Mystery brt-2

by Peter Straub

  Von Heilitz strode diagonally across the street, came up on the curb just past the steps where the women sat, and turned beneath a gilt sign reading ELLINGTON’S ALLSORTS AND NOTIONS into the entrance of a dark little shop. Tom caught the door behind him, and a bell tinkled as he walked in.

  Von Heilitz was already moving quickly down an aisle stocked with bottles of hot sauce, canned salmon, cat food, and boxes of cereal with names Tom had never seen in his life—Delilah’s Own and Mother Sugar—to a shelf with ballpoint pens, pads of paper, and boxes of envelopes. Von Heilitz picked up a pad of yellow paper and six boxes of variously colored envelopes, swung around and passed them to Tom, and whirled away into another aisle.

  “I thought you said two thousand,” Tom said.

  “I said it would feel like two thousand,” von Heilitz called from the next aisle.

  Tom rounded the top of the aisle and saw him swoop down on a loaf of bread, a bag of potato chips, a wrapped pound of cheddar cheese, a container of margarine, a long salami, a box of crackers, cans, bottles, bags—half of these things he tossed to Tom, and the rest he piled in his arms.

  “What’s all this food for?”

  “Sustenance,” the old man said. “What is food usually for?”

  When both of them were carrying so much that the stacks of containers threatened to fall out of their arms, von Heilitz came around the last aisle and unceremoniously dumped everything he was carrying on a scarred wooden counter. A small bald man with toffee-colored skin beamed at him from the other side of the counter.

  “Hobart, my dear old friend,” von Heilitz said, “this is a close friend of mine, Tom Pasmore.”

  Tom put down his groceries, and the little man grabbed his hand. “Lamont, he looks like you! I declare it! I think he must be your nephew!”

  “We use the same tailor.” He gave a twinkling glance toward Tom. “Do you think I could use your back room tonight?”

  “Tonight, tomorrow, any time.” The shopkeeper snatched at von Heilitz’s hand and pumped it.

  Hobart added up the total on a scrap of paper and began putting their goods into bags while von Heilitz counted out bills on the counter. “Someone else will be joining you, Lamont?”

  “One other man. Athletic-looking, with dark hair. In his late thirties.”

  “What time?” He gave a heavy bag to Tom with a conspirator’s wink.

  “Ten-thirty, eleven o’clock, around then.”

  Hobart filled the second bag and handed it to von Heilitz. “The lights will be off.”

  Von Heilitz marched off through the door, saying, “Thank you.”

  Hobart said, “He is a very great man,” and Tom, following the detective, said, “I know!” He came out into the shower of blinding light. Von Heilitz had already carried his shopping bag halfway across the street. Tom stepped down from the curb into the shadow of the St. Alwyn Hotel. The two young women in bathrobes were sitting in the police car with the policemen who had been in the bar.

  “Hurry along,” von Heilitz said, holding open the door of Sinbad’s Cavern. “We have notes to write, if we want to make today’s delivery.”

  “Can you remember the exact words she used?” von Heilitz asked him. “For a second anyhow, we want him to see Jeanine Thielman standing right in front of him, pointing her finger at him.”

  On the other side of the table with its scratched-in initials, Tom sat with the old man’s pen poised over a clean sheet of paper. I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE, he wrote. “That was on the first one, and then there was another phrase.”

  “Didn’t the second note have two phrases too?”

  Tom nodded.

  “Then write down all four phrases, in any order, as well as you can remember them, and we’ll put them together the right way.”

  “Okay,” Tom said. Beneath the first, he wrote, THIS HAS GONE ON TOO LONG. Beneath that, he wrote, YOU MUST BE STOPPED; beneath that, YOU MUST PAY FOR YOUR SINS. He looked at the list of phrases. “That’s pretty much right. Hold on.” He crossed out the second MUST and wrote WILL above it. “That’s better.”

  “The first one said ‘I know what you are,’ and …?”

  “ ‘… and you have to be stopped.’ That’s right.” Tom drew a line between the first and third phrases. “So the second note said, ‘This has gone on too long’ and ‘You will pay for your sins.’ ” He connected these two with a line.

  “Try it like that, and see how it looks,” von Heilitz said.

  On the same sheet of paper, Tom wrote:

  I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE YOU MUST BE STOPPED

  THIS HAS GONE ON TOO LONG YOU WILL PAY FOR

  YOUR SINS

  “Does that look right?”

  “I think so.” Tom stared down at the page, trying to remember the words in rusty ink on the stiff yellow paper.

  “I know what you are, and you have to be stopped,” von Heilitz said.

  “ ‘I know what you are, and …’ ” Tom looked up at von Heilitz’s face, frowned, and added a comma and the word and to the first note. Then crossed out must and wrote have to above it.

  I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE, AND YOU HAVE TO BE STOPPED.

  “That’s it,” Tom said. “How did you know that?”

  “You told me,” von Heilitz said. “You said exactly those words, just now.” He smiled. “Try to remember if there was anything special about the printing, and write out four or five separate copies. I have to make a couple of phone calls.”

  He stood up and left the room, closing the connecting door behind him. Tom tore another page off the pad and stared at it for a moment, then stood up and leaned on the window with his elbows, looking down at the curved necks of the saxophones and the intricate black shapes of the sewing machines in the pawnshop window. Tom closed his eyes and saw two yellow pieces of paper on the bottom of the inlaid wooden box.

  He remembered taking them out, unfolding them, and putting them on top of the pile of clippings. He saw his hands holding the damning notes, the creamy yellow of the paper. The words leapt up at him. SIN.

  Tom crossed a capital T with the curve in the neck of a tenor saxophone. SIN, with an angular, slanting S.

  By the time Lamont von Heilitz came back Tom had written out four versions of each note on separate pieces of paper. The old man walked around the table to look down at what he had done. He laid a hand on Tom’s shoulder. “You think you’ve done it?”

  “They’re as close as I can come.”

  “Then let’s get the envelopes ready,” von Heilitz said. He moved to the other chair, put the boxes of envelopes on the table, and took out eight envelopes in different colors. He dipped back into the bag for two ballpoint pens. “You address half, and I’ll do the others. Print your grandfather’s name and address on each, but vary the printing each time. We want him to open all these letters.”

  He took two versions of each note, and said, “The one about paying for his sin—it was sin, by the way, and not sins?”

  “I’m sure it was.”

  “Good. I think that was the second one he got, don’t you? We don’t want to get them mixed up. He should get four of the first note today, and the other four tomorrow.”

  Tom addressed four envelopes to Mr. Glendenning Upshaw, Bobby Jones Trail, Founders Club, Mill Walk in varying styles of printing, inserted the notes, sealed them, and put them in separate piles. Von Heilitz added two envelopes to each pile, and looked at his watch. “Two minutes,” he said.

  “What happens in two minutes?”

  “Our mailman arrives.” Von Heilitz put his hands behind his head, stretched out his legs, and closed his eyes. Down on the street, a middle-aged man in sunglasses and a white short-sleeved shirt walked past the pawnshop and leaned against the façade of The Home Plate. He slapped a cigarette from a pack and dipped his head toward the flame of a lilghter. He breathed out a cloud of smoke the color of milk and raised his head. Tom backed away from the window.

  “See anything?” The old man’s eyes were still closed.
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br />   “Just a guy looking at the front of the hotel.”

  Von Heilitz nodded. An Ostend’s Market truck crept down Calle Drosselmayer behind half a dozen girls on bicycles. The back of the truck gradually moved past the shop window and The Home Plate. The woman in the yellow dress came out of the bar, dragging behind her a man in a plaid shirt. The man in the sunglasses was gone.

  Von Heilitz said, “Enter Andres,” and a soft double knock came from the door.

  Tom laughed.

  “You doubt?” Von Heilitz drew in his legs, and stood up and went to the door. A second later, he ushered the driver into Tom’s room.

  Andres tossed him a roll of stamps in a cellophane wrapper. “So—want me to mail some letters for you?” He wandered over to the table, where the old man was removing the stamps from their container and sticking them on the letters.

  Von Heilitz gave him a stack containing a red, a grey, and two white envelopes. “Here’s what I need, Andres—these letters all have to be mailed today before ten, from different points around the island. Drop one in the Elm Cove post office, another one downtown here, one at the substation in Turtle Bay, and the last one out at Mill Key.” Andres sketched a map in the air with his forefinger, nodded, and put the letters in the right-hand pocket of his ripped coat. Von Heilitz gave him the second batch of envelopes, and said, “Mail these in the same places after ten o’clock tonight. Is that all right?”

  “Isn’t everything always all right?” Andres said. He put the second batch of envelopes in his left pocket. Then he slapped his right pocket, and said, “These you want to arrive this afternoon.” He slapped the left pocket. “These you want to arrive tomorrow. From all over the island. Easy.”

  He leaned over and peered into the shopping bags. “You want me to call you when I’m done? It doesn’t look like you’re going anywhere.”

  “Call me around one,” von Heilitz said. “We’ll want to take a little trip in the afternoon.” He stood up and walked Andres back to the door. His hand went into his pocket, and a folded bill passed into the driver’s hand. Andres slapped his forehead, mumbled something to the old man, and took a paperback from his left pocket and passed it to von Heilitz, who thrust it into a jacket pocket. He came back into the room, bent over the shopping bags, reached down, and pulled out a shiny gold and blue bag.

  “What do we do now?” Tom asked.

  Von Heilitz tore open the bag along its seam, pointed the open end at him, and said, “Have a potato chip.”

  Tom took a chip out of the bag. The old man set the bag on the table and walked around to the window.

  “Was the man you saw looking at the front of the hotel an ordinary-looking fellow in his fifties with thinning black hair, a little portly around the middle, and wearing black boots, tan slacks, a white shirt, and sunglasses?”

  “That’s him,” Tom said, and nearly knocked over his chair to get to the window.

  An immensely fat woman carrying a load of washing on her head passed the pawnshop.

  “Well, he’s not there now,” von Heilitz said.

  Tom squinted at him. This close, von Heilitz smelled of soap and some more personal odor that was faintly like the scent of a freshly opened apple. The wrinkles at the side of his eyes were as deep as furrows.

  “I saw him outside the hotel this morning.” Von Heilitz pushed himself back from the window. “Doesn’t have to mean anything. There are two hundred people in the St. Alwyn, and nearly all of them deserve to be followed.” He went back around the table, holding his sharp chin in his hand the way a child holds an ice cream cone. “Still, in the next couple of days we’d better go in and out through Sinbad’s Cavern.”

  He fell into the other chair and placed his hand on the telephone, still clutching his chin. He looked up, said, “Hmm,” and let go of his chin to dial a number. “Hello, I’d like to speak to Mr. Thomas, please.… Hello, Mr. Thomas? This is Mr. Cooper at the central post office, I’m the sub-manager for your region? … I’d like to inquire if you and your members at the Founders Club feel that the service you’ve been getting from us is satisfactory … I’m happy to hear that. As you know, our delivery hours are varied from time to time, and I wondered, as you are certainly one of our priority districts, whether you felt the members had a preference … Well, Mr. Thomas, everybody on the island would prefer that, but morning delivery would compromise the same-day service we’re so proud of … I see. Well, I’ll speak to the route manager, see if we can shuffle things around a bit, and get your members’ mail to you closer to noon than four o’clock … Of course, Mr. Thomas. Goodbye.”

  He hung up and looked across at Tom. “We really do have an extraordinary postal system, you know. It’s one of the best things about this island.” He uncoiled from the chair, went to the window and looked down at the sidewalk, and walked to the connecting door, rubbing his hands together. “I think we might get Andres to take a spin out to the Founders Club around three-thirty. Wouldn’t you like to see what happens when your grandfather reads his mail?”

  Tom nodded cautiously.

  “How do we get on the grounds without going past the guardhouse?

  Von Heilitz pushed himself off the door frame and looked up in mock amazement. “Is it possible that you’ve never climbed a fence?”

  Tom smiled at him, and said that he probably had, once or twice, in his childhood.

  “Well, that’s a relief. Oh, I got something for you to read. Here.” He pulled the paperback out of his pocket and tossed it to Tom.

  The cover illustration of The Divided Man, by Timothy Underhill, was a close-up of the face of a man who resembled a younger Victor Pasmore. He wore a grey hat and a trench coat with a turned-up collar, and deep shadow obliterated half his face.

  “It’s the book I told you about—a way of seeing those Blue Rose murders. We’re going to be here for a long time, and I thought you’d like something to read, knowing you.”

  Tom turned the book over to read the blurb, and von Heilitz stretched out on the sofa against the wall. His feet protruded far over the sofa’s armrest.

  “I met Tim Underhill when he came to Mill Walk for a little while to do research for the book. He stayed here, in fact—a lot of that book is set in the St. Alwyn.”

  Von Heilitz closed his eyes and crossed his hands over his chest. “When we get hungry, we’ll make some sandwiches.”

  Tom moved to the bed, and began reading Timothy Underbill’s book. After thirty pages, he unlaced the sleek black shoes and dropped them on the floor; after seventy, he sat up and removed his jacket and vest and yanked down his necktie. Von Heilitz fell asleep on the sofa.

  Tom had expected The Divided Man to be set on Mill Walk, but Underhill had located the murders in a gritty Midwestern industrial city of chain-link fences, inhuman winters, foundries, and a thousand bars. Its only real resemblance to Mill Walk was that the city’s wealthiest citizens lived on the far east side, in great houses built on a bluff above the shore of an enormous lake.

  At the start of the fifth chapter, the novel’s main character, a homicide detective named Esterhaz, woke up in an unfamiliar apartment. The television set was on, and the air smelled like whiskey. So hung over that he felt on the verge of disappearance, Esterhaz wandered through the empty apartment, trying to figure out who lived in it and how he had come to wake up there. Men’s and women’s clothes hung in the closet, dirty dishes and milk bottles filled with green webs of mold covered the kitchen counters. He had a dim memory of fighting, of beating someone senseless, hitting already unconscious flesh again and again, of blood spattering on a wall … but there was no blood in the apartment, no blood on his clothes, and his hands ached with only a faint, tender ache, as if a demon had kissed them. A nearly empty whiskey bottle stood beside a bedroom door, and Esterhaz drank what was left in long swallows and went into the room. On the floor beside a mattress covered by a rumpled blanket, he found a note that said, One anguish—in a crowd—A minor thing—it sounds—Come back tonight.
—G. Who was G.? He stuffed the note into his jacket pocket. Esterhaz found his coat balled up in a corner of the room, and buttoned himself into it. He shuddered with nausea, and the thought came to him full-blown, as if he had just read and memorized it, that invisibility was more than a fantasy: invisibility was so real that most of the world had already slipped into a great invisible realm that accompanied and mocked the visible.

  Esterhaz walked down a dark, clanging staircase and went outside into a bitter cold and a tearing wind. He saw that he was next door to a bar called The House of Correction and recognized where he was. Four blocks away stood the St. Alwyn Hotel, where two people he knew had been murdered. Esterhaz walked through a snowdrift to get to his car, took a pint bottle from the glove compartment, and let a little more reality into his system. It was some unearthly hour like six-thirty in the morning. A little anguish in a crowd, he thought, that bitch knew what she was talking about. He put the pint bottle between his knees, started his car, and drove to a deserted parking lot on the lakefront. Absolutely still curls and feathers of smoke clung to the grey surface of the lake, frozen into place.

  “Pretty good, wouldn’t you say?”

  Tom looked up through the memory of smoke feathers tethered to the surface of Eagle Lake, and saw von Heilitz bending over the table, making sandwiches with chunks of cheddar cheese and slices of salami.