by Peter Straub
“I guess I better get going,” Tom said.
“Keep it in your pants.”
Outside in the warm humid darkness, a fat black cat named Corazon, a pet of the Langenheims’, materialized beside him. “Cory, Cory, Cory,” Tom crooned, and bent down to stroke the animal’s silky back. The big cat pushed its heavy body against his shins. Tom scratched its wedge-shaped head, and Corazon looked up at him with uncanny yellow eyes and trotted ahead of him down the path to the sidewalk, her thick tail raised like a flag. When they reached the sidewalk the cat stood beside him for a moment in a round circle of light. Tom took a step left toward An Die Blumen, which led to The Sevens, the street on which the Spences inhabited a thirty-room Spanish extravaganza with an interior courtyard, a fountain, and a chapel that had been converted into a screening room. Corazon tilted her head, and light from the street lamp turned her eyes to transparent mystery. She began moving across the street with a gliding muscular step and disappeared into the darkness between the Jacobs’s house and Mr. von Heilitz’s.
Tom swallowed. He looked at the letter protruding from the book in his hand, then across the street to Mr. von Heilitz’s heavily curtained windows. All evening he had seen the image of Mr. von Heilitz’s pale face, swimming out at him from the back seat of a wrecked green sedan with a look of pure recognition.
Tom walked toward An Die Blumen through pools of light alternating with hour-glass shaped areas of darkness. He came to the red pillar postbox on the corner of An Die Blumen and withdrew the long white envelope from the pages of the novel. The typing on the envelope, Captain Fulton Bishop, Central Police Headquarters, Homicide Division, Armory Place, Mill Walk, District One, looked disturbingly adult and authoritative. Tom pushed the long envelope into the open mouth of the pillar box, pulled it part of the way out again, then pushed it into the box until his fingers touched the warm metal. Then he released the envelope, and a second later heard it fall softly on the mound of mail at the bottom of the pillar box.
In a sudden depression Tom turned around and looked down An Die Blumen to the corner of The Sevens, where an enclosed wooden telephone booth stood half-engulfed by an enormous stand of bougainvillaea. He began to walk slowly down the block.
The inside of the booth was permeated with the thick, heavy perfume of bougainvillaea. Tom hesitated only a moment, wishing that he really had been able to turn into The Sevens and ring Sarah Spence’s doorbell, and then dialed the number for directory inquiries. The operator told him that there were four listings for Lamont von Heilitz. Did he want the listing on Calle Ranelagh, Eastern Shore Road, or—
“That one,” he said. “Eastern Shore Road.”
When he had the number, he dialed again. The phone rang twice, and a surprisingly youthful voice answered.
“Maybe I have the wrong number,” Tom said. “I was trying to reach a Mr. von Heilitz.”
“Is this you, Tom Pasmore?” the voice asked.
“Yes,” Tom said, so softly he could scarcely hear his own voice.
“Your father seems not to want you to accept my invitation to dinner. Are you at home?”
“I’m out on the street,” Tom said. “In a call box.”
“The one around the corner?”
“Yes,” Tom virtually whispered.
“Then I’ll see you in a few seconds,” said the old man’s vibrant voice. He hung up.
Tom replaced the receiver on the hook. He felt intensely afraid and intensely alive.
Scent leaked from the closed-up parchment of the bougainvillaea blossoms. Geckos and salamanders scurried through the grass and flew along dark plaster walls.
Tom came to Eastern Shore Road and turned left. Down behind the houses the water washed rhythmically up on the shoreline. An enclosed horse-drawn carriage came rattling down Eastern Shore Road. The coachman wore a neat grey uniform almost invisible in the night, and the horses were matched bays with sleek muscles and arching necks. The equipage moved smoothly past Tom Pasmore, making surprisingly little sound, like an image from a dream but so secure in its reality that it made Tom feel as if he were the dream. The elegant apparition continued past the corner and rolled north down the drive toward the Redwing compound.
Light escaped in chinks and beams from the curtained windows of Lamont von Heilitz’s house.
When he got to the front door of the von Heilitz house, Tom hesitated as he had before dropping the letter into the pillar box. He wanted to flee across the street and escape upstairs into his room. For a moment Tom regretted everything that had made him commandeer poor Dennis Handley and his car. At that moment, he could have given up and gone home, chosen what he already knew instead of the mystery of what he did not. At a turning point such as this, many people do turn away from what they do not know—their fear, not only of the risk, is too great. They say no. Tom Pasmore wanted to say no, but he raised his hand and knocked on the door.
Of course when he did this, he had no idea at all of what he was doing.
It opened almost immediately, as if the old man had been standing behind it, waiting for Tom to decide.
“Good,” Lamont von Heilitz said. Until this moment, when his eyes met a pair of very pale blue eyes, Tom had never quite realized that the old man was nearly his own height. “Very good, in fact. Please come into my house, Tom Pasmore.”
He moved out of the way, and Tom stepped inside.
For a moment he was too surprised to speak. He had expected what Eastern Shore Road defined as a domestic interior. The entry hall might have been enclosed or not, but it should have opened into a sitting room with couches, tables, and chairs, perhaps a grand piano; beyond that, there might be a less formal living room, similarly furnished. Somewhere a door would open into a grand dining room, generally lined with ancestral portraits (not necessarily of actual ancestors). Off to the side would be a door, perhaps a pocket door, into a billiard room paneled in walnut or rosewood. Another door would lead to a large modern kitchen. There might be a library with glass-enclosed books or an art gallery or even an orangery. A prominent staircase would lead up to the dressing rooms and bedrooms, and a separate, narrow staircase would go up to the servants’ rooms. There would be a general impression, given by Oriental carpets, sculptures, paintings in massive ornate frames with their own indirect lighting, cushions, the right magazines, of luxury either frank or understated, of money consciously spent to attain comfort and splendor.
Lamont von Heilitz’s house was nothing like this.
Tom’s first impression was that he had walked into a warehouse; his second, that he was in a strange combination of furniture store, office, and library. The entry hall and most of the downstairs walls had been removed, so that the front door opened directly into a single vast room. This enormous room was filled with file cabinets, stacks of newspapers, ordinary office desks, some heaped with books, some littered with scissors and glue and cut-up newspapers. Couches and chairs stood seemingly at random in the maze of papers and cabinets and, throughout the room, old-fashioned upright lamps and low library lamps on the desks shone tiny and bright as stars, or glowed with a wide mellow illumination like the street lamps outside. At the back of the amazing room, pushed up against dark mahogany paneling, was a Sheraton dining table with a linen tablecloth and an open bottle of red Bordeaux beside a pile of books. Then Tom noticed the wall of books beside the table, and took in that at least three-fourths of the enormous room was walled with books in ceiling-high dark wooden cases. Before these walls stood high-backed library chairs or leather couches and coffee tables with green-shaded brass library lamps. Interspersed through the long sections of wall given over to bookshelves were sections of the same dark paneling as behind the dining table. Paintings glowed from these dark walls, and Tom correctly thought he identified a Monet landscape and a Degas ballet dancer. (He looked at, but did not recognize, paintings by Bonnard, Vuillard, Paul Ranson, Maurice Denis, and a drawing of flowers by Joe Brainard that in no way seemed out of place.)
Whe
rever he looked, he saw something new. A huge globe stood on a stand on one of the desks. An intricate bicycle leaned against a file cabinet, and a hammock had been slung between two other cabinets. To one side of it was a rowing machine. The most impressive hi-fi system Tom had ever seen in his life took up most of a huge table at the back of the room; tall speakers stood in each of the room’s corners.
In something like wonder, he turned to Mr. von Heilitz, who had his arms crossed over his chest and was smiling at him. Mr. von Heilitz was wearing a pale blue linen suit with a double-breasted vest, a pale pink shirt and a dark blue silk tie, and very pale blue gloves that buttoned at his wrists. His grey hair still swept back in perfect wings at the sides of his head, but a thousand wrinkles as fine as horsehair had printed themselves into the old man’s face since Tom had seen it in the hospital. Tom thought he looked wonderful and silly at the same time. Then he thought—no, he’s dignified, he doesn’t look silly at all. He could not be other than this. This was what he was. He was—
Tom opened his mouth but found that he did not know what he wanted to say, and the fine horse-hair wrinkles around the old man’s mouth and eyes etched themselves more deeply into his face. It was a smile.
“What are you?” Tom finally said.
The old man raised his chin—it was as if he had expected something better from him. “I thought you might have known, after this morning,” he said. “I am an amateur of crime.”
PART FOUR
THE SHADOW
“An absurd phrase, of course,” Lamont von Heilitz said to him a few minutes later. “It might be more accurate to call myself an amateur homicide detective, but I have certain objections to that phrase. I certainly cannot call myself a private detective, because I no longer accept money from clients. The only sort of crime that interests me is murder. I can’t deny that my interest is quite intense—a passion, in fact—but it is a private passion—”
Tom sipped from a Coca-Cola the old man had poured into a crystal glass, so exquisite it was nearly weightless, etched with gauzy images of women in flowing robes.
Mr. von Heilitz was leaning forward slightly in one of the chairs around the massive table. His back was very straight, and he was twirling in the gloved fingers of his right hand the stem of a wine glass etched like Tom’s goblet. “You’re something like me, you know,” he said in his incongruously vibrant voice. His eyes seemed very kind. “Do you remember seeing me, when you were a child? I don’t mean the times I chased you and the other ruffians off my lawn, though I ought to tell you, I suppose, that I couldn’t afford—”
“To have us look in your windows,” Tom said, suddenly understanding.
“Exactly.”
“Because we would talk about—well, about all this after we got home.” Tom paused. “And you probably thought that you …”
Von Heilitz waited for him to finish. When Tom did not complete his sentence, he said, “That my reputation was already peculiar enough?”
“Something like that,” Tom said.
Mr. von Heilitz smiled back at him. “Doesn’t it seem to you that much of what people call intelligence is really sympathetic imagination? And that sympathetic imagination virtually …? Well, in any case, you know why I became the neighborhood grouch.” He lifted his wine glass, glanced at Tom, and sipped. “I am still curious as to whether you remember the first time I saw you—really saw you. It took place on a significant day for you.”
Tom nodded. “You came to the English hospital. And you brought books.” Now Tom grinned. “Sherlock Holmes. And the Poe novel, Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
“There was an earlier time, but that’s not important now.” Before Tom could question him about this statement, he said, “And of course we saw each other this morning. You know who shot Miss Hasselgard?”
“Her brother.”
Mr. von Heilitz nodded. “And of course she was sitting in the passenger seat of his Corvette when he killed her.”
“And he put her body in the trunk because he had to drive to Weasel Hollow, and she was so big that otherwise everybody who looked at the car would have seen her,” Tom said. “He was born in Weasel Hollow, wasn’t he?”
“How did you work that out?”
“The Eyewitness,” Tom said. “I really knew it all along, but this afternoon, I remembered that one of the articles said that he had gone to—”
“The Ziggurat School. Very good.”
“Who was the woman who hid the money for him?”
“She was his aunt.”
“I suppose Hasselgard stole—what do you call it, embezzled the money, or took it as a bribe—”
“We don’t know yet. But my feeling is that it was a bribe.”
“—and Marita learned about it—”
“She must have actually seen him take the money, because she felt she had a claim on it.”
“—and she demanded half of it or something, and he told her to get into his car—”
“Or she got into it, demanding that he take her to the money.”
“And he leaned in the driver’s window and shot her in the head. He rolled up the driver’s window and shot through it to make it look as if Marita had been behind the wheel. Then he put her body in the trunk and drove to the native district. He abandoned his car and made his way home. And a week later, the old lady was killed for the money.”
“And the same money is confiscated by the government of Mill Walk, which turns it over to Friedrich Hasselgard, the Minister of Finance.”
“What were you waiting for, this morning?” Tom asked.
“To see who would come. In the best of all worlds, Finance Minister Hasselgard would have appeared, and dug the first bullet out of the door with a pocket knife.”
“What would you have done, if he had?”
“Watched him.”
“I mean, would you have gone to the police then?”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t even have written the police about what you knew?”
Mr. von Heilitz tilted his head and looked at Tom in a way that made him uncomfortable—it had too many shades and meanings, and it went straight through him to his deepest secrets. “You wrote to Fulton Bishop, didn’t you?”
Tom was surprised to see Mr. von Heilitz now looking at him with undisguised impatience.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“What did your father tell you about me? When he said that I’d called? He must have warned you off.”
“Well … he did, yes. He said that it might be better to avoid you. He said you were bad luck. And he said that you used to be called the Shadow.”
“Because of my first name, of course.”
Tom, who was trying to figure out why the old man was irritated, looked blank.
“Lamont Cranston?”
Tom raised his eyebrows.
“My God.” Mr. von Heilitz sighed. “Back in pre-history, a fictional character named Lamont Cranston was the hero of a radio series called ‘The Shadow.’ That was my bad luck, if you like. But what your father was talking about is something else.”
The old man sipped his wine, and again regarded Tom with what looked like irritated impatience. “When I was twelve years old, both of my parents were murdered. Butchered, really. I came home from school and found their bodies. My father was lying dead in this room. He had been shot several times, and there was a tremendous amount of blood. As well as what is still probably called ‘gore.’ I found my mother near the back door, in the kitchen. She had obviously been trying to escape. I thought she might still be alive, and I rolled her body over. Suddenly my hands were red with blood. She had been shot in the chest and the stomach. Until I rolled her over and saw what they had done to her, I hadn’t even noticed all the blood on the floor.”
“Did they ever find who did it?”
“I found out who did it, years later. When this house was closed, I went to live with an aunt and uncle while the police investigated my parents’ murders. I don’
t suppose you knew that my father was David Redwing’s Minister of Internal Affairs after Mill Walk became independent? He was an important man. Not as important as David Redwing, but important all the same. So a vigorous investigation took place. It went nowhere, and its failure was an ongoing sorrow. As if in recompense for the inability of the police to solve his murder, my father was posthumously awarded the Mill Walk Medal of Merit. I have it in a desk drawer somewhere over there—I could show it to you.” He was staring off into some internal space now, not looking at Tom at all.
“I waited nearly ten years,” he finally continued. “I inherited this house and everything in it. After I graduated from Harvard, I came back here to live. I had enough money not to have to worry about it for the rest of my life. I wondered what I was going to do. I could have gone into business. If I had been a different sort of person, I could have gone into local politics. My father was a local martyr, after all. But I had another purpose, and I set about it. Almost immediately I discovered that the police had learned very little. So I turned to the only sources I had, the public record. I obtained a complete file of the Eyewitness. I examined everything—property transfers, land deals, steamship arrivals, court records, death notices. I had so much material that I had to alter the house in order to be able to store it all. I was looking for patterns that no one else had seen. And, after three years, I began to find them. It was the most tedious and frustrating work I had ever done, but also the most satisfying. I felt that I was saving my own life. Eventually I was concentrating on a single man—a man who had come and gone from Mill Walk many times, a former member of our secret police who went into retirement when the secret police were disbanded. He had houses here and in Charleston. I went to Charleston and followed him. The man who had murdered my father and mother seemed ordinary—he might have been a property developer who had made enough money to devote all his time to golf. I had thought I might kill him, but found that I was no murderer. I came back to Mill Walk and presented my research to the Secretary of Internal Defense, Gonzalo Redwing, who had been a friend of my father’s. A week later, the murderer returned to Mill Walk to attend a charity function, and the militia arrested him on the dock at Mill Key. He was jailed, tried, convicted, and eventually executed on the gallows at the Long Bay prison Compound.”