Liar

“Maybe I’ll put off meeting Barbara,” Travis said, and Frank laughed.

Frank started poking a finger into the statue. “Hold it,” I said. “There’s a limit-”

He looked back into the bottom of the statue, ignoring me. “Get me a pair of tweezers.” Tweezers!

“Please.”

Well, it was the magic word, after all.

With tweezers in hand, he began picking at something inside the statue.

“What is it?” Travis asked.

“The reason the bulb won’t fit. There’s something rolled up inside here.”

Travis looked over at me.

“Travis, you said this was the only thing among your mother’s possessions that your father had given to her…”

“And he gave it to her to protect her,” he said softly. “To protect her from Gerald?”

Frank soon began complaining that if we didn’t give him some elbow room, he wouldn’t be able to get the object-something made of metal wrapped in paper-out without tearing the paper.

But a few minutes later he succeeded, and handed a short flat key and what at first appeared to be a scroll of thick paper to Travis.

“Is that a safe-deposit box key?” I asked.

“Too short,” Frank said. “Maybe a cash box, something like that.”

Travis, who had taken a seat next to Frank on the couch, handed the scroll back to him. “Could you help me unroll it?”

Frank carefully unrolled the scroll, which turned out to be a small envelope. It was the size of the envelopes invitations and thank-you notes sometimes come in, about four-by-six inches, and it was addressed to Arthur Spa

The address was written in black ink in a rough hand. There was no return address, no stamps, no postmark, but at the top of the envelope, a different hand had penciled in the number twenty-five and circled it.

“The office address?” I asked Travis, finally remembering.

“Yes. He told me that he had most of his mail sent there, not only because W would read it to him, but because it was the one place he would be every day-otherwise, he alternated between our house and the farm, and later between his apartment and the farm. But even if he couldn’t get into the office during the day, most evenings, he stopped by to check his mail.”

“Ulkins was there all the time?”

“No. Ulkins would tape-record the mail, usually just summarizing it. See this number twenty-five? Ulkins wrote that. He numbered the envelopes, then said on the tape, ”Letter one is from so-and-so, regarding x and y…‘ and so on. My father would listen to it as soon as he got a chance, whenever he had a moment. Sometimes that was in the afternoon, but usually it was late in the day.“

He explained who W/Ulkins was to Frank as he turned the envelope over. There were two red ink marks on the back, from a pair of rubber stamps. One was the figure of a hand.

“Hand-delivered,” Travis said, pointing to it.

The other stamp was a date-all numerical. “Date received,” he said.

“The day Gwendolyn DeMont was murdered,” I said.

“Should I-should I be handling this?” Travis asked.

“Probably no prints, but just to make sure, here,” Frank said, and using the tweezers but making the barest contact otherwise, he removed five index cards and the page of a calendar from the envelope. All were as curled as the envelope, but using the eraser end of a pencil to hold down one end and the tweezers to hold the other end, Frank held them open.

The calendar page was from the same date, the day of the murder. On it, someone had drawn a crescent moon.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with the actual phase of the moon,” Travis said. “It means ‘This night.”“

On each of the five index cards, symbols had been drawn.

“What do they mean?” I asked Travis.

He pointed to a simple house shape with other symbols within it.

“I’m not sure. The symbols on the inside of the house shape mean, ”Rich people live here.“ When we used to leave the notes for one another, our house was drawn like this, but with a heart inside.”

“Maybe it was a symbol for the DeMont farmhouse,” I said. “Especially if Gerald and your dad devised it before your dad lived in it.”

Frank held the next one open. “A zero?” I asked.

“Yes, in a way,” Travis said. “It means ‘Nothing to be gained here.”“ The next one also seemed familiar. ”A diamond?“ Frank asked.

“No, see the little protrusion at the bottom?” Travis pointed to it. “It’s a hobo sign for ‘Hold your tongue.”“

Neither of us guessed at the next one.

“This means ‘A crime has been committed here,”“ he said. ”And this last one means ’Be ready to defend yourself.“”

“He killed her,” Travis said. “Gerald kept hinting about this great favor he had done my father, but he didn’t really admit killing her.”

“He warned your father with hobo signs. These papers are what he was looking for,” I said. “And this key.”

We had told Frank about our encounter with Gerald, but only the basics. Now Travis filled him in on the details, then said, “I know he’ll be convicted of murdering my mother, and maybe even charged with attempted murder for trying to kill me. Killing Ulkins, the way he hurt Irene, and tried to kill her-there may be convictions for that, too. He should go to jail for a long time, and I should be satisfied.

“But if Gwendolyn’s murder is left as an open case, it isn’t enough.” He paused, then added, “I feel sorry for her, but I’d be kidding myself if I said I wanted justice for her sake. It’s more selfish than that.

“I want to clear my father’s name. I mean, he was a bigamist, yes- that I admit. But he didn’t kill his wife. My family-my father, my mother and I-we paid for that murder. We were punished for it, even though my father was i

“Your father protected Gerald,” Frank said.

“Yes,” Travis said. “He protected the killer.”

“His only brother,” I said. “A man who had raised him.”

“His brother’s keeper,” Travis said. “And God knows, Gerald was his keeper in every sense of the word.” He turned to Frank and said, “Is there any hope of using these to convict him of murdering Gwendolyn?”

Frank looked at the curling papers in silence for a time, then said, “Using them as evidence? There are some problems. Even if you could find prints or DNA on the envelope, there’s the problem of where the evidence has been all this time, who’s had a chance to tamper with it, and so on-not that I think they’ve been anywhere but in this night-light, but a defense lawyer would probably have them thrown out in no time.”

“Oh.”

“But that doesn’t mean the police can’t make use of them,” Frank said. “I know some of the guys over in Los Alamitos. Let me talk to them about it. Gerald was obsessed about getting these from your mother and you. A good interrogator might be able to show this to him without saying a word, and maybe he’ll give it up.”

Travis didn’t say anything.

Frank said, “Used to be, we could use the methods of some of these wild women private eyes out there, and smack the bad guys around until they confessed-but those days are over.”

Travis smiled a little.

“Fortunately for us,” Frank went on, “Rachel made him polish her shoes with his face, ribs and ass, so I think his spirits will be a little low. Trust me, I have experience dealing with this kind of turkey.”

The next day, Travis asked me to go with him to St. Anthony’s to see Father Chris, to learn where Arthur had been buried. As we drove to the church, I thought of our last visit there, and of the housekeeper’s warm welcome. That in turn reminded me of things she had said then, and suddenly several pieces of information I had heard over the last few days fell into place.