Mystery

“Up here, our victims aren’t usually so well dressed,” said Tim Truehart, standing in his leather jacket by the open door of an old blue Dodge as Tom and von Heilitz came out of the hospital’s front entrance.

“I’m not usually so well dressed,” Tom said, looking down at the suit the old man had brought for him. It was a grey and blue windowpane plaid, with the label of a London tailor, and except for being a little tight across the shoulders, fit him better than any of his own suits. Von Heilitz had also loaned him a white shirt, a dark blue figured tie, and a pair of well-shined black shoes, also his size, that felt stiff and resentful on his feet. Tom had expected the detective to show up with cheap new clothes, not his own, and when he had looked at himself in the mirror that hung in his room’s tiny bathroom, he had seen a well-dressed stranger in his mid-twenties. The stranger had stubby eyelashes and only a few bristles for eyebrows. The stranger’s face looked peeled. If he had seen himself in the dark, he would have thought he was Lamont von Heilitz.

Tom got in the back seat with the suitcases, and von Heilitz sat in the front with Truehart.

“I don’t suppose you saw anybody around your lodge before the fire started,” the policeman said.

“I didn’t even know that Barbara Deane was there.”

“The fire was started at both the front and the back of the lodge at roughly the same time—it wouldn’t take more than a cup of gasoline and a match to get those old places going.” Truehart sounded as if he were talking to himself. “So we know Tom didn’t do it accidentally, and it didn’t start in the kitchen, or anything like that. That fire was deliberately set.”

For an instant Tom wished he were back in his bed in the kindergarten room, safe with his injections of antibiotics and the perpetual television.

Von Heilitz said, “Somewhere in Eagle Lake or Grand Forks, there’s a man who is down on his luck. He probably has a prison record. He will do certain things for money. He lives off in the woods, and he doesn’t have too many friends. Jerry Hasek learned this man’s name by asking around in bars and making a few telephone calls. You ought to be able to do the same.”

“There’s probably fifty guys like that around here,” Truehart said. “I’m not a famous private detective, Lamont, I’m a small-town Chief of Police. I don’t usually play games like this, and Myron Spychalla is after my job. I’d hate to have to go to work.”

Tom could not stop himself from yawning.

“You have Nappy LaBarre and Robbie Wintergreen in your jail,” von Heilitz said. “That’s all you really need. I think one of them will be happy to work out a little trade.”

“If they know about it.”

“Sure,” von Heilitz said. “If they know about it. I’m not telling you anything new. I’m not a famous private detective, either. I’m a retired old man who has the leisure to sit back and watch things happen.”

“And that’s what you were doing up here, I guess.” They passed the airport sign, and Truehart flicked on his turn signal.

“Semi-retired,” von Heilitz said, and the two men grinned at each other.

“All right,” said Truehart, “but this boy’s mother is going to go through hell when she hears that her son died in a fire. That’s the part that bothers me.”

“She won’t.”

“She won’t what?”

“Won’t hear. Her husband is off in Alabama for a couple of weeks, and she never watches television or reads the papers. She’s an invalid. If her father finds out somehow, he won’t tell her right away, and maybe he would never tell her. He has a history of protecting her from bad news.”

That was right, Tom realized—if he had died in the fire, he would never have existed. His grandfather would never speak his name, and his mother would be forbidden to mention it. It would be the way his grandfather had wanted it all along. Her and her’s Da.

Tim Truehart pulled up beside a long building with a grey metal skin, and Tom stepped out of the car after the men. The yellow light of a sodium lamp ate into everything like acid. Tom’s hands were sickly yellow, and Lamont von Heilitz’s hair turned a dead yellow-grey. Tom carried one of the old man’s bags around the open front of the long metal building and saw a dismantled airplane on the yellow-grey concrete floor, a glass bubble rearing out of lifeless canvas, and an engine in parts like a diagrammed sentence, bolts like punctuation marks, the exclamation point of the propeller.

Von Heilitz asked him if he were all right.

“Pretty much,” he said.

Truehart’s plane had been pulled to the side of the hangar. The bags went through a narrow opening like an oven door. You climbed on the wing to get into the cockpit, and Tom slipped downwards before Truehart clutched his wrist and pulled him up. He sat in a single back seat, and von Heilitz sat beside the pilot.

The engine sputtered and roared, and the plane rolled forward into the emptiness before lifting into the greater emptiness of the air.

In Minneapolis he trudged down a long hallway lined with shops alongside von Heilitz. People moving the other way cast amused looks at them, an erect old man and a tottering boy without eyelashes dressed like actors on a stage, both of them a head taller than anyone else.

From Minneapolis they flew to Houston. Tom awakened once, choking on wood smoke, and saw the dark tubular shape of a jet cabin before him. For a second he thought he was flying toward Eagle Lake again, and fell instantly back into sleep.

Between Houston and Miami Tom came awake with his head on the Shadow’s bony shoulder. He straightened up in his seat and looked across at his father, who slept on, his head tilted and his mouth open. He was breathing deeply and regularly, and his face, smoothed by the darkness of the cabin, was that of a young man.

A stewardess who looked like Sarah Spence’s older sister walked past, looked down, saw that Tom was awake, and knelt beside him with an expectant, curious smile. “The other girls are wondering about something—well, I am too,” she whispered. Her Texas voice put a slow, bottom-heavy spin on every vowel. “Is he somebody famous?”

“He used to be,” Tom said.

In Miami they had to run to their gate, and minutes after they had strapped themselves into their seats, the plane rolled down the runway and picked itself into the air to fly south across hundreds of miles of water to Mill Walk. A group of nuns filled the seats in front of them, and whenever the pilot announced that they were flying over an island, they all crowded into the seats on that side of the plane, to see Puerto Rico and Vieques, and the specks named St. Thomas and Tortola and Virgin Gorda, and the little afterthoughts of Anguilla, St. Martin, Montserrat, and Antigua.

“Am I going to stay with you?” Tom asked.

Another stewardess placed trays with scrambled eggs, bacon, and fried potatoes before them. Von Heilitz made a face and waved his away, but Tom said, “Keep it, I’ll eat that one too,” and the stewardess replaced the tray and gave them the usual curious look. “I love the way you guys dress,” she said.

Tom began devouring his eggs.

“No, I think you shouldn’t,” von Heilitz said. “I don’t think you should go home, either.”

“Then where should I go?”

“The St. Alwyn.” Von Heilitz smiled. “Which Mr. Goetz claimed to own. I’ve already booked you a room, under the name Thomas Lamont. I thought you’d be able to remember that.”

“Why don’t you want me to stay at your place?”

“I thought you’d be safer somewhere else. Besides, the St. Alwyn is an interesting place. Do you know anything about it?”

“Wasn’t there a murder there once?” Tom could remember some story from his childhood—lurid headlines in newspapers his mother had snatched away. Kate Redwing had mentioned it too.

“Two,” von Heilitz said. “In fact, it was probably the most famous murder case in the history of Mill Walk, and I had nothing to do with it at all. A novelist named Timothy Underhill wrote a book called The Divided Man about it—you never read it?”

Tom shook his head.

“I’ll loan it to you. Good book—good fiction—but misguided about the case, exactly in the way that most people were. A suicide was generally taken as a confession. We have about twenty minutes left up in this limbo, why don’t I tell you the story?”

“I think you’d better!”

“The body of a young prostitute was discovered in the alley behind the hotel. Above her body, two words had been chalked on the wall. Blue Rose.”

The nuns in the seats in front of them had ceased talking to each other, and now and then glanced over the top of their seats.

“A week later, a piano player who worked in some of the downtown clubs was found dead in a room at the St. Alwyn. His throat was slit. The murderer had printed the words Blue Rose on the wall above his bed. In the early days, he had played with Glenroy Breakstone and the Targets—the Blue Rose record is a kind of memorial to him.”

Tom remembered his mother and von Heilitz playing the record—the soft, breathy saxophone making compelling music out of the songs mangled by Miss Gonsalves at dancing class.

“So far, the victims were marginal people, half-invisible. The police on Mill Walk couldn’t get excited about a whore and a local jazz musician—it wasn’t as though respectable citizens had been killed. They just went through the motions. It seemed pretty clear that the young man had been killed because he’d witnessed the girl’s murder—even Fulton Bishop could work that one out, because the piano player’s window in the St. Alwyn was on the second floor overlooking the brick alley. A short time after that, a young doctor was attacked, same thing, Blue Rose, but when it turned out that he was homosexual—”

The pilot asked all passengers to fasten their seat belts in preparation for landing on the island of Mill Walk, where the skies were cloudless and the temperatures in the low nineties. The nuns pulled the belts taut and craned their necks.

“Well, Fulton Bishop’s patron, your grandfather, asked that he be assigned to a more salubrious case, and—”

“My grandfather?”

“Oh, Glen was very important to Captain Bishop, still is. Took an interest in his career from the beginning. Anyhow, Bishop was promoted, and a detective named Damrosch got the case. By now it looked like a curse. The Eyewitness was full of it, and the people were in the condition newspapers like to call ‘up in arms.’ What that really means is that they were titillated—they felt a kind of awful fascination. Now Damrosch was a talented detective, but an unstable man. Professionally, he was completely honest, and if he’d been a real straight arrow in every way, he could have gathered a nucleus of other honest policemen around him, the way David Natchez seems to have done. But he was a blackout drinker, he beat people up now and then, he’d had a very troubled youth, and he was a closet homosexual. None of this side of his life emerged until later. But even so, he had no friends in the department, and they gave him the case to make him the scapegoat.”

“What happened?” Tom asked.

“There was another murder. A butcher who lived near the old slave quarter. And when that happened, the case virtually closed itself. No more Blue Rose murders.”

The nuns were listening avidly now, their heads nearly touching in the gap between their seats.

“The butcher had been one of Damrosch’s foster fathers—a violent, abusive man. Worked the boy nearly to death until young Damrosch finally got into the army. Damrosch hated him.”

“But the others—the doctor, and the piano player, and the girl.”

“Damrosch knew two of them. The girl was one of his informants, and he’d had a one-night stand with the piano player.”

“What do you mean, the case virtually closed itself?”

“Damrosch shot himself. At least, it certainly looked that way.”

The plane had been moving steeply down as von Heilitz talked, and now the palm trees and bright length of ocean alongside the runways whizzed and blurred past their windows: the wheels brushed against the ground, and all of the plane’s weight seemed to strain backwards against itself.

A stewardess jumped up and announced over the loudspeaker that passengers were requested to remain in their seats, with seat belts fastened, until the vehicle had stopped moving.

“You could say that his suicide was a sort of wrongful arrest.”

“Where were you during all this?”

“In Cleveland, proving that the Parking Lot Monster was a gentleman named Horace Fetherstone, the regional manager of the Happy Hearts Greeting Card Company.”

The airplane stopped moving, and most of the passengers jumped into the aisle and opened overhead compartments. Tom and the Shadow stayed in their seats, and so did the nuns.

“By the way, was it clear that one of the victims survived? In Underhill’s book they were all killed, but the real case was different. One of them made it. He’d been attacked from behind in the dark, and he didn’t even get a glimpse of his attacker, so he was no use in the case, but he knew enough medicine to stop his bleeding.”

“Medicine?”

“Well, he was a doctor, wasn’t he? You met him this summer,” said von Heilitz. “Nice fellow.” He stood up, stooping, and moved out into the aisle. “Buzz Laing. Did you notice? He always wears something around his neck.”

Tom looked straight ahead of him and saw the brown right eye of one nun and the blue left eye of another staring at him through the gap between their seats.

“Oh, one little thing.” Von Heilitz leaned down beneath the overhead compartments. “Damrosch shot himself in the head at a desk in his apartment. There was a note saying Blue Rose in front of him on the desk. Case closed.”

He smiled, and all the fine horsehair lines around his mouth cut deeper into his skin. He turned away and started moving up the aisle toward the front of the plane. Tom scrambled out of his seat.

“Occasionally,” von Heilitz said, “what you have to do is go back to the beginning and see everything in a new way.”

They passed through the open door of the airplane and entered the annihilating sunlight of the Caribbean, pouring down from a hazy sun in an almost colorless sky.

“Occasionally,” von Heilitz said, “there are powerful reasons why you can’t or don’t want to do that.”

The stewardess who had told them she liked the way they dressed stood at the bottom of the metal staircase, handing white printed cards to the passengers. A long way away, goats pushed their heads through a wire fence. The smell of salt water mingled with the airport smell of jet fuel.

“The handwriting on the note in front of Damrosch,” Tom said.

“Printed in block letters.” He accepted one of the cards from the stewardess.

Tom took one too, and realized that it was a landing card. The first line was for his name, and the second for his passport number.

He gaped at the stewardess, and she said, “Gee, what happened to your eyebrows?”

Von Heilitz tugged at his sleeve. “The boy was in a fire. He just realized that he doesn’t have his passport.”

“Gee,” she said. “Will you have any trouble?

“None at all.” He walked Tom across the tarmac toward the door.

“Why not?”

“Watch me,” said von Heilitz.

At the baggage counter, the pool of yellow liquid seemed to have advanced another six or eight inches across the linoleum, and the American passengers gave it uneasy glances as they waited for their cases to ride toward them on the belt. Tom followed the old man toward the desk marked MILL WALK RESIDENTS, and saw him take a slim leather notecase from his pocket. He tore a sheet of perforated yellow paper from the case, bent over it for a second, and signaled for Tom to follow him to the desk.

He said, “Hello, Gonzalo,” to the official, and gave him his passport and landing card. The sheet of notepaper was folded into the passport. “My friend has been in a fire. He lost everything, including his passport. He is the grandson of Glendenning Upshaw, and wishes to convey the best wishes of Mr. Upshaw and Mr. Ralph Redwing to you.”

The official flicked bored black eyes at Tom’s face, opened von Heilitz’s passport, and pulled the note toward him. He shielded it behind his hand and opened the top half. Then he slid the folded note into his desk, stamped von Heilitz’s passport, and reached back into the desk for a form marked REPLACEMENT PASSPORT APPLICATION. “Fill this out and mail it in as soon as possible,” he said. “Nice to see you again, Mr. von Heilitz.”

The first words on the form were: No resident of Mill Walk shall be allowed to pass through Customs and Immigration until a replacement passport has been received.

“What was in the note?” Tom asked.

“Two dollars.”

They went outside into light and heat.

“How much would it have been without the best wishes of my grandfather and Ralph Redwing?”

“One dollar. Haven’t you ever heard of noblesse oblige?”

Tom looked across the ramp and saw half a dozen carriages and gigs in the open parking lot. The odor of horse manure drifted toward him, along with the smells of fuel oil and salt water. They were home. Von Heilitz raised his hand, and an old red taxi with one dangling headlight pulled up before them.

A short, chunky black man with a wide handsome face climbed out and smiled at them, showing two front teeth edged in gold. He went around to open his trunk, and von Heilitz said, “Hello, Andres.”

“Always good to see you again, Lamont,” the driver said. The trunk smelled strongly of fish. He hoisted in the cases and slammed the trunk shut. “Where we going today?”

“The St. Alwyn.” They all got in the car, and von Heilitz said, “Andres, Tom Pasmore here is a good friend of mine. I want you to treat him the same way you treat me. He might need your help someday.”

Andres leaned over the back of the seat and stuck out an enormous hand. “Any time, brother.” Tom took the hand with his left, raising his bandaged right hand in explanation.

Andres pulled out toward the highway into town, and Tom said, “Do you know everybody?”

“Only the right people. Have you been thinking about what I said?”

Tom nodded.

“Kind of stares you right in the face, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe,” Tom said, and von Heilitz snorted.

“I don’t know if we’re thinking of the same thing.”

“We are.”

“Can I ask you a question before I say anything else?”

“Go ahead.”

Tom felt a reluctant tremor move through his body like a slow electric shock. “When you were up at the lake, did you ever go swimming or fishing? Did you ever do anything that took you out into the lake?”

“Are you asking if I ever actually saw the front of your grandfather’s lodge?”

Tom nodded.

“I never swam, I never fished, I never went out into the lake. I never set foot on his property either, of course. Congratulations.”

But it was not like the time the Shadow had leaned beaming across a coffee table and shaken his hand. Tom fell against the back seat of Andres’s taxi, seeing Barbara Deane wake up in a burning bed.

“He’s so bold,” von Heilitz said. “He told me one huge bold whopping lie, and I swallowed it whole. You know what really galls me? He knew it was the kind of lie—the kind of detail—that would really speak to me. He knew I would go right to town on it. He knew I would build an entire theory on that lie. It didn’t take him an instant to figure all that out. From then on, everything fell into place.”

“Everybody thought he left for Miami the day after Jeanine disappeared,” Tom said.

“But he stayed long enough to kill Goetz.”

Tom closed his eyes, and kept them closed until they pulled up in front of the old hotel. There are things it might be better not to know, Barbara Deane had told him.

Andres said, “Here we are, boss,” and von Heilitz patted his shoulders. A door slammed. Tom opened his eyes to the lower end of Calle Drosselmayer. It was before eight in the morning on an island where nothing opened until ten, and the pawn shops and liquor stores were still locked behind their bars and shutters. A junk man’s horse clopped past, pulling a rusted water heater, a broken carriage wheel, and the dozing junk man. Von Heilitz got out on one side, Tom on the other. The air seemed unnaturally warm and bright. Far up the street, in the fashionable section of Calle Drosselmayer, a few cars rolled east, taking office workers and store managers from the island’s west end downtown to Calle Hoffmann.

Andres carried the old man’s two bags to the sidewalk in front of the hotel, and von Heilitz gave him some bills.

“Aren’t you going home?” Tom asked.

“Both of us ought to stay out of sight for a while,” von Heilitz said. “I’ll be in the room adjoining yours.”

Andres said, “Big change from Eastern Shore Road,” and pulled a little stack of business cards held together with a rubber band from a ripped pocket of his jacket. He pulled one out of the stack and presented it to Tom. The card was printed with the words Andres Flanders Courteous Efficient Driver and a telephone number in the old slave quarter. “You call me if you need me, hear?” Andres said. He watched Tom put the card into one of his pockets. When he was sure it was safe, he waved to both of them and drove off.

Tom turned around to look up at the tall façade of the hotel. Once it had been pale blue or even white, but the stone had darkened over time. An arch of carved letters over the entrance spelled out its name. Von Heilitz said, “I divided my clothes up between these bags, so why don’t you just take that one and use what’s in it as long as we’re here?”

Tom lifted the heavy bag and followed him into the dark cavern of the St. Alwyn’s lobby. Brass spittoons stood beside heavy furniture, and on the wall opposite the desk three small stained glass windows glowed dark red and blue, like the window on the staircase at Brooks-Lowood School. A pale man with thinning hair and rimless glasses watched them approach.

Von Heilitz checked in as James Cooper of New York City, and Tom filled out a card for Thomas Lamont, also of New York. The clerk took in his bandaged hand and singed eyebrows, and slid two keys across the desk.

“Let’s go upstairs and talk about your grandfather,” von Heilitz said. The clerk’s eyebrows twitched above the rims of his glasses.

Von Heilitz picked up both keys and bent to put his hand on the suitcase he carried in. “Oh,” he said, having seen a stack of Eyewitnesses in the gloom at the end of the counter. “We’ll each have one of those.” He straightened up and put his hand in his front pocket.

The clerk peeled two newspapers off the neat stack and pushed them forward in exchange for the two quarters von Heilitz slapped down on the counter, presenting them with the headline in the newspaper’s lower right-hand corner.

The old man folded the papers under his arms, and they each picked up a suitcase and went to the elevator.