Pandora by Holly Hollander

How Blue Got That Way

“You’re crazy!” I said. “You are stark, staring nuts!”

“No, not at all.” Blue was smiling his littlest smile, one that’s mostly in his eyes. “You’ll find the story in tomorrow’s Tribune—my information comes from my friend there, not from the police; an enterprising reporter caught a leak at the ballistics lab, presumably.”

“Somebody shot at them—shot at us—with a cannon? That’s crazy!” As you may have noticed, I pride myself on originality. The truth was that I was still trying to take it in. Every time I got it past my ears, my head tossed it out.

“So it seems.”

“Then that would tie right in with Vietnam! Look, suppose Larry was in the artillery there, see? And he added a bunch of numbers wrong, so they aimed too low and killed somebody’s best friend. Now the other friend gets him back.”

Blue shook his head. “I don’t think so. I believe that I mentioned that they found the baseplate. Do you know what that is?”

“What they put the gun on to fire it, I suppose.”

“You’re thinking of the baseplate of a mortar, a different thing with the same name. The baseplate of an artillery shell is a thick metal section that separates the explosive inside the shell from the gunpowder that will propel it. When the shell explodes, most of its casing shatters into the ragged and deadly scraps we call shrapnel—or when they come from an antiaircraft gun, flak. The base plate is too strong to fragment like that, however; it has to be, in order to prevent the firing of the gun from setting off the charge in the shell. If the baseplate can be found, an ordnance expert can usually determine exactly what type of shell it came from. This one was made for an artillery piece that to the best of my knowledge wasn’t used in Vietnam at all: a World War Two German eighty-eight.”

“That still doesn’t prove it had nothing to do with Vietnam,” I argued. “If there were some guys who wanted to kill Larry, they couldn’ve stolen the gun from a museum or something. Anyway, they sure couldn’t have brought their own gun back with them, and maybe they were willing to take anything they could get. Hell, they’d have to be.”

“If it’s any comfort to you, Lieutenant Sandoz appears to agree with you. He has a crew of men looking at possible sites for such a gun—it would have to have been within a mile or two of the school—and another team looking for the gun itself, in abandoned quarries and so forth.”

“And you’re not doing that.”

“Why should I?” Blue asked. “They have an army: deputies, state troopers, God knows what. If there’s a deserted spot that can be reached by road within range of that high school, they’ll find it. If the gun’s within a hundred miles of here and hasn’t already been melted down for scrap, they’ll find that.”

“Only you don’t think they will.”

Blue shrugged. “At this point I don’t know what to think. Please notice that I never said I believed anything so fantastic occurred; I merely said that the police seem to. Yet they have evidence. Conceivably, that shell might have been thrown from some kind of catapult or dropped from a plane, but those ideas are as bad as the gun. Worse.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, and then I told him about the old lady’s house where we’d gone in for lemonade. “Naturally she’d notice if somebody shot a cannon in her front yard,” I finished, “but she must leave home sometimes, and come to think of it, she said she might come to the Fair this year. If she did, she’d have been gone, and I’m certain she was living there alone.”

Blue waved a hand and stood up. I think that may have been the first time I ever saw him pace, which is something he only does when he’s really upset. He goes up and down dragging his bad leg behind him and hitting the floor with his stick like he wants to kill it. I hate it. I hated it then, the first time. He makes me think of a cougar in a nature film I saw once; this cougar had pulled loose the trap that had caught it and it was trying to get away, to go somewhere far off in the woods where horrible things didn’t happen, and it was dragging that damned trap with it all the time. When I close my eyes, the thump of Blue’s stick makes me think maybe there really is a trap on his crippled leg, one that neither of us can see.

“I’ll grant that,” Blue said, still talking about the old lady’s being gone. “Certainly if she wasn’t out, various tricks could have been used to get her out of the house—burglars have developed a whole bagful of them, from a telephone call warning the victim of some imaginary natural disaster to theater tickets supposedly sent by a business contact. Even if she wasn’t away, she could have been drugged, or silenced by threats. It’s the gun itself I can’t accept. If it had been a rocket launcher or a recoilless rifle, it might be possible; but a weapon that size would have to be transported in a large truck, or towed behind one. Did you notice how you spoke of ‘guys,’ even though only a few minutes ago you told me you felt sure the killer had worked alone? That was because you realized instinctively that several people would be required to arrange something like this. A gun crew. The thing’s preposterous.”

Just then the phone by my bed rang. When I hung up, Blue was back in my chintz chair, smiling. “My father’s on his way home,” I told him.

“I’m delighted to hear it.”

“That was Bill. He took Elaine someplace and dropped her off. My father just called from O’Hare. He’s going to get a bite to eat there while Bill drives over to pick him up.”

“That shouldn’t take long,” Blue said. “An hour and a half at the outside, if they don’t get stuck in traffic.”

“You’ve been wanting to meet him, haven’t you?” My hands were already smoothing out the sheet, even though I knew it was silly.

“I’d like to get a retainer from him if I can.”

“It would be useful, wouldn’t it? Like the stuff you told Sandoz so he’d let you stay in my room at the hospital.”

Blue shook his head. “I need the money. The money would be useful, if you want to put it that way. I’ve been looking at your bookcases—Fleming, Chandler, MacDonald. You’re fond of mysteries.”

“I’ve got Poe and Van Dine and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle here on the other side,” I told him. “Historical grounding. And I have a soft spot for Ellery Queen, even if he’d be older than my father if he were real.”

Blue sniffed. “You ought to find a detective your own age. But I was going to quote Chandler to you, and I still will. He wrote, ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.’”

I interrupted to say, “You’ve read him too—harder than I did.”

“I’ve had more time. Chandler was concerned with honor and not with money—that word tarnished is an indirect reference to knightly armor. This though Marlowe was born in the Depression, when even such a man, honorable, intelligent, brave, and tough, might have a difficult time earning a living; and though Raymond Chandler was concerned with honor, Philip Marlowe was concerned about money. He had to be. If you’ve read those books with any insight, you know that he’s a creature of the thirties, and the earliest forties, before the Second World War broke the back of the crash of twenty-nine forever. The real Philip Marlowe died in nineteen forty-one, not on a battlefield but in a thousand defense plants.”

“You’re not a private eye.” I believe in getting right to the point. After all, if I didn’t my supply of enemies might run out.

“I’m not a private detective because I couldn’t possibly get a license. I can call myself a criminologist and offer my services as a consultant because I have a degree in criminology. I earned that degree in prison.”

“You did time?”

Blue nodded emphatically. I think he wanted to make sure I couldn’t say later that I hadn’t known. “Five years and some odd months. I should have told you sooner: you are consorting with a felon.”

“You used to be a lawyer.”

He looked surprised. “That’s correct. How did you know?”

“Just a hunch. When we went out to Garden Meadow, you were going to see somebody who’d been a judge. Later Sandoz said you looked like a lawyer, and just then you sounded like one.”

“I was disbarred, of course.” Blue leaned back in the chintz chair and closed his eyes, his stick lying across his lap. “The career I planned …”

For about as long as it takes to open a package of gum, everything got perfectly quiet. Downstairs someplace I could hear Mrs. Maas running the sweeper.

“I never wanted to go into politics,” Blue said at last. “Or to go on the bench. But I was going to be a bigger trial lawyer than F. Lee Bailey or Clarence Darrow. Now here I am.”

“Perry Mason!”

Blue opened his eyes and looked at me. “Just what do you mean by that?”

“I mean you’re as big a sucker for mysteries as I am. You wanted to be Perry Mason.”

“I suppose so.”

“Well, what happened? Tell me about it.”

“It isn’t very complicated. A certain man—a professional criminal—wanted me to defend him. I took the case, even though I felt sure he was guilty of worse crimes if he was innocent of the one he had been charged with. I needed the money, and after all everyone is entitled to counsel, guilty or innocent.

“At the trial I did the best I could for him, but it became increasingly clear that he would be convicted. He asked me to bribe the judge—not to find him not guilty, which would’ve been impossible anyway since it was a jury trial, but to give him a light sentence.”

“Why didn’t he do it himself?”

“He was out on bail, but he was being watched by the police—more and more closely as it became apparent that the verdict would go against him. The few associates he had whom he could have trusted with something of that sort were being watched as well, some because they were his associates and some for other reasons. He insisted that I do it. He was a very forceful man, strong physically and strong of will. Someone once said that all strong men are goodnatured—or that if they are not, the people around them are, which comes to the same thing.”

“So you did it?”

Blue shook his head, a very slight shake this time; I don’t think the end of that sharp nose moved half an inch. “Not then. I told him he would have to find someone else if he wanted to go through with it, and that if he did I didn’t want to know about it. And then that if he continued to try to force me into it, I would have to resign the case.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t just go out and hire himself a crooked lawyer.”

“There are never enough of those to meet the demand,” Blue said. “Besides, most of them aren’t as crooked as people think. They are small crooks, who might hint to a juror’s wife that her husband would soon have a better job if things went well. This was serious. It involved a judge who needed money, and a great deal of cash in unmarked bills.

“Then too, Holly, you have to understand that most crooked lawyers aren’t very good lawyers. That’s why they’re crooked, basically—they can’t earn much of a living otherwise. I was a good lawyer, or at least I thought I was, and my client thought so too; he wanted me for his crooked lawyer. That’s one way in which lawyers are made crooked, you see. Once I had tendered that bribe, he would have me in his pocket for the rest of my life. I would have to do whatever I could to pull him out of any legal difficulty he got into, because if he thought I had not done enough and he went to prison, he would tell; then the judge and I would both have been finished.”

“But you said no.”

“Yes, I told him no. Two or three nights later—I forget just how long it was—I received a telephone call. It was a woman’s voice. The woman said she had information relating to another case of mine. She would not come to my apartment, but she offered to meet me in an all-night drugstore not far from where I lived. As I was walking toward the drugstore, a man in a raincoat came toward me. When we were close, he opened his raincoat.” Blue paused, and the little smile came back. “I remember that I wondered for an instant whether he was a flasher—whether he intended to expose himself. What he actually had beneath his raincoat wasn’t an erection but a sawed-off shotgun. He fired at my legs, and the next thing I knew I was lying facedown on the sidewalk, bleeding.”

“I dig it,” I said.

“Yes, you’ve been there yourself, haven’t you? The judge granted a continuance, of course, and my client came to visit me in the hospital. He was very friendly. He told me that he had not wanted to do what he had, but that if I refused to do as I was told he would kill me. And it suddenly came to me that the whole system of the law, which I had studied and supported, had done nothing and would do nothing to protect me from this man. As soon as I was able to hobble about, I went to see the judge.”

“And?”

“He wouldn’t take it. It was that simple. By that time he had found the racehorse thing—though I didn’t know that at the time—which was far safer and got him all the money he required. He told me to come back with the cash, and when I did there were two FBI agents in the next room videotaping everything. He was a federal judge; I should have told you that. My client went to prison, and so did I. So did the judge himself, about two years later.”

“That was the judge you went to see at Garden Meadow, then. You said he’d been in jail.”

Blue nodded. “He feels he owes me something, because he turned me in when he was acting dishonestly himself. I don’t agree, but I value his friendship.

“At any rate, all that is another story; I set out to tell you about my studies. It’s possible to do college work in most of our prisons, and I did. I knew I would need a new profession when I was released, and the only things I could really learn where I was were penology and criminology. Anything else would have been a matter of acquiring a theoretical background without practical experience. By devoting my studies to criminology, I turned my prison time to my own benefit, if you like.”

I asked him how it had felt, majoring in criminology while he was surrounded by criminals, and we talked about that till my father came.