The Hand in the Letter

By nine the next morning Pike had the whole of it, and most of it wrong. They had the stick. They did not have a name. The papers carried three columns about Ward Ellis as a young man and a line in small type that said the reward stood at twenty thousand dollars.

Pike read the papers at the window of his office on State Street with his coat still on. Then he read them again, folded them, and sat down.

He had kept Ward Ellis as a client for eleven years and Adrian Hale for twenty-six, and the office had learned to hold them in the same drawer and never say so. Now one of them was in a morgue in Boston and the other one was somewhere out at the end of Kirkland Street behind a wall, and the piece of wood that had done the killing was lying on a table in an evidence room, and Pike had bought it himself in a shop on Tremont Street and paid for the leather wrist strap to be stitched on at the end.

He took his coat off and hung it and worked until noon and did not work well.

At half past three a messenger came up the stairs with an envelope that carried no postmark and no street address, only his name in a hand he had known for twenty-six years. The note inside was four lines. It asked him to come out to the house that afternoon if he could, and it was signed A. Hale, and it said nothing else at all.

Pike put on his coat again and went down and got a car.

It was a gray afternoon, close, with the smell of the harbor in it and no wind to move anything. The car went out past the yard, past the brick, into the streets where the houses got older and the trees got bigger and the sidewalks went quiet. Hale's house stood back behind a low stone wall on Kirkland Street, three stories of dark stone with shutters, and the laboratory took up the ground behind it, a long brick shed that had been a foundry once and had never been made to look like anything else.

Diaz let him in at the front and did not smile and did not say much. He took Pike's coat and then, instead of showing him into the library where guests were usually put, he led him the other way, back through the kitchen and out the side door and across a yard that had been a garden once and was now mostly gravel and a few dead stakes. There was a smell out there that Pike could not place and did not like.

"This way, sir," Diaz said, and opened the door of the laboratory building and stood back.

Pike had never been inside it. He had walked past the front of the house a hundred times and looked at the back of it from the lane, and he had sat in the library and the dining room and the study on the second floor, but he had never been in here. It was one long room, high up, with a glass roof that let down a dull gray light, and straw on the concrete floor, and crates, and a row of tables along one wall with glass on them. It was cold in there and very quiet, the quiet of a place where somebody works alone and does not want to be heard doing it.

At the far end a wooden stair went up to a door that was covered on the inside face with red felt. Diaz went up first and knocked once and opened it and stood aside.

The room at the top was the one Hale used. It had three windows in the far wall, small ones, barred with iron, looking down into the yard. Around the other three sides were presses, glass fronted, full of bottles. There was a long table with papers squared on it, and a chair, and a sofa that had been sat on a great deal, and a cheval glass in a wooden frame standing in the corner facing the room. A fire was going in the grate, and a lamp was lit on the shelf above it although it was still afternoon, and near the fire, close up to it, in a chair drawn up small, with a rug over his knees, sat Adrian Hale.

He looked like a man the fever had been through. His face had gone the color of the inside of a shell. The hand he held out was cold and dry, and he did not stand.

"Warren," he said. His voice had changed. It was thinner, and it came from a little farther back in him than it used to.

Pike took the hand and let it go and sat down in the chair on the other side of the fire without being asked. "You sent for me," he said.

"I did."

"Then you have heard."

Hale looked at the fire. "They were saying it in the square," he said. "I heard them from the dining room window. A boy had a paper. He was shouting it."

"Yes."

"There will be a great deal of noise."

"There is already."

Hale nodded slowly, twice. Then he said nothing for a while, and the fire moved, and the lamp above it hissed a little.

Pike let the quiet sit there. He had learned a long time ago that the way to get a thing out of a man is to stop pulling at it. So he looked at the room instead: the presses full of bottles, all of them dusty except the front rank, which had been wiped; the long table with its squared papers and the pen lying across them with the cap off; the cheval glass, turned so that it faced away from the fire and would have shown whoever sat in the chair nothing but the three barred windows and his own back.

"You have not been mad enough to hide him," Pike said at last. "Have you."

Hale turned his head then and looked at him, and his eyes were wet and steady. "Warren," he said, "I will never set eyes on him again. I give you my word on it. What is left of my word. I am done with him in this world. It is finished."

"You say that very certainly."

"I say it certainly because I am certain."

"You were certain of other things."

"I was." Hale put both hands on the arms of the chair and pushed himself up a little straighter, and then let himself down again. "It does not want my help any longer, in any case. You do not know him as I do. He is safe. He is quite safe. Mark me. He will never be heard of again."

Pike listened to that and did not like it. It was not the words. It was the way they came out, fast and bright and all of a piece, like something rehearsed while shaving. A man who has nothing to hide can say I do not know. A man who is certain will usually say how.

"You seem very sure of him," Pike said.

"I am."

"For your sake I hope you are right. If it ever comes to a trial, your name will be in the papers next to his."

"It will not come to a trial."

"You cannot promise me that."

"I can promise you one part of it," Hale said. "I have grounds. I cannot share the grounds. But there is one thing I want from you, and it is why I sent for you, and it is not about him at all." He worked his hand under the rug and brought out a single sheet of paper, folded twice, and held it out. "I have had a letter."

Pike took it.

"I do not know whether I ought to give it to the police," Hale said. "I would rather put it in your hands. You would decide it better than I could. I have great trust in you, Warren. More than in anyone living."

"You are afraid it would help them find him."

"No." Hale shook his head. "You may believe me or not, but I do not care what becomes of him. I am quite done with him. I was thinking about my own name, which this business has already dragged about. That is all it is. It is a small thing to say out loud."

Pike unfolded the sheet. The writing was not like any he had seen in the case file. It was upright, careful, almost printed, every letter standing at attention with a slight backward tilt, and it was small and close, and it filled one side of the page and stopped. It was signed Cal Voss. It said, in short, that the writer's benefactor, Doctor Hale, whom he had repaid so badly, need have no fear for his safety, as the writer had certain means of getting clear which he could depend on entirely. It thanked him, once, at the end, in a clause that read like a bad translation of something polite, and it did not say where it was written or when, and it did not apologize for anything except in general.

Pike read it twice before he spoke.

"Do you have the envelope," he said.

"I burned it."

"When."

"Before I thought what I was doing with it." Hale looked at the fire. "There was no postmark on it. It did not come through the mail. It was handed in."

"Handed in to whom."

"To the house."

"By whom."

"I did not ask," Hale said, and closed his eyes.

Pike folded the letter and put it in his breast pocket and stood up. There was nothing more to be had in that room and he knew the face of a man who was done talking. He thanked Hale for his time, which was what he always said, and Hale did not answer, and Pike went down the wooden stair and through the long cold theatre with the straw on the floor and out into the yard.

Diaz was at the door, waiting to see him out. Pike stopped beside him.

"One thing," he said. "There was a letter handed in at this house today. What was the person like who brought it."

Diaz looked at him. "Nothing came today, sir."

"Nothing at all."

"Only the post. And only circulars by that. Advertisements." He said it as if he would have liked to say more and had been told not to, and then he added, because he could not help it, "The doctor has not wanted visitors. Not for a week. Nobody comes to the front."

"No," said Pike. "Thank you, Oscar."

He walked back around the corner and got into the car and sat in it for a minute before he told the driver where to go.

So the letter had come in by the other door. There was only one other door. It was the narrow one with no window in it, set into the brick at the side of the laboratory where the service lane ran, the one he had stood in front of more than once at night, watching the wall. Which meant the letter had either been handed to somebody in the laboratory or written there, and if it had been written there, then Hale had not needed it handed in at all, and had told him a small lie about a small envelope and had done it without turning a hair.

Pike thought about the last part of that all the way home. It was not the letter that worried him. It was that Hale had gone out of his way, unprompted, to say the envelope had no postmark, as if he had been afraid somebody would ask.

He stopped at a newsstand before he went up to his rooms. The boy there had the evening edition and a fresh headline and a photograph of the lane with a chalk mark on it. Pike bought it and carried it under his arm and did not read it until he got in.

At home, after dinner, he had Marta Boyd to dine with him, which he did on Thursdays when neither of them had anything better. Boyd was his head clerk and had been for eight years, and she could read a signature the way a pianist reads a score. She knew every hand in the office and every client from the beginning. She was also, and this was the part Pike was thinking about while the coffee came, a woman who could keep her mouth shut without being told to and who had never once, in eight years, let on that she noticed more than she was meant to.

The fire was good in the room, and the bottle between them was an old burgundy that had been lying in the basement since his father's time, and the light off it in the glass was almost black. Pike turned the glass and watched it and worked out how he was going to do it, and then he did it.

"This is a bad business about Ellis," he said.

"It is a terrible business," Boyd said. "It has got into everybody. The man must have been out of his mind."

"I should like to hear your view of that." Pike reached inside his coat and took out the folded sheet and laid it on the table between the glasses. "I have a document in his hand. Between us. I hardly know what to do with it. It is not a pretty thing to have in the house. But it is in your line. A murderer's autograph."

Boyd's eyes changed and she set her glass down and picked the sheet up and held it near the lamp. She read it once the way a person reads a letter, and then she read it again the way a person reads a handwriting, and then she turned it over and looked at the blank side and turned it back and studied the crossing of the letters one by one. She did not say a word for two minutes. Pike let her alone and drank his wine.

"No," she said at last.

"No what."

"Not out of his mind. Or not in the way that shows." She put the sheet down on the table and kept one finger on the corner of it. "It is an odd hand, though. It is an odd hand indeed."

"And the writer, by every account, was an odd man."

Boyd did not answer that. She was still looking at the paper. Then a knock came at the door and the woman who kept the house came in with a note on a tray, and Boyd glanced up at the tray, and then up at Pike, and her face did something small and quick.

"Is that from Doctor Hale, sir," she said. "I thought I knew the hand. Is it private, Mister Pike."

"Only an invitation to dinner. Why. Do you want to see it."

"One moment, if you please." Pike held the note out and she took it and laid the two sheets side by side on the tablecloth and put the lamp where it would fall across both of them, and then she sat and compared them, not quickly, but line by line and letter by letter, with her hands flat on the cloth on either side and her eyes going from one to the other and back. It took her longer this time than it had taken her to read the letter.

"Thank you, sir," she said at the end, and gave him back the second sheet, and sat back. "That is a very interesting autograph."

There was a pause. Pike turned his glass once and set it down.

"Why did you compare them, Marta," he said.

Boyd looked at him. She was not a woman who said a thing twice, and she was not a woman who said a thing she could be made to unsay, and Pike watched her decide.

"Because there is a resemblance, sir," she said. "The two hands are identical in a great many points. The same spur on the same letters. The same way of closing a line. The same pressure, the same slant of the pen in the hand." She stopped.

"Go on."

"Only they are sloped the other way round." She turned her own hand over on the cloth, palm up, and then over again, palm down, as if that explained it. "One leans to the right and one leans to the left. Everything else is the same. It is as if one man wrote them both, and wrote one of them standing on his head."

Pike sat without moving for a moment. The fire cracked once and settled.

"Rather quaint," he said.

"It is quaint, as you say," Boyd said.

"I would not speak of this note. The invitation. Not to anyone in the office."

"No, sir," she said. "I understand."

She went soon after, and Pike saw her out himself, and then he came back to the table and gathered the two sheets and carried them into the inner room and opened the safe. He put them inside, in the folder where the other papers in the matter already lay, the old will and the memorandum he had written after the first conversation and the pencil map he had drawn of the lane. Then he turned the dial and stood with his hand on the cold door of it for a moment before he closed it.

It is not my client who wrote to me, he thought. It is one hand, and it wrote both of them, and it wrote them leaning opposite ways so that a man looking quickly would not see it.

It is not possible that Hale forged a murderer's letter to protect himself. Nobody does that. A man who has done nothing does not sit down and copy out another man's hand to prove he has nothing to do with him.

But the two sheets were the same hand, and one of them was signed Cal Voss, and the other one invited him to dinner.