Pandora by Holly Hollander

I said, “He was shot by gangsters,” which I still think was a diplomatic thing to say under the circumstances, although Blue gave me a look that would have set fire to a pile of bricks.

“You weren’t injured by the blast, Mr. Blue?”

“I was lucky. Your daughter was sitting by a window, and wasn’t equally lucky. I was also stupid. I ran—as near as I can come to running—out of the building without realizing she had been hurt. A shard of glass wounded her; she can tell you about it.”

“I’m sure she will, but I’m keeping you standing.” My father turned to me. “Holly, I see some crutches in the corner. Can you walk?”

“A little,” I said.

“How did you get upstairs?”

“Bill carried me.”

“If Bill could carry you up, I can carry you down. I want to continue this in my study, where Mr. Blue and I can sit down, and I can offer him a good cigar and a drink. I’d like a drink myself.”

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