“It’s not against the law to have a phony rose, is it? I used to have one myself.”
There was a long pause. Then Detective Corning said, “The thing is that it was in his side jacket pocket. He was shot in the chest. The bullet stayed in him, and it stopped his heart right away, so there wasn’t a lot of bleeding. But this rose we got out of his pocket’s got bloodstains on it. Would you know anything about that, Miss Hollander?”
How Me and Blue Deduced
Maybe I ought to skip over leaving the hospital, but I’ll just hit it lightly. Except for my father, who wasn’t back from New York yet, the whole damn household came to get me. I couldn’t believe it. Bill pushed my wheelchair and lifted me into the backseat of the Caddy, Mrs. Maas fussed, and Elaine yelled and bossed. I never felt so important in my life.
What’s more, I don’t think I was ever so glad to see anyplace as I was to see my own funky little bedroom on the second floor. It was small, sure, and messy, you bet. The TV wouldn’t turn on and off or change channels unless I got out of bed and hopped over with my crutch. But that was probably good therapy for me, and there was my own phone beside my bed, and my own books and records and stuff. Heaven! It turned out Mrs. Maas had saved the paper for me—I may well be the nation’s leading Doonesbury fanatic—so I got to read all about it and find my own name on the injured list. Then, just when I’d finished that and the funnies and the lady who gives smart-ass advice, and had read all about the President and a couple of good fires, and was settling down to recipes and big-city politics, Mrs. Maas came up with the new paper, that day’s, only a little messed up with Elaine’s coffee stains. So naturally the old ones hit the floor and I dug into the BARTON BOMBING again.
And there was news! Yessir! Somebody’d sent the editors a letter claiming credit (that’s what they called it) for our own little disaster; and the editors, who I’ve got to admit usually know a good story when they see it, hadn’t just copied the words but had splashed a blow-up of the real thing over half of page five. Since the story (beginning page one, as they say) said it had come in the mail, my first idea was that it must’ve been written at least two weeks before the bomb. But no, “internal evidence” showed “clearly” that it had been done after the fact. I’d have liked to see the handwriting of somebody who’d set off a bomb in the middle of a crowd like that, and I’m sure the cops would’ve liked it too; but no such luck, the letter was typed. The funny thing, at least to me, was that it had been typed really well—a whole lot better than I could have done it myself. Naturally it was hard to be certain from a grainy newspaper photo, but I looked at every line as close as I could, and I couldn’t find a single mistake.
Here’s what it said:
To Whom It May Concern:
Our first attack at Barton was a complete success. Now bravely and cheerfully we will go on until the system that permits injustice is brought to it’s knees. We are not by any means out of high explosives, and what we have already accomplished has brought in several new members. What we have done is no crime at all to those who have suffered as we have. We will no longer be slaves, instead we will be free.
Aha, a clue!
Pretty often I get the feeling from talking to other people that when they read mysteries they pick the detectives they like best by peculiarities. Nero Wolfe’s fat, three points; Sherlock Holmes shoots dope, that’s seven. I don’t. What I try to do is look at the way they find things out and solve their cases, and ask myself: Does that make sense? Would it really work outside a book?
And it seems to me that the best system I’ve ever read is just to look at the clues and think, now who would do that? If the murderer left his handkerchief behind, what kind of person would have that kind of handkerchief? Most men wouldn’t have a colored one, for instance, but there’s certain kinds that would. Some women’s handkerchiefs are just about as useful as a man’s, but a lot are only good for decorating your fingers when you’re pretending to cry. A polka-dot bandanna with some nice, light perfume on it? It’s not a gay cowboy, the killer is your own daring and talented author, Holly Hollander. Or somebody a lot like her.
So now I looked at the picture of that letter and tried to conjure up the person who wrote it. I would have liked to see the stationery, the watermark, and whether it was rag stock, but naturally I couldn’t. From the picture, it was plain white and eight and a half by eleven. Not hotel stationery, or anybody’s letterhead cut down, or drugstore paper with daisies and like that. School paper, like you buy to type your English themes, or office paper. The characters were so even it had to be an electric typewriter. The margins were wide, but the lines were single-spaced. I didn’t know about other schools, but at Barton High they wanted you to doublespace; it made it easier for the teachers to read and gave them room for spelling corrections and that kind of stuff.
Speaking of spelling, there was a goof in the letter: it’s instead of its. A dumb, careless kind of mistake from somebody who could spell independence and explosives and injustice. An electric typewriter with a dictionary or maybe a word book lying alongside it. Whoever had written that letter had looked up the hard words, but he wasn’t really a good speller or a grammatical writer. “We will no longer be slaves” was only weakened when he tacked “instead we will be free” onto the end.
“To whom it may concern” was kind of a boiler-plate phrase. Why didn’t he just address it to the paper? He was planning to send it to the paper, after all; and he must have addressed an envelope and licked a stamp, and so forth. It made me think of a letter of recommendation: To Whom It May Concern. Ms. Holly Hollander is a girl of excellent character who has never spent above two nights in jail … .
Maybe whoever wrote it worked in an employment office, or maybe he was used to writing what Mrs. Maas called “characters” for himself. “Bravely and cheerfully” my foot!
Then it hit me—for himself. Right! All of a sudden I was perfectly sure there was only one of him, and all his talk about “we” and the “Army of Independence” was so much smoke. I still couldn’t see his hands on the keyboard, much less his face—just the jumping typeball and the little book of forty thousand words spelled and divided. But he was all alone there, I knew that. No revolutionary committee had read his letter over. Nobody had suggested changes or simplifications or corrections. There was just him there in his little room, typing and underlining.
He underlined a lot—three words in just a few lines. It’s supposed to be for emphasis, but I’ve noticed that people do it when they want to be ironic—I just love the way she treats me—or what’s practically the same thing, when they want to convince somebody of something that isn’t really true—I just love your new skirt! Okay, I’d already decided that the bit about several new members sounded fakey. (How would they know what to join, anyway?) So it seemed pretty likely that his other underlinings marked places where he wanted to put us on, too. The “attack” hadn’t been a complete success then, something had gone wrong. And he didn’t really plan to do anything else. (Right here I’m underlining for emphasis!)
That second part was good news for sure, but what had gone wrong? If he hadn’t killed enough people, and hurt enough, it would stand to reason he’d want to try again. But I’d already decided he wasn’t going to do that. So maybe what it was, was that he’d done more damage than he’d figured on; maybe he’d just wanted to scare everybody or something.