Blue glanced at my father, then went back to Sandoz. “When you told him about the shell, he involuntarily glanced up at the mantel, and his shock was apparent. He knew at that moment, and with certainty, who had planted that bomb; but he did not accuse her. He loved his wife, and he must have known of her relations with Lief and believed she had given herself to him, and killed him, because of some hold he had over her. I needed to make her do or say something that would show her husband clearly not only that she had killed those people, but that she had planned her crime so he would be blamed.”
My father said, “You did. Can you also tell me why she did it?”
“No,” Blue said. “But she can, and perhaps eventually she will. All I can say now is that it appears to me that Lief was not her primary target—that worked out too neatly. I think she contrived to have an affair with the man who would open the box, in other words, and not that she contrived that the man with whom she had an affair would open it. And certainly her target was not originally Herbert Hollander the Third; his death bears the earmarks of a spur-of-the-moment decision. But until she said she had seen you with the box open, she might have argued, for example, that she had killed Lief because he was threatening to reveal their relationship to you unless she would run away with him. If she had done that, would you have helped her?”
“I suppose I would. I would have done whatever lay in my power, I think.”
Elaine looked at him and saw that it was no good now, and looked away.
Molly’s twangy voice surprised us. “I was wishin’ a while ago I’d brought my gun to this, but I see it was the Good Lord’s provision. I’d have shot Mr. Sinclair—or maybe not, ’cause a man that’s been messed over by a bad woman has to be forgiven a lot. Miz Hollander, I didn’t hate you like I ought to have when I heard about those letters of yours, ‘cause Larry was just so handsome and good and I believed I knew how you’d felt. Now I know you didn’t ever love him. You killed him just for bait, and I’ll get you. I may have to wait till the law lets you go, but ’fore the world ends, you’re mine.”
Elaine couldn’t meet her eyes, and everybody was quiet for a minute. It was my father who broke it. “Go on, Mr. Blue.”
Blue leaned forward, looking from him to Molly, then over at Sandoz. “There were three plausible, but false, assumptions that tended to confuse things, I would say. The first may have impeded you more than it did me, Lieutenant. It was that the male voice that had threatened Larry over the telephone belonged to the person who contrived his death. Even when you decided that no vengeful veterans existed, I believe you thought those calls had been someone’s effort to throw any investigation off track.”
“And they weren’t?”
“No, they weren’t. Molly, do you want to explain now?” Molly shook her head and looked at me. I said, “Larry made those calls himself. Molly says she was never completely sure, but I think she knew and just didn’t let on. When she showed me her gun in the store—it was Larry’s really, one they kept under the counter in case of a holdup—it was so I wouldn’t guess she thought it was him. She says the voice told her some things it seemed like nobody but Larry would know. Were you onto him?”
Blue shook his head. “He came to me a month ago, brought by a mutual friend. I was interested in harassing calls, as I still am, so I poked around. By the time Larry was killed, I was considering the possibility that he had placed them himself, but I was far from sure. Now I see—or think I do—that he was tormented by guilt. If I’d exposed him, perhaps that would have provided punishment enough. There’s no way of knowing.”
“What’d he do?” I asked. When I saw how Molly was looking at me, I added, “I mean, I know it’s none of my business …”
Blue said, “It is your business, actually. It’s everyone’s. I have no idea what Larry did, but I doubt that he did anything worse than many hundreds of others. There are no good wars, and Vietnam was a particularly bad one; many of its combatants wore civilian clothes, and much of the fighting took place in densely populated areas. If you desire speculation, mine would be that Larry believed that what he was doing was right, at first. And that by the time he’d changed his mind he’d been given, or was about to get, his commission. A month is a long time in war, and he may have gone on for months acting much as he had before, all the while becoming increasingly certain that he was morally a criminal. A protracted period during which a man acts against his conscience can produce severe psychic stress, though it is invisible at the time. Eventually, of course, he resigned that commission and left the service.”
“You’re telling us he brought back his own shell,” my father said, “as I did.” He looked old, I thought.
Sandoz cleared his throat. “You were talking about three wrong assumptions, and even if you were too polite to say I made them all, I’d like to know what the others were.”
“I was led astray by the other two myself,” Blue admitted. “One was that some sort of mechanism had to have been assembled to detonate the shell; that seemed to point to Lief and suicide, or to Mr. Hollander, who has an elaborate shop in the basement of this house and is reported to be a clever mechanic. It was a day and more after the explosion before it occurred to me that even before someone had put a bomb in it, Pandora’s could have been no ordinary box. A long, long time ago, someone had taken the trouble to have that word, Pandora, lettered on its lid in gold leaf. Last night I escorted Holly home and helped her up the stairs, to the best of my ability. And as I was going out, it struck me that the collection of books on vaults and locks in Mr. Hollander’s study might include references to such a box.”
“I should have thought of that myself,” Sandoz said. “Did it?”
My father said, “Yes, it does, and I would imagine from what Mr. Blue has said that he found at least one of them.”
Sandoz looked at him. “You knew about it, then?” “Certainly.”
“Did you tell your wife what you knew?”
My father shook his head. “Why should I? The Pandoras were harmless, and as I saw it I’d only have been spoiling her fun.” He paused, and I thought he was waiting for her to say something; she didn’t, so he went on. “They belong to a class of gadgets called alarm boxes, and were made about a hundred years ago in fair numbers by an outfit called the Dependable Manufacturing Company. They came equipped with a good lock—by which I mean with a lock that was good by the standards of the period, before the introduction of pin tumblers—but they had a second line of defense, which is why we call them alarm boxes. In the Pandoras, it consisted of a spring-wound motor that rang a bell and fired a blank cartridge unless a secret catch on one side was pressed before the box was opened.”
Blue said, “The people who built those boxes weren’t out to create a murder weapon. The unrifled barrel that held the blank cartridge was not, as you might assume, directed toward the face of the unauthorized opener. It pointed toward the back of the box. The most common method of clearing what was a battlefield of unexploded shells is to detonate them by shooting them from a safe distance with a rifle. Mr. Hollander, who appears to have seen a good deal of action in World War II, may have mentioned that to his wife.” Blue looked at Elaine. “Did he?”