Mystery

by Peter Straub

  Esterhaz walked down a dark, clanging staircase and went outside into a bitter cold and a tearing wind. He saw that he was next door to a bar called The House of Correction and recognized where he was. Four blocks away stood the St. Alwyn Hotel, where two people he knew had been murdered. Esterhaz walked through a snowdrift to get to his car, took a pint bottle from the glove compartment, and let a little more reality into his system. It was some unearthly hour like six-thirty in the morning. A little anguish in a crowd, he thought, that bitch knew what she was talking about. He put the pint bottle between his knees, started his car, and drove to a deserted parking lot on the lakefront. Absolutely still curls and feathers of smoke clung to the grey surface of the lake, frozen into place.

  “Pretty good, wouldn’t you say?”

  Tom looked up through the memory of smoke feathers tethered to the surface of Eagle Lake, and saw von Heilitz bending over the table, making sandwiches with chunks of cheddar cheese and slices of salami.

  “The book,” von Heilitz said.

  Andres drove them past the tall white walls of the Redwing compound and through the old cane fields where rows of willows, the only trees that would grow in the tired soil, nearly hid all that was left on Mill Walk of the original island. Far ahead, a smooth cement riser took shape on the right side of the coastal highway, and swung to the right as it followed the curve of a blacktopped side road. This was the access road to the Founders Club, and the riser became the cement wall that ran down the southern end of the club property to the beach south of Bobby Jones Trail and Glendenning Upshaw’s bungalow. An identical cement wall bordered the northern end of the club. The guardhouse was located just past the point where the two walls were closest. Past the guardhouse, the access road divided into Ben Hogan Way and Babe Ruth Way, each of which led past the clubhouse to the members’ bungalows.

  “Pull into the cane field and hide the car,” von Heilitz said.

  Andres said, “You bet, Lamont,” and swerved across the road into the field. The old taxi jounced over the rough ground, snapping off dry bamboolike bristles, and pitched and rolled past the first row of willows. Andres patted the steering wheel.

  “We should be back in two hours, maybe less,” von Heilitz said.

  “Take your time,” Andres said. “Don’t get hurt.”

  Tom and von Heilitz got out of the car and walked through the dry stubs of cane. They crossed the road. Ahead, the white cement wall curved toward them, then curved away to cut across an empty swath of sandy ground covered with broom grass, palms, and low bushes all the way down to the low flat plane of the water. Von Heilitz moved quickly through the long grass toward the fence, which was no more than an inch taller than the top of his head. “Tell me when you think we’re about level with Glen’s bungalow,” he said.

  “It’s way down, on the first road off the beach.”

  “The last bungalow on its road?” He looked back over his shoulder at Tom without slackening his pace.

  Tom nodded.

  “That’s good luck.”

  “Why?”

  “We can just walk around the far end of the wall—down on the beach, where it comes to an end. This wall is more decorative than functional.” He smiled back at Tom, who was hurrying to catch up.

  “That’s lucky for you, then,” Tom said. “I think you’d have a hard time getting over this fence, anyhow.”

  Von Heilitz stopped moving. “Do you? Do you really?”

  “Well, it’s as tall as you are.”

  “Dear boy,” von Heilitz said. He put his hands on the top of the wall, hopped, and effortlessly pulled himself up until his waist met the smooth top of the wall; then he swung one leg up. In a second, he had disappeared over the top. Tom heard him say, “Nobody’s looking. Your turn.”

  Tom reached up and grunted his upper body over the top of the wall. He felt his face turn red. The pad of the bandage slipped on the cement. Von Heilitz looked at him from beside a tall palm. Tom lowered his chest to the top of the wall and tried to swing his legs up. The tips of the glossy shoes struck the side of the wall. He leaned forward to get his hips over the top, lost his balance, and fell to the sandy ground like a downed bird.

  “Not bad,” von Heilitz said. “Any pain?”

  Tom rubbed his shoulder. “You’re not supposed to wear suits when you do things like that.”

  “Shoulder all right?”

  “Fine.” He grinned at the old man. “At least I got over the thing.”

  Von Heilitz looked down through the palm trees and sand dunes on this side of the wall to three rows of bungalows about a hundreds yards away. The last bungalow in the row closest to the beach protruded far beyond the others. They could see straight across the terrace into a high-windowed room with leather furniture and an ornate desk. “I suppose that’s the one?”

  “That’s it,” Tom said.

  “Let’s wait for the mailman’s appearance behind the bunch of palms in front of the last set of bungalows.” Von Heilitz pulled back his sleeve and looked at his watch. “It’s about a quarter to four. He’ll be along soon.”

  They worked their way through the sand, moving from one clump of palms to another, until they reached a group of four palms leaning and arching up out of a sturdy patch of long grass. Hairy coconuts lay around them like cannonballs. Tom sat on the grass beside the old man. He could see the table where he and his mother had eaten lunch; through the high windows, he saw the dim books behind glass-fronted cases, and the lamps burning in the study. It was something like the view seen by the person who had shot at him.

  A few minutes later, a red Mill Walk mail van pulled into the parking lot, and a mailman opened the door and stepped out into the sunlight. Blue water sparkled behind him. He dragged a heavy brown bag from the side of the van, and moved out of sight, going toward the bungalows.

  “He’ll go to Glen’s first,” von Heilitz said. “It’s closest.” His voice sounded different, and Tom turned to look at his profile. A pink line covered the top of his cheek, and his eyes had both narrowed and brightened. “Now—now we see.”

  Maybe he won’t do anything at all, Tom thought. Maybe he’ll shake his head and scratch his fingers in his hair. Maybe he’ll shrug and toss the notes in the wastebasket.

  Maybe we made it all up.

  The mailman had to trudge across the parking lot, and then carry his bag across Bobby Jones Trail. Walk up the stairs and pass into the inner courtyard. Knock on the door, and wait for Kingsley to shuffle to the door. Kingsley had to go back to the sitting room and present the mail to his master. The master had to stroll toward the study, examining each letter as he went.

  Finally the door at the back of the study opened. Glendenning Upshaw, a great white head atop a massive blackness, appeared moving toward his desk. He was frowning down at a stack of letters in his hand—frowning simply from habit, not with anger or displeasure. As he came nearer the windows, Tom caught the red and grey of two of their envelopes.

  “He got them,” von Heilitz breathed.

  Tom’s grandfather stood behind his desk chair in his black suit, shuffling through eight or nine letters. Three of these he tossed immediately into the wastebasket beside the desk.

  “Junk mail,” von Heilitz said.

  He pulled his chair out from behind the desk and sat. He took up one letter, slit the long white envelope with an opener, and pondered it for a moment. He set it down at the far end of the desk, took a pen from his pocket, and leaned over to make a note at the bottom of the page.

  Next he took up the red envelope. He looked at the handwriting and examined the postmark. Then he slit the envelope open and pulled out the sheet of yellow paper. He unfolded it and read.

  Tom held his breath.

  His grandfather was motionless for a second: and then, though he did not move, gesture, or change in any way, his body seemed to alter its dimensions, as if beneath the black suit it had suddenly deflated and expanded like a bullfrog’s air sac. He seemed to have dra
wn all the air in the room into himself. His arms and his back were as rigid as posts.

  “And there we are,” von Heilitz said.

  Tom’s grandfather whirled sideways in his chair and looked through the window and out across the terrace. Tom’s heart slid up into his throat and stayed there until Upshaw slowly revolved back to the note. He stared at it for another second. Then he pushed the yellow paper to a corner of his desk and picked up the envelope to look at the handwriting and the postmark. He turned his head to make sure the door was closed, and then looked back out the window. He pulled all the rest of the letters toward him and shuffled through them, setting before him on the desk a grey envelope and two white envelopes, set down the others, and held each of the three up to examine the printed address and the postmark. One by one, he slit them open and read the notes. He leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling for a moment before reading the notes again. He pushed his chair away from the desk, and then stood and moved to the window and looked both right and left with an unconscious furtiveness Tom had never before seen in him.

  The pink line across the top of von Heilitz’s cheeks had heated up like an iron bar. “Not going to get much sleep tonight, is he?”

  “He really did kill her,” Tom said. “I don’t know if—”

  Von Heilitz put a finger to his lips.

  Tom’s grandfather was walking around his study, describing an oval that took him to the glass-fronted bookcases and back to his desk. Every time he returned to his desk, he looked down at the notes. The third time he had done this, he grabbed the notes, and went around the back of his chair to throw them into the wastebasket. Then he leaned heavily on the back of the chair, pulled it out and sat down, and leaned over to retrieve the notes. He shoved them into the top drawer of the desk along with the envelopes. He opened another drawer, removed a cigar, bit off the end, and spat it into the wastebasket.

  “Saint Nicotine,” von Heilitz said. “Concentrates the mind, soothes the nerves, eases the bowels.”

  Tom realized that they had been watching his grandfather for only something like fifteen minutes. It felt as if they had been there for hours. The misery that had been gathering in him ever since Glendenning Upshaw read the first note swam up out of his own bowels like a physical substance. He stretched out in the tall grass and the sand and rested his head on his hands. Von Heilitz gently patted his back.

  “He’s figuring out what to do—trying to work out what he risks by telling somebody.”

  Tom raised his head and saw his grandfather exhaling a cloud of white smoke. He plugged the cigar back in his mouth, and began turning it around and around with his fingers, as if trying to screw it into place. Tom lowered his head again.

  “Okay, he’s reaching for the phone,” von Heilitz said. “He’s still not too sure about this, but he’s going to do it.”

  Tom looked up. His grandfather sat with the receiver in his left hand and his right barely touching the dial. The cigar sent up a column of white smoke from an ashtray. He began dialing. He pressed the receiver to his ear. After a moment, he spoke a few words into the phone, waited, snatched at his cigar, and leaned back in his chair to say a few more words. He held the cigar in toward his chest like a poker hand. Then he hung up.

  “Now what?” Tom asked.

  “That depends on what he does. If it looks like he’s expecting someone right away, we stay here. If not, we’ll go to the hotel and come back here when it gets dark.”

  His grandfather opened the desk drawer and peered down at the notes. He lifted out the envelopes and considered the postmarks before putting them back and closing the drawer.

  “It’s what he does now that tells us,” von Heilitz said.

  Tom’s grandfather looked at his watch, stood up, and began pacing back and forth. He sat down at the far end of the room and worked at the cigar; in a moment, he got to his feet again.

  “It won’t be long,” von Heilitz said.

  A slender brow lizard with a stubby tail and a Pleistocene head padded toward them across the sand, its splayed feet lifting and falling like hammers. When it saw them, it raised its snout—one forefoot poised in the air. A vein beat visibly in its neck. The lizard skittered around and darted toward the next clump of palms. The mailman worked his way between the bungalows on the street in back of Bobby Jones way. Tom sweated into his suit. Sand leaked into his shoes. He rubbed his shoulder, which was still sore. A white-haired man and woman in golfing clothes came out on a terrace behind the farthest bungalow in the third row and stretched out on loungers to read magazines.

  “Have you ever tasted lizard?” von Heilitz asked.

  “No.” Tom propped his head on his cupped hand and looked up at the old man. He was leaning sideways against a palm with his knees drawn up, his whole body contracted into the spider-shaped shadow of the palm’s crown, his face youthful and alight. “How does it taste?”

  “The flesh of a raw lizard tastes like dirt—soft dirt. A cooked lizard is another matter. If you don’t dry it out too much, it tastes exactly the way a bird would taste, if birds had fins and could swim. Everybody always says they taste like chicken, but lizard isn’t nearly that delicate. The meat has a pungent, almost tarry smell, and the flavor’s gamy. Lot of nutrition in a lizard. A good lizard’ll keep you alive for a week.”

  “Where did you eat lizards?”

  “Mexico. During the war, the American OSS asked me to investigate a group of German businessmen who spent a great deal of time traveling between Mexico and various South American countries. Mill Walk was technically neutral, of course, and so was Mexico. Well, these men turned out to be setting up escape routes for important Nazis, establishing identities, buying land—but the point is, one of them was nutty about certain foods, and ate lizard once a week.”

  “Raw or cooked?”

  “Grilled over mesquite.”

  This story, which may or may not have been the strict truth, went on for twenty minutes.

  A black car swung into the parking lot. Two men in dark blue uniforms slammed the doors. One of them was the officer Tom had seen ordering David Natchez upstairs in the hospital lobby, and the other was Fulton Bishop. The two men moved quickly across the parking lot and disappeared from view.

  “Glen isn’t going to say anything in front of the other man,” von Heilitz said. “He’ll make Bishop send him out of the room. Watch.”

  Tom’s grandfather circled around the right side of the room, landed in the chair, and almost immediately bounced up again. He ground out the stub of the cigar in the ashtray. Then he straightened up and faced the door.

  “Heard the bell,” von Heilitz said.

  Kingsley entered the study a moment later, and Bishop and the other man came in after him. Kingsley left, closing the door behind him. Glendenning Upshaw spoke a few words, and Fulton Bishop turned to the other man and gestured toward the door. The second policeman walked out of the room.

  “Bishop is Glen’s man,” von Heilitz said. “He wouldn’t have a career at all if Glen hadn’t smoothed his way, and without Glen’s protection, I don’t think he could keep his hold on things. But Glen can’t possibly trust him enough to tell him the truth about Jeanine Thielman. He has to tell him a story. I wish we could hear it.”

  Tom’s grandfather sat behind his desk, and Fulton Bishop stayed on his feet. Upshaw talked, raised his hands, gestured; the other man remained motionless. Upshaw pointed at the upper part of his right arm.

  “Now what is that about?” von Heilitz said. “I bet …”

  Tom’s grandfather opened his desk drawer and took out the four letters and their envelopes. Fulton Bishop crossed to the desk and leaned over the notes. He asked a question, and Upshaw answered. Bishop picked up the envelopes to examine the postmarks and the handwriting. He set them back down and stepped to the window, as if he, too, feared being overheard. Bishop turned around to speak to Upshaw, and Upshaw shook his head.

  “He wants to take the letters with him. Gle
n doesn’t want to give them up, but he will.”

  The mailman came walking back to his van through the parking lot.

  Bishop looked through all four of the notes and said something that made Upshaw nod his head. Bishop passed one note and the red envelope back to Tom’s grandfather, unbuttoned his uniform pocket, folded the notes together, and put the remaining notes and envelopes into the pocket. Glendenning Upshaw came close enough to Bishop to grip his arm. Bishop pulled away from him. Upshaw jabbed his finger into the policeman’s chest. It looked like a loud conversation. Finally he walked Bishop to the door and let him out of the study.

  “Bishop’s got his marching orders, and he won’t be very happy about it,” von Heilitz said. “If Glen comes back to the window, look at his right sleeve and see if you can see anything there.”

  Tom’s grandfather moved heavily back to his desk and took out another cigar. He bit, spat, and sat down to light it. After a few minutes, Fulton Bishop and the other policeman appeared in the parking lot. They opened the doors of their car and got in without speaking. Glendenning Upshaw turned his desk chair to the window and blew out smoke. Tom could not see anything distinctive about his right sleeve. Upshaw put the cigar in his mouth, turned back to the desk, leaned over to open a drawer on the right side, and took out a pistol. He laid the pistol on the top of the desk beside the note and the red envelope and looked at it for a moment, then picked it up and checked to see that it was loaded. He put it in the top drawer, and slowly closed the drawer with both hands. Then he shoved back the chair and stood up. He took a step toward the window and stood there, smoking. Kingsley opened the study door and said something, and Upshaw waved him away without turning around.