by Peter Straub
He looked at his watch and watched the minute hand jerk from ten-fifty to ten fifty-one.
Then he lifted the receiver again and dialed von Heilitz’s telephone number. The phone rang and rang: Tom counted ten rings, then eleven, then fifteen, and gave up.
Unable to stay in the room any longer, he went to the bed and put on the shoes von Heilitz had taken off him, splashed water on his face in the bathroom, glanced at a taut face in the mirror, dried himself off and straightened his tie, and let himself out into the hallway. Through the last door came the sounds of a trumpet and tenor saxophone softly, slowly playing “Someone to Watch Over Me” in unison. Voices drifted toward him. He walked to the stairs and went down to the lobby.
A few sailors had spilled out from Sinbad’s Cavern, and stood in a tight knot around the door, holding glasses and beer bottles. The night clerk leaned over the desk in a pool of light, slowly turning the pages of an Eyewitness. Tom came down the last steps, and the clerk and a few of the sailors glanced up at him, then looked away. Steel drum music from a jukebox came faintly from the bar and grill. Lamp light fell on worn leather chairs and couches, and illuminated red and blue details in a patchy Oriental carpet. On the other side of the St. Alwyn’s glass doors, cars streamed up and down the street. Tom began moving through the sailors, who parted to let him open the door of the bar.
The steel drum music instantly sizzled into his head. Women and sailors and men in loud shirts filled the room with shouts and laughter and cigarette smoke. A couple of sailors were dancing in front of the crowded bar, flinging out their arms, snapping their fingers, drunkenly trying to keep in time to the music. Tom slowly worked his way down the bar, squeezing through the sailors and their girls, cigarette smoke making his eyes water. At last he reached the door, and went outside to the Street of Widows.
The market was closed, but the vendor still sat on his rug beside his hats and baskets, talking to himself or to imaginary customers. Across the street men went up the steps to the Traveller’s Hotel. A CLOSED sign hung in the door of Ellington’s Allsorts and Notions. When the light changed, the cars and buggies began to move toward Calle Drosselmayer. The ping-ping-ping of the steel drums sounded through the window with the flashing neon scimitar. At a break in the traffic, Tom ran across the street.
“Hats for your lady, hats for yourself, baskets for the market,” sang the barefoot vendor.
Tom knocked on Hobart’s door. No lights burned in the shop.
“Nothing in there, the cupboard be bare,” the vendor called to him.
Tom beat on the door again. He searched the frame and found a brass button and held it down until he saw a small dark figure moving toward him through the interior of the shop. “Closed!” Hobart shouted. Tom stepped back so the shopowner could see his face, and Hobart darted to the door, opened it, and pulled Tom inside.
“What do you want? What you looking for?”
“My friend isn’t still here?”
Hobart stepped backward and said, “What friend? Do I know what friend you’re talking about?” He was wearing a long cream-colored nightshirt that made him look like an angry doll.
“Lamont von Heilitz. I came here with him this morning. We bought a lot of things—you said I looked like his nephew.”
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t,” Hobart said. “Maybe a man says he’s gonna be somewhere, maybe he never means to come. Nobody tells Hobart—no reason for anybody to tell Hobart, don’t you know that?” Hobart stared at him stonily, then took a step toward the door.
“You mean he didn’t come?”
“If you don’t know, maybe you’re not supposed to,” Hobart said. “How do I know what you are? You’re no nephew of that man’s.”
“Did the policeman show up?”
“There was someone here,” Hobart admitted. “Might have been him.”
“And my friend never came for the meeting,” Tom said, for a second almost too stunned to worry.
“If you’re his friend, how come you don’t know that?”
“He left the hotel hours ago to come here.”
“Could be that’s what he told you. Man came here and waited, could be that’s what he wanted him to do,” Hobart said. “I see you’re worried, but I tell you, I worried about Lamont twenty, thirty years, it never did a bit of good. He put on a stringy old wig and a bunch a rags, and he stood on a street corner somewheres, watching for something he knew was gonna happen. I’m talking straight to you now, nephew.” Hobart put his hand on the doorknob.
“How long did the other man wait for him?”
“He was here a good hour, and when he left he was steaming. Don’t look for any favors from that man.” Hobart’s teeth gleamed in the dark shop. “Nearly tore off my bell, way he went through the door.” He patted Tom’s arm. “You just go back and wait for him. This is the way your friend works, don’t you know that yet?”
“I guess not,” Tom said.
“Don’t worry.” Hobart reached up to hold the bell with one hand as he cracked the door open with the other.
“That’s what he told me,” Tom said, and went outside. The door closed silently behind him.
“You got in, but did you buy?” the vendor chanted.
Tom glanced at the shoeless figure leaning against the wall. He nearly laughed out loud—relief made him feel lighter than air. He walked past the entrance of the Traveller’s Hotel toward the vendor and knelt on the sidewalk beside him. “You had me worried,” he whispered. “Why didn’t you—?”
The vendor was a foot shorter than von Heilitz. Two doglike teeth jutted from his upper jaw, and ragged brown scars sewed shut both of his eyes. “A basket, or a hat?”
“A hat,” Tom said.
“Three dollars, pick your size, pick your size.”
Tom gave the man bills and picked up a hat at random.
“Did you hear a fight, or a scuffle, or anything like that, a couple of hours ago? It would have been outside the bar across the street.”
“I heard the Angel of the Lord,” the vendor said. “And I heard the Lord of Darkness, walking up and down in the world. You’ll look handsome, in that hat.”
Tom gave the hat to a sailor as he passed through the bar to go back to his room, and the sailor placed it on the head of a pretty whore.
Laughter, soft conversation, and music filtered into the fourth-floor hallway. Tom let himself into his room and went to the window without turning on any of the lights. The man in the white shirt was picking his teeth with a fingernail, and a young woman in skin-tight shorts, high heels, and a halter top whispered in his ear. The man shook his head. She leaned against him, and rubbed her breasts against his arm. The man stopped picking his teeth. He turned his head and uttered two or three words, and the girl jumped away from him as if she had been touched with a cattle prod.
Tom pulled a chair up to the window and sat down, his chin on his forearms. After three or four minutes, he pushed up the window. Warm, moist air flowed over him. Steady traffic passed before the hotel on Calle Drosselmayer, and now and then a taxi pulled up and let out couples and single men who walked across the sidewalk and up the steps to the hotel.
At one o’clock, the man in the white shirt went into The Home Plate. He came out ten minutes later and went back to the wall.
Tom had been at least partially reassured by his talk with Hobart Ellington, and for a long time as he watched the street beneath him, he waited for the sound of Lamont von Heilitz coming into the adjoining room. Tom had never seen what went on at night in downtown Mill Walk, and while he waited, expecting the old man to come in at any minute, he watched the street life, fascinated. The number of cars and other sorts of vehicles on the street had actually increased, and more and more people packed the sidewalks: in couples, their arms around each others’ waists; in groups of five or six, carrying bottles and glasses, having an ambulatory party. Men and women on the sidewalk now and then recognized people in the cars and open carriages, and shouted greetings, a
nd sometimes ran through the traffic to join their friends. Neil Langenheim rolled by in an open carriage, too drunk to sit up straight, as a wild-haired girl nuzzled his red face and moved to kneel on top of him. Moonie Firestone went past in the front seat of a white Cadillac convertible, her arm slung comfortably around the neck of a white-haired man. At one-thirty, when the traffic was at its height, he heard footsteps in the hall, and jumped up to go to the connecting door; when the footsteps continued down the hall toward the party in Glenroy Breakstone’s room, he went back to the window and saw the head of a girl with shoulder-length blond hair nestled on the shoulder of a black-haired man driving another long convertible. It was Sarah Spence, he thought, and then thought it could not be; the girl moved, and he saw the flash of her profile, and thought again that she was Sarah. The car moved out of sight, leaving him with his uncertainty.
By two-thirty the crowds had gone, leaving only a few wandering groups of young people, most of them men, moving up and down the sidewalk. The man in the white shirt had vanished. At three, a tide of men and women poured out of The Home Plate and stood uncertainly outside as the lights went off behind them, then drifted off. The noises from down the hall ceased, and loud voices and footsteps went past the door. One car went up Calle Drosselmayer. Traffic lights flashed red and green. Tom’s eyelids closed.
Noises from the street—a junk man tossing cases of empty bottles onto his cart—brought him half of the way into wakefulness hours later. It was still dark outside. He staggered to his bed and fell across the covers.
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 sta
y 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.”
