Chapter Eleven
“You told Nick you destroyed these letters.” Perry looked up from the box of yellowed envelopes Horace had set before him on the dining-room table.
It had been a very long morning.
Perry had barely managed to get Horace back to his apartment before the police arrived to examine the body in the hall, and he still wasn’t one hundred percent convinced he’d made the right call. Once Horace had been sure the dead man wasn’t Troy, he had been almost gleeful that one of the “assassins” was dead. But that bloodthirsty good cheer gave way to anxiety about what his enemies would attempt next in retaliation. For the first time Perry had felt a flicker of sympathy for the disagreeable Nevins in their thankless role of Horace’s only kin.
Then the police had knocked on the door and requested a word with Horace, and Horace had referred them—through Perry—to speak to his lawyer.
That had gone over about as well as one would expect.
It was just a matter of time before the law was back with reinforcements, but Horace seemed oblivious to his peril. Instead, he had ranted about everything from his previously mentioned lawyer to the difficulty of finding a sweetened cereal called French Toast Crunch on grocery-store shelves. Eventually, he had disappeared into his bedroom and at last returned with a black-and-gray wig box full of letters.
Now Horace gazed back at Perry defiantly. “Yes.”
“Why? How can he help if you won’t give him all the facts?”
“These are not facts. These are…personal.”
“But Mr. Daly—”
“Horace, lovey.”
“Horace—” Perry swallowed the rest of it and shook his head. Arguing with Horace was what his mother used to call “an exercise in futility.” He picked up the first envelope. A felt pen had been used to print the thick block-style characters of Horace’s address. Despite the fact that the writing was print script, they did have a certain individual style. The tiny letters were all uppercase and pressed closely up against each other.
“Do you recognize the writing on the envelope?” Perry asked.
“Yes. It’s Troy’s.”
“Do you have something with Troy’s writing that I could compare this to?”
Without a word, Horace opened a cabinet drawer and handed over a battered script. There were notations all over it, and the notations did look similar to the print writing on the envelope. To Perry, at least, but he was no handwriting expert. The tops of the Ts and crossbar of the Hs certainly looked identical.
Perry laid the script aside and studied the envelope again. There was a cancelled stamp on the envelope, and the postmark indicated the letter had been mailed from Hollywood in 2013.
According to Nick, all mail was now sent to designated mail-processing stations for sorting and distribution to delivery post offices. Had that been true five years ago? If so, the postmark would indicate the local post office the mail had been sent from.
Perry opened the first letter.
The note was handwritten, and the writing seemed to match that of the envelope.
I have not forgotten. This will not be over until you are dead.
Not a specific threat, but definitely sinister.
No signature. Not even a Yours truly, Mr. X.
The next letter was shorter and more to the point.
You will die a horrible death. SOON.
And on it went.
I’m watching you.
You don’t know who I am, but I never forget you.
I like planning your death.
Not particularly imaginative, in all honesty. In fact, they were a bit slogan-ish, kind of like evil taglines. Taste the Rainbow! Just Do It! Die, Witch, Die! Not that they wouldn’t be frightening to receive. They would. Not least because, regardless of the lack of creativity, normal people didn’t operate like this. This was the work of a disturbed mind.
Perry went through the next letters. More of the same.
As he shuffled through the stack, he noticed that the writing on a couple of the later envelopes was slightly different. The script wasn’t quite so cramped, and there were a few lowercase letters in the address.
The content of the letters changed too. At first, they were very brief: a single hateful handwritten line. But about three years in, the letters grew much longer—they became full on diatribes—and they were typewritten.
Why? What did that change signify?
You have spent your whole life using people and discarding them. There is no one more selfish and cowardly than you. I used to think maybe you would learn from your mistakes and change, but I see now how foolish that was. You will never change, and you deserve everything that is going to happen to you. When my knife slides between your scrawny ribs, I will have to scrape and scrape to find your miserable, miserly heart. I will stab you and stab you, and there will be nothing but a black hole.
Perry felt his hair standing straight up.
There was a lot of that kind of thing.
It seemed clear that as the years passed, the author of the letters grew more and more angry. The part that didn’t seem to jibe was the decision to start typing them. Using a typewriter seemed less personal. And yet the content of the letters was very personal, very emotional.
What did it all mean? Perry couldn’t decide. Maybe the switch to a typewriter had been fueled by a practical consideration? Like the writer had arthritis. After all, Troy would be at least in his seventies by now. Or maybe as the letters grew more blatantly threatening (and illegal), a typewriter had seemed to offer more disguise than block print?
Or maybe someone was faking Troy’s writing and had found it too difficult to fake entire pages?
Midway toward the bottom of the pile, he picked up an envelope, and his heart seemed to drop a few ribs down his chest.
There was no stamp.
No cancellation mark to indicate there had ever been a stamp.
This letter had not gone through any post office. It been hand-delivered.
Perry checked the rest of the way through the pile.
Only one letter was missing a stamp. Only one letter had been hand-delivered.
But when he checked the typewritten letter inside, the contents were exactly like all the others.
Meaning?
Meaning that the same person had authored all the letters, but on one occasion, this person had decided—or circumstances had required them—to hand-deliver their hate mail.
“How do you get your mail?” Perry asked.
Horace looked confused. “As anyone does.”
“No, I mean, does the mail carrier leave it in a box and someone at Angel’s Rest walks down to get it? Or does the mail carrier deliver right to the hotel?”
“They used to deliver, but now there’s a box at the end of the road where we have to go pick it up. Wynne usually walks down to get it.”
Wynne. Oh no. But it made sense. Horace had admitted the night before that Wynne had reason to feel used and discarded. And—although this was probably sexist—the tone of the letters, or at least the vocabulary and grammar, felt vaguely feminine in a way Perry couldn’t quite define.
Wynne had motive and opportunity. As far as means, well, how hard was it to get hold of a typewriter?
Come to think of it, these days? Maybe more difficult than he knew.
Wait. Was she still using a typewriter? Maybe she was using a computer with a printer now?
Perry shuffled through the letters again, but no. The most recent letters still seemed to be produced on a typewriter. The lower case o had started out partially filled in, and by the last letter it was almost a solid black dot.
So Wynne had faked Troy’s handwriting, but as the years went by and the letters had gotten longer and longer, she had resorted to using a typewriter so as not to give herself away? She had even gotten a little less meticulous about the envelopes because, after all, if Horace hadn’t caught on by then, there was a good chance he wasn’t going to.
“What are you thinking?” Horace asked, snapping Perry out of his reflections.
“Are these in order, do you know?”
“Yes.”
Perry nodded thoughtfully. He studied the envelopes that came before and after the unmarked envelope. “It looks to me like these three arrived last year. Does that seem right to you?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“When Wynne picks the mail up, what does she do with it? Does she leave it somewhere for everyone to grab? Or does she actually distribute it?”
“She brings my mail to me. I have no idea what she does with everyone else’s. Perhaps she leaves it for them in the dining room.”
Perry was starting to feel a little sick. Bad enough to receive these vicious things from a stranger. But to come from someone Horace knew, someone he liked and trusted? That seemed truly terrible.
“What is it?” Horace asked, watching him.
Perry tried to decide how to answer. His “case” was pretty circumstantial. He wanted to talk to Nick before he said anything that might destroy a decades-old friendship. Besides, he might be wrong about the postmark thing. The stamp could have fallen off, and there might be other reasons why there wasn’t a postmark.
While he was making his mind up, someone thumped on the door to Horace’s suite, and he was saved from having to respond.
Horace went to answer the door.
With a knock that forceful, Perry had been expecting the police, but it was Enzo in the hall, looking wild-eyed. He pushed into the room. “The cops are poking around everywhere! They’re going to find Wally!”
Horace began to fume. “How dare they? They have no right! The bastard didn’t die in the swimming pool. Why are they poking into what doesn’t concern them?”
Perry listened to this exchange uneasily. If the police were searching the hotel grounds, they must suspect the prowler’s death was not an accident. Where the hell was Nick in all this? Why didn’t he at least text Perry to let him know what was happening?
Enzo looked at Perry, but it was obvious he didn’t see him. He said to Horace, “Goddamned busybodies. If they find Wally, they’ll sure as hell contact Animal Control. You have to do something!”
“Oh, I shall! Believe me, I shall. By God, they’ll rue the day!” Horace was puffed up with outrage, but then he seemed to deflate. He stared at Enzo. “It’s just… I don’t know what I can do,” he said helplessly.
“Get your lawyer. File a restraining order. File a cease and desist. I don’t know what it’s called, but you have to get them to stop. Now.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Perry said. “If they think they have probable cause—”
Enzo threw him a baleful look and spoke to Horace. “Tell them you’ll sue.”
Horace looked guilty and apologetic. “But I can’t afford to sue anyone. And no one ever wins suing the government.”
“You don’t pay unless you lose,” Enzo, who clearly had not attended law school, assured him. “Anyway, it’s not the government; it’s Animal Control. They can’t just come and take a man’s pet. There has to be just cause.”
And Animal Control had it. Starting with the illegality of keeping an alligator as a pet. But Perry kept quiet. He had not missed the hostility in Enzo’s eyes. Enzo thought Perry and Nick were trespassing on his turf.
“Maybe they won’t find Wally,” Horace said.
“Hell yes, they’ll find him. They’re poking their noses into everything. Asking people questions about things that don’t concern them. Duke’s still mad about that goddamned cat. He’d just love to tell them about Wally.”
Perry’s phone dinged with a text from Nick.
Okay?
Not one to waste words, Nick. Perry rolled his eyes and texted back: Yes. Still w/Horace. Where r u?
Police
Well, that was cryptic. If Nick was able to text him, he wasn’t under arrest or anything, so what did it mean?
He was distracted by the sudden and unexpected escalation of the argument between Horace and Enzo.
“I’ve done everything for you, Horace. I gave up my career, my life because you needed me. You owe me this!”
Whoa. Wait. What?
Was Enzo gay?
Horace was getting angry too. “And you were paid for it.”
“Not for the last twenty years I wasn’t.”
“You’ve lived here rent free.”
“If you can call it living!” Enzo cried.
Perry could practically see sparks shooting from Horace’s red-rimmed eyes. “You didn’t use to be so fussy. You could have left anytime you liked. I never asked you to give up your career. What career? You’re too old to be a stunt man. You were too old twenty years ago. You didn’t give it up for me.”
All at once Enzo was ice-cold. “If Wally goes, I go,” he said, heading for the door.
“Then go,” Horace shouted.
Enzo went through the door, and Horace leaped after him to slam it shut with such force, the bloodied, guillotined wax head of a French noblewoman bounced off the top of the TV and fell face-first on the floor.