Mystery brt-2

by Peter Straub

  It took a long time to get David Natchez, and he was abrupt and unfriendly when he finally came to the phone. “This is Detective Natchez, and what do you want?”

  “I want to talk to you. I’m in a Greek coffee shop just behind Armory Place.”

  “You want to talk to me. You couldn’t be a little more specific, could you?”

  “Last night you were supposed to meet a man named Lamont von Heilitz in the back room of a shop across the street from the St. Alwyn Hotel. I want to talk about what he was going to tell you.”

  “He never showed up,” Natchez said. “And frankly, I have my doubts about you.”

  “He’s dead,” Tom said. “Two policemen must have picked him up as soon as he left the hotel. He was taken to his house and murdered. Then the policemen ransacked his house. Are you interested in this kind of thing, Detective Natchez? I hope you are, because I don’t have anyone else to talk to.”

  “Who are you?”

  Tom said, “I’m the person who wrote to Captain Bishop about Hasselgard.”

  There was a long silence.

  “I guess I owe it to myself to get a look at you,” Natchez said.

  “I’m at the little—”

  “I know the place,” Natchez said, and hung up.

  Tom returned to his booth and sat facing the door. Something was going to happen now; it almost did not matter what. One man would come through the door, or a dozen. Someone would listen to him, or someone would take him out and kill him. There would be an interesting problem when they discovered that he was already dead, but it would not be interesting for long. A day later they would be sitting in another bar, drinking Pusser’s Navy Rum and talking about perfect days. All of his life to this moment slammed shut behind him, separated, and floated off, self-sufficient and uninhabitable, as his conscious self had taken leave of him in his father’s bloody bedroom. What was left was the part of him that had held Lamont von Heilitz’s body, for now he had to do Lamont von Heilitz’s job. He swallowed cooling coffee and waited to see what would happen.

  In about six minutes, the amount of time it would take a man to hang up a telephone and walk down from an upper floor of police headquarters, then down the broad stone steps to Armory Place and through narrow lanes with the old names of colonial Mill Walk—an island that no longer existed—to Sugarcane Alley, a sturdy-looking man in a dark blue suit came past the window of the café and turned to come in the door.

  He saw Tom instantly, and Tom saw that he took in everything else too, and at the same moment: the unshaven counterman, the mummy-sized slab of pork revolving on a skewer in the window, the telephone and the doors to the toilets, the enlarged black and white photographs of Poros above the booths, and the old woman and child seated together past the curve of the counter at the front of the café—everything Tom himself had not really observed until this second. All of this information swam into the focus of his attention, because it was his attentiveness that kept him alive.

  He strode down the row of booths with the crisp athletic muscularity Tom had seen once before, an ordinary-looking man with short dark hair and large features. A fatalistic electricity crackled about him, a sort of self-referring reflexive command that denied ambiguities and shades of grey. An absolute gulf separated someone like him from Lamont von Heilitz: Tom understood that there were two ways of being a detective, and that men like David Natchez would always find people like von Heilitz too whimsical, intuitive, and theatrical to be taken seriously.

  Natchez ordered a cup of coffee with a gesture and slid into the booth opposite Tom. In the next ninety seconds, he destroyed most of the preconceptions Tom had just formed.

  “You’re sure that von Heilitz is dead?”

  “I just saw his body. My name is Tom Pasmore, by the way.”

  “I know that,” Natchez said, and smiled. “You were at the hospital the day Mike Mendenhall died. You had some kind of conversation with Dr. Milton and Captain Bishop.”

  “I didn’t know you noticed me.”

  “I don’t know why not—you saw me notice everything when I came in here.” The counterman brought his coffee to the booth, and Natchez acknowledged it without ever taking his eyes off Tom’s face. “The prevailing opinion is that you died of smoke inhalation in a hospital up north. I guess you came back here with the old man.” He sipped the coffee, still keeping his eyes on Tom. “For what it’s worth, I envy you your relationship with him. I didn’t know anything about Lamont von Heilitz until Captain Bishop sent me to his house to roust out the typewriter used for that note, but after I’d met him I checked back into his history. He was a great man, and I don’t use that term loosely. I respect him more than I can say. The man was a natural resource. I wish that I’d had the chance to get to know him.”

  Tom’s own emotions embarrassed him in the midst of these astonishing words, and he turned his head away to hide the fresh tears that had come to his eyes. His chin trembled like a baby’s. A very firm hand gripped the wrist of the hand he was using to hide his face.

  “Look, Tom, a lot of what happens on this island is wellnigh intolerable to me, but when Fulton Bishop’s goons kill the greatest detective in maybe a century five minutes before I have a meeting with him, I take it as a personal affront. You and I are going to sit here until you tell me everything you know. I don’t have Lamont von Heilitz to work with anymore, and you don’t either, but I think we can do each other a lot of good.”

  He released Tom’s wrist. “Tell me about the letter you wrote.”

  “I have to go back to the time when Wendell Hasek showed up drunk in front of our house carrying a bag of rocks,” Tom said, and Natchez propped his elbows on the table and hunched forward to rest his chin on his interlaced fingers.

  Half an hour later, Tom said, “And on the floor of the bedroom where I found him I saw these little round stamped-out red stains from where my grandfather’s umbrella must have touched the blood. And I smelled his cigars. So I thought he must have stood there watching while they killed him and pushed him into the closet, and I sort of went crazy for a couple of minutes, thinking about how I got mad at him just because he’d shown me the truth. Anyhow, after Andres dragged me out and dressed me in clothes that weren’t all covered with his blood, all I could think to do was to call you.”

  “So you really did it all,” Natchez said. “I’ll be damned.”

  “No, I just stumbled along,” Tom said. “I never even wanted to admit that it must have been my grandfather who killed Jeanine Thielman and Anton Goetz.”

  “But you knew it anyway. And you figured out who shot Marita Hasselgard. And it was your idea to send the notes that spooked Glen Upshaw—”

  “Into killing my father.”

  “Upshaw would have killed you too, if you had gone with von Heilitz. And anyhow, from the way you describe it, he had the same idea.”

  But he would never have known about the notes if I hadn’t found them, Tom thought, and the names of all the people who would still be alive if he had gone to Dennis Handley’s apartment and looked at a typescript of The Spoils of Poynton marched through his mind: Foxhall Edwardes, Friedrich Hasselgard, Michael Mendenhall and Roman Klink, Barbara Deane, Lamont von Heilitz.

  “The only mistake you made was to send your letter to the wrong cop,” Natchez said. “Let’s go out to the Founders Club and break some bad news to Glendenning Upshaw.” He stood up and put three dollars on the table.

  Tom stood up and saw a worried-looking figure peering at them through the window.

  “Your friend Andres?”

  Tom said yes.

  “Real watchdog, isn’t he?” Natchez went through the door of the café, and Andres glanced at Tom and backed away. “Hold on,” Natchez said, and Tom said, “Andres, it’s all right.”

  Andres took another step backwards.

  “This is the man Lamont was going to talk to. We’re going to go out and pick up my grandfather. Go home and I’ll call you when it’s over.”

&n
bsp; The driver turned around and began moving to the corner, with many doubtful glances back.

  Tom and Natchez went back through the narrow lanes to the rear of the row of Georgian buildings. The policeman told him to wait at the top end of Armory Place until he came around with a car, and trotted off toward the police parking garage. Tom walked around the side of the Printing Office and down the long plaza, feeling conspicuous in his father’s suit. Policemen in blue uniforms sunned themselves on the benches beneath the potted palms. He heard church bells ringing, and realized that it was Sunday.

  “One thing I don’t understand,” Natchez said, braking in front of the guardhouse at the Founders Club. “How did your grandfather and Fulton Bishop get together? It turned out to be a partnership like Gilbert and Sullivan, but Glen Upshaw couldn’t have known that at the beginning. Fulton Bishop was just a young cop from the near west end of the island. I don’t think he ever showed any signs of exceptional promise, but someone was always watching out for him, getting him promoted, making sure he got taken off assignments he couldn’t handle.” A guard sauntered toward them, looking disdainfully at the dented black Studebaker Natchez had drawn from the motor pool. “Take that Blue Rose case. Bishop was in so far over his head he had to dog paddle, and instead of being sent off to a sleepy little precinct like Elm Grove, he’s promoted into an office at headquarters and Damrosch—”

  The guard had circled all around the car, and came up to Natchez and leaned on the window. “Did you have some business here, sir?”

  Natchez flipped open his shield case and shoved his badge to within an inch of the man’s nose. “Step away from the car, or I’ll run over your foot,” he said.

  The guard snatched his hands off the window and moved back. “Yes, sir.”

  Natchez drove past him into the grounds of the club. “And Damrosch, as I was saying, gets handed the case and winds up losing his mind. I’m not exactly familiar with this place. Where do I go?”

  “Right,” Tom said. “Don’t you think Damrosch was the Blue Rose murderer?”

  “Well, I guess Damrosch thought he was. Why didn’t von Heilitz ever work on it?”

  “He was fascinated by it, I know that much. But he told me he was always busy with other cases in those years, and by the time he was free to think about it, it was all over.… We go down here now.”

  Natchez turned from Suzanne Lenglen Lane into Bobby Jones Trail and said, “Jesus, who named these streets? Joe Ruddler?”

  Tom pointed to the last bungalow on Bobby Jones Trail, and Natchez swung in next to the curb below Glendenning Upshaw’s house. “I mean, I like sports as much as the next guy, but that yelling degrades public taste.” He left the car, and Tom got out on the other side.

  “What are you going to say to him?”

  “It’ll come to me.”

  Natchez jogged up the steps. They crossed the terrace and passed beneath the white arch into the bungalow’s central courtyard. Natchez pushed the bell. “He has servants?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Kingsley. They’re both in their eighties.”

  Natchez pressed the bell again. After a long time, the sound of Kingsley’s shuffling footsteps came to them.

  Natchez did not take his finger off the bell until the door opened and Kingsley’s skeletal face appeared. “I am sorry, sir, but Mr. Upshaw is—” Kingsley saw Tom standing a pace behind the policeman, and his already white face turned the color of paper. All the bones beneath his skin seemed to push forward.

  “Hello, Kingsley,” Tom said.

  The old man tottered backward, literally gasping for breath, and Natchez gently urged the door open. If he had pushed any harder, Kingsley would have fallen down.

  “Master Tom,” the butler said. “We thought—” He stopped to draw in breath, and his lips disappeared, exposing the pink false gum of his dentures. He was not wearing the frock coat, and his sleeves were rolled up.

  “I know,” Tom said. “The newspaper made a mistake. Where’s my grandfather?”

  Natchez walked into the entry, and passed without hesitating into the wide hallway that led to the sitting room at the front of the bungalow and the study, dining room, and terrace at the rear. He turned toward the study. Kingsley shot him an agonized glance. “Mr. Upshaw isn’t here, Master Tom. He left in a great hurry about an hour ago, and gave us instructions to pack his clothes—he said he’d be spending the rest of the summer at Tranquility—” Kingsley sat down on a dark wooden bench beside the suit of armor.

  “Did he say where he was going when he left?”

  “He said I should not speak to any reporters or let anyone in the bungalow—but of course we didn’t know that you—” He gaped at Tom for a moment. “I am sorry about that time when you called from the lake. He seemed so distressed ever since, and I’ve been waiting for news of your burial, and so when a call came this afternoon—”

  Natchez came storming down the hall. He gave Tom a wild look. Mrs. Kingsley was moving behind him, reaching out as if to grab his coat. “He’s gone,” Natchez said. He turned to Kingsley and said, “What call?”

  “It was from a police officer up north,” Mrs. Kingsley said. “My husband was packing clothes in Mr. Upshaw’s bedroom, and I answered.”

  “Truehart?” Tom asked.

  “I don’t think so, no, Master Tom. It was some funny name.”

  Tom groaned. “Spychalla.”

  “That’s the name. After Mr. Upshaw hung up, he handed me the phone and asked me to arrange a ticket to Venezuela for him as soon as possible. I tried to get him a flight today, but there are no international flights on Sundays, so he said he’d do it himself later.”

  “Nappy talked,” Tom said. “Or they arrested the man who actually set the fire, and Jerry turned around and pointed the finger at my grandfather.”

  “Your grandfather was a fine man,” said Mrs. Kingsley. “You ought to remember that.”

  “Who’s this Spychalla?”

  “The chief’s idiot deputy, up in Eagle Lake.”

  “He called?” Natchez bellowed. “Follow me.” He set off up the hallway toward the study.

  When Tom came in, Natchez was already behind the desk, holding the telephone with one hand, demanding to be put through to the Chief of Police in Eagle Lake, Wisconsin, and opening the drawers of the desk with the other. He turned to Tom and said, “Where’s that safe?”

  Tom went to the wall at the side of the room and began feeling the panels. “Give me Chief Truehart,” Natchez said. “Chief, this is Detective David Natchez on Mill Walk, and I’m in Glendenning Upshaw’s house with Tom Pasmore. Upshaw got a call from one of your men, and took off. What the hell is going on up there?”

  Tom pushed a panel that yielded under his hand. He ran his fingers down the seam of the panel until they slid into an indentation. He pulled, and a square door opened in the wall. Six inches inside the wall was another door. A simple hook held it shut. Tom lifted the hook out of its catch, and opened the second door. He was looking into a deep empty recess.

  “Well, your friend is dead,” Natchez said. “The boy found his body this morning.”

  Tom walked to the couch that faced the terrace and fell into it.

  “Spychalla thought what? … Well, if you were waiting for this urgent call from Marinette, why weren’t you present to take it?”

  “He was on a flying job,” Tom said.

  “A flying job?” Natchez shouted into the phone. He listened a moment, then said, “Yes, I am blaming you … Well, I’m glad you’re blaming yourself too, but that doesn’t do me much good, Chief Truehart … Okay, take care of whatever you can, and I’ll get back in touch with you.”

  He slammed down the phone. His face was blazing. “Your grandfather called the Eagle Lake police twice yesterday, concerned to know how the investigation into the fire was coming along, and today when this clown Spychalla learned that the police in Marinette had arrested the guy who actually set the fire, he thought he’d be the first to let him know the g
ood news.” He swiveled the chair around to look at the wall. “Tell me all those papers are still in there.”

  “It’s empty,” Tom said.

  Natchez lowered his gaze to Tom. “Do you realize how bad this situation actually is?”

  Tom nodded. “I think so.”

  Natchez just looked at him for a moment. He opened his mouth, then closed it.

  “He still thinks I’m dead, doesn’t he?”

  “That won’t do us any good if he gets on a plane.”

  “He needs a place to wait. He needs a place to store those records.”

  Mrs. Kingsley came a single step into the room. “Get out,” Natchez said.

  She ignored him. “You should be defending your grandfather,” she said. “Shouldn’t be helping this man—you’re only doing it because you’re weak, like he always said.” Tom looked up in astonishment, and saw that she was furious. “He was going to give you a college education and a career, and how do you repay him? You come here with this renegade policeman. He was a great man, and you’re helping his enemies destroy him.”

  Kingsley fussed in the entrance of the study, trying to shut her up.

  “You should be ashamed to draw breath,” she said. “I heard you, I heard you defending that nurse against Dr. Milton, when you came here for lunch.”

  “Do you know where he went?” Tom asked her.

  “No,” Kingsley said.

  “Raised on Eastern Shore Road,” said Mrs. Kingsley. “What you deserved was—” Her eyes skidded off him, and she turned the full force of her rage and disdain toward Natchez.

  “Eastern Shore Road,” Tom said. “I see. You think I deserve something else. What do I deserve, Mrs. Kingsley?”

  “I don’t know where Mr. Upshaw went,” she said quickly. “But you’ll never find him.”

  “You’re lying,” Tom said. Barbara Deane and Nancy Vetiver spoke within him, and a sweet conviction caused him to smile at her.

  Mrs. Kingsley stopped trying to murder Natchez with a look, and pushed past her husband. All three men heard her stamping down the hall. A bedroom door slammed.

  “He never told us where he was going,” Kingsley said. “She’s very upset—afraid of what could happen. Master Tom, she didn’t really mean—” He shook his head.