Mystery brt-2

by Peter Straub

  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 nobl
esse 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.

  In Tom’s room, they sat six feet from the bed in high-backed wooden chairs on opposite sides of a dark wooden table on the surface of which a traveling musician had once scratched PD 6/6/58. Tom reached the end of the article, and immediately began reading it again. The headline said: GLENDENNING UPSHAW’S GRANDSON DEAD IN RESORT FIRE.

  A fire of unknown origin claimed the life of Thomas Upshaw Pasmore early yesterday morning. Seventeen years old and the son of Mr. and Mrs. Victor Pasmore of Eastern Shore Road, Pasmore had spent the first weeks of the summer at the lodge on exclusive Eagle Lake, Wisconsin, belonging to his grandfather, Glendenning Upshaw.…

  The fourth-floor room stretched away from him, lighter than the lobby, but at seven in the morning filled with a twilight murk that obscured the painting above the bed. The other copy of the Eyewitness rattled, and Tom looked across the table to see Lamont von Heilitz folding the paper to read an article on the inside of the front page.

  “When did you first begin to think that my grandfather murdered Jeanine Thielman?” he asked.

  Von Heilitz snapped the paper into a neat rectangle, folded it in half, and set it down between them.

  “When one of his employees bought the house on The Sevens. How do you feel, Tom? Must be unsettling, reading about your own death.”

  “I don’t know. Confused. Tired. I don’t see what we can do. We’re back on Mill Walk, where even the police work for the people like my grandfather.”

  “Not all of them. David Natchez is going to help us, and we are going to help him. We have a rare opportunity. One of the men at the center of power on this island committed a murder with his own hands. Your grandfather is not a man to choose to suffer in silence, any more than the man who killed my parents. If he’s charged with murder, he’ll bring the whole house down with him.”

  “But how do we get him charged with murder?”

  “We get him to confess. Preferably to David Natchez.”

  “He’ll never confess.”
<
br />   “You forget that we have two weapons. One of them is you.”

  “What’s the other one?”

  “Those notes you saw in Barbara Deane’s room. They weren’t written to her, of course. She found them in the lodge when Glen sent her over to clean up. He probably left them on top of his desk—or maybe he even showed them to her. He knew that she’d sympathize with anyone falsely accused. He might even have said that the notes referred to his wife’s death. I suppose Barbara got a few anonymous notes herself, back when the paper ran those stories about her.”

  “But maybe that’s what they were—notes someone sent to her.”

  “I don’t think she would have kept them, in that case. She would have burned them. She kept these because they troubled her. I also think she planned to show them to you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when you turned up, asking a lot of questions about Jeanine Thielman and Anton Goetz, you stirred up all the doubts she had about your grandfather. She didn’t want to think he killed Jeanine, not after everything he’d done for her, but she was too smart not to wonder about it. He brought Gloria to her before the body was discovered—when nobody but the murderer knew that Jeanine was dead. I think Barbara was very relieved when I stumbled in and found Mr. Goetz hanged in his lodge.”

  Von Heilitz leaned back against his chair. A white stubble gleamed on his face, and his eyes were far back in his head. “Afterwards, people all over the mainland asked me to solve murders. I didn’t want to admit I was wrong any more than Barbara Deane did. Anton Goetz had put me on my way.”

  “Could we reconstruct what really happened?” Tom asked. “There’s a lot I still don’t understand.”

  “I bet you do, though.” Von Heilitz straightened up and rubbed a hand over his face. “Let’s say that Glen knew immediately that Jeanine Thielman had written him those notes. She was threatening him with some kind of exposure. She knew something—something really damaging. Her husband was a business rival of Glen’s, and Goetz might have told her more than he should have about your grandfather’s business. Or, as I think, it might have been another kind of exposure. At any rate, she was telling Glen to stop whatever he was doing. He left a noisy party at the club—I think he had set up this meeting for the day before he was supposed to go to Florida, but I don’t think he planned to kill her. He came to her lodge. She was waiting for him on her deck. He confronted her. Whatever she knew about was serious enough to ruin him. Jeanine refused to cooperate with him, or to believe his denials, and turned her back to go inside. He saw the gun her husband left on the table, picked it up, shot and missed, and then he shot again. Everybody else at the lake except Anton Goetz was at the club, having a good time dancing to a loud band—do you know how music carries, up there?”