Mystery

Tom did spend the evening of that day typing on a small green Olivetti portable his parents had been persuaded to give him the year before, but what he wrote was a letter, not the awkward beginning of a detective novel. This letter was addressed to Captain Fulton Bishop, the detective named in the Eyewitness. He rewrote it before dinner, then rewrote it again at night. He signed the letter “A Friend.”

It was nine o’clock at night when he folded the letter and sealed it inside the envelope. The telephone had rung twice while he wrote, but he had not been interrupted at his work. He had heard the back door close and the noises of a car starting up and driving away, so only one of his parents was still in the house. He thought he had a good chance of getting out without having to answer any questions, but just in case, he slid the letter into a copy of The Lady in the Lake and anchored the book under his arm before he left his room.

From the top of the stairs Tom saw that the lights were burning in the living room, and the doors of the room on the other side of the staircase were closed. The sound of amplified voices drifted toward him.

Tom moved quietly down the stairs. Only a few yards from the bottom, he heard the rattle of the library doorknob and unconsciously straightened up as the door opened on a wave of shouts and gunshots. His father stood outlined against a smoky, flickering pale blue background, like a figure at the mouth of a cave.

“You think I’m deaf?” his father asked. “Think I can’t hear you creeping downstairs like a priest in a brothel?”

“I was just going out for a little bit.”

“What the hell is there to do outside, this time of night?”

Victor Pasmore had crossed over the line between a little bit drunk and a little bit drunker, which meant moving from a sort of benevolent elation to surliness.

“I’m supposed to take this book over to Sarah Spence.” He held it out toward his father, who glanced at the cover and squinted up at his son. “She asked me to bring it over once I was through with homework.”

“Sarah Spence,” his father said. “You two used to be pretty good friends.”

“That was a long time ago, Dad.”

“Hey—have it your way. What do I know?” He glanced back into the library, where the noises coming from the television had just increased dramatically—squealing tires and more gunshots. “I suppose you did finish your homework, huh?”

“Yes.”

He chewed on some unspoken thought for a second, and looked back into the flickering blue cave. “Step in here for a second, will you? I wasn’t going to say anything about this, but—”

Tom followed his father into the television room. Victor moved to the table beside his chair and picked up a half empty glass. A grinning woman holding up a container of dishwashing liquid filled the screen, and the music suddenly became much louder. Victor took several big swallows, backed into his chair, and sat down without taking his eyes off the television.

“Got a funny call a little earlier. From Lamont von Heilitz. That make any sense to you?”

Tom said nothing.

“I’m waiting, but I’m not hearing anything.”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

“What do you suppose that old coot wanted? He hasn’t called since Gloria’s mother died and we moved in.”

Tom shrugged. “He wanted to invite you for dinner.”

“Lamont von Heilitz never invited anyone for dinner, as far as I know. He sits in that big house all day long, he changes suits to come outside and pull a dandelion out of his lawn—I know because I’ve seen it—and the only time I’ve ever known him to act like a human being was when you had that accident and he gave me books for you to read. Which did you more harm than good, in my opinion.” Victor Pasmore raised his glass to his mouth and gulped, glaring at Tom over the rim as if to challenge him.

Tom was silent.

His father lowered the glass and licked his lips. “You know what they used to call him? The Shadow. Because he doesn’t exist. There’s something wrong with him. Some people have a bad smell that follows them around—you ought to know this, you’re getting out in the world. Some day you’ll have a business, kid, I know it’s a shock, but you’re gonna work for a living, and you’ll have to know that some people it’s better to avoid. Lamont von Heilitz never worked a day in his whole life.”

“Why did he call?”

Victor turned back to the television set. “He called to invite you to dinner. I told him you could make that decision for yourself. I didn’t wanna tell him no straight to his face. Let a couple weeks go by, let him forget about it.”

“I’ll think about it,” Tom said, and began moving toward the door.

“I guess you haven’t been listening to me,” Victor Pasmore said. “I don’t want you to have anything to do with that freak. He’s bad news. Your grandfather would tell you the same thing.”

“I guess I better get going,” Tom said.

“Keep it in your pants.”

Outside in the warm humid darkness, a fat black cat named Corazon, a pet of the Langenheims’, materialized beside him. “Cory, Cory, Cory,” Tom crooned, and bent down to stroke the animal’s silky back. The big cat pushed its heavy body against his shins. Tom scratched its wedge-shaped head, and Corazon looked up at him with uncanny yellow eyes and trotted ahead of him down the path to the sidewalk, her thick tail raised like a flag. When they reached the sidewalk the cat stood beside him for a moment in a round circle of light. Tom took a step left toward An Die Blumen, which led to The Sevens, the street on which the Spences inhabited a thirty-room Spanish extravaganza with an interior courtyard, a fountain, and a chapel that had been converted into a screening room. Corazon tilted her head, and light from the street lamp turned her eyes to transparent mystery. She began moving across the street with a gliding muscular step and disappeared into the darkness between the Jacobs’s house and Mr. von Heilitz’s.

Tom swallowed. He looked at the letter protruding from the book in his hand, then across the street to Mr. von Heilitz’s heavily curtained windows. All evening he had seen the image of Mr. von Heilitz’s pale face, swimming out at him from the back seat of a wrecked green sedan with a look of pure recognition.

Tom walked toward An Die Blumen through pools of light alternating with hour-glass shaped areas of darkness. He came to the red pillar postbox on the corner of An Die Blumen and withdrew the long white envelope from the pages of the novel. The typing on the envelope, Captain Fulton Bishop, Central Police Headquarters, Homicide Division, Armory Place, Mill Walk, District One, looked disturbingly adult and authoritative. Tom pushed the long envelope into the open mouth of the pillar box, pulled it part of the way out again, then pushed it into the box until his fingers touched the warm metal. Then he released the envelope, and a second later heard it fall softly on the mound of mail at the bottom of the pillar box.

In a sudden depression Tom turned around and looked down An Die Blumen to the corner of The Sevens, where an enclosed wooden telephone booth stood half-engulfed by an enormous stand of bougainvillaea. He began to walk slowly down the block.

The inside of the booth was permeated with the thick, heavy perfume of bougainvillaea. Tom hesitated only a moment, wishing that he really had been able to turn into The Sevens and ring Sarah Spence’s doorbell, and then dialed the number for directory inquiries. The operator told him that there were four listings for Lamont von Heilitz. Did he want the listing on Calle Ranelagh, Eastern Shore Road, or—

“That one,” he said. “Eastern Shore Road.”

When he had the number, he dialed again. The phone rang twice, and a surprisingly youthful voice answered.

“Maybe I have the wrong number,” Tom said. “I was trying to reach a Mr. von Heilitz.”

“Is this you, Tom Pasmore?” the voice asked.

“Yes,” Tom said, so softly he could scarcely hear his own voice.

“Your father seems not to want you to accept my invitation to dinner. Are you at home?”

“I’m out on the street,” Tom said. “In a call box.”

“The one around the corner?”

“Yes,” Tom virtually whispered.

“Then I’ll see you in a few seconds,” said the old man’s vibrant voice. He hung up.

Tom replaced the receiver on the hook. He felt intensely afraid and intensely alive.

Scent leaked from the closed-up parchment of the bougainvillaea blossoms. Geckos and salamanders scurried through the grass and flew along dark plaster walls.

Tom came to Eastern Shore Road and turned left. Down behind the houses the water washed rhythmically up on the shoreline. An enclosed horse-drawn carriage came rattling down Eastern Shore Road. The coachman wore a neat grey uniform almost invisible in the night, and the horses were matched bays with sleek muscles and arching necks. The equipage moved smoothly past Tom Pasmore, making surprisingly little sound, like an image from a dream but so secure in its reality that it made Tom feel as if he were the dream. The elegant apparition continued past the corner and rolled north down the drive toward the Redwing compound.

Light escaped in chinks and beams from the curtained windows of Lamont von Heilitz’s house.

When he got to the front door of the von Heilitz house, Tom hesitated as he had before dropping the letter into the pillar box. He wanted to flee across the street and escape upstairs into his room. For a moment Tom regretted everything that had made him commandeer poor Dennis Handley and his car. At that moment, he could have given up and gone home, chosen what he already knew instead of the mystery of what he did not. At a turning point such as this, many people do turn away from what they do not know—their fear, not only of the risk, is too great. They say no. Tom Pasmore wanted to say no, but he raised his hand and knocked on the door.

Of course when he did this, he had no idea at all of what he was doing.

It opened almost immediately, as if the old man had been standing behind it, waiting for Tom to decide.

“Good,” Lamont von Heilitz said. Until this moment, when his eyes met a pair of very pale blue eyes, Tom had never quite realized that the old man was nearly his own height. “Very good, in fact. Please come into my house, Tom Pasmore.”

He moved out of the way, and Tom stepped inside.

For a moment he was too surprised to speak. He had expected what Eastern Shore Road defined as a domestic interior. The entry hall might have been enclosed or not, but it should have opened into a sitting room with couches, tables, and chairs, perhaps a grand piano; beyond that, there might be a less formal living room, similarly furnished. Somewhere a door would open into a grand dining room, generally lined with ancestral portraits (not necessarily of actual ancestors). Off to the side would be a door, perhaps a pocket door, into a billiard room paneled in walnut or rosewood. Another door would lead to a large modern kitchen. There might be a library with glass-enclosed books or an art gallery or even an orangery. A prominent staircase would lead up to the dressing rooms and bedrooms, and a separate, narrow staircase would go up to the servants’ rooms. There would be a general impression, given by Oriental carpets, sculptures, paintings in massive ornate frames with their own indirect lighting, cushions, the right magazines, of luxury either frank or understated, of money consciously spent to attain comfort and splendor.

Lamont von Heilitz’s house was nothing like this.

Tom’s first impression was that he had walked into a warehouse; his second, that he was in a strange combination of furniture store, office, and library. The entry hall and most of the downstairs walls had been removed, so that the front door opened directly into a single vast room. This enormous room was filled with file cabinets, stacks of newspapers, ordinary office desks, some heaped with books, some littered with scissors and glue and cut-up newspapers. Couches and chairs stood seemingly at random in the maze of papers and cabinets and, throughout the room, old-fashioned upright lamps and low library lamps on the desks shone tiny and bright as stars, or glowed with a wide mellow illumination like the street lamps outside. At the back of the amazing room, pushed up against dark mahogany paneling, was a Sheraton dining table with a linen tablecloth and an open bottle of red Bordeaux beside a pile of books. Then Tom noticed the wall of books beside the table, and took in that at least three-fourths of the enormous room was walled with books in ceiling-high dark wooden cases. Before these walls stood high-backed library chairs or leather couches and coffee tables with green-shaded brass library lamps. Interspersed through the long sections of wall given over to bookshelves were sections of the same dark paneling as behind the dining table. Paintings glowed from these dark walls, and Tom correctly thought he identified a Monet landscape and a Degas ballet dancer. (He looked at, but did not recognize, paintings by Bonnard, Vuillard, Paul Ranson, Maurice Denis, and a drawing of flowers by Joe Brainard that in no way seemed out of place.)

Wherever he looked, he saw something new. A huge globe stood on a stand on one of the desks. An intricate bicycle leaned against a file cabinet, and a hammock had been slung between two other cabinets. To one side of it was a rowing machine. The most impressive hi-fi system Tom had ever seen in his life took up most of a huge table at the back of the room; tall speakers stood in each of the room’s corners.

In something like wonder, he turned to Mr. von Heilitz, who had his arms crossed over his chest and was smiling at him. Mr. von Heilitz was wearing a pale blue linen suit with a double-breasted vest, a pale pink shirt and a dark blue silk tie, and very pale blue gloves that buttoned at his wrists. His grey hair still swept back in perfect wings at the sides of his head, but a thousand wrinkles as fine as horsehair had printed themselves into the old man’s face since Tom had seen it in the hospital. Tom thought he looked wonderful and silly at the same time. Then he thought—no, he’s dignified, he doesn’t look silly at all. He could not be other than this. This was what he was. He was—

Tom opened his mouth but found that he did not know what he wanted to say, and the fine horse-hair wrinkles around the old man’s mouth and eyes etched themselves more deeply into his face. It was a smile.

“What are you?” Tom finally said.

The old man raised his chin—it was as if he had expected something better from him. “I thought you might have known, after this morning,” he said. “I am an amateur of crime.”