Mystery brt-2

by Peter Straub

  “Where don’t I belong?” Tom asked.

  “You don’t belong anywhere!” Buddy exploded. “Goddamn it! You know how long I’ve been going out with Sarah? Three years! We have a whole goddamned relationship!”

  Tom smiled, and Buddy’s eyes seemed to shrink within their sockets. “Don’t you get it? Sarah belongs to me. Sarah is mine. You don’t have anything to do with her.”

  “You can’t own other people,” Tom said. “People make up their minds by themselves.”

  Buddy reared back. “Is that what you think? You ought to know better, considering your family.”

  “Lay off my family, you spoiled, lazy, indifferent shithead,” Tom said, stung.

  Buddy pressed on into what he perceived as Tom’s weakness. “We own old man Upshaw, Pasmore. You think he does anything we don’t know about? Your grandfather belongs to us. There’s no umbrella over you.”

  Tom blinked, but did not react in any other way.

  “You want me to explain your problem to you?”

  “Can you?”

  Buddy waved his hand before his face as if scattering a cloud of gnats. “You problem is, you don’t know the rules. Because you don’t know the rules, you don’t know the right way to act. I’m a Redwing. Let’s start with that. Nothing happens up here unless it’s okayed by us. The second thing is, you don’t mess with another guy’s girlfriend. That is an error. If you expect me to be civilized about this, you don’t know me, because I don’t intend to be civilized about it.”

  “It’s funny,” Tom said, “but I guess I never did expect you to be civilized, Buddy.”

  “You fucking twerp!” Buddy roared. “You see these guys here? They work for me! If I ask them to do something to you, they’ll do it! But I don’t need them to get rid of you—I can do that myself.”

  Tom stepped backwards, shaking with fear, anger, and distaste—an intense and unpleasant odor, of yeast and secret dirt, seemed to float out of Buddy’s pores. “The dumbest thing you could have done was to try to send me home in a cast. Did you think that would make you irresistible?”

  “Jesus, what bullshit,” Buddy said. “Could somebody tell me what this guy is talking about?” He looked over his shoulder at Jerry.

  “He’s crazy,” Jerry said.

  “He’s all fucked up,” said Kip Carson, sounding faintly admiring.

  “What bullshit,” Buddy repeated in a wondering voice. “This guy can’t say anything that isn’t one hundred percent pure bullshit.” He swayed back and forth, swinging his thick short arms. “Didn’t I just say that I don’t need anybody else to take care of you? Why do you think I brought you here? I’m telling you right now to stay away from Sarah Spence. Whatever you think about her is wrong. Do you understand that? Maybe she played with you a little bit—she could do that. But I understand her a lot better than you do, believe me.”

  “I don’t think you understand her at all,” Tom said.

  “She’s trying to make me jealous,” Buddy said. “She knows I see a couple girls at Arizona, and she wanted to get back at me. And it worked! I’m jealous, okay? I’m pissed off—but you don’t want me pissed off at you, Pasmore.”

  “Why, what are you going to do?” Tom asked.

  Buddy shoved a forefinger into Tom’s chest. “I’ll leave you in pieces. Is that clear enough for you? You’re so insignificant, I shouldn’t have to take the trouble, but if you push me, I’ll take you apart.”

  “I know what you should do,” Tom said, pushed past self-control. “Tell yourself she isn’t good enough for you. You’re going to be saying that sooner or later, so why not start now? Tell yourself you’re lucky you found out in time.”

  Nappy snickered. Buddy balled his fists and grimaced and swung a roundhouse punch at Tom’s head. Tom ducked out of the way. Buddy swung with his other arm and missed again. Tom stepped back and took a quick look at Jerry and the others, who were doing nothing but looking on impassively. Buddy came flat-footed toward Tom and shot out his right hand. Instinctively, Tom stepped inside the blow, and hit him hard in the stomach. It was like ramming his fist into a bowl of oatmeal. Buddy clapped both hands to his stomach and sank to his knees.

  “Oh, hell,” Jerry said. He flapped his hand at Nappy, and the two of them got Buddy up on his feet and helped him toward the door. Kip Carson set down the can of Coke and followed them outside. Tom wiped his face with his hands and tried to stop trembling. He went through the open wooden door and pushed aside the screen. Jerry Hasek stood on the top step with his hands on his hips, and Kip was floating uncertainly alongside the car. Buddy struggled to breathe as Robbie and Nappy opened the Lincoln’s passenger door and got him inside. Kip Carson climbed in the back and waited. “You talk too much,” Jerry said from the top step.

  “So does he,” Tom said.

  Tom spent the rest of the morning alone. He called Sarah, but no one answered in their lodge. He knocked on her door. No one responded, and he went down past the compound. The Lincoln and the Cadillac were both gone. He walked all the way around the lake, hearing nothing but birds and insects and an occasional fish slapping the water. Tom felt like the last person left on earth—the whole Redwing caravan had moved on. When he came back around Roddy Deepdale’s lodge to his own, he changed into his bathing suit and swam until his muscles felt tired and relaxed.

  At the club, Marcello sat beneath a lamp on a pale couch, reading a comic book. He stood when Tom entered, yawned, and strolled through a bleached wooden door marked OFFICE. Tom went upstairs to the empty dining room. The elderly waiter he had seen that morning got up from a bar stool and led him to a table near the bandshell.

  “Where is everybody?” Tom asked.

  “They don’t tell me where they go,” the waiter said, and placed the enormous menu in his hands.

  After lunch, he took a novel out on the deck, and had just sat down on one of the hard wooden chairs when he heard the telephone ringing in his grandfather’s study.

  “So what happened?” Sarah asked him.

  “Where were you?” he asked back. “I called your place, but nobody answered. There wasn’t even anybody at the club.”

  “We all went to the White Bear. Ralph and Katinka were very disgruntled all through lunch, though they did their best not to show it, and Buddy told me that you said he was spoiled, lazy, and indifferent. Did you say that?”

  “I couldn’t help it,” Tom said.

  “You got two out of three. He’s certainly spoiled and lazy, but I wouldn’t call him indifferent.”

  “Did he yell at you?”

  “He sort of yelled in whispers. He didn’t want his parents to hear. I was at a table with him and Kip, and my parents were at another table with his parents and his aunt. Buddy usually watches himself around his parents, and I think he has to be on his good manners at the White Bear for a while.”

  “What did you tell him the other night?”

  “Just that I wanted him to stop assuming that we were going to get married. I said that I liked you, too, and I said I wasn’t sure I wanted to always live on Mill Walk. It was pretty uncomfortable.”

  “You didn’t break off with him.”

  “I have to spend the whole summer here, Tom. I thought I was pretty good, actually. I told him that being a Redwing is a career, and I wasn’t sure it was the one I wanted.”

  “I told him he should decide that you’re not good enough for him.”

  “I like that,” she said, meaning she did not. “Anyhow, will you please tell me what happened, please?”

  He described as much as he could remember of the scene between himself and Buddy, except for the way it ended.

  “Well, well. The compound is almost empty right now. So if you want to see where the bodyguards live, this is the time. The only person in the place should be Aunt Kate, and she takes a long nap every afternoon.”

  Tom said he’d meet her in front of her lodge.

  “I suppose I must be crazy,” she said, and hung up.

/>   She stepped out from between the oaks as he walked toward her lodge. He went down the track to join her. She pulled him back between the big oaks and tilted her face toward his and gave him a long kiss. “I had to get out. My mother knows that something went wrong between Buddy and me, and I couldn’t stand the interrogation anymore. I called you when she went upstairs to wash her hair.”

  They walked across the narrow parking area in front of the compound, and Sarah opened the door in the tall fence. “Here we go.”

  Gravel paths led to three highly ornamented wooden houses with long porches, gables, and dormer windows on the third floor. The houses were so perfectly maintained they looked artificial. Banks of flowers and bright green grass grew between the gravel paths. The whole thing looked like a toyland, like Disneyland. “Well, here you are,” Sarah said. “This is it. The holy of holies. The one on Mill Walk looks just like it, except the houses are newer and they’re not all alike.”

  Sarah led him up the steps of the lodge nearest the compound’s lakeside wall. “I’d better stay out here in case they come home early,” she said. “I’ll bang on the door, or something.”

  “I won’t be long,” Tom said, and went inside.

  The lodge smelled of cigarettes and grease. Discarded clothes and open magazines lay on the floor of the main downstairs room, and the kitchen was a mound of crusty dishes and empty beer bottles. Tom walked up the steps and peered into the bedrooms. Blue jeans, socks, and T-shirts covered the unmade beds and the bare floors. In the largest of the three bedrooms, a portable television and a tape deck stood on a low table. Tom opened the dresser drawers and found underwear, clean white shirts still in the dry cleaner’s wrappings, and clean socks. On a shelf in the closet above two grey suits he saw a stack of pornographic magazines and, in a row of books about concentration camps, Hitler, Nazis, and famous criminals, four tattered paperback books called The Torturer’s Library.

  Pictures from muscle magazines decorated Nappy’s room. Crumpled O Henry and Twinkies wrappers lay around the bed. Robbie’s room was a sty of beer bottles, dirty plates, and wadded-up tissues. A cheap portable record player like the one in Gloria Pasmore’s room sat on the floor next to a stack of forty-fives and a full-length mirror where Robbie could watch himself pretend to play guitar.

  Tom walked downstairs and went outside.

  “I never realized that being lookout was such a tricky job,” Sarah said. “I’m sure that several birds gave me very suspicious looks. My hands were clenched so tight I practically gave myself bruises. Did you find anything?”

  “About what I expected,” Tom said. “A lot of Vivaldi records and books by T.S. Eliot. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Now would you mind telling me why you wanted to do this?”

  “I was looking for—”

  A car crunched onto the gravel of the little parking area beyond the fence. Car doors slammed shut. Voices floated toward them. Tom and Sarah were in the middle of the compound, halfway to the gate.

  “Whoops,” Sarah said.

  The door in the fence opened, and Katinka Redwing came through, immediately followed by her husband. Both of them froze at the sight of Tom and Sarah.

  “Oh, hi!” Sarah said. “I was just showing Tom what the compound looks like. It’s so beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Beautiful,” Tom said. “So peaceful. I can really see why you love it.”

  Both Redwings stared at them with implacable faces.

  “Well,” Sarah said. “Tell Buddy I’m looking forward to our drive this afternoon.”

  They smiled and walked past the staring Redwings.

  Outside the tall fence, Jerry Hasek leaned against the Cadillac, smoking. When Tom and Sarah appeared through the door, he took his cigarette out of his mouth and stared at them and bit his lower lip. His jaws worked as if he were chewing gum.

  “See you later, Jerry,” Sarah said. She and Tom walked across the gravel, and turned onto the path.

  “Yeah,” Jerry said. “I’ll see you later.”

  At ten minutes to four Tom was standing back in the trees near the rank of mailboxes, and after a little while a blue and white mail van pulled up before the boxes. Joe Truehart jumped out and began sliding advertising circulars, catalogues, and magazines into the Redwings’ boxes. Tom walked out of hiding and gave him another long letter to Lamont von Heilitz. The mailman said he would take care of it, and pushed it into his back pocket. Tom walked back down the long hill and went back to his lodge. He read for half an hour, and then walked over to the Deepdale lodge to see Kate Redwing.

  Buzz opened the door and said, “Come on in!” His bathing suit was only a narrow strip of blue cloth, and his skin glistened with oil. A red polka dot bandanna was tied around his neck. His perfect teeth shone white. He stepped backwards, and Tom followed him into a long, loftlike room with oatmeal-colored couches and chairs, cut flowers in glass vases, a piano with framed photographs, and creamy yellow rectangular rugs on the polished wooden floor. A big stone fireplace stood against the back wall. Kate Redwing stood up and smiled from one end of the long couch facing him.

  “Kate is having a cup of tea, would you care for one? I can give you a Coke or a 7-Up, or any kind of drink, if you’d prefer.”

  “Tea would be great,” Tom said.

  “Roddy and I are working on our tans out on the deck, and Kate says the two of you want to talk about graves and worms and epitaphs, so I’ll just give you your tea and go back out, if that’s all right.” He put his hands on his narrow hips and gave Tom a humorous inspection. “Have you completely recovered from your tumble the other day? You look as if you have.”

  “I think it’s been one long tumble ever since,” Tom said, and Buzz laughed and walked into the kitchen to boil up the water.

  “Come sit next to me,” Kate said. “Are you really all right?”

  He walked around to her, nodding. Through the window wall on the far end of the room, Tom waved to Roddy Deepdale, who was lying back in a recliner. He wore the same nearly nonexistent kind of bathing suit as Buzz, and his chest and shoulders were turning a smooth, uniform gold. A brown plastic bottle of suntan lotion and a pile of books stood on the deck beside the recliner. Roddy propped himself up on one elbow and waved back. The kettle whistled in the kitchen.

  “You’ve succeeded in stirring up my nephew and his wife, at any rate,” Kate said. “There was some kind of unpleasantness between you and Buddy this morning, wasn’t there? Of course everybody’s terribly tactful, but I don’t suppose you’ll be able to keep me entertained at any more family dinners.”

  Tom said she probably wouldn’t be able to entertain him, either.

  “Maybe not at dinners, anyhow,” she said, and he knew that this wonderful old woman was offering him her friendship. He said he supposed there were other times of the day.

  “Well, exactly. Ralph doesn’t think much of Roddy and Buzz either, but we never saw any reason for that to interfere with our enjoyment of each other. The world doesn’t run according to the rules of a few Redwings.” She patted his hand. “I gather that all this has to do with that beautiful young Spence girl. Of course I think it would be a shame for her to get engaged to my grand-nephew. On top of everything else, she’s far too young. Ralph and Katinka will get over the shock sooner than you think, and before you know it Buddy will discover some other girl who will turn out to be much more appropriate. You should just be discreet and get as much out of this summer as you can.”

  “So that’s what this talk is all about,” Buzz said, returning with a steaming cup of tea. “Now I know I’d better get out of the way!” He set the tea down on the glass coffee table before them, and padded out through a side door. A minute later, he appeared on the deck, moving past the window toward a lounge chair.

  “Does Buzz have a job?” Tom asked.

  “He’s a doctor.” Kate Redwing smiled at him. “An excellent pediatrician, I hear. He had some trouble at the start of his career, when he worked with an
important doctor, and he’s had some rough patches, but he’s doing very well now.” She frowned into her cup, and then looked at him with bright lively eyes. “But that’s not what you wanted to talk to me about. Weren’t you interested in what happened during my first summer up here? When that poor woman was killed?”

  “Didn’t you and your fiancé find her body?” Tom asked.

  “I suspect you know very well we did.” She smiled at him again. “I wonder why you want to know about all this.”

  “Well,” Tom said, “my mother got much worse during that summer, and I’m sure the murder had a lot to do with the trouble she had.”

  “Ah,” said the old woman.

  “And I’ve been talking about Mrs. Thielman’s murder with Lamont von Heilitz ever since I met him.”

  “So he got you interested in it.”

  “I guess you could say that. I think there’s a lot that’s still unknown, or that was never explained, and the more I can find out …” He let the sentence go unfinished. “Maybe I’m not saying this right, but I’m interested in Mill Walk, and that murder involved a whole lot of important people who ran things on the island.”

  “I’m certainly glad not to be having this conversation at the compound. But I’ll confess that it’s fascinating. Do you really think that Lamont might have missed something?”

  “Probably nothing important.” He looked at the fireplace and saw the bare, slightly paler rectangle spot on the creamy wall above it where the portrait had hung.

  “Well, I can tell you one thing. Everything about a murder is probably surprising, because all of a sudden you learn about other people’s secrets, but it really was a surprise to me that Jeanine Thielman had been seeing Anton Goetz. And if it hadn’t been for those curtains—the curtains that were wrapped around her when Jonathan found her underwater—I don’t know if I would have believed that he had anything to do with it. That and the fact that he killed himself, of course. But the curtains were really damning, I thought.”