Mystery

Hunger awakened him at ten. He left the bed and looked into the next room. Von Heilitz had not returned. Tom showered and put on clean underclothes and socks from the suitcase. He dressed in a pale pink shirt and blue linen suit he remembered from his first visit to von Heilitz’s house. Before he buttoned the double-breasted vest, he knotted a dark blue tie around his neck. In von Heilitz’s clothes, he walked back into the other room, thinking that the detective might have come in and gone out again while he was asleep, but there was no explanatory note on the table or the bed.

The owner of the pawnshop was pushing up the metal grille, and the man in the white shirt, like von Heilitz, had not returned.

Tom sat on the end of his bed, almost dizzy with worry. It seemed to him that he would have to stay in this little room forever. His stomach growled. He took out his wallet and counted his money—fifty-three dollars. How long could he stay at the St. Alwyn on fifty-three dollars? Five days? A week? If I go downstairs and eat, he’ll be here when I come back, Tom thought, and let himself out into the hall.

The day clerk rolled his eyes when Tom asked if any messages had been left for him, and laboriously looked over his shoulder at a rank of empty boxes. “Does it look to you like there are any messages?” Tom bought a thick copy of the Eyewitness.

Tom went into Sinbad’s Cavern and ate scrambled eggs and bacon while a hunchback mopped spilled beer off the wooden floor. The paper said nothing about the fire at Eagle Lake or Jerry Hasek and his partners. A paragraph on the society page told Mill Walk that Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Redwing had decided to spend the rest of the summer at Tranquility, their beautiful estate in Venezuela, where they expected to be entertaining many of their friends during the coming months. Tranquility had its own eighteen-hole golf course, both an indoor and an outdoor pool, a tennis court, a thirteenth-century stained glass window Katinka Redwing had purchased in France, and a private library of eighteen thousand rare books. It also housed the famous Redwing collection of South American religious art. The street door opened, and Tom looked over his shoulder to see the same two policemen who had been there the day before easing their bellies up to the bar. “Usual,” one of them said, and the barman put a dark bottle of Pusser’s rum and two shot glasses in front of them. “Here’s to another perfect day,” one of the cops said, and Tom turned back to his eggs, hearing the clink of the shot glasses meeting.

He went back to the lobby and climbed the stairs, praying that he would find the old man in his room, pacing impatiently between the bed and the window, demanding to know where he had gone. Tom came down the hall and put his key in the lock. Please. He turned the key and swung the door open. Please. He was looking into an empty room. The food in his stomach turned into hair and brick dust. He walked inside and leaned against the door. Then he moved to the connecting door—this room, too, was empty. Fighting off the demon of panic, Tom went to the closet and put his hand in the pocket of the suit he had worn the day before. He found the card, and went to the table and dialed Andres’s number.

A woman answered, and when Tom asked to speak to Andres, said that he was still asleep.

“This is an emergency,” Tom said. “Would you please wake him up?”

“He worked all night long, Mister, it’ll be an emergency if he don’t get his rest.” She hung up.

Tom dialed the number again, and the woman said, “Look, I told you—”

“It’s about Mr. von Heilitz,” Tom said.

“Oh, I see,” she said, and put down the telephone. A few minutes later, a thick voice said, “Start talking, and you better make it good.”

“This is Tom Pasmore, Andres.”

“Who? Oh. Lamont’s friend.”

“Andres, I’m very worried about Lamont. He went out to a meeting with a policeman early last night, and he never showed up for the meeting, and he’s still not back.”

“You got me up for that? Don’t you know Lamont disappears all the time? Why do you think they call him the Shadow, man? Just wait for him, he’ll turn up.”

“I waited up all night,” Tom said. “Andres, he told me he’d be back.”

“Maybe that’s what he wanted you to think.” It was like talking to Hobart Ellington.

Tom did not say anything, and finally Andres yawned and said, “Okay, what do you want me to do about it?”

“I want to go to his house,” Tom said.

Andres sighed. “All right. But give me an hour. I have to make a pot of coffee before I do anything else.”

“An hour?”

“Read a book,” Andres said.

Tom asked him to pick him up outside the entrance of Sinbad’s Cavern at eleven-thirty.

Beside the sewing machines and the row of tenor saxophones with necks curved like the top of Jeanine Thielman’s capital T’s, a fiftyish man in a white shirt with rolled sleeves leaned against the wall and drew on a cigarette while looking at the entrance to the St. Alwyn through his sunglasses. Tom backed away from the window and paced around the room. He understood why people tore their hair out, why they bit their nails, why they banged their heads against walls. These activities weren’t brilliant, but they kept your mind off your anxieties.

Then an idea struck him—maybe it was not brilliant either, but it would help fill the time until Andres came. And it would answer the question he had failed to ask Kate Redwing, back when he had thought his most serious problem was getting through lonely meals at the Eagle Lake clubhouse. He sat down and picked up the telephone—and nearly did start chewing on his fingernails, from sheer doubt of the rightness of what he intended to do. He thought of Esterhaz pulling on his bottle, seeing phantoms all around him, and of a real detective named Damrosch, who had killed himself, and dialed information and asked for a telephone number.

Without giving himself time to reconsider, he dialed the number.

“Hello,” said a voice that brought back an avenue of trees and the touch of cool water against his skin.

“Buzz, this is Tom Pasmore,” he said.

There was a moment of startled silence before Buzz said, “I don’t suppose you’ve seen the papers. Or is this a very long distance call?”

“Someone else died in the fire, and I came back to the island with Lamont von Heilitz. But nobody else knows I’m alive, Buzz, and I want to ask you not to tell anybody. It’s important. Everybody will know in a couple of days, but until then—”

“I won’t tell anybody, if you want to stay dead. Well, I might tell Roddy—he felt as bad as I did. In fact, I can hardly believe I’m talking to you! I called your house to speak to your mother, but Bonaventure Milton answered, and I knew he wouldn’t let me say anything to her.…” Buzz inhaled and exhaled a couple of times. “Frankly, I’m reeling. I’m so glad you’re alive! Roddy and I saw the article in the paper, and it reminded us of those times you were nearly injured, and we wondered—you know—”

“Yes,” Tom said.

“My God. Whose body did they find, if it wasn’t yours?”

“It was Barbara Deane.”

“Oh, heavens. Of course. And you came back with Lamont? I didn’t even know that you knew him.”

“He knows everybody,” Tom said.

“Tom,” Buzz said. “You got our portrait back! I don’t know how you did it, but you were brilliant, and Roddy and I are forever in your debt. The Eagle Lake police called last night to say that it’s safe. Is there anything in the world I can do for you?”

“There is one thing. This is going to sound funny, and maybe you’ll think it isn’t any of my business.”

“Try me.”

“Kate Redwing mentioned something to me about your first job.”

“Ah.” Buzz was silent for a moment. “And you were curious about it—about what happened.”

“Yes,” Tom said.

“Did she say I was working with Boney Milton?”

“She just said it was an important doctor, and something reminded me of it a few minutes ago.”

Buzz hesitated again. “Well, I—” He laughed. “This is a little awkward for me. But I could tell you sort of the bare bones of the thing, I suppose, without violating anybody’s confidentiality. I used to take home Boney’s files at night, in order to catch up with the patient histories. I was a pediatrician, of course, so at first I just read the files of the kids I was seeing, but then later I started reading the files on their parents too, so I could have the whole family history in mind when I saw the kid. I had the idea that what happened to the parents played some kind of role in their kids’ lives—Boney didn’t think much of this idea, which is typical of him, by the way, but he didn’t mind much, and I was always tactful when I noticed that he had missed something, or goofed something up. Anyhow, one time I made a mistake, and brought home the file of one of the patients Boney kept for himself, and I thought I saw some classic indications of real trouble, if you see what I mean. Vaginal warts, vaginal bleeding, and a couple of other things that at the time should at least have called for further investigation and were probably an indicator for psychiatric counseling. Do you see what I’m talking about? This was in the woman’s childhood. Really it could only mean one thing. I can’t be more specific, Tom. Anyhow, I said something about it to Boney, and he hit the ceiling. I was out on my ear, and that’s why I don’t have any patients at Shady Mount.”

“Did you know a policeman named Damrosch?”

“You are digging into things, aren’t you? No, not really. I knew of him, and I would have recognized him if I’d seen him on the street. The period I’m talking about was around the time of those Blue Rose murders, though.”

“After the first one?”

“After the first two, I think. I was supposed to be the third, as I guess you know by now. Scarcely my favorite memory. Lamont must have told you about my connection to all that.”

Tom said that he had.

“Of course there’s no connection between my encounter with a maniac and Boney’s throwing me out of his practice—I’m still not convinced that Damrosch was the person who attacked me, but I can tell you one thing—I’m damn sure it wasn’t Boney!”

“No,” Tom said, though at this moment almost anything would have seemed possible to him.

They said good-bye a few seconds later. Tom jittered around the room, thinking about what Buzz had told him, and then could no longer stand the tension of being alone, and let himself out into the hallway and walked downstairs to the bar and grill. He drank two Cokes and stared out the window past the flashing neon scimitar. A battered red taxi slid up to the curb.