Mystery

by Peter Straub

  “Do you remember what sort of car it was?”

  “Of course. It was a Corvette. Identical to this one, in fact. I hope this is the end of these questions.”

  Tom leaned sideways toward him. He took the pen out of his mouth. “Just about. Marita was a big woman, wasn’t she?”

  “I can’t see any possible point in going on—”

  “I only have two more questions.”

  “Promise?”

  “Here’s the first one. Where do you suppose that woman in Weasel Hollow got the money she put under her mattress?”

  “What’s the second question?”

  “Where do you think that feeling in the antiques shop came from, that feeling of knowing you were going to find something?”

  “Is this still a conversation, or are we just free associating?”

  “You mean you have no idea where the feeling came from?”

  Dennis just shook his head.

  For the first time since they had turned onto Calle Burleigh, Tom paid some attention to the landscape of sturdy houses surrounding them. “We’re nowhere near Shore Park.”

  “I don’t live anywhere near Shore Park. Why would you think—oh.” He smiled over at Tom. “I live near Goethe Park, not Shore Park. Just next to the old slave quarter. Ninety percent of the houses were built in the twenties and thirties, I think, and they’re good, solid, middle-class houses, with porches and arches and some interesting details. This area is tremendously underrated.” He had by now recovered his habitual good humor. “I don’t see why Brooks-Lowood shouldn’t widen its net, so to speak.”

  Tom slowly turned his head to face the teacher. “Hasselgard didn’t attend Brooks-Lowood.”

  “Well, after all,” the teacher said, “I can’t see that where Hasselgard went to secondary school has any bearing on his sister’s murder.” Tom’s expression had begun to alarm him. Within a few seconds, his face had taken on an almost sunken look, and his skin seemed very pale beneath the thin golden surface. “Would you like to rest for a bit? We could stop off in the park and look at the ziggurats.”

  “I can’t go any farther,” Tom said.

  “What?”

  “Pull over to the side of the road. You can drop me off here. I feel a little queasy. Don’t worry about me. Please.”

  Dennis had already pulled up to the curb and stopped his car. Tom had bent over to rest his head on the dashboard.

  “You don’t really think I’m going to drop you off on the side of the road, do you?”

  Tom rolled his head from side to side on the dashboard. The gesture seemed so childlike that Dennis stroked Tom’s thick hair.

  “Good, because of course I’m not. I think I’ll just take you back to my place and let you lie down for a bit.”

  He gently helped Tom lean back to rest his head against the seat. The boy’s eyes glittered and seemed without depth, like shiny painted stones.

  “Let me get you home,” Dennis said.

  Tom very slowly shook his head, then wiped his hands over his face. “Would you take me somewhere else?”

  Dennis raised his eyebrows.

  “Weasel Hollow.”

  Tom turned his head toward Dennis, and the English teacher felt as if he were looking not at a seventeen-year-old boy overcome by a sudden illness, but a powerful adult. He reached for the ignition key and started his car again.

  “Anywhere in particular in Weasel Hollow?”

  “Mogrom Street.”

  “Mogrom Street,” Dennis repeated. “Well, that makes sense. Anywhere in particular on Mogrom Street?”

  Tom had closed his eyes, and appeared to be asleep.

  The original native civilization and culture on Mill Walk had completely disappeared by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Its only real remains, apart from the gap-toothed natives themselves, were the two little pyramidal ziggurats in the open field that had become Goethe Park. At the base of one was inscribed the word MOGROM; at the base of the other, RAMBICHURE. Though no one now knew the meaning of these enigmatic words, they had been wholeheartedly adapted by the surviving native population. At the bottom of the narrow valley that was Weasel Hollow, Mogrom Street intersected Calle Rambichure. On opposing corners were the Mogrom Diner and Rambichure Pizza. Rambichure Hardware and Mogrom Stables and Smithy flanked Rambi-Mog Pawnbrokers. On Calle Rambichure stood the Ziggurat School for Children of Indigenous Background, the Zig-Ram Drugstore, Rambi’s Hosiery, the Mogrom Adult Bookstore, and M-R Artificial Limbs.

  Dennis silently drove up Calle Burleigh, turned north on Market Street and zipped past Ostend’s. He came to the rise called Pforzheimer Point. Across the narrow valley the long grey shapes of the Redwing Impervious Can Company and Thielman’s Sugarcane Refinery defined the opposite horizon. Weasel Hollow lay below. Tom still seemed to be drowsing. Dennis drove over the lip of the hill and down toward Mogrom.

  “Well, then,” Tom said. He was sitting up straight, as if a puppeteer had pulled a string attached to the top of his head. He looked impatient, even slightly feverish. Dennis felt that if he drove downhill too slowly Tom would jump out of the car.

  At the foot of the hill, Mogrom Street went east to Calle Rambichure and the center of Weasel Hollow. The western half of the street led directly into a maze of tarpaper shacks, tents made of blankets suspended on poles, native houses of pink and white stone, and huts that appeared to be made of propped-up boards. Two blocks down, a large black dog lay panting in the middle of the street. Goats and chickens wandered through the yellow grass between wrecked cars and ruined pony traps. Dennis dimly heard rock and roll coming from a radio.

  Tom leaned forward to examine the numbers beside the porch of a native house. “Turn right.”

  “You do realize, don’t you, that I have no idea what’s going on?”

  “Just drive slowly.”

  Handley drove. Tom inspected the houses and hovels on his side of the street. A goat swung his head, and chickens moved jerkily through the grass. They came up an intersection with a hand-painted sign reading CALLE FRIEDRICH HASSELGARD. Two small native children with dirty faces, one of them in brown military-style shorts and carrying a toy gun, the other entirely naked, had materialized beside the sign and gazed at Dennis with a grave sober impertinence.

  “Next block,” Tom said.

  Dennis moved slowly past the staring children. The dog lifted his head from the dust and watched them draw near. Dennis steered around it. The dog lowered its muzzle and sighed.

  “Stop,” Tom said. “This is it.”

  Dennis stopped. Tom had twisted sideways to look at a wooden shack. Waves of heat radiated up from the corrugated tin roof. It was obviously empty.

  Tom opened the door and went through the tall yellow grass toward the house. Dennis expected him to look into the window beside the front door, but the boy disappeared around the side of the house. Behind the wheel of the Corvette, Dennis felt fat and hot and conspicuous. He imagined that he heard someone creeping up behind his car, but when he stuck his head through the window, it was only the dog thrashing its legs in its sleep. Dennis looked at his watch, and saw that four minutes had passed. He closed his eyes and moaned. Then he heard footsteps crackling through the brittle grass and opened his eyes to the sight of Tom Pasmore walking back toward the car.

  Tom was walking very quickly, his face as closed as a fist. He folded himself in half and dropped into the other seat without looking at Dennis. “Go around the corner.”

  Dennis twisted the key in the ignition, lifted his foot from the clutch, and the car jerked forward.

  “La Bamba” came from one of the shuttered native houses, and for a moment Dennis thought of how like paradise it would be to stretch out his legs on a couch and take a long swallow of a gin and tonic.

  “Into the alley,” Tom said. “Slow.”

  Dennis turned into the narrow walled alley; the Corvette shuddered down the narrow space between crumbling walls.

  “Stop.” Tom said. They ha
d drawn up to a collapsed portion of the wall, and Tom leaned his head through the passenger window to peer into a thicket of waist-high yellow grass. “Farther,” Tom said. Dennis let the car roll forward.

  After a moment they came to the green doors of a one-horse stable converted into a garage. Two dusty windows covered with spiderwebs faced the narrow alley. “Here,” Tom said, and jumped out of the car. He shielded his eyes to look through one of the windows. He immediately moved to the other, then back again. He straightened himself up to his full height and then covered his face with his hands.

  “Is this over now?” Dennis asked.

  Tom folded himself back into the car.

  “I’m going to take you home,” Dennis said.

  “Mr. Handley, you are going to drive me around the block. We are going to go up and down every street and every alley in this part of Weasel Hollow, if that is what we have to do.”

  No, I’m going to take you home, Dennis said very clearly in his mind, but his mouth said, “If that’s what you want,” and he rolled forward to the end of the narrow alley, and turned deeper into Weasel Hollow.

  At the next corner he turned right onto a street lined with shacks, rusting cars up on their rims, and a few native houses set far back on dead yellow lawns. Goats nibbled weeds in front of dwellings that were blankets slung tepee-style around leaning poles. Tom uttered a noise that sounded amazingly like a purr. Twenty yards ahead and across the street, partially obscured by a mound of garbage—tin cans, empty bottles, rotting onion peels, and slimy bits of fly-encrusted meat—was a car identical to his, so highly polished that it sparkled.

  “Let me off here,” Tom said. He was opening the door before Dennis came to a stop.

  Tom ran toward the sleek black car and laid his hands on the hood.

  For a moment—a long moment, but no more than that—Tom experienced a sensation something like déjà vu, an echo of a sensation more than the sensation itself, that he had become invisible to the ordinary physical world and had entered a realm in which every detail spoke of its true essence: as if he had slipped beneath the skin of the world. A sweet, dangerous familiarity filled him. Sweat seemed to have risen up out of every pore of his body. Tom slowly moved around to the driver’s side. He bent down. A neat bullet hole half an inch wide perforated the driver’s window. The driver’s seat was spattered with blood. A thick film of blood covered the passenger seat.

  Tom moved to the back of the car and fiddled with the trunk for a moment, then succeeded in opening it. Here, too, was a quantity of blood, though much less than on the seats. For a hallucinatory second he saw the pudgy corpse wadded into this small space. Finally he went to the passenger door, opened it, and knelt down. He ran his hands over the smooth black leather. Flakes of dried blood shredded onto the ground. Again he gently passed his fingers over the leather and near the bottom of the door touched a clump of dried fuzz stained black with blood. He delicately prodded. Beneath the shredded leather he felt a hard round nugget of metal.

  Tom exhaled and stood up. His body seemed oddly light, as if it might continue to rise and leave the ground entirely. A vanishing glow momentarily touched the mound of bald tires in the front yard of the pink house across the street, also an old green sedan down the street. Tom looked toward Dennis Handley, who was wiping his forehead with a large white pocket handkerchief, and felt a goofy smile spread across his face. He began to walk toward Handley on legs that seemed immensely long. A movement where there should have been none caught his eye like a waving flag, and Tom swiveled his head to look at the green sedan parked by the opposite curb. Lamont von Heilitz leaned toward the window of its back seat. A moment of total recognition passed between them, and then the old man raised a gloved finger to his lips.

  Dennis Handley drove his best and most puzzling student home in a silence that was broken only by his increasingly hesitant questions and the boy’s monosyllabic answers. Tom seemed pale and exhausted during the drive, and Dennis had the odd feeling that he was saving himself for one further effort. When Dennis tried to picture the nature of this effort, he could do no better than to picture Tom Pasmore seated before an old Underwood upright—a typewriter very like the one on which he typed out his end-of-term comments—and typing with one finger upon the middle of a page of good bond the cornball motto THE CASE OF THE BLOODY CAR SEAT. In ten minutes he was turning off An Die Blumen into Eastern Shore Road, and thirty seconds after that he sat in his car and watched Tom’s tall, wide-shouldered figure move up the path toward the front door of his house.

  Dennis was halfway home before he realized that he was driving twenty miles an hour over the speed limit. He realized he was angry only after he had nearly run down a bicyclist.

  Two weeks later Dennis met a definitely tipsy Gloria Pasmore at a dinner party at the Thielmans’ and said that he didn’t think there was anything to worry about. The boy was just going through some sort of adolescent phase. And, in answer to a question from Katinka Redwing, no, he had not been following any of the stories in the Eyewitness about Finance Minister Hasselgard—that sort of thing did not interest him at all, not at all.

  Tom did spend the evening of that day typing on a small green Olivetti portable his parents had been persuaded to give him the year before, but what he wrote was a letter, not the awkward beginning of a detective novel. This letter was addressed to Captain Fulton Bishop, the detective named in the Eyewitness. He rewrote it before dinner, then rewrote it again at night. He signed the letter “A Friend.”

  It was nine o’clock at night when he folded the letter and sealed it inside the envelope. The telephone had rung twice while he wrote, but he had not been interrupted at his work. He had heard the back door close and the noises of a car starting up and driving away, so only one of his parents was still in the house. He thought he had a good chance of getting out without having to answer any questions, but just in case, he slid the letter into a copy of The Lady in the Lake and anchored the book under his arm before he left his room.

  From the top of the stairs Tom saw that the lights were burning in the living room, and the doors of the room on the other side of the staircase were closed. The sound of amplified voices drifted toward him.

  Tom moved quietly down the stairs. Only a few yards from the bottom, he heard the rattle of the library doorknob and unconsciously straightened up as the door opened on a wave of shouts and gunshots. His father stood outlined against a smoky, flickering pale blue background, like a figure at the mouth of a cave.

  “You think I’m deaf?” his father asked. “Think I can’t hear you creeping downstairs like a priest in a brothel?”

  “I was just going out for a little bit.”

  “What the hell is there to do outside, this time of night?”

  Victor Pasmore had crossed over the line between a little bit drunk and a little bit drunker, which meant moving from a sort of benevolent elation to surliness.

  “I’m supposed to take this book over to Sarah Spence.” He held it out toward his father, who glanced at the cover and squinted up at his son. “She asked me to bring it over once I was through with homework.”

  “Sarah Spence,” his father said. “You two used to be pretty good friends.”

  “That was a long time ago, Dad.”

  “Hey—have it your way. What do I know?” He glanced back into the library, where the noises coming from the television had just increased dramatically—squealing tires and more gunshots. “I suppose you did finish your homework, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  He chewed on some unspoken thought for a second, and looked back into the flickering blue cave. “Step in here for a second, will you? I wasn’t going to say anything about this, but—”

  Tom followed his father into the television room. Victor moved to the table beside his chair and picked up a half empty glass. A grinning woman holding up a container of dishwashing liquid filled the screen, and the music suddenly became much louder. Victor took several big swallows, backed
into his chair, and sat down without taking his eyes off the television.

  “Got a funny call a little earlier. From Lamont von Heilitz. That make any sense to you?”

  Tom said nothing.

  “I’m waiting, but I’m not hearing anything.”

  “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “What do you suppose that old coot wanted? He hasn’t called since Gloria’s mother died and we moved in.”

  Tom shrugged. “He wanted to invite you for dinner.”

  “Lamont von Heilitz never invited anyone for dinner, as far as I know. He sits in that big house all day long, he changes suits to come outside and pull a dandelion out of his lawn—I know because I’ve seen it—and the only time I’ve ever known him to act like a human being was when you had that accident and he gave me books for you to read. Which did you more harm than good, in my opinion.” Victor Pasmore raised his glass to his mouth and gulped, glaring at Tom over the rim as if to challenge him.

  Tom was silent.

  His father lowered the glass and licked his lips. “You know what they used to call him? The Shadow. Because he doesn’t exist. There’s something wrong with him. Some people have a bad smell that follows them around—you ought to know this, you’re getting out in the world. Some day you’ll have a business, kid, I know it’s a shock, but you’re gonna work for a living, and you’ll have to know that some people it’s better to avoid. Lamont von Heilitz never worked a day in his whole life.”

  “Why did he call?”

  Victor turned back to the television set. “He called to invite you to dinner. I told him you could make that decision for yourself. I didn’t wanna tell him no straight to his face. Let a couple weeks go by, let him forget about it.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Tom said, and began moving toward the door.

  “I guess you haven’t been listening to me,” Victor Pasmore said. “I don’t want you to have anything to do with that freak. He’s bad news. Your grandfather would tell you the same thing.”