun Street in Clifton is a crowded, urban road,
lined on the south side with storefronts, fast food joints, and swart
brownstone apartments and, on the north, with those university
dormitories that look a little like sets of giant building blocks
made of glass and steel. It was not, all told, a likely spot for a
nest of conspirators or of spies. And yet, in spite of her demure
good looks, Sarah Lovingwell seemed to be one or the other. Seems,
not is, I told myself. Only it was such a strong case of seeming that
I had trouble drumming up a healthy skepticism.
    At ten o’clock that Tuesday morning I’d followed
my seeming suspect up Middleton to Clifton Avenue, through the
slippery side streets filled with dirty snow and drooping elder
branches, to the door of the Friends of Nature Club on the south side
of Calhoun. Judging from the flaky decal on the top of the front
window, the clubhouse had once housed a shoe repair shop. There was
an open lot to its west and on its east a used-clothing store, with
one forlorn mannequin in the window, dressed like a befuddled flapper
in a cloche hat and a silk chemise with a string of big white pearls
on her breast. The poor mannequin looked so cheerless and out of
place in the weather that I began to grow rather fond of her. But
then she was the only thing I had to look at, save for the half-dozen
collegiate-types bundled in fat, shiny parkas who passed her by
without a second glance.
    Sarah had pulled her tan V.W. into an alley beside
the clubhouse and gone into the building through a side door. In and
maybe out—I couldn’t see the rear of the clubhouse from where I
was parked. But then I didn’t really care where Sarah went that
morning. It was the Friends  of Nature who interested me. For
almost two hours, right up until noon, I sat in the Pinto with a
candy bar in one hand and a Minox in the other. And every time
someone went in or came out of the club, I stopped gnawing the candy
and snapped a picture. It was a little like insurance work, which I
don’t like to do but which also happens to be the most common kind
of job that this detective (and every other detective in the world)
gets thrown at him since the courts have liberalized the divorce
laws.
    So, you snap the picture, Harry. And scrunch up in
the car seat like a bitter fetus. And maybe you come up with face
that the good Professor will be interested in. Not an insurance
swindler—not this time. But somebody from the lab or the