Mystery. Part 15

"You said said it all! Now you want to say it all again?" They heard her moving slowly toward the door. In a quieter voice: "I looked at you thirty years, Boney, I don't have to see you one day more." it all! Now you want to say it all again?" They heard her moving slowly toward the door. In a quieter voice: "I looked at you thirty years, Boney, I don't have to see you one day more."

"Hattie, it's not Boney," Tom said.

"No? Then I guess it must be Santa Claus."

"Open the door and find out."

She cracked the door and peered out. Alert black eyes in a suspicious face took in Tom's tall figure, then moved to Sarah. She opened the door a notch wider. Her white hair was skimmed back from her forehead, and the lines on her face that had seemed bitter now expressed a surprisingly youthful curiosity. "Well, you're a big one anyhow, aren't you? You people lost? How you know my name?" She looked hard at Tom, and her whole face softened. "Oh, my goodness."

"I was hoping you would recognize me," Tom said.

"If you hadn't turned into a giant, I would've recognized you right away."

Tom turned and introduced Sarah, who was lingering awkwardly in the little yard, her hands in the pockets of her shorts.

"Sarah Spence?" Hattie said. "Didn't I hear from Nancy Vetiver, all that time ago, that you visited our boy here in the hospital?"

Tom laughed at her perfect recall, and Sarah said, "I guess you did. But how could you remember ...?"

"I remember about everybody came to visit Tom Pasmore. I believe he was the most left-alone little boy I ever saw, all the time I worked at Shady Mount-you were, you know," she said directly to Tom. "I hope you two fine young people didn't plan on spending your whole visit here standing on my porch. You'll come in, won't you?"

Hattie smiled and stepped out to hold her door open, and Tom and Sarah went into the little interior.

"Oh, it's so pretty," Sarah said, a second before Tom could say the same thing. Threadbare but clean patterned rugs covered the floor, and every inch of the walls had been decorated with framed pictures of every kind-portraits and landscapes, photographs of children and animals and couples and houses. After a second, Tom saw that most of them had been clipped from magazines. Hattie had also framed postcards, newspaper articles, letters, hand-printed poems, and pages from books. She had brought the bent-back chairs and her table to a high shine which was increased by her bra.s.s lamps. Her bed was a burnished walnut platform softened by many pillows covered in fabrics; her table looked as though George Washington might have owned it. In one corner a huge birdcage held a stuffed hawk. The whole effect was of profusion and abundance. A dented kettle painted fire-engine red steamed on the gas hob beside the small white refrigerator against the back wall, covered like the others with photographs in frames. Tom saw Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and a self-portrait in a golden robe of Rembrandt that gazed out with the wisest and most disconcerting expression Tom had ever seen on any face.

"I do my best," Hattie said. "I live next to the biggest furniture store in all Mill Walk, and I'm a little bit handy, you know. Seems like rich people would rather throw things away than give 'em away, lots of times. I even know the houses a lot of my things came from."

"You got all this from the dump?" Sarah asked.

"You pick and choose, and you scrub and polish. People around here know I'm fond of pictures, and they bring me frames and such, when they find 'em." The kettle began to whistle. "I was making a cup of tea for Boney, but he wouldn't stay-just wanted to throw a scare into Hattie, was all he he wanted. You two won't be in such a rush, will you?" wanted. You two won't be in such a rush, will you?"

"We'd love some tea, Hattie," Tom said.

She poured the boiling water into a teapot and covered it. She brought three unmatched mugs from a little yellow cupboard to the table, a pint of milk, and sugar in a silver bowl. Then she sat beside them and began talking to Sarah about the original owners of some of her things while they waited for the tea to steep.

The big birdcage had been Arthur Thielman's-or rather, Mrs. Arthur Thielman's, the first first Mrs. Arthur Thielman, and so had her bra.s.s lamps; some shoes and hats and other clothes had also been Mrs. Thielman's, for after her death her husband had thrown out everything that had been hers. Her little old-fashioned desk where she kept her papers and the old leather couch had come from a famous gentleman named Lamont von Heilitz, who had got rid of nearly half his furniture when he had done something-Hattie didn't know what-to his house. And the big gilded frame around that picture of Mr. Rembrandt- Mrs. Arthur Thielman, and so had her bra.s.s lamps; some shoes and hats and other clothes had also been Mrs. Thielman's, for after her death her husband had thrown out everything that had been hers. Her little old-fashioned desk where she kept her papers and the old leather couch had come from a famous gentleman named Lamont von Heilitz, who had got rid of nearly half his furniture when he had done something-Hattie didn't know what-to his house. And the big gilded frame around that picture of Mr. Rembrandt- "Mr. von Heilitz? Famous?" Sarah said, as if the name had just caught up with her. "He must be the most useless man ever born! He never even comes out of his house, he never sees anyone-how could he be famous?"

"You're too young to know about him," Hattie said. "I think our tea's ready by now." She began to pour for them. "And he comes out of his house now and again, I know-because he comes to see me."

"He comes to see you?" Tom asked, now as surprised as Sarah.

"Some old patients come around now and again," she said, smiling at him. "Mr. von Heilitz, he brought me some of his parents' things himself, instead of tossing them on the dump and making me drag them home. He might look like an old fool to you, but to me he looks like that picture of Mr. Rembrandt up on my wall." She sipped her tea. "Came to visit you too, didn't he? Back when you got hurt."

"But why was he famous?" Sarah asked.

"Everybody knew about the Shadow once," Hattie said. "Used to be the most famous man on Mill Walk. I think he was the greatest detective in the world-like someone you could read about in a book. He made a lot of people uncomfortable, he did-they had too many secrets, and they were afraid he'd know all about them. He still makes 'em uncomfortable. I think a lot of folks on this island would be happier if he pa.s.sed real soon."

Sarah turned a reflective glance on Tom, and he said, "Hattie, did Dr. Milton come here to warn you off talking to me?"

"Let me ask you something. Are you making ready to sue Shady Mount? And do you want Nancy Vetiver to help you do it?"

"Is that what he said?"

"Because you had to have that second operation-they made a mess of the first one, you know. Tom ain't that stupid, I said. If you could be sued on this island, it would have happened a long time ago. But if you want to, Tom, you go ahead-you might not be able to win, but you could smear him a little."

"Dr. Milton?" asked Sarah.

"Hattie once told me I ought to take my fork and stab him in his fat fish-colored hand."

"Should have too. Anyhow, you want Nancy's address, I got it. I see Nancy once a week or so-she drops in to talk to me. Boney can try to get me thrown out of my house here, it might be harder than he thinks."

"He said he'd get you evicted? Don't you own this place?"

"Tossed out on my old black a.s.s, was the way he said it. Every month but June, July, and August, I pay rent to a man who comes collecting for the Redwing Holding Company. Jerry Hasek is his name, and he's just the man you'd send if you wanted to scare the rent out of seventy-seven-year-old ladies. He wouldn't be good for much else. In September, he takes four months' money all at once. Summers, he goes up north with all the Redwings, and a couple other no-goods Ralph Redwing keeps on the payroll."

"I know him," Sarah said. "Well, I know who he is. Acne scars, always looks worried about something?"

"That's him, that's my rent collector."

"You know him?" Tom asked. know him?" Tom asked.

"Sure-he drives Ralph, when Ralph uses a car. And he's a kind of bodyguard."

"So," Hattie said. "You gonna take on Boney? It don't look that way to me."

"No," Tom said. "I just saw him at the hospital this morning-I asked him about Nancy, and he told me she was suspended, but he wouldn't say why. I don't think he wants you to tell me why, either."

Hattie scowled down into her mug of tea, and all the lines in her face deepened alarmingly. An almost ferocious sadness had claimed her, and Tom saw that it had always been there, underlying everything she had said. "This tea's gone cold," she said. Hattie pushed herself up and went to the sink, where she rinsed out the mug. "I guess that man died. That policeman who got shot. Reminds me of the old days, with Barbara Deane."

"Mendenhall," Tom said. "Yes, he died this morning. I saw them taking his body out of the hospital."

Hattie leaned back against her sink. "You think Nancy Vetiver was a bad nurse?"

"I think she was the only one as good as you," Tom said.

"That girl was a nurse nurse, same as me," Hattie said. "She could have been a doctor but n.o.body would let her, so she did the next best thing. Didn't have the money to be a doctor, anyhow, so she went to the nursing school at St. Mary Nieves, same as me, and when they saw how good she was, they hired her for Shady Mount." She looked at each of them with the fierce sadness Tom had seen earlier. "You can't tell someone like that not to do her job-you can't say, do bad now, we don't want you to be good today." Hattie lowered her head and wrapped her arms around her chest. "This island, this is some place. This can be some d.a.m.n place, Mill Walk." She turned from them, and seemed to look at her wall of framed photographs.

"Nancy came here a couple times, the last few weeks. Seemed like it was getting worse. See, if she got suspended, that meant she couldn't keep her place anymore, because the hospital owned her apartment. They told her. Told Told her." her."

Hattie turned around again. "You know what? Boney's scared of something. Tells you Nancy got suspended, and doesn't have sense enough to make up a good lie about why." She crossed her arms over her chest again, and looked amazingly like the stuffed hawk in the birdcage. "Makes me mad-d.a.m.n mad. Because I halfway believed the man." mad. Because I halfway believed the man."

She looked up at Tom. "Everything about this thing makes me mad. Two kinds of law-two kinds of medicine. Boney coming out here, all sweet and nice, then telling me that if I talk to you he might have to-to 'respond to my disloyalty,' that's how he said it-hard as that would be for him, he says, when he already got got Nancy out of the hospital. See, he went too far then too!" She seemed to blaze as she came across the floor to Tom: it was as if the hawk had come to life and swooped toward him. She put her thin old hand on his shoulder, and he felt her talons clamp down. "He doesn't know who you are, Tom. He Nancy out of the hospital. See, he went too far then too!" She seemed to blaze as she came across the floor to Tom: it was as if the hawk had come to life and swooped toward him. She put her thin old hand on his shoulder, and he felt her talons clamp down. "He doesn't know who you are, Tom. He thinks thinks he knows, he thinks he knows all about you. Thinks you'll be just like all the rest-except he knows, he thinks he knows all about you. Thinks you'll be just like all the rest-except one one. You know who I mean, don't you?"

"The Shadow." He looked at Sarah, who sipped her tea and looked calmly back across the top of the cup. "You said something about a woman named Barbara Deane? She was a nurse?"

"For a time. Barbara Deane was your midwife." She dug her fingers into his skin. "You want to see Nancy Vetiver? If you do, I'll take you to her."

"I want to come too," Sarah said.

"You don't know where she is." Hattie turned sharply to face her.

"I bet I do. Dr. Milton or whoever it was wanted to scare her into doing what they wanted, right? So who owns the hospital? And what else do they own?"

Hattie nodded. "Dressed like that? Looking like you look? You can't."

"Can't what?" Tom asked.

"Go with you to the Elysian Courts."

Tom looked up at Hattie, and Hattie raised her eyebrows, amused and impressed.

"Give me something else to wear, then. I don't care what it is, I just need something to cover me up."

"I got something here might work," Hattie said. She moved across the room, knelt by the bed, and pulled a trunk from beneath it. She opened the trunk, swept aside layers of bright fabrics, and drew out a long black shapeless thing. "n.o.body's touched this since the first Mrs. Arthur Thielman."

"What's that?" Tom asked. "A parachute?"

"It's a cape," Sarah said, springing up to try it on. "It's perfect."

The red lining flashed against the black silk as Sarah twirled the cape over her shoulders, and then the whole thing gathered and swung and fell back into its natural folds, covering Sarah from her neck to her feet. She instantly looked ten years older and more sophisticated, another kind of person altogether.

For a second, Tom thought he was seeing Jeanine Thielman.

Then Sarah said, "Wow! I love it!" and she was Sarah Spence again, and in the next second, swept to the window and bent down to see if her dog was still where she had left him. Evidently he was, for she straightened up and made another twirl that exposed her tennis shoes. "Jamie's grandmother used to wear this? What do you think she was like?"

Hattie gave Tom a sly look, and said, "Tuck your hair in, turn up the collar, keep the front closed, and we'll be ready to visit Nancy, I reckon. n.o.body'll mess with you now, as long as I'm with you."

Hattie ushered both of them back outside into the hot sun, the sweet, sickening odor drifting from the dump, the wheeling gulls, and the rows of identical houses.

Bingo barked once, then recognized Sarah.

"How do you get three people and one dog into that car?" Hattie asked.

"Do you mind sitting on Tom's lap?" Sarah asked.

"Not if he doesn't," Hattie said. "We can put the car across the street from Maxwell's Heaven. Friend of mine will keep it safe-the dog too."

Hattie climbed in after Tom, and seemed to weigh no more than Bingo. As if she were a child, he could see over the top of her head.

"Tuaregs and lascars, here we come," Sarah said, and turned around on the narrow road.

"G.o.d help us," said Hattie.

Soon they were driving in the darkness between the listing tenements. Hattie told Sarah to turn down into a nearly invisible cobblestone path beneath a shadowy archway, and around various corners past curtained windows and peeling walls until they came to a small cobbled court with a blue sc.r.a.p of sky at its top, as if they were deep in a well. Barred windows and heavy doors stood on every side, and the air smelled of must. One of the heavy doors creaked open, and a large bearded man with a leather cap and ap.r.o.n peered out at them. He frowned at the car before recognizing Hattie, but immediately agreed to keep watch on the car and look after the dog for half an hour. Hattie introduced him as Percy, and Percy took the willing dog under his arm and led them into the building and up stairs and through vast empty rooms and small rooms crowded with bags and barrels. Bingo stared at everything with intent interest. "Who is Percy?" Tom whispered, and Hattie said, "Bone merchant. Human hair." The man took them through a dusty parlor and back out into the slanting street. They were across the street from Maxwell's Heaven.

"Just follow me now, and don't talk to anyone or stop to stare at anything," Hattie said.

Tom crossed the narrow street a step behind her. Sarah gripped his arm through the cape. The series of linked tenements built by Maxwell Redwing seemed to grow taller with every step.

"Are you sure you want to come with us?" he whispered.

"Are you kidding?" she whispered back. "I'm not going to let you go in there alone!"

Hattie walked unhesitatingly into an arched pa.s.sageway and disappeared. Tom and Sarah followed. The light died. Hattie was visible only as a small dark outline before them. The air instantly became colder, and the odors of must and dry rot-along with a thousand others-seeped from the walls. They hurried forward, and seconds later followed Hattie out of the pa.s.sageway.

"This is the First Court," Hattie said, looking around them. "There are three, altogether. Nancy's in the second. I've only been as far as her place, and I suppose I'd get lost if I tried to go any farther."

In the jumble of first impressions, Tom had taken in only that the s.p.a.ce around him looked vaguely like a prison, vaguely like a European slum, and more than either of these like an ill.u.s.tration from a sinister comic book-tilting little streets connected by wooden pa.s.sages like freight cars suspended in the air.

Three or four ragged men had begun shambling toward them from a doorway next to a lighted window across the court. Hattie turned to face them. The men shuffled and whispered to each other. One of them gave Hattie a wave that flapped the entire sleeve of his coat. They shambled back toward their doorway, and sat down, puddled in their coats, before Bobcat's Place.

"Don't mind those old boys," Hattie said. "They know me.... Tom! Read this writing."

He moved beside her and looked down. At his feet was a square bra.s.s plaque on which the raised lettering had been rubbed away to near illegibility, like the letters on an old headstone: ELYSIAN COURTS.

DESIGNED BY THE PHILANTHROPIST MAXWELL REDWING.

BUILT BY GLENDENNING UPSHAW.

AND MILL WALK CONSTRUCTION CO.

FOR THE GREATER GOOD.

OF THE PEOPLE OF THIS ISLAND.

1922.

"LET EACH MAN HAVE A HOME TO CALL HIS OWN"

"See that?" Hattie said. "That's what they said-'Let each man have a home to call his own.' Philanthropists, that's what they called themselves."

1922: two years before the death of his wife, three years before the murder of Jeanine Thielman and the construction of the hospital in Miami. Elysian Courts had been Mill Walk Construction's first big project, built with Maxwell Redwing's money.

Maxwell's Heaven looked like a small city. Crooked little streets twisted off the court, which was lined with a jumble of bars, liquor stores, and lodging houses, connected overhead by the wooden pa.s.sages that reminded Tom of freight cars. Through the lanes and mazelike pa.s.sages, he saw an endlessly proliferating warren of cramped streets, leaning buildings, walls with narrow doors and wooden stiles. Neon signs glowed red and blue, FREDO'S. 2 GIRLS, BOBCAT'S PLACE FREDO'S. 2 GIRLS, BOBCAT'S PLACE. Laundry hung on drooping lines strung between windows.

"Look out below!" a woman yelled from above them. She was leaning out of a narrow window in a building across the court. She overturned a black metal bowl, and liquid streamed down, seeming to dissolve into the air before it struck the ground. A barefoot man in torn clothes led an exhausted donkey and a ragged child through one of the pa.s.sages into the maze.

Hattie took them toward the pa.s.sage from which the man with the donkey had come. White letters in the brick gave its name as Edgewater Trail. It led beneath one of the suspended wooden freight cars.

Hattie said, "Old Maxwell and your grandfather thought that street names from your part of town would be a good influence on the people in here-over there's Yorkminster Place, and where we're going there's Ely Place and Stonehenge Circle." Her black eyes flashed at him as she led them into the pa.s.sage.

"Doesn't the mail ever get mixed up?" Tom asked.

"There's no mail here," Hattie said from in front of him. "No police, either, and no firemen, no doctors, no schools, except for what they teach themselves, no stores but liquor stores, no nothin' but what you see."

They had emerged into a wide cobbled lane lined with high blackened wooden walls inset here and there with slanted windows. The same white inset letters, some of which had fallen off or been removed, gave its name as Vic or a Terrace. A crowd of dirty children ran past the front of the lane, splashing in a stream that ran down the middle of the street. Now the odor was almost visible in the air, and Sarah held an edge of the cape over her nose and mouth.