nobody’d know he was supposed to be in an institution. Suppose he called his brother in New York. Asking for help, maybe.”
My father shook his head. “He didn’t.”
“I’m just supposing. Like I told you, so far this is all hypothetical.
“Well, what would be more natural than for the brother to say, ‘I’m just now leaving for Chicago to see about Holly. Meet me in the parking lot—not in the lobby, where they might spot you and send you back—and I’ll give you the money for a ticket to Tahiti.’ Or whatever it was his brother had said he wanted.” Sandoz spread his big, hard-looking brown hands. “You see what I mean? It falls into place pretty good.
“So it was Herbert Hollander that got killed, and it was him that was meant to be killed. All right, how about the other killing, the cannon shell that exploded at Barton High?”
“Cannon shell?” My father’s face was so tight it seemed like somebody was standing behind him pulling at the skin.
Sandoz drew on his cigar. “Didn’t you think we knew about that? Yes, sir, an old shell from a German Army gun. We know who was killed when it went off, but I asked myself there, too, if they were meant to be killed. Mrs. Simmons was farther away than several people that haven’t died, so I think we can forget about her. We’ve dug around a bit on Mr. Munroe without coming up with a better-thanaverage reason somebody’d want him dead.”
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
