The way it turned out, I hobbled on my crutches—aluminum jobs Elaine had rented at the hospital—as far as the top of the stairs, and my father picked me up there and carried me down and through the foyer, with Blue limping on ahead of us to open the study door.
I mentioned the study when I told about going in there to have a look at the letter from Garden Meadow, but I didn’t tell too much about it. It wasn’t a big room as rooms in our place went, although I’m sure that in lots of nice homes it would be the biggest room in the house. About fifteen by twenty, maybe. The door was at one end, and there was a bow window looking out onto some japonica and grass and other stuff (I don’t know what you’re supposed to call it) at the other. On the right wall was a big fieldstone fireplace with white birch logs stacked beside it. Sometimes my father had a fire there in the winter. The walls were paneled with some kind of nearly black wood—it was American walnut, I think—that I liked. There was no light in the ceiling, so it seemed kind of dark and cozy in there even with the desk light and both floor lamps on. Besides the desk, there were bookcases, a big library table, a coffee table, a wet bar, a little brown leather sofa (which was where my father set me down) and brown leather easy chairs.
“Drink?” my father asked Blue.
Blue nodded and said, “Whatever you’re having,” which meant he got Chivas and soda. I got a gin rickey minus the gin, which was what I always got when my father mixed drinks. I didn’t get offered a cigar (I would have taken it) and Blue waved his away. I wondered if he knew it was a Ruiz y Blanco, made by people who skipped out of Cuba when Castro took over.
“You don’t object to my smoking, I hope?”
Blue shook his head, and my father lit up. I thought about Lieutenant Sandoz then, because both of them turned their cigars to get the fire even.
“When I spoke to you by telephone, I told you everything I knew about the case at the time,” Blue said, “but there’ve been several interesting developments since.”
“The bombing, you mean.”
Blue nodded.
“I’m not concerned with the bombing, Mr. Blue. I tried to make that clear earlier.”
Blue glanced at me. “Your daughter was one of the victims, Mr. Hollander.” It was the first time he’d called my father anything. I got the feeling he’d come to some kind of decision when he said that.
“I know it, and unless you have children of your own you’ll never understand how much I regret that. But Holly was hurt as anyone else might have been hurt; in fact, as a good many others actually were. If these radicals had put a bomb on an airplane instead, and I had been killed with two hundred other passengers, I wouldn’t expect my family or my friends to discover just which lunatic had built the bomb or who had checked the fatal suitcase on board. That’s badly put, but perhaps you see what I mean.”
Blue nodded again. “I believe I do.”
“The crime I’m concerned about, the crime that has brought me back at an exceedingly inconvenient time, is the murder of my brother Bert.”
“I ought to have expressed my sympathy sooner,” Blue said. “In any event, I extend it now. I can’t resist adding, however, that your brother’s murder is one of the developments to which I referred.”
My father’s eyebrows went up. I bet he looks that way when somebody asks for a raise. “You believe the two are connected, Mr. Blue?”
“They appear to be, yes.”
I must have made some sort of a noise, sucked air, maybe, because they both looked at me and I felt dumb. Then my father said, “I admit that I probably don’t know as much about this as you do. Not only because I lack your training, but because you have been on the spot and I haven’t. In my business, I’ve found it’s the man on the spot whose opinions can be relied upon. But from what I do know, those events seem completely unrelated. My daughter was injured by some fanatic’s bomb, while Bert was—”
He broke off and wiped his forehead. “Good Lord! I don’t even know how he died. Joan called from the office and told me he’d been murdered in some parking lot. What happened? Was he shot? Stabbed?”
I put in, “On TV they said he’d been shot with a thirty-eight.”
My father looked relieved, as if knowing how his brother had died made it easier somehow. Maybe it did.
Blue added, “He was shot only once, in the chest, and died almost instantly. He can hardly have known what was happening. Someone—presumably his murderer—dragged his body about fifteen feet to conceal it in shrubbery.”
“A mugger?”
“No. The police thought so at first, because there was no watch and no wallet. I was able to demonstrate to them that it was much more probable that those things were never present to begin with. Your brother—as we both know—had escaped from a private mental hospital.”
My father gave me a Look, and I signaled back no good and hard.
Blue said, “I sometimes visit a friend at the same hospital, Mr. Hollander. I met your brother several times, and recognized his name at once when I heard it over the police shortwave. The point I wanted to make is that most patients there don’t bother to wear watches—I’ve verified this with my friend—and have no reason to carry wallets. They are not permitted currency, and whatever identification they may have is locked away.”
“A mugger couldn’t have known that.”
Blue nodded. “Of course not. But when a mugger kills his victim it is usually by accident—he strikes him on the head, and in the excitement of the moment strikes too hard. Or the victim resists and is stabbed in the melee. One seldom hears of a mugger who shoots his victims in cold blood so he can loot the corpse afterward, and it would seem to be a poorly thought-out technique. Pistols are noisy.”
My father drew on his cigar; he was looking at the ceiling. “Bert might have rushed him just the same. Bert was like that. Suppose this mugger drew his gun—”
“Technically,” Blue interrupted, “that word gun indicates an artillery piece. Let’s call it a pistol.”
If my father knew that an artillery shell had exploded at the Fair, he sure didn’t let on. For a minute there I thought he was going to get angry because Blue was quibbling; then he smiled. “That’s right. How did it go? ‘This is my rifle, and this is my gun. This’s for shooting, this other’s for fun.’”
The smile turned to a grin when he looked at me. “I won’t explain that, Holly. G.I. poetry.”
“You’re correct, of course,” Blue went on. “It’s possible a mugger approached your brother in that parking lot, pointed a pistol at him and demanded his money, and your brother tried to take his weapon from him. I don’t believe it, but it is barely possible.”
“Why don’t you believe it, Mr. Blue?”
“There are at least three reasons. The first is that your brother appears to have been shot while standing fully erect. If he had died while rushing at his assailant, the bullet would have entered his chest an an angle; a man bends forward when he runs or leaps at his enemy.”
“You’ve seen his body?”
Blue nodded.
“Suppose he had grasped the other man’s arm. The two of them might have been wrestling for the pistol.”
“In that case, there would have been severe powder burns around the wound. There were powder burns, but they were light, indicating that the muzzle of the weapon was at least a foot away from him when it was fired.”
My father got quiet for a minute or two, then he said, “All right, you said you had three reasons. What’s the second?”
Blue shook his head. “You won’t like it.”
“I want to hear it.”
“Aside from a few coins, only one object was found in your brother’s pockets. It was a bloodstained paper rose.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand. What’s the significance of that?”
“When I was talking with your daughter just before the bomb went off, she was wearing a red flower in her hair. When I saw her after the explosion, her hair was disheveled and the flower was gone. Your brother had come to that room, looking for her, once. He must have come again—perhaps hours, but perhaps only minutes, after the explosion. He found that flower, recognized it, and picked it up. He learned where she had been taken.”