Mystery brt-2

by Peter Straub

  Now Captain Fulton Bishop faced a press conference staged in the full congratulatory official manner, from behind a desk in a flag-filled reception room at Armory Place. Captain Bishop’s smooth, suntanned head, as hard and expressionless as a knuckle, tilted toward the bank of microphones. “Of course his sister is distressed, but it would be unwise to take her allegations for anything more than the emotional outburst they are. We gave Mr. Edwardes ample opportunity to surrender. As you know, the suspect chose to respond with fire, and seriously injured the two brave men who were the first to see him.”

  “The two officers were injured inside the house?” asked a reporter.

  “That is correct. The suspect admitted them to the house for the express purpose of killing them behind closed doors. He was not aware that backup teams had been ordered to the area.”

  “Backup teams were ordered before the first shots?”

  “This was a dangerous criminal. I wanted my men to have all the protection they could have. No more questions.”

  Captain Bishop stood up and turned away from the table in a bubble of noise, but a shouted question reached him.

  “What can you tell us about the disappearance of Minister Hasselgard?”

  He turned back to the crowd of reporters and leaned over the microphones. Harsh white light bounced off the top of his smooth head. He paused a moment before speaking. “That matter is under full investigation. There will be a full disclosure of the results of that investigation in a matter of days.” He paused again, and cleared his throat. “Let me say this. Certain matters in the Finance Ministry have recently come to light. If you ask me, Hasselgard wasn’t washed off that boat—he jumped off it.”

  He straightened up into a roar of questions and smoothed his necktie over his shirt. “I would like to thank someone,” he said, shouting to be heard over their questions. “Some good citizen wrote to me with information that led indirectly to the solution of Miss Hasselgard’s murder. Whoever you are, I think you are watching me at this minute. I would like you to make yourself known to me or anyone here at Armory Place, so that we can demonstrate our gratitude for your assistance.” He marched away from the table, ignoring the shouts of the reporters.

  Setting out sandwiches and bowls of soup on the little breakfast table in the kitchen, Gloria reminded Tom of a glamorous mother in a television commercial. She smiled at him, her eyes bright with the effort to demonstrate how good she was being. “I’ll leave some food in the refrigerator for you tonight, Tom, but here’s something nice to tide you over. We’re going out tonight, you know.”

  Then he understood—she had dressed for the dinner party as soon as she got out of bed. He sat down and ate. During lunch his father several times said how tasty the soup was, how much he enjoyed the sandwiches. It was a great lunch. Wasn’t it a great lunch, Tom?

  “Now they’re claiming that Hasselgard drowned himself,” Tom said. “They’re going to announce that he was stealing from the treasury. If someone hadn’t written to the police, none of this would have happened. If the police had never gotten that letter—”

  “They would have nailed him anyway,” his father broke in. “Hasselgard came too far too fast. Now drop the subject.”

  He was talking to Tom but watching Gloria, who had raised her sandwich halfway to her mouth, shuddered, and lowered it again to her plate. She looked up, but she did not see them. “ ‘Her and her’s da,’ the servants used to say. Because there were just the two of us in this house.”

  “Let me help you upstairs.” Victor shot Tom a dark look, and took his wife’s arm to get her to her feet and lead her out of the room.

  When his father came back down, Tom was in the little television room, eating the rest of his sandwich and watching one of the WMIL-TV reporters stand beside the hull of the Mogrom’s Fortune at the police dock as he described how the Maritime Patrol had found the boat. “Here on the waterfront, they are scoffing at the theory that Hasselgard could have been washed overboard. Amid growing rumors—”

  “Haven’t you had enough of this?” Victor unceremoniously bent down and turned the channel indicator until a baseball game appeared on the screen. “Where’s my sandwich?”

  “On the table.”

  He left and returned almost immediately, the big sandwich dripping out of his hand. He lowered himself into his chair. “You’re mother will be fine, no thanks to you.”

  Tom went up to his room.

  At seven o’clock, his parents came downstairs together, and Tom turned off the television just before they came into the room. His mother looked exactly as she had at noon—dressed to go out in her pearls and high heels. He told them to have a good time, and called Lamont von Heilitz as soon as they walked out the door.

  They sat on opposite sides of a leather-topped coffee table stacked with books. Lamont von Heilitz leaned against the high tufted back of a leather sofa and squinted at Tom through cigarette smoke.

  “I feel restless, that’s why I’m smoking,” he said. “I never used to smoke when I worked. When I was a young man I used to smoke between cases, waiting to see who might appear on my doorstep. All in all I must be a weaker creature now than I was then. I didn’t enjoy seeing the police in my house this afternoon.”

  “Bishop came to see you?” Tom asked. Everything about Mr. von Heilitz seemed different this night.

  “He sent two detectives named Holman and Natchez home with me. The same two men invited me along to Armory Place last night to discuss the death of Finance Minister Hasselgard.”

  “They consulted you?”

  Von Heilitz drew in smoke, then luxuriantly exhaled. “Not quite. Captain Bishop thought I might have written them a certain letter.”

  “Oh, no,” Tom said, remembering trying to call the old man after watching the previous night’s news.

  “Whatever they were doing down in Weasel Hollow kept interrupting the interrogation. I didn’t get back here until nearly noon, and Detectives Holman and Natchez didn’t leave until after three.”

  “They questioned you for another three hours?”

  He shook his head. “They were looking for a typewriter that would match up with the letter. The search was slow and industrious. I’d forgotten how many typewriters I had accumulated. Holman and Natchez took it as particularly suspicious that one old upright was hidden away in the filing cabinets.”

  “Why did you hide one of your typewriters?”

  “Just what Detective Natchez wanted to know. He seemed very distressed, this Detective Natchez. I gather that one of the young officers injured in Weasel Hollow—Mendenhall?—was important to him. In any case, the typewriter was a souvenir of the Jack the Ripper’s Grandson business—did you read about it last night? It was the machine on which Dr. Nelson wrote his letters to the New York police.” Von Heilitz smiled and smoked, sprawled out on his chesterfield, his feet up on the coffee table. He had spent a night at police headquarters, and a morning watching detectives paw through his files. He had showered, shaved, napped, and changed clothes, but he still looked exhausted to Tom.

  “Nothing happened the way I thought it would,” Tom said. “They keep you overnight—”

  The old man shrugged.

  “—and this man Edwardes is killed, and two policemen were shot, and Hasselgard killed himself—”

  “He didn’t kill himself,” von Heilitz said, squinting at Tom through a cloud of smoke. “He was executed.”

  “But what did Foxhall Edwardes have to do with it?”

  “He was just—what was the word his sister used? A convenience. He’s the way they close the books.”

  “That means I killed him too. Hasselgard and Edwardes would still be alive if I hadn’t written that letter.”

  “You didn’t kill them. The system killed them to protect itself.” He lowered his legs, sat up, and ground out the cigarette in an ashtray. “Do you remember my saying that the man who killed my parents told one lie? The lie, of course, was about my father’s involvement i
n the corruption on Mill Walk—I think the truth was that he hated what had become of the island. And I think he must have gone to his friend David Redwing, and told him what he had discovered and what he planned to do about it. Let’s say that David Redwing was as shocked as my father had been. He might have talked about my father’s charges to the wrong person. Consider that for a second. If my father and mother were killed soon after David Redwing heard my father’s tale, wouldn’t he be suspicious of their deaths? The answer’s obvious—of course he would. Unless someone he trusted absolutely had assured him that my father had been wrong in his allegations, and that an ordinary criminal had murdered my parents.”

  “Who do you think it was?”

  “His own son. Maxwell Redwing. Until his resignation, Maxwell was his father’s right-hand man.”

  Tom thought of Maxwell Redwing on the terrace of the club at Eagle Lake, entertaining young nieces and nephews who were old people now; he remembered the obituary in the Eyewitness.

  “Tell me, what do you think I am working on these days?”

  “I don’t know,” Tom said. “You were working on Hasselgard, but I suppose that’s over now.”

  “Our late Finance Minister was only a little piece of it. It’s my last case—I could even say the case. In fact, it goes all the way back to Jeanine Thielman.”

  He had done nothing but lead Tom back into the circle of his obsession with the Redwings. “Look,” Tom began, “I don’t want you to think—”

  Von Heilitz stopped him by holding up a gloved hand. “Before you say anything, I want you to think about something. Do you imagine that anyone looking at you would guess what happened to you seven years ago?”

  It took Tom a long time to realize that, like his mother that afternoon, von Heilitz was referring to his accident. It seemed utterly disconnected to him—buried within his recent life, as clay pipes and old bottles were now and then found buried in old back gardens.

  “That is an essential part of who you are. Who you are.”

  Tom wanted to get out of the old man’s house—it was as bad as being caught in a spiderweb.

  “You nearly died. You had an experience most people have only once in their lives, and which very few live to remember or talk about. You’re like a person who saw the dark side of the moon. Few people have been privileged to go there.”

  “Privileged,” Tom said, thinking: Jeanine Thielman, what makes her a part of this stuff?

  “Do you know what some people have reported of that experience?”

  “I don’t want to know,” Tom said.

  “They felt they were moving down a long tunnel in darkness. At the end of the tunnel was a white light. They report a sense of peace and happiness, even joy—”

  Tom felt as though his heart might explode, as though everything in his body had misfired at once. He literally could not see for a moment. He tried to stand up, but none of his muscles obeyed him. He could not draw breath. As soon as he became aware that he was blind, he could see again, but panic still surged through his body. It was as if he had been blown apart into scattered atoms and then reassembled.

  “Tom, you are a child of the night,” von Heilitz said.

  The words triggered something new in him. Above him Tom saw the vault of the night sky, as if the roof had been lifted off the house. Only a few widely scattered stars pierced the endless blackness. Tom remembered Hattie Bascombe saying, “The world is half night.” Layer after layer of night, layer after layer of stars and darkness.

  He said, “No more, I can’t take any more of this—” He looked at his body, arranged loosely in Lamont von Heilitz’s leather chair. It was the body of a stranger. His legs looked impossibly long.

  “I just wanted you to know that you have all of that inside you,” the old man said. “Whatever it is—pain, terror, wonder too.”

  Tom smelled gunpowder, then realized he was smelling himself. He felt that if he started, he would never stop crying.

  The old man smiled at him. “What do you think you were doing on that day? Way out on the far west end?”

  “I had a friend in Elm Cove. I guess I was going there.” It sounded false the instant he said it.

  For a moment neither spoke.

  “I can remember this feeling—of having to get somewhere.”

  Von Heilitz said, “There.”

  “Yes. There.”

  “Have you ever been back to the Goethe Park area?”

  “Once. I almost threw up. I couldn’t stay there—anywhere around there. It was that day I saw you.”

  He was struck by the way the Shadow was looking at him—as if he were figuring out a thousand different things at once.

  He fought to recover himself. “Could I ask you something about Jeanine Thielman?” he asked.

  “You’d better.”

  “This sounds kind of stupid—probably I just forgot something.”

  “Ask me anyhow.”

  “You said that Arthur Thielman left the gun on a table near the dock, and that Anton Goetz picked it up and shot Jeanine in the back of the head from thirty feet away. How did Goetz know that the gun pulled to the left? You can’t tell that just by looking at a gun, can you?”

  Von Heilitz lowered his legs and leaned forward over the table, extending his hand. He gave Tom’s hand a surprisingly firm grip, and laughed out loud.

  “So I didn’t miss anything?”

  Von Heilitz was still pumping his hand. “Nothing at all. In fact, you saw what was missing.” He released Tom’s hand and leaned back, placing his hands on his knees. “Goetz knew that the gun pulled to the left because he took two shots. The first one hit the Thielman lodge. Goetz corrected instantly, and hit her with the second. I dug the first bullet out of the lodge myself.”

  “So you knew where Goetz had been standing. You figured out where the pistol had to be by backtracking from the bullet. Like with Hasselgard’s car.”

  Von Heilitz smiled and shook his head.

  “There were spent cartridges under the table.”

  “There were no spent cartridges.”

  “You saw it happen,” Tom said. “No. You saw the gun on the table.” He thought about this. “No. I can’t figure it out.”

  “You were close. Another summer resident of Eagle Lake saw the gun on the table that evening. A single man in his mid-twenties, like myself. A widower with a young daughter, living alone in his family’s lodge. He left Eagle Lake the morning after Jeanine was killed.”

  An unpleasant thrill went through Tom’s body. “Who was it?”

  “He was probably the only person to have heard the shots that night, because his was the next lodge in line. And there was a Redwing family party at the club that night, celebrating Jonathan Redwing’s engagement to Kate Duffield. They had a band in from Chicago—Ben Pollack. Made a lot of noise.”

  In a quiet voice, Tom asked, “Was he building a hospital in Miami?”

  “One of Mill Walk Construction’s first big contracts. You saw the clipping in my book, did you? He had set up a separate office in Miami even then. I gather it still does a great deal of business.”

  “So my grandfather heard the shots. He must have thought …”

  “That Arthur had killed Jeanine?” The Shadow crossed one leg over the other and interlaced his fingers over his nonexistent stomach. “I stopped off to see him in Miami after I made sure that Minor Truehart was out of jail. I wanted him to know what had happened up in Eagle Lake after he left. In fact, I brought him copies of all the Eagle Lake papers that covered the murder.”

  Some message was being passed to him, but Tom could not read it in either von Heilitz’s words or his manner—it could not be that Glendenning Upshaw had witnessed a murder and calmly left the scene.

  “The balcony of your grandfather’s lodge overlooked the lake. He used to spend his evenings out there, thinking about how he could get a better discount on cement than Arthur Thielman, or whatever it was he thought about. From his balcony, Glen could
see the Thielmans’ dock as well as his own.”

  “He ran away the next morning?”

  Von Heilitz snorted. “Glen Upshaw never ran away from anything in his life. I think he just never considered altering arrangements he had already made. In any case, that was the last summer he spent at Eagle Lake—the last time any member of your family was at the lake.”

  “No, no,” Tom said. “It was grief. He stopped going to the lodge because of grief. My grandmother drowned that summer. He couldn’t stand to see the place again.”

  “Your grandmother lost her life in 1924, the year before all this. It wasn’t grief that made your grandfather leave Eagle Lake. It was business—the hospital was a lot more important to him than a marital dispute between a competitor and his wife.”

  “He would have let the guide be executed?”

  “Well, all he told me was that he saw a long-barreled Colt lying on the table. The shots could have been anything—on a lake, it can be next to impossible to know where sounds are coming from. You do hear shots up there; people have guns. It’s possible that he didn’t know that Jeanine was dead.”

  “It’s possible he did, you mean.”

  “How often do you see your grandfather?”

  “Maybe once or twice a year.”

  “You’re his only grandchild. He lives about fifteen miles from your house. Has he ever thrown a ball to you? Taken you riding or sailing? To a movie?”

  Any such suggestion would have been ridiculous, and Tom’s response must have shown in his face.

  “No,” said the old man. “I didn’t think so. Glen is an aloof man—preposterously aloof. There’s something missing in him, you know.”

  “Do you know how my grandmother happened to drown? Did she go out by herself at night? Was she drunk?”

  The old man shrugged, and again looked as if he were thinking a thousand thoughts at once. “She went out at night,” he finally said. “Everybody at Eagle Lake drank a lot in those days.” He looked down at the hem of his suit jacket, lifted it, and crossed his left hand over his waist to flick away a blemish invisible to Tom. Then he looked up. “I’m worn out. You’d better be getting home.”