“I come to the Fair each year for the book sale. Several other dealers do as well, but I’ve priced the books myself and know exactly where the ones I wish to buy are located. I take what I want, pay, and leave; everyone knows I have no interest in antiques other than books. I realized, of course, that I’d be gone before my bomb went off.”
Elaine whispered, “This is incredible.”
Sandoz said, “I’ve got you placed now. Miss Hollander told us it was you that got her the cashiering job at the book sale.”
“That’s right.” Uncle Dee looked at me, then looked away. “I like Holly, and I wanted her to be where she would be safe. I was wrong about that, she got hurt anyway, and I’m sorry.”
Elaine, not whispering now, said, “De Witte, I can’t let you do this!”
“I loved Elaine, you see, Lieutenant. She wouldn’t have me, wouldn’t let me touch her, but that was all right. She was a married woman, and I could understand and admire a lady who wouldn’t betray her vows and her husband. Then I learned about Lief, and I thought I had a chance after all …”
I checked Molly out of the corner of my eye. She must have known already; she was taking it all right.
Sandoz said, “But you didn’t?”
Uncle Dee shook his head. “She laughed at me. Elaine, you mocked me, and that was too much. I decided to kill you and to kill him, to kill you and your lover together.”
Sandoz nodded like he had known all along. “So you put the bomb in the box. How’d you do that?”
“I came to this house often to show Harry books. One night when I knew that he and Elaine would be out, I came as though I had been invited. When the housekeeper told me they were gone, I said that Mr. Hollander was expecting me; she let me wait in his study, where we always talked. The box was there, on the table. I’d read about that type of lock in one of the books I’d found for Harry, and the tools I required were in the satchel in which I normally carry books. I picked the lock, and used the dud shell from his mantelpiece for the charge.”
“You had the trigger mechanism with you?”
“That’s correct. It was a simple affair, really—a small battery and an electrical switch I arranged so as to set off my blasting cap when the box was opened.”
“You’d planned all along to use the shell?”
Uncle Dee nodded. “Harry had told me about it a couple of times. He had been a young corporal, a supply clerk, in Italy during the war. His outfit hit the beach, and just after he got off the LST that shell tossed sand in his face. He said he had thrown himself flat afterward, and that he must have lain there a couple of minutes waiting for it to go off. Then he realized that if it hadn’t been a dud he would have been killed already, and stood up and went away to do whatever it was he was supposed to be doing.
“A day or so later, when things had quieted down somewhat—am I telling this right, Harry?—he discovered that the chain on which he wore his dogtags had broken. He went looking for them and found them where he had thrown himself down that first time. That reminded him of the shell, and he dug it up to look at. It was a foolish thing to do because it might have exploded, but he said he had the feeling that since it hadn’t gotten him when it had the chance, it never would.”
Sandoz said, “So this time you decided to give it a little help. You must have known that it would be traced back to him eventually.”
Uncle Dee nodded again. “He had her and Lief had her, but I couldn’t; I was going to get them both. Harry had packed that shell in his company’s supplies and trucked it all over Europe, that’s what he told me. If it had done what it was supposed to do the first time, perhaps I would have found Elaine. This time I was going to make certain it didn’t miss.”
Very softly Blue inquired, “Do you want to tell them about Herbert Hollander now?”
“I suppose I’d better.” Uncle Dee mopped his forehead; I could see his hand shake. “But first—Lieutenant, am I going to have to repeat all this again later?”
Sandoz nodded. “For a police stenographer, Mr. Sinclair. She’ll type it up and you’ll have to sign it.”
“Then I’ll try to keep it short. That same evening, when I put the bomb in the box, I got Harry’s gun from his desk drawer. He had shown it to me about a year ago when there was a rash of home invasions here and I advised him to get a dog. He said he didn’t need a dog, he had that, and showed me where he kept it. I thought that if either Elaine or Lief escaped the bomb I’d use it to kill them, then put it someplace where it would be linked to him. I felt sure the servants could identify it, and if they wouldn’t, I’d do it myself.
“My bomb worked, as you know. I was certain it would; I had tried out the mechanism with blasting caps several times in advance.” He glanced around at us when he said that, his smile only a sickly imitation of his old one. “Blasting caps aren’t much more powerful than the big firecrackers—salutes, they were called—that I used to shoot off as a boy. I tested the battery and switch in my basement, and I doubt that the people next door heard anything.
“So I was confident, you see—quite confident, when I came here. Then I realized that I had forgotten the black vinyl tape I had intended to use. I taped the cap to the shell with Scotch tape from Harry’s desk instead, and as it turned out that worked just fine.”
Sandoz said, “Except that Mrs. Hollander wasn’t killed.” Uncle Dee had always had a clean handkerchief in his breast pocket; now he was wadding it between his hands. “That’s right, she wasn’t touched. She’d left the platform before my bomb went off, and of course I couldn’t kill her afterward until Harry got back.”
“But you had the gun.”
“That’s right. I carried it with me everywhere, because I didn’t know when Harry would come home and I’d have a chance at Elaine. Something else had gone wrong as well, however; Holly had been injured. As I said before, I’d tried to arrange things so she wouldn’t be. I felt that the least I could do was visit her, bring her something to read in the hospital.”
“And you met Herbert Hollander in the parking lot?”
