left. It took me another half-hour to catch a cab to the
Delores.
I don’t think I’ve ever opened a door more
carefully than I did that night when I got back to my apartment. I’ll
be honest—I was really spooked. In fact, if some neighbor had
hailed me in the hallway, I might have screamed. Regardless of what
you may have seen in the movies, detectives just don’t get shot at
all that often. And the fact that I didn’t know why I was being
shot at made it that much worse.
It took me a week to satisfy myself that nobody was
hiding in the apartment. I acted like a kid on a stormy night,
opening every closet door twice. The nice part about being a kid is
that you can do that sort of thing and feel good and safe when you’re
through. When I finished I felt distinctly like an idiot and not a
bit safer than when I’d started. I went over to the liquor cabinet
and poured myself four fingers and a thumb of Scotch. Then I turned
on the Globemaster and turned in a talk show on WGN in Chicago.
Between the liquor and the soothing sound of a voice, I slowly
recovered my sanity.
Someone tried to kill you," I said aloud.
"That’s all."
I kept saying it with different inflections, like an
actor practicing a line from a play. "Someone tried to kill you;
someone tried to kill you; someone tried to kill you!"
After a time, I believed it. Then I asked out loud,
"Why would someone try to kill you?" And when I couldn’t
answer that, I asked "Who?"
At the emergency room I’d been certain that my
assailant was Sean O’Hara or his black friend. In my apartment that
began to seem less and less likely. First, there was the time
element. Before I’d left Lovingwell’s home, I’d seen O’Hara
sitting on the living room couch, glimpsed his Dodge van in the
driveway as I’d walked up Middleton to where I’d parked the
Pinto. It had taken me about a quarter of an hour to drive back to
the Delores. Unless Sean had been following me in another car, he
couldn’t have known that I was headed home. And he would’ve had
to have been moving pretty quickly to make it out the door, into a
car, and over to the Burnet lot in fifteen minutes. Second, there was
the physical evidence. The killer could have been O’Hara, but he
couldn’t have been the black boy, O’Hara’s friend. I hadn’t
seen much of the kid in the rearview mirror. Just enough to know that
he was a thin type and, if head size correlates at all with body
size, not a particularly tall kid, either.
Thinking the problem through wasn’t a complete
waste of time; it made me realize that, while I might have had the
wrong suspects, I had to have the right M.O. Whoever had tried to
kill me must have followed me in a car to the Delores’s parking
lot—unless he’d been sitting there for almost five hours in the
cold. He’d waited until I’d gotten out of the Pinto, then he’d
popped from behind the rosebushes and taken ten shots at me. That
meant that whoever it was had known that I was at the Lovingwell
house. I began to feel unbalanced again—the way I’d felt in the
study when Sarah Lovingwell had told me that she’d hated her father
and that he’d hated her. I thought it through one more time, but
the facts stayed the same. I hadn’t been followed once that
afternoon; I’d been followed twice. And the second time, I ’d
been totally unaware that someone was following me.
7
First thing in the morning I called Louis Bidwell at
the Sloane Lab. I was in a delicate position. I didn’t want to tell
him what I knew about the missing document; on the other hand, if the
document was the reason he had called Lovingwell on Tuesday, I wanted
to know what had been said, especially if it had anything to do with
an internal security problem. Bidwell, who spoke in a thick Alabamian
accent—the voice of every second lieutenant I’d ever known—was
polite and not very helpful.
"If you want to come all the way out heah ta
Batavia, ah’ll be more than happy to show you
Delores.
I don’t think I’ve ever opened a door more
carefully than I did that night when I got back to my apartment. I’ll
be honest—I was really spooked. In fact, if some neighbor had
hailed me in the hallway, I might have screamed. Regardless of what
you may have seen in the movies, detectives just don’t get shot at
all that often. And the fact that I didn’t know why I was being
shot at made it that much worse.
It took me a week to satisfy myself that nobody was
hiding in the apartment. I acted like a kid on a stormy night,
opening every closet door twice. The nice part about being a kid is
that you can do that sort of thing and feel good and safe when you’re
through. When I finished I felt distinctly like an idiot and not a
bit safer than when I’d started. I went over to the liquor cabinet
and poured myself four fingers and a thumb of Scotch. Then I turned
on the Globemaster and turned in a talk show on WGN in Chicago.
Between the liquor and the soothing sound of a voice, I slowly
recovered my sanity.
Someone tried to kill you," I said aloud.
"That’s all."
I kept saying it with different inflections, like an
actor practicing a line from a play. "Someone tried to kill you;
someone tried to kill you; someone tried to kill you!"
After a time, I believed it. Then I asked out loud,
"Why would someone try to kill you?" And when I couldn’t
answer that, I asked "Who?"
At the emergency room I’d been certain that my
assailant was Sean O’Hara or his black friend. In my apartment that
began to seem less and less likely. First, there was the time
element. Before I’d left Lovingwell’s home, I’d seen O’Hara
sitting on the living room couch, glimpsed his Dodge van in the
driveway as I’d walked up Middleton to where I’d parked the
Pinto. It had taken me about a quarter of an hour to drive back to
the Delores. Unless Sean had been following me in another car, he
couldn’t have known that I was headed home. And he would’ve had
to have been moving pretty quickly to make it out the door, into a
car, and over to the Burnet lot in fifteen minutes. Second, there was
the physical evidence. The killer could have been O’Hara, but he
couldn’t have been the black boy, O’Hara’s friend. I hadn’t
seen much of the kid in the rearview mirror. Just enough to know that
he was a thin type and, if head size correlates at all with body
size, not a particularly tall kid, either.
Thinking the problem through wasn’t a complete
waste of time; it made me realize that, while I might have had the
wrong suspects, I had to have the right M.O. Whoever had tried to
kill me must have followed me in a car to the Delores’s parking
lot—unless he’d been sitting there for almost five hours in the
cold. He’d waited until I’d gotten out of the Pinto, then he’d
popped from behind the rosebushes and taken ten shots at me. That
meant that whoever it was had known that I was at the Lovingwell
house. I began to feel unbalanced again—the way I’d felt in the
study when Sarah Lovingwell had told me that she’d hated her father
and that he’d hated her. I thought it through one more time, but
the facts stayed the same. I hadn’t been followed once that
afternoon; I’d been followed twice. And the second time, I ’d
been totally unaware that someone was following me.
7
First thing in the morning I called Louis Bidwell at
the Sloane Lab. I was in a delicate position. I didn’t want to tell
him what I knew about the missing document; on the other hand, if the
document was the reason he had called Lovingwell on Tuesday, I wanted
to know what had been said, especially if it had anything to do with
an internal security problem. Bidwell, who spoke in a thick Alabamian
accent—the voice of every second lieutenant I’d ever known—was
polite and not very helpful.
"If you want to come all the way out heah ta
Batavia, ah’ll be more than happy to show you
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