by Peter Straub
Tom felt enormously complimented.
“Remember that he saw me as a kind of private detective, one unaccountably of his own class. He would not want to admit to any stranger that his wife had probably run away from him. And when she was found murdered, that put an end to that embarrassment—he didn’t need me to save him from it anymore. And he certainly wished no deeper embarrassment.”
“Wait a second,” Tom said. “What deeper embarrassment? He killed her.”
“I said that I wanted you to think about my situation, and I want you now to consider my state of mind. Once the body had been discovered, I noticed a change in everything about me. I could say that I had become more alert, more involved in things, or that Eagle Lake had become more interesting. But it was much more than that. Eagle Lake had become more beautiful.”
Tom wanted to shake him. “How did you get him to confess?”
“Listen to me. The solution is not what I am talking about here. I am describing a sudden change in my most basic feelings. When I walked beside my lodge and looked at the lake and the lodges scattered around it, at the docks, at the pilings outside the Redwing compound, the tall Norway pines and enormous oaks, it all seemed—charged. Every bit of it spoke to me. Every leaf, every pine needle, every path through the woods, every bird call, had come alive, was vibrant, full of meaning. Everything promised. Everything chimed. I knew more than I knew. There was a secret beating away beneath the surface of everything I saw.”
“Yes,” Tom said, not knowing why this raised goose bumps on his arms.
“Yes,” the old man said. “You have it too. I don’t know what it is—a capability? A calling?”
Tom suddenly realized why Lamont von Heilitz always wore gloves, and nearly blurted it out.
Von Heilitz saw Tom looking at his hands, and folded his hands before him on the table. “I rode over to Judge Backer’s lodge, and saw Wendell Hasek tinkering with the Judge’s coupe. Hasek was no more than eighteen, and he began to look guilty the second he saw me—he didn’t want to lose his job, and he was afraid of what I might get out of him.”
“What did you do?” Tom asked, unable not to look at the old man’s hands in their neat blue gloves, unable not to see blood on the hands of the boy the old man had been.
“I told him that I already knew that Truehart had sold the long-barreled Colt to his boss, and that the Judge had given it to Arthur Thielman for some reason. I just wanted to know the reason. I promised him—not entirely forthrightly—that the Judge’s ownership of the gun would never become public knowledge.
“ ‘No one will know about the Judge?’ he asked me. ‘No one will know I told you?’ ‘No one,’ I said. ‘Judge Backer wanted to get rid of that gun,’ Hasek said. ‘Fired off to the left. Made him madder than a hornet that a halfbreed got good money for a bad gun. So he sold it to Mr. Thielman, who’s such a bad shot he doesn’t know enough to blame the gun.’ ”
“Okay!” Tom said. “You had him!” He began to laugh. “Arthur Thielman was such a bad shot he had to sneak up behind his wife and put the barrel two inches from her head to be sure of hitting her at all!”
The old man smiled. “Arthur Thielman wasn’t his wife’s murderer, but the real killer would not have been at all unhappy to have me think he was. The murderer knew that he had furnished Arthur with one of the most traditional motives for murder.” His smile deepened at the expression on Tom’s face. “Jeanine had not only been unfaithful to her husband, but her lover thought that she was going to leave Arthur for him. And Arthur thought she had left him—he thought she had run off with the other man.”
For the second time that night, Tom was too surprised to speak. At length he said, “That was the deeper embarrassment you were talking about?”
Von Heilitz nodded. “So all I had to do was learn which of the men visiting Eagle Lake that summer had been away from the lake on the day of Jeanine’s disappearance. I went back to the Truehart cabin to see if anyone had canceled a date with the guide. If that didn’t work, I intended to question the other two or three men who worked as guides for the summer people, but I didn’t have to go any further. Minor’s wife worked as a cleaning woman for most of the same people her husband guided. On the sixteenth of June, she had two cleaning jobs. She went to the first lodge at eight in the morning, but the man who lived there didn’t get up to answer the door. She thought he must have been sleeping off a heavy night, and went through the woods to the second job, where she cleaned house until about two in the afternoon. Then she returned to the first house. Again, no one answered her knock—no one came even when she called out. She decided that he had left for town, or some other destination, without bothering to tell her that he wouldn’t be home. She scribbled a note that she would be back the next day, and walked back through the woods to her cabin. When she came back on the seventeenth, he opened the door to her, saying that he was very sorry but that he’d had to take a sudden business trip to Hurley, a larger town about twenty miles south. He’d taken the six-thirty train, and hadn’t returned until after nightfall. He paid her double for the day, and asked her not to mention his absence to any of her other customers—his business involved a real estate matter that he wanted kept secret.”
“But if he was going to run away with her and killed her instead, why did he leave by himself?”
“He hadn’t gone anywhere. Arthur Thielman just thought he had. Mrs. Truehart found two empty whiskey bottles in his trash, another half-empty on the kitchen counter, and the remains of several packs of Lucky Strikes in the wastebaskets. He’d holed up in his lodge, drinking himself into a stupor. She was told to stay out of the guest room, and she thought he must have had some woman’s belongings in there that he didn’t want her to see. He was a sentimental man. He shot his lover in the back of the head when she refused to leave with him, and then spent the rest of the night and the next day mourning her. Sentimentality is a mask for violence.”
“Who was he? What was his name?”
“Anton Goetz.”
Tom felt a decided letdown. “I’ve never heard of him.”
“I know you haven’t, but he was an interesting figure—a German who had come to Mill Walk some fifteen years earlier and made a lot of money. He bought into the St. Alwyn Hotel, and then developed some tracts of land on the west side of the island. He never married. Excellent manners. Good stories—most of them entirely invented, I think. He built that huge Spanish house around the corner, on The Sevens. The Spence house. I’ve always thought that it revealed the man very exactly—all that grandiosity, the sort of overreaching quality of the house.” He took in Tom’s expression again, and quickly added, “Perhaps you think it’s beautiful. It is rather beautiful, in its way. And of course we’re all used to it now.”
“Did you have any proof against Goetz?”
“Well, I had the curtain, of course. He would have been caught sooner or later, because he’d had his lodge decorated that spring, just after he began his affair with Jeanine Thielman. The old curtains were stored in one of the outbuildings next to his lodge. Until she refused to leave with him, Goetz had imagined that she would get divorced and marry him, and that they would return to Mill Walk and live as a couple. Jeanine may have gone along with this fantasy, but she never took it seriously.”
“But how did you know they were having an affair? Just because the cleaning woman didn’t get into his house?”
“Aha! One night the previous summer, I went into the club late, and met Jeanine rushing down the stairs from the bar in the dining room. She didn’t say anything to me, just went past me with an embarrassed smile. When I got upstairs, I saw Goetz at the bar by himself, in front of two glasses and an ashtray full of cigarettes. He told me a story about having met her there by accident, which I took at face value. But for the rest of that summer, I never saw the two of them saying anything at all to each other in public. They even went out of their way to avoid being seen together in public, and I wouldn’t have suspected anythi
ng at all if it hadn’t been for that one time when they had clearly spent an hour or two together. So it seemed to me that they were doing everything they could not to attract suspicion, and of course it had the opposite effect on me.”
He stood up and began pacing with slow strides back and forth alongside the table. “There was a party scheduled at the Eagle Lake Club the night after I spoke to Mrs. Truehart. Of course it had been canceled, but a lot of people were planning to stop in there anyhow to talk things over, have a few drinks, that sort of thing. More from the lack of anything better to do than anything else. I walked over to the club about six in the evening, and I was still in the grip of that feeling I described—of a kind of radiance of significance shining through everything I saw. But when I went to the upstairs bar and saw Anton Goetz on the terrace, what I mainly felt was sorrow. Goetz had been taking his meals home for a few days, staying out of sight. He was sitting at a table with Maxwell Redwing, David’s son, and some of the younger Redwing cousins. Maxwell was the Redwing patriarch of those days—the one who really took the family out of public life. He was something like your grandfather, in fact.
“To tell the truth, I don’t know if my sorrow was for poor Goetz, who looked flushed and hectic and was obviously struggling to resemble his old self in the midst of this attractive crowd, or for myself, because it was all coming to an end. I went to the end of the bar and ordered a drink. I stared at Goetz until he looked up and noticed me. I nodded, and he looked away. I kept on staring at him—it seemed to me that I could see his entire life. Everything, all the emotions and excitement that had swirled around me in the past few days, had come down to this one wretched human being, who was trying to ingratiate himself with Maxwell Redwing. He kept looking up, seeing me, and turning away to gulp his drink.
“At last Goetz excused himself and stood up. He walked across the terrace and stood beside me at the bar, fidgeting. He was waiting for me to say something. When he pulled out one of his Luckies, I lit it for him. He exhaled and took a step backward. ‘What’s your game, sport?’ he finally asked me.
“ ‘You are,’ I said. ‘You don’t have a chance. Even if I hadn’t figured it out, sooner or later someone would start to think about that length of curtain. They’d check to see if you ever took that train to Hurley. There’ll be someone who saw you and Jeanine together. They’ll examine your boat, and they’ll find threads from the carpet, or a bloodstain, or one of Jeanine’s hairs …’
“His face had gone bright red. He looked back out at the veranda, toward that group of chattering Redwing cousins. He literally straightened his back. Then he asked me what I intended to do. I said that I wanted to take him into town, and get Minor Truehart out of jail as soon as possible. ‘You really are the Shadow, aren’t you?’ he asked me. Then he turned toward me so his back would be to the veranda. He leaned forward to whisper, and his face was already pleading. ‘Give me one more night,’ he said. ‘I won’t try to get away. I just want to have one last night here at Eagle Lake.’ He was a sentimentalist, you see. I told him I’d give him until nightfall.”
“Why until nightfall? Why give him any time at all?”
“Well, it might sound funny, but I wanted to give him some time to think about things while he was still a free man. Only he and I knew what he had done, and that changed everything for both of us. If I gave him only the hour or two until nightfall, I could make sure that he didn’t escape after it got dark. I intended to keep watch on his house, of course. So I agreed. I left the club and trotted home, ran down to my dock, untied my boat, and started across the lake. I thought my little outboard motor could get me to Goetz’s dock before he got home. When I was in the middle of the lake, someone took a shot at me.”
Tom opened his mouth in surprise, imagining himself out in the middle of a lake while Anton Goetz fired at him with a rifle.
“The shot hit the water about a foot from the dinghy. I cursed myself for letting him go and lay down in the bottom of the boat, soaking my clothes. A second later, there was another shot, and this one struck the side of the dinghy and went straight through to the bottom of the boat, about an inch from my head. I scrunched backwards, but I didn’t dare lift my head for another minute or so. I was going around and around in a big circle. Finally I dared lift my head again and steered toward Goetz’s dock, while still more or less lying down in the boat. At the dock I killed the motor and jumped out—the boat was about one-quarter full of water, and I just left it to fill up and sink. I ran up to the house, knowing that I’d made a terrible fool of myself—not only had he nearly killed me, but he had obviously managed to get away. I had to admit what I’d done and persuade the police to start looking for him. By the time I got to a telephone, Goetz could have been twenty miles away.
“But he hadn’t gone anywhere. His door was wide open. I rushed in and threw myself on the floor, just in case he was waiting for me. Then I heard something dripping onto the wooden floor. I looked up and saw him. He was hanging from one of the crossbeams in his living room, with a length of high-test fishing line around his neck that had nearly taken his head off.”
“He could have killed you!” Tom said.
“The funny thing was, he hadn’t even stolen the Colt from Arthur Thielman. It was lying on a table outside near the Thielmans’ dock the night Goetz thought he and Jeanine were going to run off. When she told him she had no intention of leaving her husband and turned away to go back inside, he picked it up and shot her in the back of the head. The next day, he thought that he could put the blame on Minor Truehart, and after Truehart’s wife left his house to do her next job, he went out through the woods, dead drunk, to their cabin, and threw it under the bed. Arthur Thielman was careless with everything, including his wife and his weapons.”
“Then who shot at you? It must have been Goetz.”
Mr. von Heilitz smiled at Tom, then knitted his fingers behind the back of his head and yawned. “Your grandfather’s lodge was about forty yards to the left of the Thielmans’. About the same distance to the right, in the direction of the club, was the boundary of the Redwing compound. This was only a year after I had exposed my parents’ murderer, who had spoken at great length about corruption on Mill Walk. Of course, it might have been Goetz. He could have fired at me, tossed the rifle into the lake, and then hanged himself. But Goetz was a very good shot—from at least thirty feet away, he killed Jeanine with a pistol that pulled badly to the left.”
He turned to the next page of the scrapbook. MYSTERY RESOLVED IN TRAGEDY read the banner across the top of the Eagle Lake Gazette. Two single-column articles on either side were headed GUIDE TRUEHART RELEASED TO SOBBING WIFE, CHILDREN and SHADOW STRIKES AGAIN! In the middle of the page was a two-column picture of a strikingly handsome man with wide-set clear eyes and a dark little gigolo’s mustache above the caption Killer Anton Goetz Confessed to Private Sleuth Minutes Before Grisly Suicide. Beside this was another, smaller photograph, of a slim young man in a Norfolk jacket and a plaid shirt with an open collar. The young man looked as if he wished the photographer would point his camera at some more willing object. The caption beneath this photograph was Twenty-jive-Year-Old Amateur Detective von Heilitz, Known as “The Shadow,” Seeks to Avoid Publicity. Tom stared at the picture of the young man his neighbor had been, once again struck by the dreamlike familiarity of the page. MYSTERY. RESOLVED. TRAGEDY. Connected to these words, as to so much of his childhood, was the image of his mother locked into her encompassing misery.
The young Lamont von Heilitz had worn his hair shorter, though not as short as was the fashion at Brooks-Lowood School at the end of the 1950s, but the high cheekbones and intelligent, thin hawk’s face was the same. What was different was the sense of taut nerves and tension that came from the young man’s face and posture: he looked like a human seismograph, a person whose extreme sensitivity made much of ordinary daily life a nearly intolerable affair.
Tom looked up into the older face, affectionately regarding him from the o
ther side of the big journal, and felt as if he had been given some enigmatic clue about his own life—some insight he had just failed to catch.
“I’ll let you borrow that, if you like,” von Heilitz said. “We’ve spent a lot of time together, and too much of it was spent with your being polite while I indulged myself with old memories. Next time, it’s your turn to talk.”
He slammed the old journal shut, picked it up with both hands and offered it to Tom, who took it gladly.
They moved toward the door through the aisles of the crowded room. Tom had one more question, which he asked as von Heilitz opened his front door.
Before him was the familiar world of Eastern Shore Road, almost a surprise: Tom had been so engrossed in the story of Jeanine Thielman and Anton Goetz that, without knowing it, he had half-expected to find a starry woods of Norway spruce and tall oak trees beyond the door, a wide blue lake and paths between big lodges with porches and balconies. “You know,” Tom said, realizing that he was not after all asking a question, “I don’t think ‘The Shadow’ was on the radio in 1925. I bet they named that program after you.”
Lamont von Heilitz smiled and closed the door. Tom looked at his watch. It was nearly eleven o’clock. He walked back across the street in the darkness.
Without quite knowing that a new era of his life had begun, Tom lay on his bed until one o’clock, flipping through the thick leather-bound journal. Columns of newsprint from different newspapers covered each page. There were headlines from New Orleans, from California, from Chicago and Seattle. Sometimes the articles concerned the murders of prominent people, sometimes those of prostitutes, gamblers, homeless wanderers. Interspersed with the articles were telegrams sent to Lamont von Heilitz of Eastern Shore Road, Mill Walk.
WISH TO ENGAGE YOUR SERVICES ON MATTER OF GREAT DELICACY AND IMPORTANCE STOP
MY HUSBAND HAS UNJUSTLY BEEN PLACED UNDER SUSPICION STOP I PLEAD WITH YOU TO GIVE YOUR HELP STOP YOU ARE MY LAST RESORT STOP