Mystery

“I wonder if you’d like to go on an excursion with me,” Tom said. He was talking on the telephone to Sarah Spence, and it was just past four o’clock. His father was still at his office on Calle Hoffmann—or doing whatever he did when he was not at home—and Gloria Pasmore was upstairs in her room. When Tom returned from the hospital, he had opened her bedroom door on a wave of soft music and whiskey fumes and looked in to see her sprawled out asleep on her bed. It was her “afternoon nap.”

“That sounds interesting, but I’m kind of busy,” Sarah said. “Mom and I are getting ready to go up north. Dad suddenly announced that we’re going early this year, so now we only have two days to pack. Well, what he said was that we’re going up in the Redwings’ private plane. And I can’t find Bingo anywhere, but of course it’s ridiculous to worry about Bingo.” After a pause, she said, “What kind of excursion?”

“I thought we might walk somewhere.”

“You won’t suddenly gasp and turn pale and run away if I say something absolutely doltish?”

Tom laughed. “No, and I won’t suddenly remember that I have to go somewhere else.”

“So you want to begin all over again where we left off? I like that idea.”

“I was thinking of going somewhere new,” Tom said. “The old slave quarter.”

“I’ve never even been there.”

“Me neither. No one from the far east end has ever even thought of going there.”

“Isn’t it a long way away?”

“Not that far. We wouldn’t spend more than half an hour there.”

“Doing what? Investigating opium dens, or organizing a white slavery ring, or tracking down stolen Treasury money, or—”

“What kind of books do you read?”

“Mainly the trash I see you carrying through the halls. I just finished Red Harvest. What do you want to do?”

“I want to look up an old friend of mine,” Tom said.

“Is this an excursion or an adventure? I wonder. And I wonder who the old friend could be.”

“Someone I used to know. Someone from the hospital.”

“That nurse who thought you were so cute? I remember her. Why would she be living in the old slave quarter? Maybe you want to set her free from a haunt of vice, and you need me to distract the Tuaregs and lascars.”

“No, not that nurse, another one,” Tom said, amused and disconcerted. “Named Hattie Bascombe. But she might be able to tell me something about the other one.”

“Aha!” Sarah said. “I knew it. Okay, I’ll come along, just to protect you. Are you bringing your gat, or should I pack mine?”

“Let’s both pack our gats,” Tom said.

“One more thing. I think this will be an automotive excursion, not a walking trip.”

“I can’t drive.”

“But I can,” Sarah said. “I’m an ace. I could barrel through a passel of gunsels as well as anybody in Dashiell Hammett. And this way I can look out for Bingo on the way.”

“Should I come over there, or—”

“Be outside of your house in fifteen minutes,” she said. “I’ll be the doll in the shades and the snap-brim hat behind the wheel of the ostentatious car.”

Twenty minutes later he was seated in the leather bucket seat of a little white Mercedes convertible with what seemed to him an abnormally loud engine, watching Sarah Spence downshift as she accelerated through a yellow light and turned on Calle Drosselmayer. “Bingo doesn’t do things like this,” she was saying. “He’s not really a very adventurous dog. He seems to worry a lot about whether or not we’re going to feed him.”

“What happens to him when you go up north?”

“We put him in a kennel.”

“Then he probably figured out that he was going back to the kennel in two days, and he wandered away to brood about it. I bet he’ll be back by dinnertime.”

“That’s brilliant!” she said. “Even if it’s not true, I feel better already.” Then: “Bingo doesn’t brood much, actually.”

“He didn’t strike me as a broody dog,” Tom said. Sarah’s driving delighted him—Sarah’s company delighted him. He thought he had never been in a car with anyone who drove like Sarah, with as much control and exhilaration. His mother drove at an uncertain five miles under the limit, mumbling to herself most of the time, and his father drove wildly, in a rage at other drivers the second he pulled out of the driveway. Sarah laughed at what he had said. When she drew up at a stoplight, she leaned over and kissed him. “A broody dog,” she said. “I think you’re the broody dog, Tom Pasmore.”

Then the light changed, and the little car flashed through the intersection, and sunlight fell all about them, and Tom felt that he had entered into a moment of almost inhuman perfection. His sense of guilty responsibility had suddenly disappeared. Sarah was still laughing, probably at the expression on his face. People on the sidewalk stared at them as they zipped past. The light streamed down, and the pretty shop fronts of Calle Drosselmayer, golden wood and sparkling glass, glowed and shone. Men and women sat beneath striped umbrellas at an outdoor café. Behind one great shining window, a model railway puffed through mountains and snowy passes, circling around again to a perfect scale model of Calle Drosselmayer—he saw their reflection in the window, and imagined himself and Sarah in a tiny white car on the model street. A great unconscious paradise lay all about him, the paradise of ordinary things.

Auer, Tom thought. Our. Hour. And remembered feeling this same way at least once before. Some buried subcontinent of his childhood broke the surface of his thoughts—he remembered a sense of impendingness, of some great thing about to happen, of imminent discovery in a forbidden place.…

Now they were in the lower end of Calle Drosselmayer, driving by the grey, prisonlike St. Alwyn Hotel. Years ago, someone had been murdered there—some scandal that had ended in a bigger scandal his parents had not let him read about, and which he had been too young to understand.…

“This isn’t much like being with Buddy,” she said. “He only ever wants to go to gun shops.”

“Do you ever think about what you want to be?” she said when she drove them down the hill to Mogrom Street. “You must—I think about it a lot. My parents want me to get married to somebody nice with a lot of money and live about two blocks from them. They can’t imagine why I’d want to do anything else.”

“My parents want me to make a lot of money and live eight hundred miles away,” Tom said. “But first they want me to get an engineering degree, so that I can set up a construction business. Mr. Handley wants me to write novels about Mill Walk. My grandfather wants me to keep my mouth shut and join the John Birch society. Brooks-Lowood School wants me to straighten up at last and learn how to play basketball—turn right here, go past the alley, and turn right again onto the next street—Miss Ellinghausen wants me to learn how to tango. Dr. Milton wants me to stop thinking altogether and be a loyal future member of the Founders Club.”

“And what do you want?”

“I want—I want to be what I really am. Whatever that is. Here we are. Let’s stop and get out.”

Sarah gave him an uncertain, questioning look, but pulled over to the side and stopped nearly on the same few feet of roadway where Dennis Handley had parked his Corvette. Both of them got out. In the valley that was Weasel Hollow, the air steamed and stank.

The smell of boiled cabbage that came from the yellow house mingled with the stench of rotting garbage from the fly-encrusted, glistening heap some yards farther down the street. The pile of garbage had grown since Tom had been here with Dennis Handley: several broken chairs and a rolled-up carpet had been added to it, along with five or six stained paper bags. Tinny radios sent conflicting fragments of nearly inaudible music into the air. Far off, a child screeched.

“What was burning around here?” Sarah asked, sniffing.

“A house and a car. The house is a block away, but the car’s just up ahead.”

Sarah stepped out into the empty street and saw it. She turned to look at Tom. “You were here before?”

“The car hadn’t been burned then. The owner abandoned it here because he thought it would be safe. He thought nobody would see it.”

Tom walked into the dusty street and joined her. What was left of Hasselgard’s Corvette looked like a crushed insect left in the sun. The seats, dashboard, and steering wheel had been burned away to metal skeletons; the tires were ashy black chips beneath the rims; the whole body was a blackened shell already turning orange with rust. Someone, probably a child, had hammered at it with a heavy stick and then tossed the stick through the empty windshield.

“Who was the owner?” Sarah said.

Tom did not answer this question. “I wanted to see if they’d really burn it. I was pretty sure they’d burn the house, because it was so destroyed by gunfire that it must have been in danger of collapsing. And they couldn’t be sure of what might be inside it. But I wasn’t really sure about the car. They must have come over on the same night—come right through the lots, carrying their gasoline cans.” He looked up into Sarah’s puzzled face. “It was Hasselgard’s car.”

She frowned, but said nothing.

“You see how they act? How they do things? They don’t even sneak it away on the back of a truck—they just douse it with gasoline and burn the shit out of it. They solve everything with sledgehammers. The people around here certainly aren’t going to say anything, are they? Because they know if they do, their own houses’ll burn up. It wouldn’t even be on the news.”

“Are you saying that the police burned Hasselgard’s car?”

“Didn’t I make that clear?”

“But, Tom, why—”

It seemed, at last, that he had to tell her: the words nearly marched out of his mouth by themselves. “I wrote the letter the police got—the letter was supposed to be about that ex-con, Foxhall Edwardes. Fulton Bishop talked about it at his press conference. It was an anonymous letter, because I didn’t want them to know a kid wrote it. I told them how and why Hasselgard killed his own sister. The next day, all hell broke loose. They killed Hasselgard, they killed this guy Edwardes, they killed a cop named Mendenhall, and injured his partner, Klink, they let loose this huge black cloud—”

He threw up his arms, stopped short by the incongruity of saying these terrible things to a beautiful girl in a blue shirt and white shorts who was thinking about a lost dog. “It’s this whole place,” he said. “Mill Walk! We’re supposed to believe every word they say and keep on taking dancing lessons, we’re supposed to keep on going to Boney Milton when we’re sick, we’re supposed to get excited about a picture book of every house the Redwings ever lived in!”

She took a step nearer to him. “I’m not saying I understand everything, but are you sorry you wrote the letter?”

“I don’t know. Not exactly. I’m sorry those two men died. I’m sorry Hasselgard wasn’t arrested. I didn’t know enough.”

Then she said something that surprised him. “Maybe you just wrote to the wrong person.”

“You know,” he said, “maybe I did. There’s a detective named Natchez—I used to think he was one of the bad guys, but a friend of mine told me that he was close to Mendenhall. And this morning at the hospital I thought I saw that he and some of his friends …”

“Why don’t you go to him?”

“I need more. I need to have something he doesn’t already know.”

“Who’s this friend? The one who told you about Natchez and Mendenhall?”

“Somebody wonderful,” he said. “A great man. I can’t tell you his name, because you’d laugh at me if I did. But someday I’d like you to meet him. Really meet him.”

“Really meet him? This isn’t Dennis Handley, is it?”

Tom laughed. “No, not Handles. Handles has given up on me.”

“Because he didn’t get you into bed.”

“What!”

She smiled at him. “Well, I’m glad it’s not him anyhow. Are we still going to the old slave quarter?”

“Do you still want to?”

“Of course I do. In spite of what my parents want for me, I still haven’t completely given up hoping I might have an interesting life.” She moved nearer to him, and looked up with an expression that reminded him of the first time Miss Ellinghausen had brought them together. “I really do wonder where you’re going. I wonder where you and I are going too.”

She did not want him to kiss her, he saw—it was just that she saw more of him than he had ever expected her to see. She had not questioned or disbelieved him; he had not shocked her: she had taken every step with him. This girl he had just mentally accused of thinking of nothing more than a lost dog suddenly seemed surpassing, immense. “Me too,” he said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you all this stuff.”

“You had to tell somebody, I suppose. Isn’t that why you invited me on this excursion?”

And there she was again: in his very footsteps, this time before he had even made them.

“Are you going to introduce me to this Hattie Bascombe, or not?”

They smiled at each other and turned back to the car.

“I’m glad you’re coming to Eagle Lake,” she said, when they were both in their seats. “I have the feeling you might be safer there.”

He thought of Fulton Bishop’s face, and nodded. “I’m safe now, Sarah. Nothing’s going to happen.”

“Then if you’re this great detective and all, find Bingo for me.” She gunned the engine and shot forward.