Mystery

Tom led David Natchez through the arched passageway into the First Court, saying, “I came here to see a nurse named Nancy Vetiver, who got suspended for taking care of Mike Mendenhall too well to please Dr. Milton. He was afraid of what Mendenhall would say, and he said a lot—that’s how I really learned about you.”

“Don’t go so fast,” Natchez said in the musty darkness.

They came out into the visual chaos of bars and lodging houses around the First Court. Cold moisture and a faint smell of sewage tainted the air, and a hum of voices came from the passages that led deeper into Maxwell’s Heaven, FREDO’S sign flickered on and off. “Fulton Bishop and his sister grew up in the Third Court. My grandfather built this place—it was his first big project. He’d know it was a perfect place to hide.”

“Do you remember how to get to the Second Court?” Natchez wandered out into the center of the court and looked down at the brass plaque that named Glendenning Upshaw and Maxwell Redwing.

“I think so.” Tom looked doubtfully around the square. Half a dozen crooked lanes led away into a sprawl of half-visible streets. The same laundry seemed to droop on lines between windows above them, and the same ragged men passed a different bottle back and forth in front of a lighted doorway. Flies clustered over a muddy stain a few feet from the plaque. Tom turned toward a narrow brick opening beneath an overhanging wooden room, and walked toward it until he saw the white lettering in the brick: Edgewater Trail. “This is it.”

They came out into a cobbled lane between black wooden walls that he remembered. A woman huddled against the wall when she saw them, and a child ran past screaming. The stench of excrement grew stronger. Tom pointed to a wooden flight of steps on the other side of the sluggish stream that ran down the middle of the lane. He went up to the edge of the stream and jumped across. Natchez followed him up the stairs and through echoing darkness until they emerged at the top of the matching steps that led down into the Second Court.

Wooden balconies lay across the front of the buildings on all sides, and at every corner steps went downward into arcades and intersecting narrow streets. “When I was here,” Tom said, the atmosphere of the place making him whisper, “I saw Bishop pass through. He came down these steps and went straight across the Court to that corner.”

Natchez and Tom descended the stairs and walked across the court. A few men eased out of the shadows on the walkways and watched them go. Tom paused at the top of the steps at the corner of the building where Nancy Vetiver had grown up, and went down.

He came out on a flat concrete bridge over a muddy stream. To his left, the bridge ended in steps leading down to a row of hunched brick buildings built along the low banks of the stream. An enormous black rat darted up out of a hole in the concrete and slithered over the top of the bank to disappear between two of the buildings. At the right end of the bridge, the concrete flooring became the beginning of a lane that twisted past a wooden tenement. Footsteps sounded behind them. Tom turned right.

The buildings huddled closer together. The lane divided, and Tom took the left-hand fork because the right sloped downward into a dead end where murky lodging houses loomed over an empty yard.

They walked past a barred and empty shop on the ground floor of a tenement. Women leaned out of windows and watched them pass beneath. Tom had the feeling they were circling around beneath the Second Court, and only the occasional glimpse of sky above the leaning buildings let him know that they were instead following the slope of the hill down toward the old slave quarter.

Abruptly the lane widened, and the concrete turned to brick cobbles. A broken cart leaned against a wall, which leaned against a leaning building. Two men who had been talking beside the cart vanished into a doorway. “That’s what happens when they see a cop in a place like this,” Natchez said. “I guess this must be the Third Court.”

It was a combination of the first two: wooden walkways and exterior staircases clung to the sides of the four-story tenements. Straw and broken bottles lay across the concrete before them. A peaked wooden roof covered the entire court, intensifying the gloom and the thudding of rock and roll from a basement bar with a hand-painted sign in a window at ground level that read BEER-WHISKEY. Footsteps coming toward them from the concrete lane slowed, then stopped. Natchez backed under a walkway, stood against the wall of the rear tenement, took out a pistol with a long barrel, and peered around the side of the building. Then he shook his head and shoved the pistol back into his holster. “I just want to point out,” he said in a quiet voice, “that we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble by walking around to the other side of this place.”

“How?” Tom asked.

“Because that’s where we are.” He nodded at an arched passageway like a tunnel that ran down the side of the building across from them. On the other end of the tunnel, diminished as if by a telescope looked through backwards, a car rolled downhill in bright unreal daylight. Tom sagged against the tenement wall.

They were standing far back in the shadow of one of the walkways. Both of them looked up at the bleak dark walls on the opposite side of the court. The smells of sewage and stale beer, of unwashed skin and blocked toilets, mingled with the low sounds of voices and clashing radios. In one room a girl cried out; from another Joe Ruddler bawled baseball scores. Tom felt the blood beating in his temples. His eyes stung.

“Well, you have any brilliant ideas?” Tom asked.

“I don’t exactly feel like knocking on a hundred doors,” Natchez said. “We want something that will get him out of her rooms, if that’s where he is.”

“Oh, he’s here. He’s up there somewhere, hating every second he has to be in this place.” And this, he felt with an overwhelming certainty, was true: a kind of inspiration had caused Tom to make David Natchez bring him to this place, but now that he was here, he knew that there was no other place on the island where Glendenning Upshaw would have gone. He flew by the seat of his pants, and he relied on women to solve his leftover problems. He had no friends, only people who owed him services. Tom thought that maybe Carmen Bishop was the only person in all of his grandfather’s life who had understood him.

“So let’s get him out,” Natchez said.

“Right,” Tom said. “If we just stand here shouting his name, he’ll never move. What we want is something that only my grandfather will respond to—something that wouldn’t mean anything special to everybody else up there, but that’ll make him feel like he’s being stung by a thousand bees.”

Natchez frowned and turned to Tom in the darkness beneath the walkway.

Tom smiled, though it was almost too dark for Natchez to see it. “Two thousand bees,” he said.

“Well?”

“He had von Heilitz killed because he thought nobody else could have sent him copies of Jeanine Thielman’s notes. They meant that von Heilitz had finally worked out what really happened to her.”

He felt more than saw Natchez nodding.

“So let’s convince him that someone else knew about those notes. He might recognize my voice, but he wouldn’t know yours. How do you feel about stepping out there and shouting ‘This has gone on too long’?”

Natchez said, “I’ll try anything once.” He moved out from beneath the dark shadow on the walkway, cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, “THIS HAS GONE ON TOO LONG!” He moved back—the radios still bleated and chattered, but all other voices had fallen silent. “Well, they heard me,” Natchez whispered.

Tom told him what to say next, and Natchez came out from under the walkway and yelled, “YOU WILL PAY FOR YOUR SIN!”

Someone pushed up a window, but the only other sounds were of radios, suddenly louder in the quiet. Jeanine Thielman’s words bounced off the wooden roof and echoed on the tenement walls. Tom imagined the words rolling through all of Maxwell’s Heaven, freezing the rats in their holes and waking babies, stopping the bottles in their passage from hand to hand.

“I know what you are,” Tom whispered, so softly he might have been talking to himself.

Natchez ducked out again. “I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE!”

Someone above them threw down an empty bottle of Pforzheimer beer, and it exploded against the brick cobbles. “Go away!” yelled a fuzzy male voice, and another suggested that they fuck themselves.

“You must be stopped,” Tom whispered.

“YOU MUST BE STOPPED!”

Another bottle smashed against the bricks, sending glass shrapnel across the court. More windows went up. A door slammed, and heavy footsteps came out on a wooden walkway two or three floors up in the tenement to their right. The wood creaked beneath his grandfather’s weight. Tom’s heart caught in his throat as his grandfather took another step forward: he imagined him leaning on the railing and scowling down into the grimy court, twilit in the middle of the day. His grandfather’s voice floated down: “I can’t see you. Walk out into the court, whoever you are.”

“Well, well,” Natchez whispered.

“I’m curious,” came Tom’s grandfather’s voice. “Did you come here to make a deal?”

With the random irrelevance of an orchestra tuning itself, all the other voices started speaking again. Glendenning Upshaw stepped back from the railing and began walking toward the staircase at the opposite end of the tenement. The wood creaked with every step he took. When he reached the stairs, he thumped down toward the next level. Tom counted each step, and at ten Upshaw reached the next walkway and moved to the railing again. “You won’t disappoint me, will you? After going to the trouble of finding out so much about me?” He waited. “Say something. Speak!” His voice was that of an enraged man almost succeeding in concealing his rage.

Natchez pulled Tom into the concrete passage by which they had entered the Third Court.

“Then wait for me,” Upshaw said, and began to work his way down the next flight of steps. Tom counted to six, and heard his grandfather’s slightly bowed black legs carrying his massive body down to the fifth tread of the near staircase, one flight up, of the tenement to the right of the passage where he and David Natchez stood waiting. “Still there?”

Natchez rapped his knuckles against one of the supports for the walkway above their heads.

“There was once a ridiculous man on this island.” Upshaw came down another step.

“He came into the possession of certain papers of sentimental interest to me.” Down another step.

“I have no quarrel with you, whoever you are.” Upshaw stepped on another creaking tread.

“I’m sure that we can come to an arrangement.” He came down the last two steps, and reached the walkway immediately above them. The wood groaned as he stepped forward on the walkway and looked down. “The original papers were written in 1925. The matter they referred to is no longer of any importance.” Tom heard him panting from exertion—it had been a long time since his grandfather had had to cope with stairs. He chuckled. “In fact, it was not of much importance at the time. Are you going to come out and let me see your face?”

Natchez tapped Tom’s shoulder and pointed to the topmost walkway of the tenement on the other side of the court. Deep in the shadow, a pale shape that might have been a man in a white shirt and a pair of tan trousers moved with foglike slowness toward the nearest staircase.

“You’re being foolish,” Upshaw said. “You cannot frighten me—you just came here to sell what you have.”

Tom and Natchez waited in the passage. The man in the white shirt reached the staircase and began noiselessly to move down.

“All right, I’ll do it your way,” Upshaw said. He turned away from them and stumped along the walkway to the staircase at the opposite end. “How much do you think those notes are worth? A thousand dollars apiece?” He chuckled, and reached the stairs on the other side of the next tenement and began coming down. Tom saw his white hand sliding along the railing. The vague shape of his shoulder, his white hair, came into view. He reached the bottom of the stairs and turned around. “If so, you’re sadly mistaken. They aren’t worth a hundred each to me.”

He stepped forward, and moved under the walkway. His body lost definition in the darkness and became only a black shape coming down the front of the tenement toward the passage. Tom glanced across the court and saw that the man in the white shirt had stopped on the next walkway down.

“Send the other man away,” Natchez said.

“If you like.” Upshaw stopped moving and called across the court, “Go out and wait on the street.”

The man said, “Sir?”

“Do it,” Upshaw called to him.

The man came out of the shadows and trotted down all the flights of steps and slipped into the long tunnel that led to the street.

“All right?” asked Tom’s grandfather.

“I’m going out,” Natchez whispered.

“No, he has to see me,” Tom whispered back, and moved out of the passage and stepped backward in the shadow of the walkway.

“Who is that?” Upshaw shifted forward, now letting more of his anger show itself. “Who are you?”

Tom moved an inch nearer the lighter darkness of the court. His grandfather would be able to see his body, but not his face.

Glendenning Upshaw stopped moving. Tom felt the air around him tighten, like the pressure inside his head. The black cloud of his grandfather’s body sent out a wave of shock like a flash of lightning. Two loud breaths came from him. Tom’s own chest heaved.

“To hell with you,” his grandfather said. “Von Heilitz is dead.”

Tom moved backwards away from the passage.

“What the hell is this, a charade? Some babyish trick?”

Tom moved backwards in the darkness, and saw the black cloud of his grandfather’s heavy body surge forward toward the passage where Natchez stood concealed. Another arrow had flown into his haunch, but for Tom there was none of the confusion and depression of yesterday, only a bleak satisfaction. A slanting black line of absolute shadow obliterated the top half of the old man’s body from shoulder to hip, and what was visible was only half-visible, but pain and outrage boomed toward him as his grandfather shouted, “Stand still!” and moved closer to the passage.

“I know what you are,” Tom said. He stepped backwards again, and heard doors opening in the tenements above him.

His grandfather moved past the open passage, and his head came free of the shadows of the walkway. Shadowy light fell on his white hair. His face was savage. Almost instantly, the shadow of the next walkway obliterated all but the impression of relentless moving force.

“You murdered Jeanine Thielman,” Tom said. A door slammed above him, but neither he nor the man coming toward him noticed.

“That’s very interesting,” his grandfather said.

Tom saw David Natchez slide out of the passage with his pistol upraised.

“The way I saw it,” his grandfather said, “she chose to commit suicide. Weak people do that with a terrible frequency. I’ve been surrounded by them all my life.”

“Blue Rose,” Tom said.

His grandfather sighed heavily.

“All you were was a flunky for the Redwings,” Tom said.

His grandfather stopped moving. He was a foot or two short of the point where he and Tom would see enough of each other’s faces to be recognized. “I know you, by God,” Upshaw said, and again Tom felt the moment of shock that was like an arrow piercing his grandfather’s hide.

“No, you don’t,” Tom said. “You never knew anybody at all.” He stepped out from under the walkway into the murky courtyard.

“By God,” his grandfather said. “Tom. You were hard enough to get rid of, boy, but I imagine—” His hand went into his pocket and came out with the gun Tom had seen him take from his desk drawer.

Tom’s gut went cold. He looked over his shoulder at David Natchez, who shouted, “Upshaw, put down—”

His grandfather pointed the gun at him and pulled the trigger. Fire and smoke came out of the end of the gun, and the explosion struck Tom like a blow. Mortality whizzed past his head, heating the air, and before the bullet splatted against the wall, another explosion banged into his ear drums. His grandfather had vanished into the gloom beside him, and Tom looked toward the passage and saw only empty space. He sensed a crowd of people staring down from the walkways. He turned sideways and saw what looked like the barrel of a cannon pointed at his head. His grandfather held it with arms extended, almost cross-eyed with concentration. Tom saw an index finger fat as a trout pulling on the trigger, and Natchez yelled, and the barrel jerked away from his face. It exploded again. Tom jumped backwards with the explosion in his head and saw a black hole appear in his grandfather’s head, just above the bridge of his nose. Flags of red and grey stuff flew out of the back of his head. The gun sank, and his grandfather twitched backwards and righted himself and went down on his knees, still trying to pull the trigger. A ringing clamor filled Tom’s ears like a physical substance. He was dimly aware of David Natchez walking toward him from beneath a walkway. Natchez said something that did not penetrate the molten lead filling his ears. His grandfather settled down into himself and fell foward. A muffle of sound came from Natchez, and all the heads hanging over the railings jerked back, except for that of a woman with a rag-doll face. Carmen Bishop lingered at the railing, looking as if she wanted to fly down at him, and then slowly backed away. Tom wobbled sideways and sat down.

Another muffled pillow of sound came from Natchez. Beneath the fullness in his ears, the words reached him at last. I don’t know how he missed you.

The gun didn’t pull to the left, Tom said, and felt his own words as individual, cottony wads striking his ears from the inside of his head.

Natchez looked puzzled, and Tom felt himself say, It’s an old story. He reached out and touched his grandfather’s back.

He looked back up at the walkways and Carmen Bishop screamed something down at him that disappeared entirely into the noise in his ears. “We’re going to do something with him,” he said, and this time dimly heard his own voice—tinny as an old record heard through a wall, but real words, not bubbles of pressure inside his head.

“I’ll call the station,” Natchez said in a nearly identical voice. “And I’ll send someone out to pick up von Heilitz’s body.”

Tom shook his head. “We’re going to take him with us.”

“Take him where?”

“Back to the bungalow,” Tom said. He leaned forward and picked up his grandfather’s pistol. It seemed surpassingly ugly, and heavy as an iron weight. He put it in his jacket pocket. Two men came through the long tunnel from the street, and Tom and Natchez turned to look at them as they walked into the court. One of them was the man in the white shirt, and the other, a few paces behind him, was Andres. The man in the white shirt looked down at Glendenning Upshaw’s body, glanced at Natchez, and shoved his hands in his pockets. Andres reached down, and Tom took his hand and stood up.

“You could make this a perfect day,” Natchez said, “by telling me you know where this pile of shit hid his papers and records.”

“I do know,” Tom said. “You do too.”

Natchez looked at his own pistol as if it had just been magicked into his hand, and pulled back his jacket to slip it into his holster. “Holman, go up to the third level on this side,” he said to the man in the white shirt. “Captain Bishop’s sister lives up there. I want a box of papers and journals, anything like that. Bishop’s finished.”

“I can see that,” the man said, and began moving toward the stairs. The woman with the rag-doll face was peering down at them again.

“No,” Tom said. “That’s not where they are. My grandfather stopped somewhere on the way here. He gave them to somebody for safekeeping.”

“Who was that?” Natchez asked.

Tom managed to smile at him, and saw understanding gradually cross Natchez’s face.

“You want me to go up?” the other policeman asked.

“No,” Natchez said. “If you want to stay out of jail, go home and keep your mouth shut. I have some business to take care of with this boy here, and then I’ll call you. I’ll pick up the papers, and then you and I are going to take two drunken shit-heads to the Elm Cove station and arrest them for the murder of Lamont von Heilitz.”

The other man swallowed.

“We were never here,” Natchez said. “Is that right?” he asked Tom.

“That’s right,” Tom said.

The other policeman faded away toward the long passage out to the street, and Natchez leaned down to try to pick up Glendenning Upshaw’s body. After a second, Andres bent to help him.