by Peter Straub
“But maybe that’s what they were—notes someone sent to her.”
“I don’t think she would have kept them, in that case. She would have burned them. She kept these because they troubled her. I also think she planned to show them to you.”
“Why?”
“Because when you turned up, asking a lot of questions about Jeanine Thielman and Anton Goetz, you stirred up all the doubts she had about your grandfather. She didn’t want to think he killed Jeanine, not after everything he’d done for her, but she was too smart not to wonder about it. He brought Gloria to her before the body was discovered—when nobody but the murderer knew that Jeanine was dead. I think Barbara was very relieved when I stumbled in and found Mr. Goetz hanged in his lodge.”
Von Heilitz leaned back against his chair. A white stubble gleamed on his face, and his eyes were far back in his head. “Afterwards, people all over the mainland asked me to solve murders. I didn’t want to admit I was wrong any more than Barbara Deane did. Anton Goetz had put me on my way.”
“Could we reconstruct what really happened?” Tom asked. “There’s a lot I still don’t understand.”
“I bet you do, though.” Von Heilitz straightened up and rubbed a hand over his face. “Let’s say that Glen knew immediately that Jeanine Thielman had written him those notes. She was threatening him with some kind of exposure. She knew something—something really damaging. Her husband was a business rival of Glen’s, and Goetz might have told her more than he should have about your grandfather’s business. Or, as I think, it might have been another kind of exposure. At any rate, she was telling Glen to stop whatever he was doing. He left a noisy party at the club—I think he had set up this meeting for the day before he was supposed to go to Florida, but I don’t think he planned to kill her. He came to her lodge. She was waiting for him on her deck. He confronted her. Whatever she knew about was serious enough to ruin him. Jeanine refused to cooperate with him, or to believe his denials, and turned her back to go inside. He saw the gun her husband left on the table, picked it up, shot and missed, and then he shot again. Everybody else at the lake except Anton Goetz was at the club, having a good time dancing to a loud band—do you know how music carries, up there?”
Tom nodded. “But he was a bad shot. How did he hit her?”
“Because of the gun—he would have missed her both times, if the gun had been accurate. Anyhow, I don’t think he was very far from her. After that, I think he pulled her off the deck so that she wouldn’t bleed all over it. And then—”
He looked up at Tom, who said, “Then he ran across the little path and went through the woods to get Anton Goetz. My mother saw him through the window in her bedroom, but she wasn’t sure who it was—she only had a glimpse of him. Goetz worked for him, but I bet he wasn’t an accountant, any more than Jerry Hasek was a public relations assistant.”
“He would have been a lot more useful than Jerry Hasek. Goetz could go everywhere, he could talk to people and hear things. Goetz did whatever Glen couldn’t afford to be seen doing. Mainly, I suppose he carried money around for Glen and the Redwings. He was a criminal with a smooth façade. I misunderstood him completely, exactly in the way he wanted to be misunderstood.” Von Heilitz gave Tom an angry, self-disgusted look. “Tell me what they did next.”
“My grandfather and Goetz wrapped her body in the old curtains, weighted her down, and rowed her out into the lake after the party broke up at the club. Then they must have washed off the deck. My grandfather carried my mother over to Barbara Deane’s house early the next morning, and then walked back to Goetz’s lodge and spent the next four nights in the guest room, waiting to see what would happen. Goetz brought them meals back from the club. Everybody knew Grand-Dad was planning to go to Florida, and they just assumed that’s where he was.”
“And by the time I got to Miami, he was there waiting for me.”
Tom looked down at the article about his death. “Oh, my God,” he said. “Grand-Dad is going to know I didn’t die in that fire. The Langenheims saw me, and the Spences know that I got out alive.”
“When they read that a fire ‘claimed your life’ in the paper this morning, they’ll think you died in the hospital. Smoke inhalation kills more people than actual fires. People generally believe what they read in the papers. You’re dead, I’m afraid.”
“I suppose that’s a relief.”
Von Heilitz smiled at him. “Tell me what happened to Goetz.”
“After you talked to him at the club, he went back to the lodge to tell my grandfather that you’d accused him of the murder—he was an accessory, anyhow. As soon as Goetz told him that you thought he’d killed Mrs. Thielman, he knew—” Tom remembered Sarah’s father saying, “Your grandfather does everything by the seat of his pants, you know,” and shuddered—“he knew how to solve all his problems.”
“Glen strangled him, or knocked him down and suffocated him, or maybe just got the line around his neck and threw the spool over a beam and pulled him off the ground. It’s no wonder the line nearly took Goetz’s head off. Then he took a couple of shots at me just to slow me down, got his things together, and took off for Barbara Deane’s house to pick up his daughter.”
“Did you know all this when I went to your house, that first time?”
“I didn’t really know any of it. When I began spending more time on Mill Walk, I did a little checking into the ownership of Goetz’s house and lodge. One dummy company led to another dummy company, which was owned by Mill Walk Construction. Glen could have made it a lot more complicated, but he never thought anybody would bother to look even that closely. Once I knew that Goetz had worked for Glen, I began to think about Goetz bringing his meals home from the club, and telling Mrs. Truehart not to go into his guest room.”
“But you didn’t tell me about any doubts. You just told me about the case.”
“That’s right. I presented it to you exactly as it came to me.”
For a moment they looked at each other across the table, and then Tom smiled at the old man. Von Heilitz smiled back, and Tom laughed out loud. Von Heilitz’s smile broadened. “You handed it to me!”
“I did, I handed it to you. And you took it!”
“But you didn’t think I’d actually go to Eagle Lake.”
Von Heilitz shook his head. “I thought we’d have a few more peaceful conversations, and I’d let you know that Goetz worked for your grandfather, and things would go like that for a while.”
“Peaceful conversations, nothing,” Tom said. An astonishing bubble of hilarity broke free inside him; this laughter seemed to come from the same place as his tears, in the moonlit clearing when he had learned the answer to the puzzle of his childhood.
Von Heilitz kept smiling at him. “You turned out to be a little more talkative and energetic than I bargained on. And it almost got you killed. I’m glad you’re laughing.”
Tom leaned forward in his chair. “It’s hard to explain—but everything’s clear now. We sit here talking for twenty minutes, and all of a sudden I can see exactly what happened—it’s like points on a graph or something.”
“That’s right,” von Heilitz said. “Clarity is exhilarating.”
“The only thing we don’t know is why it all happened.” Tom leaned back in his chair and pushed his hands against his forehead, straining to capture some knowledge that seemed just out of sight—something else he knew without being able to see. “What were those notes about? What did Jeanine Thielman know he was?” He threw his arms out. “Maybe she knew that he killed his wife and faked her suicide. Maybe the newspaper editor was right.”
“Would she say, You have to be stopped—this has gone on too long?”
“Sure, she could,” Tom said.
“I saw Magda Upshaw’s body at the same time Sam Hamilton did, and what he thought were stab wounds were the marks of the hooks on the drag.”
“You think she killed herself.”
The old man nodded. “But I don’t know why s
he killed herself. Didn’t one of those notes say I know what you are? Maybe Magda found out what he was, and it was too much for her.”
“She found out he was a crook. Isn’t that what we’re saying? He was involved with dirty deals with Maxwell Redwing from the start—he was in Maxwell’s pocket, and Fulton Bishop was in his?”
“That’s what we’re saying, all right, though we’re talking about the days before Fulton Bishop.”
Some other knowledge flickered in and out of Tom’s sight. “Adultery? Younger women?” He groaned. “Actually, Barbara Deane told me that all he ever did with younger women was take them out, so that he could be seen with them.”
“Even if he did sleep with them, I don’t think that Jeanine would have gotten so excited about it. And is it a secret he’d kill to keep?”
“Not if he went out with them in public,” Tom admitted.
The old man crossed his legs and yanked his tie down. “We can use this secret of his without knowing what it is.”
“How?”
Von Heilitz stood up, and his knees cracked. He made a pained face. “We’ll talk about that after I shower and have a nap. There’s a little place to eat downstairs.” He bent forward and pushed the folded newspaper across the table. “In the meantime, take a look at this article.”
The Shadow stepped away from the table and stretched his long arms above his head. Tom scanned the short article, which was about the arrest of Jerome Hasek, Robert Wintergreen, and Nathan LaBarre, residents of Mill Walk, in Eagle Lake, Wisconsin on charges of housebreaking, burglary, and auto theft. Von Heilitz was looking at him with an overtone of concern that made him feel nervous.
“We already know this,” Tom said.
“And now everybody else knows it too. But there’s something else you have to know, though I hate to be the one to tell you. Read the last sentence.”
“ ‘The three men are assisting the Eagle Lake police in their investigations of other crimes.’ ” Tom looked up at von Heilitz.
“That little crime you solved is crucial to helping us with all the big ones.”
“Does this have to do with what you and Tim Truehart were talking about after I left the hospital? About the man who lives by himself in the woods? Who’s down on his luck?”
Von Heilitz unbuttoned his vest and leaned against the frame of the connecting door. “Why do you think your grandfather was in such a hurry to get you up north?”
“To get me off Mill Walk.”
“Tell me what were you doing when someone took a shot at you.”
“I was talking—” The physical sensations of the knowledge arrived before the knowledge itself. Tom’s throat constricted. He felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach.
Von Heilitz nodded, bowing his whole body so that his clothes flapped over his chest. He looked like a sorrowful scarecrow. “So I don’t have to tell you.”
“No,” Tom said. “That can’t be true. I’m his grandson.”
“Did he tell you to come back home? Did he even tell you to call the police?”
“Yeah. He did.” Tom shook his head. “No. He tried to talk me out of calling them. But after I called them, he told me it was a good idea.”
Tell me, what do you see when you look out the window, this time of night? I always liked nights up at Eagle Lake.
“Grand-Dad knew where the phone was,” Tom said. The boot was still in his stomach.
“He knew you’d have a light on. He wanted you framed in the window.”
“He even made me face forward—he asked me what I saw out the window—but at the last minute I bent to see through my reflection …”
“He had it set up,” von Heilitz said, in a voice that would have been consoling if he had been speaking different words. “The man Jerry hired knew when Glen was going to call.”
“I knew he killed those two people,” Tom said, unable to say their names, “but that was forty years ago. I guess I finally understood that he was mixed up in dirty stuff with Ralph Redwing. But I still thought of him as my grandfather.”
“Glen is your grandfather, worse luck,” von Heilitz said. “And he’s your mother’s father. But even when I knew him back in school, other people were never very real to him. They never have been.”
Tom stared down at the newspaper without seeing it.
“Do you know what I mean, that other people aren’t real to him?”
Tom nodded.
“It’s a special kind of mind—it’s a sickness. Nobody can change people like that, nobody can help them.” He moved into the room. “Will you be all right for an hour or so?”
Tom nodded.
“We’ll get him, you know. We’ll rattle his cage. This time he went too far, and he’ll know it as soon as he sees the paper.”
“I guess I’d like to be by myself for a while.”
Von Heilitz nodded slowly, and then went into his room and closed the connecting door.
A little while later, Tom heard the drumming of the shower in the next room.
His body felt light and insubstantial, and nothing around him seemed quite real. Everything looked real, but that was a trick. If he knew how, he could walk through the bed, pass his arm through the table, pierce the telephone with his fingers. He felt as if he could move through the wall—it would flatten itself against him and dissolve, like the smoke rising from Eagle Lake.
I always liked nights, up at Eagle Lake.
Tom stood up with dreamlike slowness and looked out of the window to see if Calle Drosselmayer was still real, or if everything out there was only painted shadows, like himself and the room. Bright automobiles streamed up and down on the street below. A man in a work shirt and wash pants, like Wendell Hasek years ago, cranked up the metal grille over a pawn shop window, uncovering guitars and saxophones and a row of old sewing machines with foot treadles. A woman in a yellow dress walked past a bar called The Home Plate, turned around, and pressed her face to the window as if she were licking the glass.
He turned around. He could disappear in this room. Disappearance was what rooms like this were for. They were places in which people had given up, stepped aside, quit—his mother’s rooms on Eastern Shore Road and Eagle Lake were disappearance places akin to this hotel room. A green carpet flecked with stains, tired brown furniture, tired brown bed. A seam of pale yellow wallpaper stamped with some indistinct pattern lifted an inch off the wall beside the door.
He laid the suitcase flat on the carpet, opened it, and took out the Shadow’s beautiful suits and lustrous neckties. After he put away the older man’s clothes, he undressed, tossed the shirt and underwear back into the case, and hung up the suit he had been wearing—its wrinkles had been shaped by his own knees, shoulders, elbows. Solidity seemed to swim back into his body, and he went into his bathroom and saw another, older person in the mirror. He saw the Shadow’s son, a kind of familiar stranger. Thomas Lamont. He would have to get used to this person, but he could get used to him.
He turned on the shower and stepped under the hot water. “We’ll get him,” he said out loud.
“Glen Upshaw and the island of Mill Walk came together at the moment when he could cause the most damage,” von Heilitz said.
They were downstairs in a restaurant called Sinbad’s Cavern, a dark hole with tall wooden booths and fishnets hung on the wall like spiderwebs. It had both a lobby and a street entrance, and a long bar ran along one wall. Above the bar hung an immense painting of a nude woman with unearthly flesh tones reclining on a sofa the color of the carpet in Tom’s room. At the end of the bar nearest the street door two uniformed policeman with blotchy faces were drinking Pusser’s Navy Rum out of shot glasses, neat. Their hats were placed upside down on the bar beside them.
“A generation earlier, he would have been tied in knots—David Redwing would have tossed him in jail or kept him straight. He wouldn’t have let Glen start up a system of payoffs and kickbacks, he wouldn’t have let him turn the police force into the mess it is.”
/>
He took another bite of the seafood omelette both he and Tom had ordered.
“If Glen had been born a generation earlier, he might have seen what would wash and what wouldn’t, and imitated a respectable citizen all his life. He wouldn’t have had any principles, of course, but he might have seen that he had to keep his vices private. If he’d been born a generation later, he would have been too young to have any influence over Maxwell Redwing. Maxwell was just an opportunistic crook who was lucky enough to be born into a helpful family. He wasn’t as smart as Glen—by the time they were in their mid-twenties, Glen was operating almost like an independent wing of the Redwing family. And by the time Ralph came of age, Glen had so much power that he was sort of a permanent junior partner. He had the records and paperwork on every secret deal and illegal operation. If Ralph tried anything, all Glen had to do was leak some of those records to the press to make a stink big enough to drive the Redwings off Mill Walk. People here want to believe that David Redwing’s legacy is intact, and they’ll go on thinking that something like the Hasselgard scandal is an aberration and Fulton Bishop is a dedicated policeman until they’re shown different.”
“So what can we do?”
“I told you. We’re going to rattle Glendenning Upshaw’s cage. He’s bothered already—Glen didn’t know that Ralph’s bodyguards were dumb enough to go around breaking into houses. He isn’t going to want to face an extradition order, once Tim Truehart finds the man Jerry hired to kill you. There’s already been too much trouble on Mill Walk. Ralph Redwing is waiting things out in Venezuela, and if I were Glen I’d think about going there too.”
Von Heilitz dipped his chin in a nod like the period at the end of a sentence, and pushed his empty plate to the side of the table.