Mystery

Tom looked back from the far corner of Sarah’s street and saw her gazing toward him. The little terrier was still tugging at the leash, and she stepped forward and waved tentatively. He returned the wave, and crossed the intersection of Yorkminster Place. Houses he had seen and known all his life presented blank, lifeless façades; sprinklers whirred above grass that seemed to be made of spun sugar. Through windows left open to the breezes he saw immaculate empty rooms with grand pianos and looming portraits.

He walked past Salisbury Road, past Ely Place and Stonehenge Circle, past Victoria Terrace and Omdurman Road. Between Omdurman Road and Balaclava Lane the houses became slightly smaller and closer together, and by Waterloo Parade they were ordinary three-story frame and red brick houses. Here a few children rode tricycles up and down driveways, and thick low hedges were the only separation between the houses. A man reading a newspaper on his front porch looked up at him suspiciously but went back to the Eyewitness when he saw only a fairly ordinary Eastern Shore Road teenager.

Cars, bicycles, and pony traps streamed up and down Calle Berlinstrasse. An ambulance went by, then a second ambulance. After another step Tom realized that four police cars had pulled into a circular drive across the street. Lights whirled and flashed. Above the turmoil of ambulances and police cars before which a crowd had begun to gather stood the red brick building in which he had spent nearly three months of his tenth year.

When the light changed, he ran across the street and began to weave through the people peering over the tops of the police cars.

A policeman stood in front of the revolving door that led to the hospital’s waiting room and front desk. He was in his mid-twenties, his uniform was pressed and spotless, and his face looked very white beneath his visor. His buttons, belt, and boots gleamed. He kept his eyes a careful foot or so above the heads of the crowd.

“What happened?” Tom asked a stout woman carrying a white plastic shopping bag.

She leaned over and looked up at him. “I’m just lucky, I was right here when all the cops pulled up—way it looks, somebody got killed in there.”

Tom walked forward into the empty space between the spectators and the lone officer at the top of the hospital steps. The young cop gave him a hard glance, and then looked back out at nothing. When Tom started coming up the steps, he took his hand off his gun butt and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Officer, could you tell me what’s happening?” He was half a foot taller than the policeman, who tilted his neck and glared at Tom.

“Are you going in or not? If not, get back down.”

Tom pushed his way through the revolving door, took two steps toward the desk, and stopped short.

His past had been rewritten. The tiny waiting room with two or three rickety chairs and a low wooden partition before an equally tiny office with a switchboard and receptionist was now the size of a train station. Wooden benches and molded plastic chairs lined the walls on either side. Patients in bathrobes, most of them staring fixedly at their laps, occupied a few of these chairs. A whiskery old man in a wheelchair looked up sharply at Tom’s entrance, and a strand of drool wobbled from his lower lip. At the far end of the great lobby a new partition of thick translucent glass or plastic divided the office from the lobby. Behind the partition women moved between file cases, sat at desks with telephones propped to their ears, and consulted papers at their desks.

On the wide marble floor between the revolving door and the partition stood two groups of policemen that reminded Tom of the huddles of opposing football teams. The lobby was much darker than the street.

“Natchez! What are you doing over there?” called an officer in the larger of the two groups. “We’re here to do a job.”

Tom had been trying to sidle past the old men in chairs. He looked up when he heard the name. A sturdy policeman in a business suit whispered a few words to his cohort and began moving toward the others. He looked like an athlete, muscular and self-contained. An angry flush covered his cheeks. In the way the other officers parted to admit him, then crowded a little too closely around him, Tom had an impression of barely concealed hostility. Then he remembered the name: Natchez was one of the two detectives who had searched the Shadow’s house.

He backed away toward the wall and sat down to wait until the policemen left the lobby. Detective Natchez strode across the floor and punched an elevator button. Some of the other policemen continued to stare at him. The men to whom Natchez had been talking dispersed.

“My daughter is coming today,” said the old man beside Tom.

“Do you know why all these policemen are here?” Tom asked him.

The old man’s lower lip sagged, and his eyes were pink. “Do you know my daughter?”

“No,” Tom said.

The old man gripped his upper arm and leaned very close. “Someone died,” he uttered. “Murdered. It’s my daughter’s birthday.”

Tom pulled his arm free of the old man’s grip. A hole had opened in the surface of the earth, and he had just fallen through it.

“They want to shoot her full of lead,” the man said, “but I won’t let them.”

Another old man a few chairs away hitched toward them, obviously wishing to join this interesting conversation, and Tom hastily stood up. One of the officers in the original group cast him a look of impersonal hostility. Tom looked down and turned away, and saw the bottoms of neatly pressed, dark blue trousers and polished black boots with buttons protruding from the bottom of the robe worn by the second old man. The first man, and nearly all of the other patients sitting in the lobby, wore limp pajamas and slippers. He looked at the man’s face, and saw him looking back at him.

The second old man was at first indistinguishable from all the others—his grey hair fell about his face, his lip drooped, his head trembled. The man clutched his robe close about his neck, and bent forward to mumble something. Tom stepped away, but the man’s eyes still held him. They were alert and intelligent, not at all the eyes of senility. A recognition jogged the boy. And then—with a shock that almost made him cry out—Tom realized that he was looking at Lamont von Heilitz.

Tom looked over his shoulder at the police. The hostile officer was sauntering up toward Natchez, the intention of saying something unpleasant clear upon his face. He slid onto the seat beside von Heilitz, glanced at him for a second, and looked away. The Shadow had whitened his face with makeup and pasted straggling thorny eyebrows over his own. His whole face looked gaunt and stupid and hopeless. “Look away.” The words seemed to speak themselves.

Tom gazed across the vast emptying lobby. The officer in charge of the first group had begun moving toward a corridor to the right of the new desk. The others went toward the doors and the elevators: there was the same sense of inactivity Tom had felt when he first came in. “What are you doing here?” he whispered.

“My house, tonight,” von Heilitz said in the same ventriloquial fashion.

“Somebody died?”

“Go,” von Heilitz ordered, and Tom stood up as if he had been jabbed with a pin.

He wandered out into the great empty lobby. The elevator into which Detective Natchez had disappeared returned to the lobby, and when Tom reached the desk its doors opened. Detective Natchez and two uniformed policemen emerged on either side of a kind of wheeled sheet-covered cart, which obviously held a corpse. Tom again fell through the hole in the earth’s surface. I did that, he thought. I wrote a letter, and that man died.

“May I help you?” The woman seated at the desk facing the partition had set down her telephone and was looking up at Tom with a crisp challenge that suggested she would much prefer not to do anything of the kind.

“Ah, I was visiting a friend of mine upstairs,” Tom said, “and I saw all these policemen here, and—”

“No, you were not,” she said.

“What?”

“You were not visiting a patient, not in this hospital,” she said. Her perfectly black, lifeless-looking hair rolled back from her low forehead in a high crest, and half-glasses perched just beneath the bridge of her nose as if commanded to go no further. “I saw you enter the lobby no more than a minute or two ago, young man, and the only patients with whom you have had any contact are those two men seated against the wall. Are you going to leave this hospital by yourself, or will I have to have you escorted out?”

“I wonder if you could tell me what happened here,” he said.

“That wouldn’t be any business of yours now, would it?”

“Two people told me that someone was murdered.”

Her eyes widened, and her chin tilted up another tiny portion of an inch.

“I’d like to see Nancy Vetiver,” Tom said. “She’s a nurse who used to—”

“Nurse Vetiver? Now it’s Nurse Vetiver? And who would you like to see after that, King Louis the Fourteenth? Our people are too busy to be bothered by stray cats like you, most especially when they come babbling about—Officer! Officer! Will you come here, please?”

All the policemen in the lobby looked at them, and after a momentary show of hesitation the officer who had sent Detective Natchez upstairs moved toward the desk. He said nothing, but looked first at Tom, then the receptionist, with a strained, impatient, wholly artificial smile.

“Officer …?” the receptionist began.

“Get on with it,” he said.

Suddenly the entire scene seemed wrong to Tom, essentially out of key. Even the receptionist had been nonplussed by the policeman’s hostility. Some of the men in the lobby seemed angry, and some of them seemed almost triumphant beneath their mask of indifference.

“This young man,” the receptionist began again, “has entered the hospital under false pretenses. He said something about a murder, he’s asking about the nurses, he’s disrupting—”

“I don’t care, lady,” the officer said. He walked away shaking his head.

“Is this how you do your job?” she called to him. Her voice was sharp enough to split wood. Then she saw a more likely source of aid. “Doctor, if you’ll assist me—for a moment?”

Dr. Bonaventure Milton had just emerged from the corridor to the right of the desk, accompanied by a lean, brown, anonymous-looking man in a blue uniform with conspicuous braid. The fat little doctor in his pince-nez and black bow tie looked from the receptionist to him and smiled. “Of course, Miss Dragonette. You have a problem with my young friend here?”

“Friend?” Now she seemed startled. “This young man has been saying things about murder—trying to intrude himself into the hospital—asking for one of the nurses—I want him expelled.”

Dr. Milton made soothing passes with his hands. “I’m sure we can straighten this out, Miss Dragonette. This young fellow is Glendenning Upshaw’s grandson, Tom Pasmore. I saw him just a week or two ago at the Founders Club. Now what was it you wanted, Tom?”

Miss Dragonette had given up on the little doctor and was now trying to galvanize the officer beside him by drilling holes in his head with her eyes.

“I was just outside, and when I saw all the squad cars I wanted to come in—I realized that my grandfather had never called me back about Nancy Vetiver—” He looked at the face of the officer in the splendid uniform, and was disconcerted both by the coldness of the man’s eyes and the sense that he had seen him somewhere before.

“I shouldn’t wonder!” said Miss Dragonette.

“Is there some trouble?” the officer said, and this time Tom took in his bald head and the smooth knuckle of his face and recognized Captain Fulton Bishop. His stomach froze—for a moment all he wanted to do was turn and run. The Captain was shorter than he had appeared on television. There was no humor in the man at all. He looked like a torturer in a medieval drawing.

Dr. Milton looked quickly from Tom to Captain Bishop, then, questioningly, back again. “Oh, I don’t think there is any trouble—do you? The boy was looking for Nurse Vetiver, an old favorite of his. By the way, Tom, this is Captain Bishop, who did all that excellent work bringing Miss Hasselgard’s murderer to justice.”

Neither Tom nor Captain Bishop offered to shake hands.

“An unhappy day for us all,” the doctor went on. “One of the Captain’s men, a patrolman named Mendenhall, died this morning. We did what we could, but the man had been quite severely wounded—died a hero’s death, one of the first men into the killer’s house, thought we could pull him through, did the best we could despite some interference”—here a meaningful glance at Tom—“but poor Mendenhall slipped away from us about half an hour ago. Tragic, of course.”

“But why are there so many policemen here?” Tom asked. He was not quite aware of speaking, because he had just dropped through the earth’s surface again.

“We came for the body,” Bishop said flatly.

“Well, it didn’t make any sense to me,” said Miss Dragonette. “He did say something about a murder.”

“An old man over there said something—he’s senile, it didn’t really make sense.…”Now both the doctor and Captain Bishop were staring at him.

“Which man over there?” the Captain said.

Tom looked again to the side of the room. Von Heilitz was gone. “The old man in the yellow bathrobe.” He turned back to the doctor. “I really came in to see Nancy Vetiver.”

“Mr. Williams doesn’t know what day it is,” said Miss Dragonette. “Sits there all day long, waiting for his daughter, but he wouldn’t recognize her if she walked right in that door. Which isn’t likely, since she lives in Bangor, Maine.”

“Doctor, I’ll speak to you later,” the Captain said, and walked across the lobby and disappeared through the revolving door after the men wheeling the dead policeman’s body.

Dr. Milton sighed and watched him go. “What are you trying to do? Do you have any notion …?” He shook his head. “I’ll take care of this, Miss Dragonette. Come with me, Tom.”

The doctor led Tom into the corridor on the desk’s right side. He slipped his arm through the boy’s and said, “Let me make sure I understand all this. You came in here looking for Nurse Vetiver—because of the conversation you overheard at your grandfather’s house. You wanted to be assured of her well-being, am I right? You saw the policemen in the lobby. You sat down next to that old fellow, who began babbling about a murder.”

“That’s right,” Tom said.

“You understand—things get very sensitive when a police officer dies. Feelings run high.”

Was that what he had seen? Tom wondered. A display of intense feeling? He remembered the two groups of policemen, the sense of hostility and some queer victory. His sense of guilt made him feel as though he were walking through thick fog, unable to see or think properly.

The doctor self-consciously looked into Tom’s eyes. “You want to be careful, Tom. You don’t want to upset people. Everyone is a little sensitive these days. The Hasselgard business, all of that—you know. You’re an intelligent young man. You come from a good family, and you have a long life before you.”

“That cop, Mendenhall, died because of ‘the Hasselgard business.’ ”

“Indirectly, yes,” the doctor said. He had begun to look annoyed.

“Because of the letter Captain Bishop got.”

“What do you know about that letter? Who told you—”

“It was on the news. But nobody but Captain Bishop ever saw the letter, did they?”

“I don’t quite see your point, if you have one.”

“My point is—” Tom hesitated, then went on. “What if the letter actually said something else. What if it didn’t say anything about a poor half-native ex-con named Foxhall Edwardes? What if it proved that someone else actually killed Marita Hasselgard, and that her death was directly related to what was going on at the Treasury?”

“This is ridiculous,” the doctor said. “A man just died here.”

“And a lot of other men in here didn’t seem exactly unhappy about that,” Tom said.

“Remember that there are both loyal and disloyal officers,” Dr. Milton said. “What are you trying to do, Tom? Real letters and unreal letters, questions about murder …?”

“How could that man Mendenhall be disloyal if he was killed in the line of duty? Disloyal to what?”

Dr. Milton visibly controlled himself. “Listen to me—loyal means sticking to your own people. You know who they are. Your neighbors, your friends, your family. They are you. Don’t run away with yourself.”

The doctor straightened his back and tugged at his vest. “You have to live in this world with the rest of us,” the doctor said. He looked at his watch. “I want us both to forget this conversation. I still have a lot to do today. Please give my regards to your mother and your grandfather.” He looked sharply up at Tom, still agitated, stepped around him, and began to walk back to the lobby. After a few steps, he stopped and faced Tom again. “By the way, Nurse Vetiver has been suspended. Let the whole matter drop, Tom.”

“What about Hattie Bascombe?” Tom asked.

This time, the doctor laughed. “Hattie Bascombe! I imagine she’s in the old slave quarter, if she’s still alive. Retired years ago. Mumbling over a chicken bone and casting spells, I suppose. Quite a character, wasn’t she?”

“Quite a character,” Tom said to the doctor’s retreating back.