Mystery

Tom became interested in Mill Walk’s few murders, and kept a scrapbook of clippings from the Eyewitness that concerned them. He did not know why he was interested in these murders, but every one of them left behind, on a hillside or in a room, a prematurely dispossessed body, a body that would otherwise be filled with life.

Gloria was distressed when she discovered this scrapbook, which was of ordinary, even mundane appearance, with its dark board covers that resembled leather and large stiff yellow pages—part of her distress was the contrast between the homely scrapbook, suggestive of matchbook collections and photographs from summer camp, and the headlines that jumped from its pages: BODY DISCOVERED IN TRUNK. SISTER OF FINANCE MINISTER MURDERED IN ROBBERY ATTEMPT. She considered removing the scrapbook from his room and confronting him with it, but almost immediately decided to pretend that she had not seen it. The scrapbook was merely one of a thousand things that distressed, alarmed, or upset Gloria.

Most of Mill Walk’s murders were as ordinary as the scrapbook into which Tom glued their newspaper renderings. A pig farmer was hit in the head with a brick and dumped, to be trampled and half-devoured by his livestock, into a pen beside his barn. BRUTAL MURDER OF CENTRAL PLAINS FARMER, said the Eyewitness. Two days later, the newspaper reported SISTER OF FARMER CONFESSES: Says He Told Me He Would Marry, I Had To Leave Family Farm. A bartender in the old slave quarter was killed during a robbery. One brother killed another on Christmas Eve: SANTA CLAUS DISPUTE LEADS TO DEATH. After a native woman was found stabbed to death in a Mogrom Street hovel, SON MURDERED MOTHER FOR MONEY IN MATTRESS—MORE THAN $300,000!

Gloria eventually decided to seek reassurance from a sympathetic source.

Tom’s English teacher at Brooks-Lowood, Dennis Handley, Mr. Handley, or “Handles” to the boys, had come to Mill Walk from Brown University, looking for sun, enough money to live reasonably well, a picturesque apartment overlooking the water, and a life reasonably free of stress. Since he enjoyed teaching, had spent the happiest years of his life at a draconian prep school in New Hampshire, was of an even-tempered, friendly nature, and had virtually no sexual desires whatsoever, Dennis Handley had enjoyed his life on Mill Walk from the first. He had found that apartments on the water were beyond his price range, but almost everything else about his life in the tropics suited him.

When Gloria Pasmore told him about the scrapbook, he agreed to have a talk with the boy. He did not know exactly why, but the scrapbook sounded wrong. He thought it might be a sourcebook for future stories, but the whole tone of the thing disturbed him—too morbid, too twisted and obsessive. Surely Tom Pasmore was not thinking of writing crime novels? Detective novels? Not good enough, he said to himself, and told Gloria, who seemed to have gone perhaps two drinks over her limit, that he would find out what he could.

Some time ago Dennis Handley had mentioned to Tom that he had begun collecting rare editions of certain authors while at Brown—Graham Greene, Henry James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, primarily—and that Tom might come to look at these books any time he liked. On the Friday after his conversation with Gloria Pasmore, Dennis asked Tom if he would be free after school to look over his books and see if he’d like to borrow anything. He offered to drive him to his apartment and bring him back home afterward. Tom happily agreed.

They met outside Dennis’s classroom after the end of school and in a crowd of rushing boys walked down the wide wooden stairs past a window with a stained glass replica of the school’s circular seal. Because he was a popular teacher, many of the boys stopped to speak to Dennis or to wish him a good weekend, but few even said as much as hello to Tom. They scarcely looked at him. Except for the healthy glow of his skin, Tom was not a particularly handsome boy, but he was six-four. His hair was the same rough silky-looking blond as his mother’s, and his shoulders stuck out impressively, a real rack of muscle and bone under his rumpled tweed jacket. (At this stage of his life, Tom Pasmore never gave the impression of caring about, or even much noticing, what clothes he had happened to put on that morning.) At first glance, he looked like an unusually youthful college professor. The other boys acted as though he were invisible, a neutral space. They stood suspended on the stairs for a moment as the departing boys swirled about them, and as Dennis Handley talked to Will Thielman about the weekend’s homework, he glanced at Tom, slouched in the murky green-and-red light streaming through the colored glass. The teacher saw how thoroughly Tom allowed himself to be effaced, as if he had learned how to melt away into the crowd—all the students poured downstairs through the dim light and the shadows, but Tom Pasmore alone seemed on the verge of disappearance. This notion gave Dennis Handley, above all a creature of sociability, of good humor and gossip, an unpleasant twinge.

Soon they were outside in the faculty parking lot, where the English teacher’s black Corvette convertible looked superbly out of place among the battered Ford station wagons, ancient bicycles, and boatlike sedans that were the conventional faculty vehicles. Tom opened the passenger door, folded himself in half to get in, and sat with his knees floating up near the vicinity of his nose. He was smiling at his discomfort, and the smile dispelled the odd atmosphere of secrecy and shadows, which Handley had surely only imagined about the boy. He was the tallest person who had ever been in the Corvette, and Dennis told him this as they left the lot.

It was like sitting next to a large, amiable sheep dog, Dennis thought, as he picked up speed on School Road and the wind ruffled the boy’s hair and fluttered his tie. “Sorry the space is so tight,” he said. “But you can push the seat back.”

“I already did push the seat back,” Tom said, grinning through the uprights of his thighs. He looked like a circus contortionist.

“Well, it won’t be long,” Dennis said, piloting the sleek little car south on School Road to Calle Berghofstrasse, then west past rows of shops selling expensive soaps and perfumes to the four lanes of Calle Drosselmeyer, where they drove south again for a long time, past the new Dos de Mayo shopping center and the statue of David Redwing, Mill Walk’s first Prime Minister, past rows of blacksmiths and the impromptu booths of sidewalk fortune-tellers, past auto repair shops and shops dealing in pythons and rattlesnakes. They moved along in the usual bustle of cars and bikes and horse carts. Past the tin can factory and the sugarcane refinery, and further south through the little area of hovels, shops, and native houses called Weasel Hollow, where the woman who slept on “a king’s ransom” (the Eyewitness) had been murdered by her son. Dennis swerved expertly onto Market Street, weaved through and around a series of vans delivering produce to Ostend’s Market, and zipped through the last seconds of a yellow light onto Calle Burleigh, where at last he turned west for good.

Tom spoke for the first time since they had left the school. “Where do you live?”

“Out near the park.”

Tom nodded, thinking that he meant Shore Park, and that he must be planning on doing some shopping before he went home. Then he said, “I bet my mother asked you to talk to me.”

Dennis snapped his head sideways.

“Why do you think she’d want me to talk to you?”

“You know why.”

Dennis found himself in a predicament. Either he confessed that Gloria Pasmore had described Tom’s scrapbook to him, thereby admitting to the boy that his mother had looked through it, or he denied any knowledge of Gloria’s concern. If he denied everything, he could hardly bring up the matter of the scrapbook. He also realized that denial would chiefly serve to make him look stupid, which went against his instincts. It would also set him subtly against Tom and “on the side of” his parents, also counter to all his instincts.

Tom’s next statement increased his discomfort. “I’m sorry you’re worried about my scrapbook. You’re concerned, and you really shouldn’t be.”

“Well, I—” Handley stopped, not knowing how to proceed. He realized that he felt guilty, and that Tom was perceptive enough to see that too.

“Tell me about your books,” Tom said. “I like the whole idea of rare books and first editions, and things like that.”

So with evident relief, Dennis began describing his greatest bookfinding coup, the discovery of a typed manuscript of The Spoils of Poynton in an antiques shop in Bloomsbury. “As soon as I walked into that shop I had a feeling, a real feeling, stronger than anything I’d ever known,” he said, and Tom’s attention was once again completely focused on him. “I’m no mystic, and I do not believe in psychic phenomena, not even a little bit, but when I walked into that shop it was like something took possession of me. I was thinking about Henry James anyhow, because of the scene in the little antiques shop in The Golden Bowl, where Charlotte and the Prince buy Maggie’s wedding present—do you know the book?”

Tom nodded, extraordinary boy, and listened intently to the catalogue of goods in the antiques shop, the slightly enhanced depiction of the shop’s proprietor, the grip of the mysterious “feeling” that increased as Handley wandered through the shabby goods, the excitement with which he had come across a case of worn books at the very back of the shop, and at last the discovery of a box of typed papers wedged between an atlas and a dictionary on the bottom shelf. Dennis had opened the box, almost knowing what he would find within it. At last he had dared to look. “They began in the middle of a scene. I recognized that it was The Spoils of Poynton after a few sentences—that’s how keyed up I was. Now. That book was the first one James ever dictated—and he didn’t dictate the whole thing. He had begun to have wrist trouble, and he hired a typist named William McAlpine after he began work on it. I knew I’d found McAlpine’s dictation copy of the book, which he had later retyped, including James’s handwritten chapters, to prepare a correct copy to send to James’s publisher. I could never prove it, probably, but I didn’t have to prove it. I knew what I had. I took it up to the little man, trembling like a leaf, and he sold it to me for five pounds, clearly thinking that I was a lunatic who’d buy anything at all. He thought I was buying it for the box, actually.”

Dennis paused, in part because his listeners usually laughed at this point and in part because he had not described this moment for several years and his retelling had brought back to him its sensations of triumph and nearly uncontainable jubilation.

Tom’s response brought him thumping to earth.

“Have you been reading about the murder of Marita Hasselgard, the sister of the Finance Minister?”

They were back to the scrapbook—Tom had whipsawed him. “Of course I have. I haven’t had my head in a bag during the past month.” He looked across at the passenger seat with real irritation. Tom had propped his legs on the dashboard, and was rolling a ballpoint pen in his mouth as if it were a cigar. “I thought you were interested in what I was saying.”

“I’m very interested in what you were saying. What do you think happened to her?”

Dennis sighed. “What do I think happened to Marita Hasselgard? She was killed by mistake. An assassin mistook her for her brother because she was in his car. It was late at night. When he discovered his mistake, he pushed her body into the trunk and left the island in a hurry.”

“So you think that the newspaper is right?”

The theory that Dennis Handley had just expressed, held by most citizens of Mill Walk, had first been outlined in the editorial columns of the Eyewitness.

“Basically, yes. I suppose I do. I hadn’t quite remembered that the paper put it like that, but if they did, then I think they are right, yes. Would you mind telling me how this relates to The Spoils of Poynton?”

“Where do you think the assassin came from?”

“I think he was hired by some political enemy of Hasselgard—by someone who opposed his policies.”

“Any policy in particular?”

“It could have been anything.”

“Don’t you think Hasselgard ought to be careful now? Shouldn’t he be heavily guarded?”

“Well, the attempt failed. The assassin took off. The police are looking for him, and when they find him, he’ll tell them who hired him. If anybody ought to be afraid, it’s the man who hired the killer.”

All this, too, was conventional wisdom.

“Why do you think he put the sister’s body in the trunk?”

“Oh, I don’t really care where he put Marita,” Dennis said. “I don’t see what bearing that can possibly have on anything. The man looked into the car. He saw that he’d killed his intended victim’s sister. He hid the body in the trunk. Why are we talking about this sordid business, anyway?”

“Do you remember what sort of car it was?”

“Of course. It was a Corvette. Identical to this one, in fact. I hope this is the end of these questions.”

Tom leaned sideways toward him. He took the pen out of his mouth. “Just about. Marita was a big woman, wasn’t she?”

“I can’t see any possible point in going on—”

“I only have two more questions.”

“Promise?”

“Here’s the first one. Where do you suppose that woman in Weasel Hollow got the money she put under her mattress?”

“What’s the second question?”

“Where do you think that feeling in the antiques shop came from, that feeling of knowing you were going to find something?”

“Is this still a conversation, or are we just free associating?”

“You mean you have no idea where the feeling came from?”

Dennis just shook his head.

For the first time since they had turned onto Calle Burleigh, Tom paid some attention to the landscape of sturdy houses surrounding them. “We’re nowhere near Shore Park.”

“I don’t live anywhere near Shore Park. Why would you think—oh.” He smiled over at Tom. “I live near Goethe Park, not Shore Park. Just next to the old slave quarter. Ninety percent of the houses were built in the twenties and thirties, I think, and they’re good, solid, middle-class houses, with porches and arches and some interesting details. This area is tremendously underrated.” He had by now recovered his habitual good humor. “I don’t see why Brooks-Lowood shouldn’t widen its net, so to speak.”

Tom slowly turned his head to face the teacher. “Hasselgard didn’t attend Brooks-Lowood.”

“Well, after all,” the teacher said, “I can’t see that where Hasselgard went to secondary school has any bearing on his sister’s murder.” Tom’s expression had begun to alarm him. Within a few seconds, his face had taken on an almost sunken look, and his skin seemed very pale beneath the thin golden surface. “Would you like to rest for a bit? We could stop off in the park and look at the ziggurats.”

“I can’t go any farther,” Tom said.

“What?”

“Pull over to the side of the road. You can drop me off here. I feel a little queasy. Don’t worry about me. Please.”

Dennis had already pulled up to the curb and stopped his car. Tom had bent over to rest his head on the dashboard.

“You don’t really think I’m going to drop you off on the side of the road, do you?”

Tom rolled his head from side to side on the dashboard. The gesture seemed so childlike that Dennis stroked Tom’s thick hair.

“Good, because of course I’m not. I think I’ll just take you back to my place and let you lie down for a bit.”

He gently helped Tom lean back to rest his head against the seat. The boy’s eyes glittered and seemed without depth, like shiny painted stones.

“Let me get you home,” Dennis said.

Tom very slowly shook his head, then wiped his hands over his face. “Would you take me somewhere else?”

Dennis raised his eyebrows.

“Weasel Hollow.”

Tom turned his head toward Dennis, and the English teacher felt as if he were looking not at a seventeen-year-old boy overcome by a sudden illness, but a powerful adult. He reached for the ignition key and started his car again.

“Anywhere in particular in Weasel Hollow?”

“Mogrom Street.”

“Mogrom Street,” Dennis repeated. “Well, that makes sense. Anywhere in particular on Mogrom Street?”

Tom had closed his eyes, and appeared to be asleep.

The original native civilization and culture on Mill Walk had completely disappeared by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Its only real remains, apart from the gap-toothed natives themselves, were the two little pyramidal ziggurats in the open field that had become Goethe Park. At the base of one was inscribed the word MOGROM; at the base of the other, RAMBICHURE. Though no one now knew the meaning of these enigmatic words, they had been wholeheartedly adapted by the surviving native population. At the bottom of the narrow valley that was Weasel Hollow, Mogrom Street intersected Calle Rambichure. On opposing corners were the Mogrom Diner and Rambichure Pizza. Rambichure Hardware and Mogrom Stables and Smithy flanked Rambi-Mog Pawnbrokers. On Calle Rambichure stood the Ziggurat School for Children of Indigenous Background, the Zig-Ram Drugstore, Rambi’s Hosiery, the Mogrom Adult Bookstore, and M-R Artificial Limbs.

Dennis silently drove up Calle Burleigh, turned north on Market Street and zipped past Ostend’s. He came to the rise called Pforzheimer Point. Across the narrow valley the long grey shapes of the Redwing Impervious Can Company and Thielman’s Sugarcane Refinery defined the opposite horizon. Weasel Hollow lay below. Tom still seemed to be drowsing. Dennis drove over the lip of the hill and down toward Mogrom.

“Well, then,” Tom said. He was sitting up straight, as if a puppeteer had pulled a string attached to the top of his head. He looked impatient, even slightly feverish. Dennis felt that if he drove downhill too slowly Tom would jump out of the car.

At the foot of the hill, Mogrom Street went east to Calle Rambichure and the center of Weasel Hollow. The western half of the street led directly into a maze of tarpaper shacks, tents made of blankets suspended on poles, native houses of pink and white stone, and huts that appeared to be made of propped-up boards. Two blocks down, a large black dog lay panting in the middle of the street. Goats and chickens wandered through the yellow grass between wrecked cars and ruined pony traps. Dennis dimly heard rock and roll coming from a radio.

Tom leaned forward to examine the numbers beside the porch of a native house. “Turn right.”

“You do realize, don’t you, that I have no idea what’s going on?”

“Just drive slowly.”

Handley drove. Tom inspected the houses and hovels on his side of the street. A goat swung his head, and chickens moved jerkily through the grass. They came up an intersection with a hand-painted sign reading CALLE FRIEDRICH HASSELGARD. Two small native children with dirty faces, one of them in brown military-style shorts and carrying a toy gun, the other entirely naked, had materialized beside the sign and gazed at Dennis with a grave sober impertinence.

“Next block,” Tom said.

Dennis moved slowly past the staring children. The dog lifted his head from the dust and watched them draw near. Dennis steered around it. The dog lowered its muzzle and sighed.

“Stop,” Tom said. “This is it.”

Dennis stopped. Tom had twisted sideways to look at a wooden shack. Waves of heat radiated up from the corrugated tin roof. It was obviously empty.

Tom opened the door and went through the tall yellow grass toward the house. Dennis expected him to look into the window beside the front door, but the boy disappeared around the side of the house. Behind the wheel of the Corvette, Dennis felt fat and hot and conspicuous. He imagined that he heard someone creeping up behind his car, but when he stuck his head through the window, it was only the dog thrashing its legs in its sleep. Dennis looked at his watch, and saw that four minutes had passed. He closed his eyes and moaned. Then he heard footsteps crackling through the brittle grass and opened his eyes to the sight of Tom Pasmore walking back toward the car.

Tom was walking very quickly, his face as closed as a fist. He folded himself in half and dropped into the other seat without looking at Dennis. “Go around the corner.”

Dennis twisted the key in the ignition, lifted his foot from the clutch, and the car jerked forward.

“La Bamba” came from one of the shuttered native houses, and for a moment Dennis thought of how like paradise it would be to stretch out his legs on a couch and take a long swallow of a gin and tonic.

“Into the alley,” Tom said. “Slow.”

Dennis turned into the narrow walled alley; the Corvette shuddered down the narrow space between crumbling walls.

“Stop.” Tom said. They had drawn up to a collapsed portion of the wall, and Tom leaned his head through the passenger window to peer into a thicket of waist-high yellow grass. “Farther,” Tom said. Dennis let the car roll forward.

After a moment they came to the green doors of a one-horse stable converted into a garage. Two dusty windows covered with spiderwebs faced the narrow alley. “Here,” Tom said, and jumped out of the car. He shielded his eyes to look through one of the windows. He immediately moved to the other, then back again. He straightened himself up to his full height and then covered his face with his hands.

“Is this over now?” Dennis asked.

Tom folded himself back into the car.

“I’m going to take you home,” Dennis said.

“Mr. Handley, you are going to drive me around the block. We are going to go up and down every street and every alley in this part of Weasel Hollow, if that is what we have to do.”

No, I’m going to take you home, Dennis said very clearly in his mind, but his mouth said, “If that’s what you want,” and he rolled forward to the end of the narrow alley, and turned deeper into Weasel Hollow.

At the next corner he turned right onto a street lined with shacks, rusting cars up on their rims, and a few native houses set far back on dead yellow lawns. Goats nibbled weeds in front of dwellings that were blankets slung tepee-style around leaning poles. Tom uttered a noise that sounded amazingly like a purr. Twenty yards ahead and across the street, partially obscured by a mound of garbage—tin cans, empty bottles, rotting onion peels, and slimy bits of fly-encrusted meat—was a car identical to his, so highly polished that it sparkled.

“Let me off here,” Tom said. He was opening the door before Dennis came to a stop.

Tom ran toward the sleek black car and laid his hands on the hood.

For a moment—a long moment, but no more than that—Tom experienced a sensation something like déjà vu, an echo of a sensation more than the sensation itself, that he had become invisible to the ordinary physical world and had entered a realm in which every detail spoke of its true essence: as if he had slipped beneath the skin of the world. A sweet, dangerous familiarity filled him. Sweat seemed to have risen up out of every pore of his body. Tom slowly moved around to the driver’s side. He bent down. A neat bullet hole half an inch wide perforated the driver’s window. The driver’s seat was spattered with blood. A thick film of blood covered the passenger seat.

Tom moved to the back of the car and fiddled with the trunk for a moment, then succeeded in opening it. Here, too, was a quantity of blood, though much less than on the seats. For a hallucinatory second he saw the pudgy corpse wadded into this small space. Finally he went to the passenger door, opened it, and knelt down. He ran his hands over the smooth black leather. Flakes of dried blood shredded onto the ground. Again he gently passed his fingers over the leather and near the bottom of the door touched a clump of dried fuzz stained black with blood. He delicately prodded. Beneath the shredded leather he felt a hard round nugget of metal.

Tom exhaled and stood up. His body seemed oddly light, as if it might continue to rise and leave the ground entirely. A vanishing glow momentarily touched the mound of bald tires in the front yard of the pink house across the street, also an old green sedan down the street. Tom looked toward Dennis Handley, who was wiping his forehead with a large white pocket handkerchief, and felt a goofy smile spread across his face. He began to walk toward Handley on legs that seemed immensely long. A movement where there should have been none caught his eye like a waving flag, and Tom swiveled his head to look at the green sedan parked by the opposite curb. Lamont von Heilitz leaned toward the window of its back seat. A moment of total recognition passed between them, and then the old man raised a gloved finger to his lips.

Dennis Handley drove his best and most puzzling student home in a silence that was broken only by his increasingly hesitant questions and the boy’s monosyllabic answers. Tom seemed pale and exhausted during the drive, and Dennis had the odd feeling that he was saving himself for one further effort. When Dennis tried to picture the nature of this effort, he could do no better than to picture Tom Pasmore seated before an old Underwood upright—a typewriter very like the one on which he typed out his end-of-term comments—and typing with one finger upon the middle of a page of good bond the cornball motto THE CASE OF THE BLOODY CAR SEAT. In ten minutes he was turning off An Die Blumen into Eastern Shore Road, and thirty seconds after that he sat in his car and watched Tom’s tall, wide-shouldered figure move up the path toward the front door of his house.

Dennis was halfway home before he realized that he was driving twenty miles an hour over the speed limit. He realized he was angry only after he had nearly run down a bicyclist.

Two weeks later Dennis met a definitely tipsy Gloria Pasmore at a dinner party at the Thielmans’ and said that he didn’t think there was anything to worry about. The boy was just going through some sort of adolescent phase. And, in answer to a question from Katinka Redwing, no, he had not been following any of the stories in the Eyewitness about Finance Minister Hasselgard—that sort of thing did not interest him at all, not at all.