Gene Wolfe - Pandora by Holly Hollander

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.