Gene Wolfe - Pandora by Holly Hollander

“A day or so later, when things had quieted down somewhat—am I telling this right, Harry?—he discovered that the chain on which he wore his dogtags had broken. He went looking for them and found them where he had thrown himself down that first time. That reminded him of the shell, and he dug it up to look at. It was a foolish thing to do because it might have exploded, but he said he had the feeling that since it hadn’t gotten him when it had the chance, it never would.”

Sandoz said, “So this time you decided to give it a little help. You must have known that it would be traced back to him eventually.”

Uncle Dee nodded again. “He had her and Lief had her, but I couldn’t; I was going to get them both. Harry had packed that shell in his company’s supplies and trucked it all over Europe, that’s what he told me. If it had done what it was supposed to do the first time, perhaps I would have found Elaine. This time I was going to make certain it didn’t miss.”

Very softly Blue inquired, “Do you want to tell them about Herbert Hollander now?”

“I suppose I’d better.” Uncle Dee mopped his forehead; I could see his hand shake. “But first—Lieutenant, am I going to have to repeat all this again later?”

Sandoz nodded. “For a police stenographer, Mr. Sinclair. She’ll type it up and you’ll have to sign it.”

“Then I’ll try to keep it short. That same evening, when I put the bomb in the box, I got Harry’s gun from his desk drawer. He had shown it to me about a year ago when there was a rash of home invasions here and I advised him to get a dog. He said he didn’t need a dog, he had that, and showed me where he kept it. I thought that if either Elaine or Lief escaped the bomb I’d use it to kill them, then put it someplace where it would be linked to him. I felt sure the servants could identify it, and if they wouldn’t, I’d do it myself.

“My bomb worked, as you know. I was certain it would; I had tried out the mechanism with blasting caps several times in advance.” He glanced around at us when he said that, his smile only a sickly imitation of his old one. “Blasting caps aren’t much more powerful than the big firecrackers—salutes, they were called—that I used to shoot off as a boy. I tested the battery and switch in my basement, and I doubt that the people next door heard anything.

“So I was confident, you see—quite confident, when I came here. Then I realized that I had forgotten the black vinyl tape I had intended to use. I taped the cap to the shell with Scotch tape from Harry’s desk instead, and as it turned out that worked just fine.”

Sandoz said, “Except that Mrs. Hollander wasn’t killed.” Uncle Dee had always had a clean handkerchief in his breast pocket; now he was wadding it between his hands. “That’s right, she wasn’t touched. She’d left the platform before my bomb went off, and of course I couldn’t kill her afterward until Harry got back.”

“But you had the gun.”

“That’s right. I carried it with me everywhere, because I didn’t know when Harry would come home and I’d have a chance at Elaine. Something else had gone wrong as well, however; Holly had been injured. As I said before, I’d tried to arrange things so she wouldn’t be. I felt that the least I could do was visit her, bring her something to read in the hospital.”

“And you met Herbert Hollander in the parking lot?”

“Yes, and that destroyed my whole plan, or at least at the time I thought it did.”

“Why’d you kill him, Mr. Sinclair?”

“I had to. Several times when Harry couldn’t come to see about him, I had gone in his place, as his deputy so to speak. Sometimes I’d taken Harry’s check to the sanatorium, and once or twice when I thought Bert wasn’t getting the treatment he should have had, I’d told Harry about it and relayed his instructions to the doctors there. Somehow that had given Bert the idea that I was the one who was keeping him locked up. He was insane, of course, though if you hadn’t been around him much he could seem quite normal. He had a knife, and I shot him. The next morning I came to this house; I knew Elaine had spent most of the night at the hospital and would sleep late, but I told the housekeeper I had to talk to her about straightening up at the school. As I had expected, the housekeeper wouldn’t wake her; but she let me wait again in Harry’s study, and I put back the gun.”

Elaine stood up, her violet eyes brimming with tears. “De Witte, I won’t let you do this. You’re a wonderful person—the best, the most unselfish man I’ve ever known. But I’m not going to let you destroy yourself. Lieutenant Sandoz, those are lies. De Witte is Harry’s friend, his best friend, and now he’s trying to save Harry, but it’s not right.”

Sandoz was up now, too, trying to get Elaine back into her chair. “Just let him tell his story, Mrs. Hollander. Hear him out.” Between them I saw my father’s face as if it were a photo in a frame; his mouth was open, but I don’t think he was saying anything.

“Lieutenant,” my mother said, “I saw my husband with that box open!”

All of a sudden it got so quiet in our living room you could hear yourself breathe.

Elaine dropped back into her chair and put her face in her hands. “I came into the study, and he was at the table. The box was open. He didn’t see me. There. It’s out. I said it.”

“Elaine!” It was my father. “My God, Elaine!”

Blue said, “Yes, Elaine. My God.” I’d never heard him use that tone before. Everybody looked at him, even her. “You saw your husband with Pandora’s Box open, and you didn’t ask why he had opened it? Why not? And by the way, what was in it?”

There were tears streaking my mother’s perfect little face; I don’t think she wanted to say anything, but after a minute she did. “Nothing. There was nothing in it when I saw it.”

“You didn’t see him put the German shell in it?”

“No, of course not. I wouldn’t have gone through with the drawing.”

“But you went through with it believing that the box was empty? Thinking the whole thing would end in an excruciating anticlimax?”

“I had to. There wasn’t anything else to do.”

Once I heard my father fire a man; it was the chauffeur we had before Bill, and my father had told him to clear out in just the tone he used now. What he said this time was, “Lieutenant, I never opened that box.”

“Mr. Hollander, I’m beginning to think you didn’t.”

Blue paid no attention to them. “There was everything else to do, Elaine. All you would have had to do—if you’d actually seen your husband with that box open, and the box was empty—was suggest to him that you find some interesting antique to put in it as a prize. For a hundred dollars you could have gotten some nineteenth-century books from De Witte Sinclair. You could have used an old gun, or some antique silver. Anything—anything, if you had really seen it open as you say.”

“Are you accusing me of having put the shell in that box?”

“Yes, I am,” Blue told her. “I can prove it. I will prove it.”

Sandoz snorted. “First Mr. Hollander, then Sinclair, and now Mrs. Hollander? Okay, let’s hear it.” He sounded skeptical; but I was watching his eyes, and they told Jake to get behind my mother. Jake did it, just a couple of steps over.

Blue said, “Mr. Sinclair’s confession was simply a trick, as you certainly understand by now. He and I arranged it over the telephone last night, and this morning he came to my place and we rehearsed it.”

Sandoz said, “He was running one hell of a risk.”

Blue nodded. “He really is Mr. Hollander’s best friend, you see. Even rich and powerful men sometimes have one or two real friends, though often they don’t know it. We took a few precautions, however; Mr. Sinclair can produce three witnesses, including myself, who will swear that we heard him express his intention to make a false confession this morning. And it any event a polygraph test would have cleared him.”