Mystery

by Peter Straub

  The second old man was at first indistinguishable from all the others—his grey hair fell about his face, his lip drooped, his head trembled. The man clutched his robe close about his neck, and bent forward to mumble something. Tom stepped away, but the man’s eyes still held him. They were alert and intelligent, not at all the eyes of senility. A recognition jogged the boy. And then—with a shock that almost made him cry out—Tom realized that he was looking at Lamont von Heilitz.

  Tom looked over his shoulder at the police. The hostile officer was sauntering up toward Natchez, the intention of saying something unpleasant clear upon his face. He slid onto the seat beside von Heilitz, glanced at him for a second, and looked away. The Shadow had whitened his face with makeup and pasted straggling thorny eyebrows over his own. His whole face looked gaunt and stupid and hopeless. “Look away.” The words seemed to speak themselves.

  Tom gazed across the vast emptying lobby. The officer in charge of the first group had begun moving toward a corridor to the right of the new desk. The others went toward the doors and the elevators: there was the same sense of inactivity Tom had felt when he first came in. “What are you doing here?” he whispered.

  “My house, tonight,” von Heilitz said in the same ventriloquial fashion.

  “Somebody died?”

  “Go,” von Heilitz ordered, and Tom stood up as if he had been jabbed with a pin.

  He wandered out into the great empty lobby. The elevator into which Detective Natchez had disappeared returned to the lobby, and when Tom reached the desk its doors opened. Detective Natchez and two uniformed policemen emerged on either side of a kind of wheeled sheet-covered cart, which obviously held a corpse. Tom again fell through the hole in the earth’s surface. I did that, he thought. I wrote a letter, and that man died.

  “May I help you?” The woman seated at the desk facing the partition had set down her telephone and was looking up at Tom with a crisp challenge that suggested she would much prefer not to do anything of the kind.

  “Ah, I was visiting a friend of mine upstairs,” Tom said, “and I saw all these policemen here, and—”

  “No, you were not,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You were not visiting a patient, not in this hospital,” she said. Her perfectly black, lifeless-looking hair rolled back from her low forehead in a high crest, and half-glasses perched just beneath the bridge of her nose as if commanded to go no further. “I saw you enter the lobby no more than a minute or two ago, young man, and the only patients with whom you have had any contact are those two men seated against the wall. Are you going to leave this hospital by yourself, or will I have to have you escorted out?”

  “I wonder if you could tell me what happened here,” he said.

  “That wouldn’t be any business of yours now, would it?”

  “Two people told me that someone was murdered.”

  Her eyes widened, and her chin tilted up another tiny portion of an inch.

  “I’d like to see Nancy Vetiver,” Tom said. “She’s a nurse who used to—”

  “Nurse Vetiver? Now it’s Nurse Vetiver? And who would you like to see after that, King Louis the Fourteenth? Our people are too busy to be bothered by stray cats like you, most especially when they come babbling about—Officer! Officer! Will you come here, please?”

  All the policemen in the lobby looked at them, and after a momentary show of hesitation the officer who had sent Detective Natchez upstairs moved toward the desk. He said nothing, but looked first at Tom, then the receptionist, with a strained, impatient, wholly artificial smile.

  “Officer …?” the receptionist began.

  “Get on with it,” he said.

  Suddenly the entire scene seemed wrong to Tom, essentially out of key. Even the receptionist had been nonplussed by the policeman’s hostility. Some of the men in the lobby seemed angry, and some of them seemed almost triumphant beneath their mask of indifference.

  “This young man,” the receptionist began again, “has entered the hospital under false pretenses. He said something about a murder, he’s asking about the nurses, he’s disrupting—”

  “I don’t care, lady,” the officer said. He walked away shaking his head.

  “Is this how you do your job?” she called to him. Her voice was sharp enough to split wood. Then she saw a more likely source of aid. “Doctor, if you’ll assist me—for a moment?”

  Dr. Bonaventure Milton had just emerged from the corridor to the right of the desk, accompanied by a lean, brown, anonymous-looking man in a blue uniform with conspicuous braid. The fat little doctor in his pince-nez and black bow tie looked from the receptionist to him and smiled. “Of course, Miss Dragonette. You have a problem with my young friend here?”

  “Friend?” Now she seemed startled. “This young man has been saying things about murder—trying to intrude himself into the hospital—asking for one of the nurses—I want him expelled.”

  Dr. Milton made soothing passes with his hands. “I’m sure we can straighten this out, Miss Dragonette. This young fellow is Glendenning Upshaw’s grandson, Tom Pasmore. I saw him just a week or two ago at the Founders Club. Now what was it you wanted, Tom?”

  Miss Dragonette had given up on the little doctor and was now trying to galvanize the officer beside him by drilling holes in his head with her eyes.

  “I was just outside, and when I saw all the squad cars I wanted to come in—I realized that my grandfather had never called me back about Nancy Vetiver—” He looked at the face of the officer in the splendid uniform, and was disconcerted both by the coldness of the man’s eyes and the sense that he had seen him somewhere before.

  “I shouldn’t wonder!” said Miss Dragonette.

  “Is there some trouble?” the officer said, and this time Tom took in his bald head and the smooth knuckle of his face and recognized Captain Fulton Bishop. His stomach froze—for a moment all he wanted to do was turn and run. The Captain was shorter than he had appeared on television. There was no humor in the man at all. He looked like a torturer in a medieval drawing.

  Dr. Milton looked quickly from Tom to Captain Bishop, then, questioningly, back again. “Oh, I don’t think there is any trouble—do you? The boy was looking for Nurse Vetiver, an old favorite of his. By the way, Tom, this is Captain Bishop, who did all that excellent work bringing Miss Hasselgard’s murderer to justice.”

  Neither Tom nor Captain Bishop offered to shake hands.

  “An unhappy day for us all,” the doctor went on. “One of the Captain’s men, a patrolman named Mendenhall, died this morning. We did what we could, but the man had been quite severely wounded—died a hero’s death, one of the first men into the killer’s house, thought we could pull him through, did the best we could despite some interference”—here a meaningful glance at Tom—“but poor Mendenhall slipped away from us about half an hour ago. Tragic, of course.”

  “But why are there so many policemen here?” Tom asked. He was not quite aware of speaking, because he had just dropped through the earth’s surface again.

  “We came for the body,” Bishop said flatly.

  “Well, it didn’t make any sense to me,” said Miss Dragonette. “He did say something about a murder.”

  “An old man over there said something—he’s senile, it didn’t really make sense.…”Now both the doctor and Captain Bishop were staring at him.

  “Which man over there?” the Captain said.

  Tom looked again to the side of the room. Von Heilitz was gone. “The old man in the yellow bathrobe.” He turned back to the doctor. “I really came in to see Nancy Vetiver.”

  “Mr. Williams doesn’t know what day it is,” said Miss Dragonette. “Sits there all day long, waiting for his daughter, but he wouldn’t recognize her if she walked right in that door. Which isn’t likely, since she lives in Bangor, Maine.”

  “Doctor, I’ll speak to you later,” the Captain said, and walked across the lobby and disappeared through the revolving door after the me
n wheeling the dead policeman’s body.

  Dr. Milton sighed and watched him go. “What are you trying to do? Do you have any notion …?” He shook his head. “I’ll take care of this, Miss Dragonette. Come with me, Tom.”

  The doctor led Tom into the corridor on the desk’s right side. He slipped his arm through the boy’s and said, “Let me make sure I understand all this. You came in here looking for Nurse Vetiver—because of the conversation you overheard at your grandfather’s house. You wanted to be assured of her well-being, am I right? You saw the policemen in the lobby. You sat down next to that old fellow, who began babbling about a murder.”

  “That’s right,” Tom said.

  “You understand—things get very sensitive when a police officer dies. Feelings run high.”

  Was that what he had seen? Tom wondered. A display of intense feeling? He remembered the two groups of policemen, the sense of hostility and some queer victory. His sense of guilt made him feel as though he were walking through thick fog, unable to see or think properly.

  The doctor self-consciously looked into Tom’s eyes. “You want to be careful, Tom. You don’t want to upset people. Everyone is a little sensitive these days. The Hasselgard business, all of that—you know. You’re an intelligent young man. You come from a good family, and you have a long life before you.”

  “That cop, Mendenhall, died because of ‘the Hasselgard business.’ ”

  “Indirectly, yes,” the doctor said. He had begun to look annoyed.

  “Because of the letter Captain Bishop got.”

  “What do you know about that letter? Who told you—”

  “It was on the news. But nobody but Captain Bishop ever saw the letter, did they?”

  “I don’t quite see your point, if you have one.”

  “My point is—” Tom hesitated, then went on. “What if the letter actually said something else. What if it didn’t say anything about a poor half-native ex-con named Foxhall Edwardes? What if it proved that someone else actually killed Marita Hasselgard, and that her death was directly related to what was going on at the Treasury?”

  “This is ridiculous,” the doctor said. “A man just died here.”

  “And a lot of other men in here didn’t seem exactly unhappy about that,” Tom said.

  “Remember that there are both loyal and disloyal officers,” Dr. Milton said. “What are you trying to do, Tom? Real letters and unreal letters, questions about murder …?”

  “How could that man Mendenhall be disloyal if he was killed in the line of duty? Disloyal to what?”

  Dr. Milton visibly controlled himself. “Listen to me—loyal means sticking to your own people. You know who they are. Your neighbors, your friends, your family. They are you. Don’t run away with yourself.”

  The doctor straightened his back and tugged at his vest. “You have to live in this world with the rest of us,” the doctor said. He looked at his watch. “I want us both to forget this conversation. I still have a lot to do today. Please give my regards to your mother and your grandfather.” He looked sharply up at Tom, still agitated, stepped around him, and began to walk back to the lobby. After a few steps, he stopped and faced Tom again. “By the way, Nurse Vetiver has been suspended. Let the whole matter drop, Tom.”

  “What about Hattie Bascombe?” Tom asked.

  This time, the doctor laughed. “Hattie Bascombe! I imagine she’s in the old slave quarter, if she’s still alive. Retired years ago. Mumbling over a chicken bone and casting spells, I suppose. Quite a character, wasn’t she?”

  “Quite a character,” Tom said to the doctor’s retreating back.

  “I wonder if you’d like to go on an excursion with me,” Tom said. He was talking on the telephone to Sarah Spence, and it was just past four o’clock. His father was still at his office on Calle Hoffmann—or doing whatever he did when he was not at home—and Gloria Pasmore was upstairs in her room. When Tom returned from the hospital, he had opened her bedroom door on a wave of soft music and whiskey fumes and looked in to see her sprawled out asleep on her bed. It was her “afternoon nap.”

  “That sounds interesting, but I’m kind of busy,” Sarah said. “Mom and I are getting ready to go up north. Dad suddenly announced that we’re going early this year, so now we only have two days to pack. Well, what he said was that we’re going up in the Redwings’ private plane. And I can’t find Bingo anywhere, but of course it’s ridiculous to worry about Bingo.” After a pause, she said, “What kind of excursion?”

  “I thought we might walk somewhere.”

  “You won’t suddenly gasp and turn pale and run away if I say something absolutely doltish?”

  Tom laughed. “No, and I won’t suddenly remember that I have to go somewhere else.”

  “So you want to begin all over again where we left off? I like that idea.”

  “I was thinking of going somewhere new,” Tom said. “The old slave quarter.”

  “I’ve never even been there.”

  “Me neither. No one from the far east end has ever even thought of going there.”

  “Isn’t it a long way away?”

  “Not that far. We wouldn’t spend more than half an hour there.”

  “Doing what? Investigating opium dens, or organizing a white slavery ring, or tracking down stolen Treasury money, or—”

  “What kind of books do you read?”

  “Mainly the trash I see you carrying through the halls. I just finished Red Harvest. What do you want to do?”

  “I want to look up an old friend of mine,” Tom said.

  “Is this an excursion or an adventure? I wonder. And I wonder who the old friend could be.”

  “Someone I used to know. Someone from the hospital.”

  “That nurse who thought you were so cute? I remember her. Why would she be living in the old slave quarter? Maybe you want to set her free from a haunt of vice, and you need me to distract the Tuaregs and lascars.”

  “No, not that nurse, another one,” Tom said, amused and disconcerted. “Named Hattie Bascombe. But she might be able to tell me something about the other one.”

  “Aha!” Sarah said. “I knew it. Okay, I’ll come along, just to protect you. Are you bringing your gat, or should I pack mine?”

  “Let’s both pack our gats,” Tom said.

  “One more thing. I think this will be an automotive excursion, not a walking trip.”

  “I can’t drive.”

  “But I can,” Sarah said. “I’m an ace. I could barrel through a passel of gunsels as well as anybody in Dashiell Hammett. And this way I can look out for Bingo on the way.”

  “Should I come over there, or—”

  “Be outside of your house in fifteen minutes,” she said. “I’ll be the doll in the shades and the snap-brim hat behind the wheel of the ostentatious car.”

  Twenty minutes later he was seated in the leather bucket seat of a little white Mercedes convertible with what seemed to him an abnormally loud engine, watching Sarah Spence downshift as she accelerated through a yellow light and turned on Calle Drosselmayer. “Bingo doesn’t do things like this,” she was saying. “He’s not really a very adventurous dog. He seems to worry a lot about whether or not we’re going to feed him.”

  “What happens to him when you go up north?”

  “We put him in a kennel.”

  “Then he probably figured out that he was going back to the kennel in two days, and he wandered away to brood about it. I bet he’ll be back by dinnertime.”

  “That’s brilliant!” she said. “Even if it’s not true, I feel better already.” Then: “Bingo doesn’t brood much, actually.”

  “He didn’t strike me as a broody dog,” Tom said. Sarah’s driving delighted him—Sarah’s company delighted him. He thought he had never been in a car with anyone who drove like Sarah, with as much control and exhilaration. His mother drove at an uncertain five miles under the limit, mumbling to herself most of the time, and his father drove wildly, in a rage at other dri
vers the second he pulled out of the driveway. Sarah laughed at what he had said. When she drew up at a stoplight, she leaned over and kissed him. “A broody dog,” she said. “I think you’re the broody dog, Tom Pasmore.”

  Then the light changed, and the little car flashed through the intersection, and sunlight fell all about them, and Tom felt that he had entered into a moment of almost inhuman perfection. His sense of guilty responsibility had suddenly disappeared. Sarah was still laughing, probably at the expression on his face. People on the sidewalk stared at them as they zipped past. The light streamed down, and the pretty shop fronts of Calle Drosselmayer, golden wood and sparkling glass, glowed and shone. Men and women sat beneath striped umbrellas at an outdoor café. Behind one great shining window, a model railway puffed through mountains and snowy passes, circling around again to a perfect scale model of Calle Drosselmayer—he saw their reflection in the window, and imagined himself and Sarah in a tiny white car on the model street. A great unconscious paradise lay all about him, the paradise of ordinary things.

  Auer, Tom thought. Our. Hour. And remembered feeling this same way at least once before. Some buried subcontinent of his childhood broke the surface of his thoughts—he remembered a sense of impendingness, of some great thing about to happen, of imminent discovery in a forbidden place.…

  Now they were in the lower end of Calle Drosselmayer, driving by the grey, prisonlike St. Alwyn Hotel. Years ago, someone had been murdered there—some scandal that had ended in a bigger scandal his parents had not let him read about, and which he had been too young to understand.…

  “This isn’t much like being with Buddy,” she said. “He only ever wants to go to gun shops.”

  “Do you ever think about what you want to be?” she said when she drove them down the hill to Mogrom Street. “You must—I think about it a lot. My parents want me to get married to somebody nice with a lot of money and live about two blocks from them. They can’t imagine why I’d want to do anything else.”