The Note and the Hand

Vane went to see Kessler at four that afternoon. He was admitted by Manny Reyes and taken in through the kitchen, across the courtyard where a garden had once been, and into the long back building that had started life as somebody else's laboratory and had been Kessler's for thirty years.

Vane had never been in that part of the house. The main room was windowless and cold and full of the smell of solvents; a hundred bottles stood in racks; the floor was littered with packing straw; the light came down gray from a dusty skylight. At the far end a narrow stair went up to a door covered in red felt.

Behind the door was the room Kessler called the cabinet: a big, warm, close space, ringed with glass-fronted cabinets, a business desk against one wall, three barred windows giving onto the street, and a fire going in the grate. Adrian Kessler sat close up against the warmth in a chair drawn up to the hearth. He did not get up. He held out a cold hand and told his friend to sit down.

“You've heard,” said Vane.

Kessler shuddered. “They were shouting it in the street,” he said. “I heard them from the dining room.”

“One question,” said Vane. “Ashby was my client. So are you. I need to know what I'm doing here. You haven't been stupid enough to hide this man somewhere.”

“Howard, I swear to you, on my life, I will never set eyes on him again. I am done with him in this world. It is finished.” He was holding the arms of the chair. “He doesn't want my help. You don't know him as I do. He is safe. He is quite safe. He will never be heard of again.”

Vane listened to that, and disliked the fever in it. “You seem very sure.”

“I am sure,” said Kessler. “I have grounds for certainty that I am not going to share with you. But there is one thing you could advise me on. I have received a letter. I don't know whether to take it to the police. I would rather leave it with you.”

“You're afraid it would lead them to him.”

“No,” said Kessler. “I could not care less what becomes of him. I was thinking about myself. This business has exposed me, and that is all I care about now.”

Vane, who was surprised by the selfishness and in some obscure way relieved by it, said: “Let me see it.”

The note was five lines. It was written in a thin, upright hand, sloped backwards, and signed Calvin Voss. It said that the writer's benefactor, Adrian Kessler, whom he had repaid so unworthily for so many generosities, need have no fear for his own safety, because the writer had means of escape on which he placed a sure dependence.

Vane read it twice. It was, on the face of it, a good letter, and it put a better color on the whole thing than he had expected; and he was aware, in a way he did not enjoy, of being relieved.

“Have you got the envelope?”

“I burned it,” said Kessler. “Before I thought. There's no postmark. It was hand-delivered.”

“Shall I take this and sleep on it?”

“I wish you would decide for me entirely,” said Kessler. “I have lost all confidence in my own judgment.”

“Then tell me one more thing,” said Vane. “It was Voss who dictated the disappearance clause in your will.”

Kessler's mouth shut tight. He nodded.

“I knew it,” said Vane. “He was planning to kill you. You had a remarkably lucky escape.”

“I had something more to the purpose than an escape,” said Kessler. And then he put his face in his hands and said, from behind them, “a lesson. O God, Howard, what a lesson.”

On the way out Vane stopped in the kitchen and asked Reyes whether anything had been delivered that morning.

“Nothing came but by post,” said Reyes, “and only junk by that.”

Which sent Vane out of the house with his fears entirely renewed. If there was no postmark and nothing had been delivered, then the note had come through the laboratory door, which meant it had very likely been written inside the building. The newsboys on Massachusetts Avenue were already shouting about it: Judge beaten to death in own neighborhood. That was the funeral oration of one client. Vane could not help wondering whose funeral the next one would be.

He needed advice, and he could not ask for it, so he did what lawyers do instead: he arranged to be overheard.

That night Berta Solis came up to his office to close out a closing. Solis had been his senior paralegal for nineteen years and was, among other things, the best forensic document examiner in the firm and possibly in the city, a fact she never mentioned. Vane poured two glasses, and the two of them sat on either side of his fireplace with the fog pressed up against the window.

“Terrible business about Ashby,” he said.

“It's put everybody in a mood,” Solis agreed. “The man was obviously out of his mind.”

“I'd like your view on that.” Vane took the letter out of his jacket and flattened it on the table. “I have a document here in the killer's handwriting. Between us. It's an ugly business and I don't know what to do with it. But it's rather in your line.”

Solis's eyes lit up, and she put down her glass and went to work, and was quiet for two full minutes.

“No,” she said at last. “Not out of his mind. That is a sane hand. But it's an odd one.”

“And by all accounts a very odd writer.”

The intercom buzzed. His assistant had gone home, so the courier handed the envelope up the stairs; it was an invitation to a fundraiser that Kessler was chairing, signed at the bottom, in Kessler's hand.

Solis glanced at it. “That from Kessler? I thought I knew that writing. Anything private, Howard?”

“It's a fundraiser. Why, do you want to see it?”

“One second.” She laid the two sheets side by side and studied them in silence for a while, and then, with a small breath, handed both back. “Thank you. That's a very interesting autograph.”

There was a pause.

“Why did you compare them, Berta?”

“Because there's a rather singular resemblance,” she said. “The two hands are in many points identical. Only sloped differently.”

“Quaint,” said Vane.

“Very quaint,” Solis agreed.

“I wouldn't mention the note to anyone.”

“No,” she said. “I understand.”

And as soon as she had gone, Vane locked the note in the safe, and sat down, and heard his own blood in his ears, because she had put the two sheets side by side on his own table and told him the hands were identical, and there was no way out of what that left. Either Adrian Kessler had taught a murderer to write in his own hand, which was absurd, or the note from Voss and the invitation from Kessler had come off the same pair of hands, which was not absurd at all, and which he was not prepared to think about at eleven o'clock at night.