Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

It’s a short walk. My office is located on Ocean Street over a music store. I unlocked the office, collected the mail, and got my feet up on the desk.

Fifteen minutes later the door opened, and a thin, worried-looking man walked in. He was wearing a mud-brown suit, yellow shirt, and narrow brown knit tie.

“Mr. Stubblefield?”

“Right the first time. Have a seat.” He sat across from me and primly crossed one leg over the other.

“My name is Alfred Windle. I’m station manager of WVOC here in Hyannis. Are you familiar with the station?”

“Sure,” I said. “ ‘VOC, Voice of the Cape.’ An all-talk format, right?”

“Correct.” He straightened his chocolate-colored tie. “Have you had occasion to listen to the Archie Chandler Show? No? Well, Archie is the anchor, if you will, of our programing. He’s intelligent, articulate, and quite often controversial. I suspect that people like him and loathe him in equal numbers, which, of course, makes for good ratings. At any rate, he recently received a rather dire threat.”

“Dire?”

“Oh my, yes. A death threat, actually.”

“If Chandler is as controversial as you say he is, he must receive a certain amount of hate mail as a matter of course.”

“That’s true, Mr. Stubblefield, and some of it quite vulgar. This is rather more serious, I’m afraid.” He fumbled in his coat pocket. “I brought along a copy of the letter. It’s rather incoherent, but it will give you an idea of the writer’s complaint.”

The letter was two pages long, typed, single-spaced. As Windle had said, it was rambling, incoherent, and filled with misspellings. The gist of it, so far as I could make out, was that Mikhail Gorbachev was the Antichrist and that glasnost was an elaborate trick to get America to disarm and withdraw, after which the Russians would crush us and then proceed to enslave the world. Anyone who thought otherwise, the letter went on, was a dupe and a comsymp, and anyone who broadcast the big commie lie over the radio was a traitor. The penalty for treason, the writer pointed out, was “summery execution.”

“Archie often deals with international issues,” said Windle, “and since the upheavals in the communist bloc, he has devoted a number of shows to discussions of Gorbachev, the dissolution of the various communist regimes, that sort of thing.”

“Have you been to the police?”

“Oh yes. They have the original letter. Realistically, there is little they can do at this point.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Can you provide protection for Archie for awhile? Not full time, of course, but when he is coming from and going to the station, or making a personal appearance somewhere?”

I walked to the window. It was starting to snow. Wrong time of year for a summery execution. “Yes and no. If someone is really determined to kill Chandler, they’ll probably succeed. A foolproof defense is an illusion.” Windle looked crestfallen. “That’s not to say that nothing can be done. We can make it difficult for this guy. I’ll have to talk to Chandler.”

“Indeed, indeed you will.” He checked his watch. “Archie goes on at three. It’s half-past one now. Could you come by the station in the next hour?”

I said I’d be there and saw Windle to the door. From my window I watched him bundle down the street, his thin frame bent against the freshening storm.

Archie Chandler was a short fireplug of a man with a florid face and graying red hair. Both in manner and appearance he was a rooster.

“Look, Alfred, I’m busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest. Can we do this another time?” His desk was a welter of books, magazines, and newspaper clippings. “Who the hell are you?” he snapped, looking me up and down.

“Whittaker Chambers,” I said. “I just stopped in on my way to the pumpkin patch.”

Chandler threw some papers on his desk. “All right, Alfred. Who’s the wiseguy and what’s it all about?”

“This is Charles Stubblefield, Archie. He’s a private investigator. I’ve asked him to talk with you about the threat you received.”

Chandler snorted. “That wasn’t a threat. That was the demented ravings of some acrocephalic who spends too much time reading the National Review.”

“Man threatened to kill you,” I said.

Chandler stared at me truculently. “ ‘If a man hasn’t found something that is worth dying for, he isn’t fit to live,’ ” he quoted. “Martin Luther King.”

“ ‘A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it,’ ” I retorted. “Oscar Wilde.”

Chandler cocked an eyebrow and let go the faintest of smiles. “You begin to interest me, Snugglefeel.”

“It’s Stubblefield,” said Windle, “and it would seem advisable, Archie, that we make some arrangements regarding your safety.”

“For pity’s sake, why? Because some addled, right-wing, paranoid whacko scribbles an illiterate threat? If I worried about every cretin from Rip-socket, Vermont, who sent me a nasty letter, I’d be out of a job.”

“You intend to discuss the issue in future shows?” I asked.