Mystery. Part 6

"'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 embarra.s.sment 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 rus.h.i.+ng down the stairs from the bar in the dining room. She didn't say anything to me, just went past me with an embarra.s.sed smile. When I got upstairs, I saw Goetz at the bar by himself, in front of two gla.s.ses 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 anything 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 sc.r.a.pbook. MYSTERY RESOLVED IN TRAGEDY MYSTERY RESOLVED IN TRAGEDY read the banner across the top of the read the banner across the top of the Eagle Lake Gazette Eagle Lake Gazette. Two single-column articles on either side were headed GUIDE TRUEHART RELEASED TO SOBBING WIFE, CHILDREN GUIDE TRUEHART RELEASED TO SOBBING WIFE, CHILDREN and and SHADOW STRIKES AGAIN 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 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 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 MYSTERY. RESOLVED. TRAGEDY. Connected to these words, as to so much of his childhood, was the image of his mother locked into her encompa.s.sing misery.

The young Lamont von Heilitz had worn his hair shorter, though not as short as was the fas.h.i.+on 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 other 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 Sh.o.r.e 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 prost.i.tutes, gamblers, homeless wanderers. Interspersed with the articles were telegrams sent to Lamont von Heilitz of Eastern Sh.o.r.e 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.

IF YOU ARE AS GOOD AS PEOPLE SAY WE NEED YOU FAST STOP.

Tom looked at pictures of his neighbor in clippings from newspapers in Louisiana, Texas, and Maine-in the latter, his left arm was encased in plaster and canvas, and his haggard face looked as white as the sling, completely out of key with the triumphant caption. Famous Sleuth Unmasks, Kills Red Barn Murderer Famous Sleuth Unmasks, Kills Red Barn Murderer.

The headlines from all these cities and towns celebrated his triumphs. THE SHADOW SUCCEEDS WHERE POLICE FAIL. VON HEILITZ UNCOVERS LONG HELD SECRET, REVEALS KILLER. TOWN CELEBRATES SHADOW'S VICTORY WITH BANQUET THE SHADOW SUCCEEDS WHERE POLICE FAIL. VON HEILITZ UNCOVERS LONG HELD SECRET, REVEALS KILLER. TOWN CELEBRATES SHADOW'S VICTORY WITH BANQUET. And here was the young Lamont von Heilitz, impeccable and taut as ever, looking straight ahead with a ghostly smile as a hundred men at long tables washed down venison and roast boar with magnums of champagne. He had managed to avoid photographers on all but two other occasions, on each of which he faced the camera as if it were a firing squad. He had captured or revealed the ident.i.ty of The Roadside Strangler, The Deep River Madman, The Rose of Sharon Killer, and The Terror of Route Eight. The Hudson Valley Poisoner had been proven to be a poetic-looking young pharmacist with complicated feelings about the six young women to whom he had proposed marriage. The Merry Widow, whose four wealthy husbands had suffered domestic accidents, turned out to be a doughy, uninspiring woman in her sixties, unremarkable in every way except for having both a brown and a blue eye. A Park Avenue gynecologist named Luther Nelson was the murderer who had written to The New York Times The New York Times identifying himself as "Jack the Ripper's Grandson." The Parking Lot Monster, of Cleveland, Ohio, had been one Horace M. Fetherstone, the father of nine daughters and the regional manager of the Happy Hearts Greeting Card Company. In all these cases, Lamont von Heilitz, the "renowned amateur consulting detective and resident of the island of Mill Walk," had "offered invaluable a.s.sistance to the local police" or had "been helpful in providing evidence" or "by use of brilliant ratiocination, had advanced a coherent theory of the true nature and cause of the baffling crimes"-in other words, had done the work of the police for them. identifying himself as "Jack the Ripper's Grandson." The Parking Lot Monster, of Cleveland, Ohio, had been one Horace M. Fetherstone, the father of nine daughters and the regional manager of the Happy Hearts Greeting Card Company. In all these cases, Lamont von Heilitz, the "renowned amateur consulting detective and resident of the island of Mill Walk," had "offered invaluable a.s.sistance to the local police" or had "been helpful in providing evidence" or "by use of brilliant ratiocination, had advanced a coherent theory of the true nature and cause of the baffling crimes"-in other words, had done the work of the police for them.

Page after page, the cases went by. Mr. von Heilitz had worked ceaselessly during the late twenties and throughout the thirties. At a certain point in the late thirties, some of the news stories began referring to him as "the real-life counterpart of radio's most famous fictional detective, the Shadow." He camped in hotel rooms and the libraries and newspaper offices in which he did his research. The last of the detective's photographs contained in the book accompanied an article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Louis Post-Dispatch ent.i.tled ent.i.tled ECCENTRIC RENOWNED SLEUTH POUNDS BOOKS, NOT PAVEMENT ECCENTRIC RENOWNED SLEUTH POUNDS BOOKS, NOT PAVEMENT and showed a man with greying hair seated at a desk buried under rifts of newspapers, notebooks, and boxes of papers. Except for the gloves on his hands, the excellence of his suit, and his habitual air of distinction, he looked like an overworked high school teacher. and showed a man with greying hair seated at a desk buried under rifts of newspapers, notebooks, and boxes of papers. Except for the gloves on his hands, the excellence of his suit, and his habitual air of distinction, he looked like an overworked high school teacher.

The Shadow had abruptly left St. Louis after solving the murders of a brewer and his wife, refusing to grant any further interviews. (The Post-Dispatch: Post-Dispatch: AFTER DEDUCTIVE TRIUMPH, ECCENTRIC SLEUTH GOES ON THE LAM AFTER DEDUCTIVE TRIUMPH, ECCENTRIC SLEUTH GOES ON THE LAM.) After that, the flow of clippings continued, but contained far fewer references to the detective. In Boulder, Colorado, the murderer of a well-known novelist was found to be a local literary agent, incensed that his most lucrative client had intended to move to a New York firm; Boulder police credited the advice of a "self-styled amateur of crime" with helping them to identify the killer. Lamont von Heilitz was obviously concealed behind that phrase, and Tom saw his neighbor in the "anonymous source" who had a.s.sisted the police when a movie star was found shot to death in his Los Angeles bedroom; in the "concerned private citizen" who had appeared in Albany, Georgia, to give help to police when an entire family was found murdered in a city park.

In 1945, a letter from "an amateur expert in crime who wishes to preserve his anonymity" gave the police of Knoxville what they needed to arrest a local honor student for the murders of three of his cla.s.smates.

After 1945, all the clippings were of this kind. Von Heilitz had refused all invitations to a.s.sist individuals or police, and instead had followed only newspaper accounts of cases that interested him and solved them at long distance. Telegrams and letters begging for his aid-Dear Mr. von Heilitz, I believe I am a detective too for I have tracked you down to your island lair...-had been marked "No Reply" and pasted into the book. When he had become interested in a case, as with the Fox River Valley Menace, the Beast of Lover's Lane, and the Tattoo Killer, he had subscribed to community newspapers and written to the local police. "Somebody out there likes us," said Chief of Police Austin Beer of Grand Forks, Nebraska, after arresting an elderly woman who had killed two children enrolled at a nursery school located across the street from her house. "One day we got this letter that just put things together in a new way. It wasn't from anywhere around here, but I'll tell you, this fellow knew all about us-he'd gone and followed property transfers from years back and worked out that Mrs. Ruppert had a grudge against the families of these children. That letter set us going in the right direction. I don't mind telling you, the whole thing makes you believe in the kindness of strangers." Chief Beers added that the letter had been signed only with the initials LVH, which had gone unrecognized. Twenty years after the detective's greatest fame, "The Shadow" was Lamont Cranston, not Lamont von Heilitz.

Then these cases, too, faded out of the big journal. The book's final pages confused Tom at first, for they contained nothing like the sequence of cases, of solutions flowing from carefully a.s.sembled evidence, that made up the rest of the journal. The entire journal seemed to mark a progress toward invisibility as the detective went from prominence to anonymity; in the final pages even the cases seemed to have disappeared. The focus was entirely on Mill Walk, and all the clippings came from the pages of the Eyewitness Eyewitness, but few of them concerned any obvious crime. Tom wondered if Mr. von Heilitz had merely clipped stories at random, searching for a pattern as invisible as he had become himself because none existed.

Tom's initial sense of dislocation was only partially explained by an odd distortion of the journal's chronology-the jumble of clippings from Mill Walk jumped back to the twenties. Among them were articles about the end of construction work on Shady Mount Hospital, "a medical facility," in the words of Maxwell Redwing, its first board chairman, "to rival any in the world." A row of Mill Walk citizens posed before Shady Mount's front door. These were the members of the hospital's first board of governors. Two familiar faces scowled toward him from the photograph. Dr. Bonaventure Milton, already showing the beginnings of his jowls and looking extremely satisfied with his accomplishments, had got himself up like a nineteenth-century prime minister in swallowtail coat, striped satin vest, and black bow tie. And between short, round Maxwell Redwing and pompous, inexplicably successful Dr. Milton, exuding power and rect.i.tude, loomed Tom's grandfather.

Tom experienced the thrill of mingled respect, fear, and awe Glendenning Upshaw always inspired in him. His grandfather's wide commanding face stared out from the photograph, challenging all the world to deny that the hospital behind him was the finest it had to show. At thirty, he had recently founded Mill Walk Construction, and his broad bulllike body looked even stronger than it did in the old photographs that hung in the halls of Brooks-Lowood, taken in the days when Glen Upshaw had been the school's Head Boy and captain of the football team. "Designed to answer the medical needs of every citizen of our island," read the caption, though in practice Shady Mount had chosen to respond to the needs only of residents of the far east end. Shady Mount left Mill Walk's less advantaged citizens to the care of the less fas.h.i.+onable facility farther west, St. Mary Nieves. In the photograph above the optimistic caption, Glendenning Upshaw wore one of the heavy black suits he had adopted long before Tom's birth, after the death of Tom's grandmother. His large left hand clutched the lion's head handle of his unfurled, trademark umbrella. His right hand held his flat, wide-brimmed black hat.

Any other man, Tom thought, who invariably dressed in a black suit, worn always with a stiff white s.h.i.+rt, a black necktie, a black hat, and a loose black umbrella, would look so much like a priest that strangers on the street would call him "Father." Yet Glen Upshaw had never looked priestly. He looked like a bank vault or some forbidding public building, and the aura of the world, of money and luxurious rooms, of first-cla.s.s suites on liners and large expensive appet.i.tes indulged behind closed doors, hung about him like a cloud. He made all of the other men in the photograph seem insignificant.

Tom turned the page.

Here was more chaos. Steams.h.i.+p arrivals and society parties, obituaries-Judge Morton Backer had died, and Tom stared at the name until he remembered that Judge Backer had been the man who had sold Arthur Thielman the long-barreled Colt pistol with which Jeanine Thielman had been murdered. Governmental appointments, long ago elections, business promotions, wedding announcements. Mill Walk Construction built a five-hundred-bed hospital in Miami. Here were his own parents, Victor Pasmore and Gloria Ross Upshaw, among a dozen other eastern sh.o.r.e residents of their age and station. Garden parties, lawn parties, Christmas parties, and New Year's parties, and country club b.a.l.l.s.

Then his eye moved to yet another photograph he had seen before. His mother in her early twenties, splendidly dressed, stepping down from a carriage as she arrived at the Founders Club for a charity ball. It was of this picture that the photograph of Jeanine Thielman had reminded him. The pose was identical, a good-looking blond woman stepping down from a carriage with a long, elegant leg protruding from a whirl of clothing. Gloria Upshaw Pasmore, too, seemed to be grimacing instead of smiling, but she was fifteen years younger than Jeanine Thielman, less encrusted with jewelry, altogether less sleek. Because of the contrast with the photograph of the murdered woman, it struck Tom that his mother looked vulnerable even then. Just dimly visible behind her, bending forward to help her get out of the carriage, was her father, whose tuxedo made him seem to melt backwards into the darkness of the interior.

Lamont von Heilitz had tracked the most trivial events of Mill Walk life in the hope that some day a name here, a date there, would intersect to lead him to a conclusion. He had cast out his nets day after day, and hauled in these minnows. The last ten pages of the big journal were a fact collection, no more.

Various names caught his eye. Maxwell Redwing and family went to Africa on safari and returned intact. Maxwell's son, Ralph, announced that, like his father, he had no political ambitions and would devote his energies to "the private sphere, where so much remains to be done." He pledged "all my efforts to the improvement of the quality of life on our beloved island." The Redwing Holding Company put in a successful bid to purchase the Backer mansion, known as "The Palms," located in a section of Mill Key now too close to the growing downtown and business district to be fas.h.i.+onable, gutted and renovated it and then sold it to the Pforzheimer family for use as a luxury hotel.

Maxwell Redwing retired as president of the Redwing Holding Company and appointed his son, Ralph, as its new chief officer.

A man named Wendell Hasek, a night security guard at Mill Walk Construction, was wounded in a payroll robbery and retired on full salary for the remainder of his life. Tom struggled to remember where he had heard the name before, and then did remember-Hasek had been Judge Backer's valet and driver, and had told Mr. von Heilitz about the sale of a pistol.

Two days later, the bank robbers were shot to death by police in a gun battle in the streets of the old slave quarter, but none of the stolen money, estimated to be in excess of thirty thousand dollars, was recovered.

Mill Walk Construction announced plans for an extensive housing development on the island's far west end, near Elm Cove.

Two days after selling his own construction company to Mill Walk Construction, Arthur Thielman died in his sleep, attended by his family and Dr. Bonaventure Milton.

Judge Backer, Wendell Hasek, Maxwell Redwing, and Arthur Thielman-Tom finally understood. Mr. von Heilitz was doing no more than following the careers of those who had been linked to the murder of Jeanine Thielman in Eagle Lake. That case, even more than the solution to the deaths of his parents, had determined the rest of his life. He had come into what became twenty years of prominence and activity because of it: in a way, Tom remembered, he had come fully to life at Eagle Lake. It was no surprise that he should never really let go of the case.

Tom undressed, turned off his lights, and got into bed, deciding to ask his grandfather about Lamont von Heilitz and the old days on Mill Walk. It was a strange thought-his grandfather and the Shadow must have grown up together.

PART FIVE.

THE.

FOUNDERS CLUB.

Letters mailed on Mill Walk usually arrived on the day they were posted, and mail put in the box at night always arrived the next day. Tom told himself that nothing would happen on the day Captain Bishop got his letter, that it could be a week or more before the police took action or released any information about the murder of Marita Ha.s.selgard. And because this was a Sat.u.r.day, it was always possible that his letter might not arrive on Fulton Bishop's desk until the following Monday. Everything went slower on the weekends. And if the letter arrived at headquarters on Monday, maybe it would sit half the day in the mail room before being rerouted to Bishop's office. And maybe Bishop took Sat.u.r.days off, or never looked at his mail until evening....

"You know what I think?" his father said. "Wake up, I'm talking to you."

Tom's head snapped up. From the other side of the breakfast table, Victor Pasmore regarded him with an unusual intensity. Tom had not even heard his father come into the kitchen. Now he was leaning on the back of a chair, staring as Tom absent-mindedly used his fork to push around on his plate the eggs he had scrambled himself. Like many heavy drinkers, Victor was virtually immune to hangovers, and the way he now looked at Tom was heavily confidential, almost paternal in a way that was rare with him.

"You have a good time last night? With the Spence girl?"

"Pretty good."

Victor pulled the chair out and sat down. "The Spences are good people. Very good people."

Tom tried to remember if he had seen any clippings about Sarah's parents in the journal, and decided that he had not. He remembered something else, and on impulse asked his father about it.

"Do you know anything about the man who built their house?"

Victor's look was now of confused impatience. "The guy who built the Spence house? That's nothing but a waste of time."

"But do you remember anything about him?"

"Christ, what are you, an archeologist?" Victor visibly calmed himself, and went on in a softer voice. "I guess it was some German. Way before my time, he wanted to knock everybody's eyes out, and he pretty well succeeded. The guy was a real con man, I guess. He got into trouble up north, and n.o.body ever saw him again."

"Why is it a waste of time?"

Victor leaned forward, his impatience struggling with his desire to impart an insight. "Okay, you wanna know, I'll tell you. You look at that house, what do you see? You see dollars and cents. Lots Lots of dollars and cents. Bill Spence started off as an accountant with your grandfather, he made some good investments, put himself where he is today. It doesn't matter anymore who built that place." of dollars and cents. Bill Spence started off as an accountant with your grandfather, he made some good investments, put himself where he is today. It doesn't matter anymore who built that place."

"You don't know anything about him?" Tom asked.

"No!" Victor yelled. "You're not listening to me! I'm making a point here. Look, it's all tied in with what I wanted to say to you. Have you thought about what you're going to do after Tulane?"

"Not really," Tom said, beginning to feel even more tense than usual. It had been decided that he would attend Tulane, his grandfather's college, after graduation.

"Well, hear me out on this. My advice is, think about business opportunities-go out and start fresh, make your own life. Don't get stuck on this island the way I did." Victor paused after making this surprising remark, and looked down at the table for a moment before going on. His voice was much softer now. "Your grandfather is willing to help you get started."

"On the mainland," Tom said. When he looked into the future, he saw only a terrifying void. His father's advice seemed directed toward an entirely different sort of person, one who would understand what a business opportunity was.

"Your future isn't here," said Victor. "You can have a whole new life." He looked across the table as if he had much more to say.

"How did you get started?"

"Glen helped me out." The statement came out in a flat, grudging tone which meant that the conversation had essentially come to an end, and Victor Pasmore turned away from his son to look out the kitchen window. Outside in the flat hot sunlight, purple bougainvillaea blossoms, too heavy for their stalks, lolled on the white terrace wall. "Just like when you were sick, I mean after your accident, Glen paid for your nurses, the tutors, a lot of things like that. You have to be grateful to the old man."

It was not clear to Tom if Victor Pasmore were talking about himself or his son. The grat.i.tude seemed heavy, an obligation endlessly paid for. His father turned from the window, unshaven, as was usual on weekends, dressed in an unconvincing sports s.h.i.+rt. "I'm just trying to talk sense to you," he said. "Save you from making mistakes. You think it's too early for a drink?" His father raised his thick eyebrows and pulled down the corners of his mouth in a comic grimace. The thought of having a drink had put him in a better mood.

"Think about what I said. Don't get-ah, you know." Victor stood up and moved toward the liquor cabinet. "Something mild mild, I think," he said, but he was no longer talking to Tom.

Tom spent the rest of the day walking around the house, unable to come to rest for longer than half an hour. He read a few pages of a novel, but kept losing his way in the sentences-the words jittered into a general blur as he pictured a uniformed policeman tossing his envelope onto Fulton Bishop's desk, Fulton Bishop glancing at it, either picking it up or ignoring it....

Tom carried the book into the living room. From the other side of the staircase came the roars and yells of a Yankees game booming fuzzily from the television in the study, where his father had collapsed into his chair. The gladiatorial New York fans always made a lot of noise. The front windows framed Lamont von Heilitz's big grey house. Had von Heilitz's father ever advised him to start thinking about business opportunities? Tom jumped up and walked twice around the living room, wis.h.i.+ng that the ball game would end so that he could switch the television to the Mill Walk station and wait for the news. Of course there would be nothing on the news. Church bake sales, the scores of the local Little League teams, the announcement of the construction of a new high rise parking lot...Tom wandered up the stairs and went into his room. He got to his knees and checked under his bed. The leather-bound journal was where he had left it. He heard his parents' bedroom door click open, and stood up in an almost guilty scramble. His mother's footsteps went down the front stairs. Tom left his bedroom and went down after her.

He found her in the kitchen, looking unhappily at the dishes in the sink and the empty beer cans his father had dropped on the table. She had brushed her hair and wore a long peach-colored satin nightgown and a matching bed jacket that looked like a compromise between underwear and clothing. "I'll wash the dishes, Mom," he said, realizing almost for the first time that, despite the uncertainty and puzzles of his life, his parents often made him feel as though they were his children.

For a moment Gloria seemed utterly confused about what to do next. She went uncertainly toward the table. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"I'm fine," she said, her voice as blurry as her face.

He went to the sink and turned on the hot water. Behind his back, Gloria moved around the kitchen turning on the kettle, rattling the cups, opening a box of tea. She seemed to be moving very slowly, and he thought that she was watching him busy himself with the pile of dirty dishes. He heard her pour hot water into the cup and sit down again with a sigh. Then he could not stand the silence any longer, and said, "Mr. Handley wanted me to come to his place after school yesterday, to show me some rare books. But I thought he really wanted to talk to me."