Mystery brt-2

by Peter Straub

  Page after page, the cases went by. Mr. von Heilitz had worked ceaselessly during the late twenties and throughout the thirties. At a certain point in the late thirties, some of the news stories began referring to him as “the real-life counterpart of radio’s most famous fictional detective, the Shadow.” He camped in hotel rooms and the libraries and newspaper offices in which he did his research. The last of the detective’s photographs contained in the book accompanied an article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch entitled ECCENTRIC RENOWNED SLEUTH POUNDS BOOKS, NOT PAVEMENT and showed a man with greying hair seated at a desk buried under rifts of newspapers, notebooks, and boxes of papers. Except for the gloves on his hands, the excellence of his suit, and his habitual air of distinction, he looked like an overworked high school teacher.

  The Shadow had abruptly left St. Louis after solving the murders of a brewer and his wife, refusing to grant any further interviews. (The Post-Dispatch: AFTER DEDUCTIVE TRIUMPH, ECCENTRIC SLEUTH GOES ON THE LAM.) After that, the flow of clippings continued, but contained far fewer references to the detective. In Boulder, Colorado, the murderer of a well-known novelist was found to be a local literary agent, incensed that his most lucrative client had intended to move to a New York firm; Boulder police credited the advice of a “self-styled amateur of crime” with helping them to identify the killer. Lamont von Heilitz was obviously concealed behind that phrase, and Tom saw his neighbor in the “anonymous source” who had assisted the police when a movie star was found shot to death in his Los Angeles bedroom; in the “concerned private citizen” who had appeared in Albany, Georgia, to give help to police when an entire family was found murdered in a city park.

  In 1945, a letter from “an amateur expert in crime who wishes to preserve his anonymity” gave the police of Knoxville what they needed to arrest a local honor student for the murders of three of his classmates.

  After 1945, all the clippings were of this kind. Von Heilitz had refused all invitations to assist individuals or police, and instead had followed only newspaper accounts of cases that interested him and solved them at long distance. Telegrams and letters begging for his aid—Dear Mr. von Heilitz, I believe I am a detective too for I have tracked you down to your island lair …—had been marked “No Reply” and pasted into the book. When he had become interested in a case, as with the Fox River Valley Menace, the Beast of Lover’s Lane, and the Tattoo Killer, he had subscribed to community newspapers and written to the local police. “Somebody out there likes us,” said Chief of Police Austin Beer of Grand Forks, Nebraska, after arresting an elderly woman who had killed two children enrolled at a nursery school located across the street from her house. “One day we got this letter that just put things together in a new way. It wasn’t from anywhere around here, but I’ll tell you, this fellow knew all about us—he’d gone and followed property transfers from years back and worked out that Mrs. Ruppert had a grudge against the families of these children. That letter set us going in the right direction. I don’t mind telling you, the whole thing makes you believe in the kindness of strangers.” Chief Beers added that the letter had been signed only with the initials LVH, which had gone unrecognized. Twenty years after the detective’s greatest fame, “The Shadow” was Lamont Cranston, not Lamont von Heilitz.

  Then these cases, too, faded out of the big journal. The book’s final pages confused Tom at first, for they contained nothing like the sequence of cases, of solutions flowing from carefully assembled evidence, that made up the rest of the journal. The entire journal seemed to mark a progress toward invisibility as the detective went from prominence to anonymity; in the final pages even the cases seemed to have disappeared. The focus was entirely on Mill Walk, and all the clippings came from the pages of the Eyewitness, but few of them concerned any obvious crime. Tom wondered if Mr. von Heilitz had merely clipped stories at random, searching for a pattern as invisible as he had become himself because none existed.

  Tom’s initial sense of dislocation was only partially explained by an odd distortion of the journal’s chronology—the jumble of clippings from Mill Walk jumped back to the twenties. Among them were articles about the end of construction work on Shady Mount Hospital, “a medical facility,” in the words of Maxwell Redwing, its first board chairman, “to rival any in the world.” A row of Mill Walk citizens posed before Shady Mount’s front door. These were the members of the hospital’s first board of governors. Two familiar faces scowled toward him from the photograph. Dr. Bonaventure Milton, already showing the beginnings of his jowls and looking extremely satisfied with his accomplishments, had got himself up like a nineteenth-century prime minister in swallowtail coat, striped satin vest, and black bow tie. And between short, round Maxwell Redwing and pompous, inexplicably successful Dr. Milton, exuding power and rectitude, loomed Tom’s grandfather.

  Tom experienced the thrill of mingled respect, fear, and awe Glendenning Upshaw always inspired in him. His grandfather’s wide commanding face stared out from the photograph, challenging all the world to deny that the hospital behind him was the finest it had to show. At thirty, he had recently founded Mill Walk Construction, and his broad bulllike body looked even stronger than it did in the old photographs that hung in the halls of Brooks-Lowood, taken in the days when Glen Upshaw had been the school’s Head Boy and captain of the football team. “Designed to answer the medical needs of every citizen of our island,” read the caption, though in practice Shady Mount had chosen to respond to the needs only of residents of the far east end. Shady Mount left Mill Walk’s less advantaged citizens to the care of the less fashionable facility farther west, St. Mary Nieves. In the photograph above the optimistic caption, Glendenning Upshaw wore one of the heavy black suits he had adopted long before Tom’s birth, after the death of Tom’s grandmother. His large left hand clutched the lion’s head handle of his unfurled, trademark umbrella. His right hand held his flat, wide-brimmed black hat.

  Any other man, Tom thought, who invariably dressed in a black suit, worn always with a stiff white shirt, a black necktie, a black hat, and a loose black umbrella, would look so much like a priest that strangers on the street would call him “Father.” Yet Glen Upshaw had never looked priestly. He looked like a bank vault or some forbidding public building, and the aura of the world, of money and luxurious rooms, of first-class suites on liners and large expensive appetites indulged behind closed doors, hung about him like a cloud. He made all of the other men in the photograph seem insignificant.

  Tom turned the page.

  Here was more chaos. Steamship arrivals and society parties, obituaries—Judge Morton Backer had died, and Tom stared at the name until he remembered that Judge Backer had been the man who had sold Arthur Thielman the long-barreled Colt pistol with which Jeanine Thielman had been murdered. Governmental appointments, long ago elections, business promotions, wedding announcements. Mill Walk Construction built a five-hundred-bed hospital in Miami. Here were his own parents, Victor Pasmore and Gloria Ross Upshaw, among a dozen other eastern shore residents of their age and station. Garden parties, lawn parties, Christmas parties, and New Year’s parties, and country club balls.

  Then his eye moved to yet another photograph he had seen before. His mother in her early twenties, splendidly dressed, stepping down from a carriage as she arrived at the Founders Club for a charity ball. It was of this picture that the photograph of Jeanine Thielman had reminded him. The pose was identical, a good-looking blond woman stepping down from a carriage with a long, elegant leg protruding from a whirl of clothing. Gloria Upshaw Pasmore, too, seemed to be grimacing instead of smiling, but she was fifteen years younger than Jeanine Thielman, less encrusted with jewelry, altogether less sleek. Because of the contrast with the photograph of the murdered woman, it struck Tom that his mother looked vulnerable even then. Just dimly visible behind her, bending forward to help her get out of the carriage, was her father, whose tuxedo made him seem to melt backwards into the darkness of the interior.

  Lamont von Heilitz
had tracked the most trivial events of Mill Walk life in the hope that some day a name here, a date there, would intersect to lead him to a conclusion. He had cast out his nets day after day, and hauled in these minnows. The last ten pages of the big journal were a fact collection, no more.

  Various names caught his eye. Maxwell Redwing and family went to Africa on safari and returned intact. Maxwell’s son, Ralph, announced that, like his father, he had no political ambitions and would devote his energies to “the private sphere, where so much remains to be done.” He pledged “all my efforts to the improvement of the quality of life on our beloved island.” The Redwing Holding Company put in a successful bid to purchase the Backer mansion, known as “The Palms,” located in a section of Mill Key now too close to the growing downtown and business district to be fashionable, gutted and renovated it and then sold it to the Pforzheimer family for use as a luxury hotel.

  Maxwell Redwing retired as president of the Redwing Holding Company and appointed his son, Ralph, as its new chief officer.

  A man named Wendell Hasek, a night security guard at Mill Walk Construction, was wounded in a payroll robbery and retired on full salary for the remainder of his life. Tom struggled to remember where he had heard the name before, and then did remember—Hasek had been Judge Backer’s valet and driver, and had told Mr. von Heilitz about the sale of a pistol.

  Two days later, the bank robbers were shot to death by police in a gun battle in the streets of the old slave quarter, but none of the stolen money, estimated to be in excess of thirty thousand dollars, was recovered.

  Mill Walk Construction announced plans for an extensive housing development on the island’s far west end, near Elm Cove.

  Two days after selling his own construction company to Mill Walk Construction, Arthur Thielman died in his sleep, attended by his family and Dr. Bonaventure Milton.

  Judge Backer, Wendell Hasek, Maxwell Redwing, and Arthur Thielman—Tom finally understood. Mr. von Heilitz was doing no more than following the careers of those who had been linked to the murder of Jeanine Thielman in Eagle Lake. That case, even more than the solution to the deaths of his parents, had determined the rest of his life. He had come into what became twenty years of prominence and activity because of it: in a way, Tom remembered, he had come fully to life at Eagle Lake. It was no surprise that he should never really let go of the case.

  Tom undressed, turned off his lights, and got into bed, deciding to ask his grandfather about Lamont von Heilitz and the old days on Mill Walk. It was a strange thought—his grandfather and the Shadow must have grown up together.

  PART FIVE

  THE

  FOUNDERS CLUB

  Letters mailed on Mill Walk usually arrived on the day they were posted, and mail put in the box at night always arrived the next day. Tom told himself that nothing would happen on the day Captain Bishop got his letter, that it could be a week or more before the police took action or released any information about the murder of Marita Hasselgard. And because this was a Saturday, it was always possible that his letter might not arrive on Fulton Bishop’s desk until the following Monday. Everything went slower on the weekends. And if the letter arrived at headquarters on Monday, maybe it would sit half the day in the mail room before being rerouted to Bishop’s office. And maybe Bishop took Saturdays off, or never looked at his mail until evening.…

  “You know what I think?” his father said. “Wake up, I’m talking to you.”

  Tom’s head snapped up. From the other side of the breakfast table, Victor Pasmore regarded him with an unusual intensity. Tom had not even heard his father come into the kitchen. Now he was leaning on the back of a chair, staring as Tom absent-mindedly used his fork to push around on his plate the eggs he had scrambled himself. Like many heavy drinkers, Victor was virtually immune to hangovers, and the way he now looked at Tom was heavily confidential, almost paternal in a way that was rare with him.

  “You have a good time last night? With the Spence girl?”

  “Pretty good.”

  Victor pulled the chair out and sat down. “The Spences are good people. Very good people.”

  Tom tried to remember if he had seen any clippings about Sarah’s parents in the journal, and decided that he had not. He remembered something else, and on impulse asked his father about it.

  “Do you know anything about the man who built their house?”

  Victor’s look was now of confused impatience. “The guy who built the Spence house? That’s nothing but a waste of time.”

  “But do you remember anything about him?”

  “Christ, what are you, an archeologist?” Victor visibly calmed himself, and went on in a softer voice. “I guess it was some German. Way before my time, he wanted to knock everybody’s eyes out, and he pretty well succeeded. The guy was a real con man, I guess. He got into trouble up north, and nobody ever saw him again.”

  “Why is it a waste of time?”

  Victor leaned forward, his impatience struggling with his desire to impart an insight. “Okay, you wanna know, I’ll tell you. You look at that house, what do you see? You see dollars and cents. Lots of dollars and cents. Bill Spence started off as an accountant with your grandfather, he made some good investments, put himself where he is today. It doesn’t matter anymore who built that place.”

  “You don’t know anything about him?” Tom asked.

  “No!” Victor yelled. “You’re not listening to me! I’m making a point here. Look, it’s all tied in with what I wanted to say to you. Have you thought about what you’re going to do after Tulane?”

  “Not really,” Tom said, beginning to feel even more tense than usual. It had been decided that he would attend Tulane, his grandfather’s college, after graduation.

  “Well, hear me out on this. My advice is, think about business opportunities—go out and start fresh, make your own life. Don’t get stuck on this island the way I did.” Victor paused after making this surprising remark, and looked down at the table for a moment before going on. His voice was much softer now. “Your grandfather is willing to help you get started.”

  “On the mainland,” Tom said. When he looked into the future, he saw only a terrifying void. His father’s advice seemed directed toward an entirely different sort of person, one who would understand what a business opportunity was.

  “Your future isn’t here,” said Victor. “You can have a whole new life.” He looked across the table as if he had much more to say.

  “How did you get started?”

  “Glen helped me out.” The statement came out in a flat, grudging tone which meant that the conversation had essentially come to an end, and Victor Pasmore turned away from his son to look out the kitchen window. Outside in the flat hot sunlight, purple bougainvillaea blossoms, too heavy for their stalks, lolled on the white terrace wall. “Just like when you were sick, I mean after your accident, Glen paid for your nurses, the tutors, a lot of things like that. You have to be grateful to the old man.”

  It was not clear to Tom if Victor Pasmore were talking about himself or his son. The gratitude seemed heavy, an obligation endlessly paid for. His father turned from the window, unshaven, as was usual on weekends, dressed in an unconvincing sports shirt. “I’m just trying to talk sense to you,” he said. “Save you from making mistakes. You think it’s too early for a drink?” His father raised his thick eyebrows and pulled down the corners of his mouth in a comic grimace. The thought of having a drink had put him in a better mood.

  “Think about what I said. Don’t get—ah, you know.” Victor stood up and moved toward the liquor cabinet. “Something mild, I think,” he said, but he was no longer talking to Tom.

  Tom spent the rest of the day walking around the house, unable to come to rest for longer than half an hour. He read a few pages of a novel, but kept losing his way in the sentences—the words jittered into a general blur as he pictured a uniformed policeman tossing his envelope onto Fulton Bishop’s desk, Fulton Bishop glancing at it, either pick
ing it up or ignoring it.…

  Tom carried the book into the living room. From the other side of the staircase came the roars and yells of a Yankees game booming fuzzily from the television in the study, where his father had collapsed into his chair. The gladiatorial New York fans always made a lot of noise. The front windows framed Lamont von Heilitz’s big grey house. Had von Heilitz’s father ever advised him to start thinking about business opportunities? Tom jumped up and walked twice around the living room, wishing that the ball game would end so that he could switch the television to the Mill Walk station and wait for the news. Of course there would be nothing on the news. Church bake sales, the scores of the local Little League teams, the announcement of the construction of a new high rise parking lot … Tom wandered up the stairs and went into his room. He got to his knees and checked under his bed. The leather-bound journal was where he had left it. He heard his parents’ bedroom door click open, and stood up in an almost guilty scramble. His mother’s footsteps went down the front stairs. Tom left his bedroom and went down after her.

  He found her in the kitchen, looking unhappily at the dishes in the sink and the empty beer cans his father had dropped on the table. She had brushed her hair and wore a long peach-colored satin nightgown and a matching bed jacket that looked like a compromise between underwear and clothing. “I’ll wash the dishes, Mom,” he said, realizing almost for the first time that, despite the uncertainty and puzzles of his life, his parents often made him feel as though they were his children.

  For a moment Gloria seemed utterly confused about what to do next. She went uncertainly toward the table. “Are you all right?” he asked.