Mystery brt-2

by Peter Straub

  The man said, “Sir?”

  “Do it,” Upshaw called to him.

  The man came out of the shadows and trotted down all the flights of steps and slipped into the long tunnel that led to the street.

  “All right?” asked Tom’s grandfather.

  “I’m going out,” Natchez whispered.

  “No, he has to see me,” Tom whispered back, and moved out of the passage and stepped backward in the shadow of the walkway.

  “Who is that?” Upshaw shifted forward, now letting more of his anger show itself. “Who are you?”

  Tom moved an inch nearer the lighter darkness of the court. His grandfather would be able to see his body, but not his face.

  Glendenning Upshaw stopped moving. Tom felt the air around him tighten, like the pressure inside his head. The black cloud of his grandfather’s body sent out a wave of shock like a flash of lightning. Two loud breaths came from him. Tom’s own chest heaved.

  “To hell with you,” his grandfather said. “Von Heilitz is dead.”

  Tom moved backwards away from the passage.

  “What the hell is this, a charade? Some babyish trick?”

  Tom moved backwards in the darkness, and saw the black cloud of his grandfather’s heavy body surge forward toward the passage where Natchez stood concealed. Another arrow had flown into his haunch, but for Tom there was none of the confusion and depression of yesterday, only a bleak satisfaction. A slanting black line of absolute shadow obliterated the top half of the old man’s body from shoulder to hip, and what was visible was only half-visible, but pain and outrage boomed toward him as his grandfather shouted, “Stand still!” and moved closer to the passage.

  “I know what you are,” Tom said. He stepped backwards again, and heard doors opening in the tenements above him.

  His grandfather moved past the open passage, and his head came free of the shadows of the walkway. Shadowy light fell on his white hair. His face was savage. Almost instantly, the shadow of the next walkway obliterated all but the impression of relentless moving force.

  “You murdered Jeanine Thielman,” Tom said. A door slammed above him, but neither he nor the man coming toward him noticed.

  “That’s very interesting,” his grandfather said.

  Tom saw David Natchez slide out of the passage with his pistol upraised.

  “The way I saw it,” his grandfather said, “she chose to commit suicide. Weak people do that with a terrible frequency. I’ve been surrounded by them all my life.”

  “Blue Rose,” Tom said.

  His grandfather sighed heavily.

  “All you were was a flunky for the Redwings,” Tom said.

  His grandfather stopped moving. He was a foot or two short of the point where he and Tom would see enough of each other’s faces to be recognized. “I know you, by God,” Upshaw said, and again Tom felt the moment of shock that was like an arrow piercing his grandfather’s hide.

  “No, you don’t,” Tom said. “You never knew anybody at all.” He stepped out from under the walkway into the murky courtyard.

  “By God,” his grandfather said. “Tom. You were hard enough to get rid of, boy, but I imagine—” His hand went into his pocket and came out with the gun Tom had seen him take from his desk drawer.

  Tom’s gut went cold. He looked over his shoulder at David Natchez, who shouted, “Upshaw, put down—”

  His grandfather pointed the gun at him and pulled the trigger. Fire and smoke came out of the end of the gun, and the explosion struck Tom like a blow. Mortality whizzed past his head, heating the air, and before the bullet splatted against the wall, another explosion banged into his ear drums. His grandfather had vanished into the gloom beside him, and Tom looked toward the passage and saw only empty space. He sensed a crowd of people staring down from the walkways. He turned sideways and saw what looked like the barrel of a cannon pointed at his head. His grandfather held it with arms extended, almost cross-eyed with concentration. Tom saw an index finger fat as a trout pulling on the trigger, and Natchez yelled, and the barrel jerked away from his face. It exploded again. Tom jumped backwards with the explosion in his head and saw a black hole appear in his grandfather’s head, just above the bridge of his nose. Flags of red and grey stuff flew out of the back of his head. The gun sank, and his grandfather twitched backwards and righted himself and went down on his knees, still trying to pull the trigger. A ringing clamor filled Tom’s ears like a physical substance. He was dimly aware of David Natchez walking toward him from beneath a walkway. Natchez said something that did not penetrate the molten lead filling his ears. His grandfather settled down into himself and fell foward. A muffle of sound came from Natchez, and all the heads hanging over the railings jerked back, except for that of a woman with a rag-doll face. Carmen Bishop lingered at the railing, looking as if she wanted to fly down at him, and then slowly backed away. Tom wobbled sideways and sat down.

  Another muffled pillow of sound came from Natchez. Beneath the fullness in his ears, the words reached him at last. I don’t know how he missed you.

  The gun didn’t pull to the left, Tom said, and felt his own words as individual, cottony wads striking his ears from the inside of his head.

  Natchez looked puzzled, and Tom felt himself say, It’s an old story. He reached out and touched his grandfather’s back.

  He looked back up at the walkways and Carmen Bishop screamed something down at him that disappeared entirely into the noise in his ears. “We’re going to do something with him,” he said, and this time dimly heard his own voice—tinny as an old record heard through a wall, but real words, not bubbles of pressure inside his head.

  “I’ll call the station,” Natchez said in a nearly identical voice. “And I’ll send someone out to pick up von Heilitz’s body.”

  Tom shook his head. “We’re going to take him with us.”

  “Take him where?”

  “Back to the bungalow,” Tom said. He leaned forward and picked up his grandfather’s pistol. It seemed surpassingly ugly, and heavy as an iron weight. He put it in his jacket pocket. Two men came through the long tunnel from the street, and Tom and Natchez turned to look at them as they walked into the court. One of them was the man in the white shirt, and the other, a few paces behind him, was Andres. The man in the white shirt looked down at Glendenning Upshaw’s body, glanced at Natchez, and shoved his hands in his pockets. Andres reached down, and Tom took his hand and stood up.

  “You could make this a perfect day,” Natchez said, “by telling me you know where this pile of shit hid his papers and records.”

  “I do know,” Tom said. “You do too.”

  Natchez looked at his own pistol as if it had just been magicked into his hand, and pulled back his jacket to slip it into his holster. “Holman, go up to the third level on this side,” he said to the man in the white shirt. “Captain Bishop’s sister lives up there. I want a box of papers and journals, anything like that. Bishop’s finished.”

  “I can see that,” the man said, and began moving toward the stairs. The woman with the rag-doll face was peering down at them again.

  “No,” Tom said. “That’s not where they are. My grandfather stopped somewhere on the way here. He gave them to somebody for safekeeping.”

  “Who was that?” Natchez asked.

  Tom managed to smile at him, and saw understanding gradually cross Natchez’s face.

  “You want me to go up?” the other policeman asked.

  “No,” Natchez said. “If you want to stay out of jail, go home and keep your mouth shut. I have some business to take care of with this boy here, and then I’ll call you. I’ll pick up the papers, and then you and I are going to take two drunken shit-heads to the Elm Cove station and arrest them for the murder of Lamont von Heilitz.”

  The other man swallowed.

  “We were never here,” Natchez said. “Is that right?” he asked Tom.

  “That’s right,” Tom said.

  The other policeman faded away to
ward the long passage out to the street, and Natchez leaned down to try to pick up Glendenning Upshaw’s body. After a second, Andres bent to help him.

  The red taxi with the dangling headlight was parked across the sidewalk from the back end of Maxwell’s Heaven. The two men carried Glendenning Upshaw’s limp body to the rear of the taxi, and Tom opened the trunk. When he slammed it down on the curled-up body, the noise came to him soft and diminished, like the closing of a bank vault.

  Andres got behind the wheel. “Maybe I shouldn’t have followed,” he said. “I went out to the Founders Club behind you, five or six cars back, all the way, and I parked where I did yesterday. After you came out, I followed you back here and saw you go into the Courts. I went in behind you, and then I got lost, so I walked around until I found my way back out, and then I drove around to the other side. When I heard the shots, I came in.”

  “You did the right thing,” Natchez said. “What I wonder about is whether we’re doing the right thing.”

  “Drive,” Tom said, and Andres pulled away from the curb. Natchez flashed his badge at the guardhouse, and the red taxi wound through the palms and sand dunes to Bobby Jones Trail and pulled up in front of the long white bungalow. When the three of them got out of the cab, Kingsley came out through the arch and began making his way down the steps. Tom held up a hand and stopped him. “Get your wife and take her into your quarters. Leave the front door open.”

  “But—”

  “Stay in your rooms until I tell you to come out. Something is going to happen that you can’t see.”

  “What?” Kingsley said, too disturbed to remember his usual formality.

  “We’re going to find my grandfather,” Tom said.

  “But Master Tom, he—”

  “Make sure your wife stays in the room with you,” Tom said.

  Kingsley nodded sadly and turned himself around and began tottering back up the steps.

  “Kingsley,” Tom said.

  The butler sagged aginst the railing and looked back at him.

  “Has the mail come yet?”

  “It just arrived, Master Tom. I put Mr. Upshaw’s letters on his desk.”

  “Fine,” Tom said.

  Kingsley gazed at Tom like an old dog that fears a beating, and said, “He was at home that night, Master Tom. You remember—the night you called him from Eagle Lake?”

  “I don’t blame you for anything,” Tom said.

  The butler nodded again and began toiling up the steps like a marionette with a couple of broken strings. Tom went back to the car and stood beside the two men, who had opened the trunk and were staring down at the swollen black thing inside it. At the back of the trunk, a little fringe of white hair showed above the rucked-up jacket and a bent arm.

  “I guess I know what you want to do,” Natchez said. “But why do you want to do it?”

  “Poetic justice,” Tom said.

  “Does this have anything to do with Damrosch?”

  “I don’t know. It might. I think he tried to kill Buzz Laing, and he could have gotten rid of Damrosch to end the investigation. I think Lamont von—I think my father was trying to get me to think about that before he was killed.”

  “Are we going to take him out of the car?” Andres asked.

  “I’ll help Natchez do it,” Tom said. “Would you wait for us out here, Andres? It’d be better if you didn’t see this.”

  “I didn’t see nothing all day except Lamont,” Andres said. He stepped back, and Tom and Natchez leaned into the trunk and pulled out Glendenning Upshaw’s heavy legs. One of his trousers had ridden up on his leg, and a long expanse of white flesh glared from the top of his sock. One of his feet swung from side to side over the black road. They leaned back in and pulled his waist and hips farther out of the trunk, and the stiff foot thumped the asphalt. The front of the suit was wet with urine, and Tom’s hand instantly felt slimy. He wiped his hand on the hem of the soft black jacket. A bubble of gas farted out of the body. Tom and Natchez got their hands on his shoulders and pulled him upright. His head lolled back, and his mouth fell open.

  “Get his right arm over your shoulders,” Natchez said, “and put your left arm around his back. I’ll get on his other side, and we’ll try to walk him in.”

  Tom propped one thick, heavy arm around the back of his neck and positioned himself. When Natchez was ready, they lifted up with their legs. Glendenning Upshaw hung between them like a fat scarecrow filled with wet cement. Something in his stomach sloshed and gurgled. His head fell forward, and Tom smelled cigars, blood, aftershave, and gunpowder. It felt like his grandfather was trying to push him down through the asphalt. Natchez stepped forward, and Tom moved with him. They moved up on the sidewalk and began dragging the body toward the steps.

  “He must weigh three hundred pounds,” Natchez said.

  Tom had to stoop so that the dead arm would not slip off his shoulders, and his back ached by the time they got up the steps. Blood from the back of the black suit soaked through to his arm.

  Natchez said, “Do you want to put him down for a second?”

  “If I put him down, I’ll never want to pick him up again,” Tom said.

  They carried him beneath the white arch and through the open door. Upshaw’s feet hooked the rug and dragged it along until it caught in the study door and fell back as his feet slipped over the top of the fabric. Through the ringing in his ears Tom could hear Mrs. Kingsley ranting in a room somewhere far back in the house. Her husband gave tired monosyllabic answers.

  “I suppose you want to put him in the desk chair.”

  “Right,” Tom said.

  “Don’t let him fall until I brace the chair, or we’ll have to clean a lot of blood up off the floor.”

  They dragged the body toward the desk. A dozen envelopes of various sizes and colors had been neatly stacked on the shiny surface. Natchez leaned forward to twirl the chair around, and Tom hastily dipped under the body when it began to slide away from him. “Okay,” Natchez said. “We have to turn around and try to get his ass over the seat of the chair.”

  They revolved, and Natchez went up on his toes to try to get Upshaw’s legs in the right position. “Let’s go down slow,” Natchez said. As they bent their knees, both Natchez and Tom reached back for the seat to hold it steady. They pulled it forward and bent another six inches. Glendenning Upshaw landed in the chair with a soft wet sound. Tom straightened up, and Natchez bent over to get the body to sit more naturally. Then he grunted and pushed the chair toward the desk. He wiped the back of the chair with his handkerchief.

  Tom fanned the letters out on the desk and picked up the four with hand-printed addresses. He ripped open the envelopes and took out the four pieces of yellow paper and put them down before the body. The other letters he gathered into an untidy pile beside the ripped envelopes and the notes. Finally he took the heavy black pistol from his pocket and put it on the desk. He looked over his grandfather’s body at Natchez.

  “You think he dropped off all his records at Wendell Hasek’s place,” Natchez said.

  “I’m sure he did.” Tom stepped back from the desk.

  “I hope to hell you’re right.”

  “He wouldn’t give them to Carmen Bishop. She’d burn them as soon as he left the island. He’d trust Hasek with them, because Hasek’s a crook. When my grandfather had his own company robbed, Hasek stored the stolen money for him. He distributed payoff money for him for years. My grandfather was used to trusting him.”

  Natchez nodded slowly. He slid the gun toward him on the desk, moving it around the notes with their stark block letters. “Poetic justice, hell,” he said.

  “That’s part of it,” Tom said. “My mother’s another part of it. She’ll have to learn a lot of things about her father, but I don’t want her to know that he was shot while he was trying to kill me face to face.”

  “But what you really want to do is make him look even worse than he was.” Natchez picked up the gun and began wiping it down with
his handkerchief. “You want to make it look like he broke—like he crumbled.”

  “He can’t look any worse than he was,” Tom said. “But you’re wrong. I want poetic justice.”

  “You think life is like a book,” Natchez said. Holding the barrel of the gun in the handkerchief, he came around behind the back of the chair to Upshaw’s right side and bent down to fit the grip in his open palm. He closed the thick fingers around the grip and wedged the index finger into the trigger guard. Then he straightened up and pushed Upshaw’s body back against the chair while he held the hand with the gun upright. Glendenning Upshaw sat upright at his desk in a bloodstained suit, his head tilted forward and his eyes and mouth open. His tongue protruded a little bit between his teeth. Natchez took a handful of white hair in his left hand and yanked the staring head upright. He bent the hand with the gun around so that the barrel faced toward Upshaw and lined it up with the wound. Natchez laid his own index finger on top of Upshaw’s, and grimaced while he brought the barrel right up to the black hole above the bridge of his nose.

  “Well, here goes nothing,” he said. “Literally.”

  Natchez pressed the dead man’s finger into the trigger. The gun went off with a roar, and the head jerked in his hand. Blood-soaked brains, hair, and bone splattered on the wall behind Upshaw’s corpse. Natchez dropped the head, and bent down to let the hand fall open and release the pistol.

  “Sometimes life is like a book,” Tom said.

  On the Saturday of the second week in September, two months after the second death of Glendenning Upshaw, Tom Pasmore sat on an iron bench fifty feet inside the entrance of the Goethe Park zoo. Men and women, most of them herding tribes of small children, streamed through the open gates and past him, going toward the balloon vendor and the ice cream cart stationed at the point where the cobbled entrance widened out to meet the concrete that led to the first row of cages and the paths into the zoo. The people pushing baby carriages or strollers, Tom noticed, always relaxed when they got off the cobbles and hit the smooth concrete. They stood up straighter, and you could see the tension leave their spines and back muscles. Some of the people who passed Tom’s bench took a second to look at him: he wore a chalk-striped grey suit with a vest with lapels, a dark blue shirt and a tie of a deep red, and on his feet were a pair of scuffed brown loafers. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and in the dusty gaps between the cobbles lay crushed cigarette packets, the tan specks of shattered potato chips, and one rightangled bread crust fought over by a cluster of chirping sparrows.