I said, “What about the guys from Vietnam who were out to get Larry, you dumb S.O.B.?”
Sandoz looked at me and smiled a little. “That’s a good question, Miss Hollander, and to tell the truth I don’t even much mind the way you asked it. These days it’s kind of nice to find out there are still kids around who get upset when somebody calls their old man a murderer. I can’t tell you anything about those guys from Vietnam, except that they’re so hard to locate that I’m beginning to wonder if they’re real at all.”
How Sandoz Pulled a Gun
“Hey, wait a minute,” I said. “I saw them. I told you about that when you came to see me in the hospital.”
Sandoz shook his head. “You saw a car pull away from the curb, Miss Hollander, after you’d heard a story that scared you a little bit. Tell ten girls your age a ghost story and stick them in an old house, and at least three will see a ghost. All of them will hear something that might have been one.”
“But—”
“We’ve looked high and low for the place where these people might have had their cannon, and there isn’t any. What’s more conclusive, to me at least, is that we’ve talked over the phone with about twenty men who knew Lief in Vietnam. Some of them we got from Army records, and those gave us the names of the rest. None of them say there was anybody who hated him enough to kill him, and in an outfit like the Army that sort of thing gets around. He didn’t rob anybody, he didn’t take anybody’s woman, and he didn’t make a habit of shooting unarmed civilians. Can I ask what you’re grinning about, Mr. Blue?”
Blue nodded. “That German eighty-eight-millimeter gun. I never did believe in it, and I’m delighted to hear that it has been put away at last.”
I protested to Sandoz, “But you were the one who said it was an artillery shell!”
“I did, Miss Hollander, and it was. After I’d wasted a lot of good men’s time looking for the spot it had been fired from, I finally got it through my head that there’s a big difference between a common bullet—that reminds me of something I forgot, by the way, and I’ll get back to it—and a shell. A bullet has to be fired. Otherwise, it’s just a little hunk of lead that can’t hurt anybody. A shell doesn’t. It can blow up, even if it’s never seen the inside of a gun barrel.
“Let’s suppose, Miss Hollander, that somebody had a shell like that. Maybe he stole it from a museum, or maybe he just found it lying around somewhere. If he was a clever man with tools, it would be pretty easy to rig up a way to detonate it, probably with a dynamite cap—they aren’t hard to come by. If he wanted to be extra sure, he might even stick a little dab of some other explosive—gelignite, let’s say—between the cap and the shell. I called up the Hollander Safe and Lock plant down in Indiana, and do you know, they use dynamite caps in their lab down there, and gelignite, too, to see how hard a safecracker would have to work to get into one of their new models.”
“If my father had done what you’re saying, and if he has all this stuff in his company—I’m not going to believe that just because you said it—he wouldn’t have needed the shell at all.”
“That’s right, he wouldn’t have. He could have used plain gelignite and the cap. But that way he couldn’t have thrown us off with war stories. The way he did it, making the phone calls and using the shell, he had us chasing our tails. Probably he hoped we’d chase them forever—anyhow, that’s what I think now. Once I search this house, maybe I’ll know better.”
My father asked, “Are you finished?”
“Why no, Mr. Hollander. I haven’t even said most of what I wanted to. Mostly I’ve been answering your questions, and your daughter’s.” Sandoz swiveled a little in the desk chair.
“I was talking about looking for connections, you remember, and I showed why it was I thought the murder of your brother was no mistake. What I mean to say is that whoever killed him meant to kill him, and not somebody else, or just anybody. So I asked myself if there was some similarity, some connection, to hook up that killing with the ones at the high school. It surely looked like the person who was intended to die there was Lawrence Lief, because of the calls. I got that information from your daughter, and I thank her for it. Those calls were meant, maybe, to throw us off; but she didn’t mean to, I believe. She passed along her information in all innocence, and in the end it helped me quite a bit, because it eliminated that Munroe fellow. I didn’t have to worry about him anymore.
“All the same, there didn’t seem to be a connection between Lief and your brother. Naturally I thought of Miss Hollander, because she’d been hurt, too. But the bomb—I’m going to call it a bomb from here on—didn’t seem like it was meant for her. Her being wounded was kind of a freak, and Mr. Blue here, who was talking to her when it went off, wasn’t hurt at all. Just the same, she’d been there in that hospital and she was Herbert Hollander’s niece. There was no getting around that.
“About the same time I gave up on the cannon idea, it hit me that maybe the bomb was intended for somebody in addition to Lief—somebody who’d link up Lief and Herbert Hollander, if only I could figure out who it was. Whoever made the bomb knew that Lief would be the one to open the box. That had been announced. It wasn’t likely he knew Drexel Munroe would be on the platform with him, although it was possible, as I explained once to Miss Hollander. But he might have thought that somebody else would be on hand—somebody who really wasn’t there, and so didn’t get hurt. Who might that be?”
Sandoz stopped talking for a minute and looked around at my father and Aladdin Blue and me. His face was just as wooden as ever, but there were red sparks in his eyes; he could have been the Indian who scalped Custer. “Why, Mrs. Hollander, of course. She’d been up on that platform just a short time before, for the drawing. She’d only gotten down because with her and Munroe and Lief up there, there wasn’t room for Lief to work. If somebody hadn’t known how big the platform would be—for instance, if he was in New York building himself a good alibi when it was put up—he’d think she’d be up there sure. She was a woman, wasn’t she, and curious? He’d figure she’d stay there to see what was inside when Lief opened it.”
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?”