Mystery. Part 44

"I want to go to his house," Tom said.

Andres sighed. "All right. But give me an hour. I have to make a pot of coffee before I do anything else."

"An hour?"

"Read a book," Andres said.

Tom asked him to pick him up outside the entrance of Sinbad's Cavern at eleven-thirty.

Beside the sewing machines and the row of tenor saxophones with necks curved like the top of Jeanine Thielman's capital T's, a fiftyish man in a white shirt with rolled sleeves leaned against the wall and drew on a cigarette while looking at the entrance to the St. Alwyn through his sungla.s.ses. Tom backed away from the window and paced around the room. He understood why people tore their hair out, why they bit their nails, why they banged their heads against walls. These activities weren't brilliant, but they kept your mind off your anxieties.

Then an idea struck him-maybe it was not brilliant either, but it would help fill the time until Andres came. And it would answer the question he had failed to ask Kate Redwing, back when he had thought his most serious problem was getting through lonely meals at the Eagle Lake clubhouse. He sat down and picked up the telephone-and nearly did start chewing on his fingernails, from sheer doubt of the rightness of what he intended to do. He thought of Esterhaz pulling on his bottle, seeing phantoms all around him, and of a real detective named Damrosch, who had killed himself, and dialed information and asked for a telephone number.

Without giving himself time to reconsider, he dialed the number.

"h.e.l.lo," said a voice that brought back an avenue of trees and the touch of cool water against his skin.

"Buzz, this is Tom Pasmore," he said.

There was a moment of startled silence before Buzz said, "I don't suppose you've seen the papers. Or is this a very very long distance call?" long distance call?"

"Someone else died in the fire, and I came back to the island with Lamont von Heilitz. But n.o.body else knows I'm alive, Buzz, and I want to ask you not to tell anybody. It's important. Everybody will know in a couple of days, but until then-"

"I won't tell anybody, if you want to stay dead. Well, I might tell Roddy-he felt as bad as I did. In fact, I can hardly believe I'm talking to you! I called your house to speak to your mother, but Bonaventure Milton answered, and I knew he wouldn't let me say anything to her...." Buzz inhaled and exhaled a couple of times. "Frankly, I'm reeling. I'm so glad you're alive! Roddy and I saw the article in the paper, and it reminded us of those times you were nearly injured, and we wondered-you know-"

"Yes," Tom said.

"My G.o.d. Whose body did they find, if it wasn't yours?"

"It was Barbara Deane."

"Oh, heavens. Of course. And you came back with Lamont? I didn't even know that you knew him."

"He knows everybody," Tom said.

"Tom," Buzz said. "You got our portrait back! I don't know how you did it, but you were brilliant, and Roddy and I are forever in your debt. The Eagle Lake police called last night to say that it's safe. Is there anything in the world I can do for you?"

"There is one thing. This is going to sound funny, and maybe you'll think it isn't any of my business."

"Try me."

"Kate Redwing mentioned something to me about your first job."

"Ah." Buzz was silent for a moment. "And you were curious about it-about what happened."

"Yes," Tom said.

"Did she say I was working with Boney Milton?"

"She just said it was an important doctor, and something reminded me of it a few minutes ago."

Buzz hesitated again. "Well, I-" He laughed. "This is a little awkward for me. But I could tell you sort of the bare bones of the thing, I suppose, without violating anybody's confidentiality. I used to take home Boney's files at night, in order to catch up with the patient histories. I was a pediatrician, of course, so at first I just read the files of the kids I was seeing, but then later I started reading the files on their parents too, so I could have the whole family history in mind when I saw the kid. I had the idea that what happened to the parents played some kind of role in their kids' lives-Boney didn't think much of this idea, which is typical of him, by the way, but he didn't mind much, and I was always tactful when I noticed that he had missed something, or goofed something up. Anyhow, one time I made a mistake, and brought home the file of one of the patients Boney kept for himself, and I thought I saw some cla.s.sic indications of real trouble, if you see what I mean. v.a.g.i.n.al warts, v.a.g.i.n.al bleeding, and a couple of other things that at the time should at least have called for further investigation and were probably an indicator for psychiatric counseling. Do you see what I'm talking about? This was in the woman's childhood. Really it could only mean one thing. I can't be more specific, Tom. Anyhow, I said something about it to Boney, and he hit the ceiling. I was out on my ear, and that's why I don't have any patients at Shady Mount."

"Did you know a policeman named Damrosch?"

"You are digging into things, aren't you? No, not really. I knew of of him, and I would have recognized him if I'd seen him on the street. The period I'm talking about was around the time of those Blue Rose murders, though." him, and I would have recognized him if I'd seen him on the street. The period I'm talking about was around the time of those Blue Rose murders, though."

"After the first one?"

"After the first two, I think. I was supposed to be the third, as I guess you know by now. Scarcely my favorite memory. Lamont must have told you about my connection to all that."

Tom said that he had.

"Of course there's no connection between my encounter with a maniac and Boney's throwing me out of his practice-I'm still not convinced that Damrosch was the person who attacked me, but I can tell you one thing-I'm d.a.m.n sure it wasn't Boney!"

"No," Tom said, though at this moment almost anything would have seemed possible to him.

They said good-bye a few seconds later. Tom jittered around the room, thinking about what Buzz had told him, and then could no longer stand the tension of being alone, and let himself out into the hallway and walked downstairs to the bar and grill. He drank two c.o.kes and stared out the window past the flashing neon scimitar. A battered red taxi slid up to the curb.

Tom ducked down in the back seat when Andres turned east on Calle Drosselmayer. "Now what?" Andres said. "You think some fellow is watching watching you?" He chugged coffee from a plastic cup with an opening in its lid and chuckled. "How do you come to think this fellow is watching?" you?" He chugged coffee from a plastic cup with an opening in its lid and chuckled. "How do you come to think this fellow is watching?"

Tom slowly straightened up. They were a block east of the hotel. Two hundred yards ahead lay the glossy shops which had seemed a paradise of earthly things from Sarah Spence's little car. "Did you see a man in sungla.s.ses and a white shirt across the street from the hotel?"

"I might have seen that man," Andres said. "I won't say I didn't."

"Lamont saw him when we first came to the St. Alwyn. He's been there ever since, just watching the front of the hotel."

"Well, careful does no harm," Andres admitted. "But there's no sense in what we are doing now. Get me out of my bed, look for Lamont. When Lamont does not want to be seen, n.o.body on earth can find him. I know Lamont forty years, and I know that man can drive you crazy. He does not explain himself. This is true! He say, I will be here, and is he? Sometimes Sometimes. He say, I will see you in two hours, and when does he come? Maybe two days. Does Lamont care, I get out of bed after sleeping two hours? He does not. Does Lamont care, you worry when he stays out? I a.s.sure you, my friend, he does not. This is Lamont. Lamont is always working, he goes here, he goes there, he stands in the rain twelve hours, and when he is done he says, 'Very few men on Mill Walk are wearing purple socks.' He has a different music in his head."

"I know, but-"

Andres was not through yet.

"And now we are going to his house! Do you have a key? Do you think he left the door open? You cannot think a circle around Lamont, you know."

"I'm not trying to out-think him, I just want to find him," Tom said. "If you want to go back to bed, I'll walk."

"You'll walk. You think just like he does. You're so worried about Lamont you stay awake a whole night, and you want me to go back to bed. What do you think happens, if I go home? My wife asks me, did you find Lamont? I say, no, I need my sleep. She says, you sleep after you find Lamont!" He shook his head. "It's not so easy, being his friend. Who do you think found him when he was nearly killed in back of Armory Place? Who do you think took him to the hospital? You think he did that himself?"

"You're worried too," Tom said, having just understood this.

"You have not been listening to me," Andres said. "That is my lot, worrying about Lamont von Heilitz. So let us go to his house, and you will walk in and find him making a cup of tea and he will say, 'Your grandfather's horse has thrown its right front shoe,' and you will go back to the hotel and think about it, and I will go back to bed and not think about it. Because I know better than to think about the kind of things he says."

Andres turned off Calle Berlinstra.s.se into Edgewater Trail. Waterloo Parade, Balaclava Lane, Omdurman Road. The houses spread apart and grew larger. Victoria Terrace, Stonehenge Circle, Ely Place, Salisbury Road. Now he was back in the peaceful landscape of his childhood, where sprinklers whirred over long lawns and bright sunlight fell on bougainvillaea and hibiscus trees with lolling red blossoms. Here every child attended Brooks-Lowood School, and a traffic jam was one servant riding a bicycle into another servant's bicycle, spilling clean laundry into the clean street. Yorkminster Place. Some of the houses had red-tiled roofs and curving white walls, some were of smooth white marble that ate the sunlight, some of grey stone piled into turrets and towers, others of shining white wood, with broad porches and columns and verandas the size of fields. Sprays of water played on the broad green lawns.

Andres turned into The Sevens and pulled up to the curb. He turned around and laid an arm along the top of his seat. "Now I sit here, the way I always did for Lamont, and you go to his place, okay? And see what you see. Then you come back and tell me about it, and we'll decide what to do after that."

Tom patted his thick arm and got out of the car. Delicately scented air drifted toward him from Eastern Sh.o.r.e Road and the ocean. Tom walked away from the car and turned toward Eastern Sh.o.r.e Road on Edgewater Trail. His scalp and the back of his neck p.r.i.c.kled with the sensation that he was being watched, and he moved quickly up the block. The flat blue line of the sea hung between the great houses.

Dr. Milton's buggy stood in front of his house, and two men carried a wrapped couch down the Langenheims' walk toward a long yellow van marked Mill Walk Intercoastal Movers. The feeling that someone was watching him grew stronger. Tom hurried past the Jacobs house and walked up onto Lamont von Heilitz's concrete drive. On the lawn, fresh cuttings lay amongst the blades of gra.s.s. From down near An Die Blumen, no louder than a bee, came the dim whirring of the big mower used by the lawn service. The curtains hung in the windows as always, blocking the secret life of the house's owner from the eyes of the neighborhood children. He's okay He's okay, Tom thought, I don't have to go any farther I don't have to go any farther. Von Heilitz would be back in the St. Alwyn, fuming at Tom for disappearing when he needed him to look for purple socks or thrown right front horseshoes. He glanced over his shoulder at his house and went reluctantly up von Heilitz's drive. At the point where the drive curved around to the back of the house and the empty garage, a flattened cigarette b.u.t.t lay between a black line of tar and the edge of the concrete. Tom came around the back of the house and saw an oil stain on the concrete halfway between the garage and the back door.

He stopped moving. All old driveways had oil stains. Wherever you had cars, you had oil stains. Even people who didn't own cars had oil stains on the driveways. The back door would be locked, and he would ring the bell a couple of times, and then go back around the block to rea.s.sure Andres. Tom walked around the glistening stain toward the step up to the back door, following faint scuff marks on the concrete.

The small pane of gla.s.s nearest the doork.n.o.b was smashed in, as if a fist had punched through it to reach inside and open the door. Tom put his hand on the k.n.o.b, too disturbed now to bother with ringing the bell, turned it, and heard the bolt slide out of the striker plate. He pulled the door toward him. "h.e.l.lo?" he said, but his voice was only a whisper. He stepped into a coatroom where a lifetime's worth of raincoats hung on bra.s.s hooks. Two or three coats lay puddled on the floor. Tom walked through into the kitchen. A smear of blood lay like a tiny red feather on the counter beside the sink. Water dripped slowly from the tap, one drop hitting the bottom of the sink as another formed and lengthened on the lip of the faucet. A nearly empty pint bottle of p.u.s.s.er's Navy Rum stood on the counter back in the shadows beneath the cabinets.

"No," Tom said, in the same strangled voice.

Here's to another perfect day.

He came out of the kitchen and stopped short as whatever was in his stomach slammed into his throat. Toppled file cabinets and scattered papers lay all across the floor. Horsehair and curd-colored stuffing foamed from the leather furniture where he and the old man had sat talking. Torn books ruffled like hair on top of the wreckage. Tom took a blind, dazed step into the enormous room. "LAMONT!" he yelled, and this time his voice was as loud as a bugle. "LAMONT!" He stepped forward again, and his foot came down on a thick fan of papers leaking from a yellow file. He bent to pick them up, and more papers streamed from the file, papers marked Cleveland, June 1940 Cleveland, June 1940, and Crossed Keys Motel, Bakersfield Crossed Keys Motel, Bakersfield, and covered with a dense, obsessive handwriting he realized he had never seen before. He moved to set them down on the coffee table where he and von Heilitz had put their feet and saw that the table had been broken in half, its filigreed leather surface sagging over the broken wood and stamped with dusty boot prints. There were no paths through the maze now, it was all chaos and obstruction, and he stepped over a file cabinet vomiting old issues of the Eyewitness Eyewitness and sent the wheel of a bicycle ticking around against its frame. Paintings floated atop shoals of papers and books; records torn from their sleeves leaned against paper mountains. Tom wandered through the chaos and saw an empty file marked and sent the wheel of a bicycle ticking around against its frame. Paintings floated atop shoals of papers and books; records torn from their sleeves leaned against paper mountains. Tom wandered through the chaos and saw an empty file marked Glendenning Upshaw, 193839 Glendenning Upshaw, 193839. Beside it was another, Blue Rose Affair Blue Rose Affair. The desks had been rifled and overturned, their drawers tossed aside-scissors and bottles of glue surfaced here and there in the litter-the tops of library lamps shattered into green fragments across ripped couches. The sharp, dog-pound smell of urine came from the ruined couches. Beneath the globe that had stood on a filing cabinet he saw the words Blue Rose Blue Rose again and pulled out the sleeve of the Glenroy Breakstone record. "Oh, G.o.d," he said. A red smear in the shape of a hand jumped toward him from the dark paneling on the staircase. Another strong, fetid odor announced itself, and he looked down and saw a ma.s.sive human t.u.r.d on a bare patch of carpet. A little scatter of coins lay beside it. He scrambled over a series of files and reached the bottom of the staircase. On the tread beneath the handprint was a dark sprinkle of dots. again and pulled out the sleeve of the Glenroy Breakstone record. "Oh, G.o.d," he said. A red smear in the shape of a hand jumped toward him from the dark paneling on the staircase. Another strong, fetid odor announced itself, and he looked down and saw a ma.s.sive human t.u.r.d on a bare patch of carpet. A little scatter of coins lay beside it. He scrambled over a series of files and reached the bottom of the staircase. On the tread beneath the handprint was a dark sprinkle of dots.

Tom ran up the staircase and threw open a bedroom door. The stench of blood and gunpowder hung in the room, along with some other, more domestic stink. The mattress had been pulled off the bed, and both bed and mattress had been slashed again and again.

In the middle of the floor, a pool of blood sent out rays and streamers extending beneath the mattress and toward the closet doors. Red footprints and red dots and splashes covered the carpet. Another impatient handprint blared from a white closet door. Tom felt the shimmer of violence all about him, and moved across the slippery floor to the closet. He pulled it open, and his father's body fell out into his arms.

Too shocked to scream, he pulled the limp body from the enclosure of the closet and sagged to the floor. Tom hugged the body and kissed the matted hair. It seemed to him that he left his body: part of him separated cleanly out of himself and floated and saw the whole room, the ripped bed and the b.l.o.o.d.y footprints like a dance pattern leading toward and away from the closet, the clear round dots made by some round thing dipped in his father's blood. He saw himself shaking and crying over the body of Lamont von Heilitz. He said to himself, "The point of an umbrella," but these words were as pointless and absent of meaning as "purple socks" or "thrown horseshoe."

After a long time, the back door slammed shut. Someone called his name, and his name brought his floating mind back into his body. He gently laid his father's head on the bedroom carpet, and moved backwards until he struck the frame of the bed. Footsteps came up the stairs. Tom gathered his legs beneath him and listened to the footsteps coming toward the door. A man appeared in the door, and Tom sprang forward and caught the man around the waist and brought him down and wrestled himself on top of him and raised his fist.

"It's me," Andres yelled. "Tom, it's me."

Tom rolled off Andres, panting. "He's in there," he said, but Andres was already on his feet and moving into the bedroom. He knelt beside the body and stroked the old man's face and closed his eyes. Tom got up on watery legs. Von Heilitz's face had changed in some unalterable fashion that had nothing to do with the disordered hair or the suddenly smooth cheeks-it had become another face altogether, a face with nothing in it.

"This is hard," Andres said. "Hard for you and me both, but we have to get out of here. They come back and find us here, they'll gun us both down and claim we killed Lamont."

He stood up and looked at Tom. "I don't know where you plan on going now, but you'd better change your clothes. Be arrested in a second, go out looking like that."

Tom looked down and saw red blotches and smears covering the pale blue linen. His knees were red circles.

Andres took a suit on a hanger out of the closet and came toward the door.

"What do you smell in here?" Tom asked.

Puzzled, Andres stopped and sniffed the air. "You know what I smell. Did you go crazy?"

"I'm not crazy now. Tell me what you smell."

"You're like him." him." Andres glanced down at the body. "I smell what you smell when someone is shot to death." Andres glanced down at the body. "I smell what you smell when someone is shot to death."

"Isn't there something else?"

Andres's face contracted into a knot of worry and despair. "What?"

"Cigars," Tom said.

"A lot of cops smoke cigars," Andres said, and took Tom's arm and began marching him down the hall to the stairs.

"Take off your shoes," Andres said in the kitchen. He peeled the jacket off the hanger and hung the trousers over his arm.

"Here?"

"Take off the shoes," Andres said. "You're too big to change clothes in a car."

Tom unlaced the shoes and slipped them off. He handed the bloodied pants, vest, and jacket to Andres, and Andres balled them up under his arm. He handed the fresh trousers to Tom like a tailor, and then s.n.a.t.c.hed them back. "Wait. Rinse your hands at the sink."

Tom obediently went to the sink and for the first time noticed that his hands were smeared with blood. He looked at Andres, and saw red stains on his shirt. "Go ahead," Andres said, and Tom washed the blood from his hands. After he put on the clean trousers and tied his shoes, Andres handed him a belt, and watched with patient concentration as he worked it through the loops. Another vest, another jacket. "Your card," Tom said, and Andres smacked his forehead and rooted through the pockets of the blood-soaked jacket until he found the card. He put it in his shirt pocket, and then deliberated and handed it back to Tom.

They went past the side of the garage and came out into the backyard of a long white manor two houses down from the Spences. In what seemed another life, a family named Harbinger had lived in this house. Now it was as empty as their lodge at Eagle Lake, while the Harbingers took their twenty-year-old daughter to Europe to make her forget the mechanic she had rashly married.

"If I had an idea, I'd give it to you," Andres said.

"There's a policeman I have to talk to," Tom said.

"The police! The police did this!"

"Not this one," Tom said.

Down at the lower end of Calle Hoffmann, a concrete plaza called Armory Place, with benches, rows of palms, and big oval planters of bougainvillaea, sat between the pair of symmetrical stone steps leading up to police headquarters and the Mill Walk courthouse. Both of these buildings were cubes of a stark, dazzling white that stood out against the washed-out sky. On the far side of Armory Place, crowded into a row of pastel Georgian buildings with fanlights and three ranks of windows, were the Treasury, Parliament House, the old Governor's Residence, and the Government Printing Office. A network of narrow streets lined with restaurants, coffee shops, bars, drugstores, stationers, law offices, and secondhand bookstores radiated out from Armory Place, and it was to one of these, a pa.s.sageway called Sugarcane Alley, that Andres reluctantly drove Tom.

"Do you know what you're doing?" he asked.

"No, but Lamont was going to meet with this man before the other policemen picked him up. I don't know who else I can trust."

"Maybe you can't trust him," him," Andres said. Andres said.

Tom remembered Hobart Ellington telling him that Natchez had waited an hour in his back room, and said, "I have to start somewhere."

Andres said he would wait around the corner, and Tom walked into a small Greek cafe and ordered a cup of coffee and took it to a booth along the wall. He sat down and sipped the hot coffee. For a moment the shock and misery of Lamont von Heilitz's death caught up with him, and he bent over the steaming cup to hide his tears from the counterman.

I am an amateur of crime. An absurd phrase, of course.

He wiped off his tears and went to the pay telephone at the back of the cafe. A ragged Mill Walk directory with a photograph of Armory Place on its cover hung beside the phone on a fraying cord. The photograph seemed to be of a beautiful tropical square-white buildings and palm trees against a pale blue sky. Tom dialed the police department number listed on the inside of the front cover.

It took a long time to get David Natchez, and he was abrupt and unfriendly when he finally came to the phone. "This is Detective Natchez, and what do you you want?" want?"

"I want to talk to you. I'm in a Greek coffee shop just behind Armory Place."

"You want to talk to me. You couldn't be a little more specific, could you?"

"Last night you were supposed to meet a man named Lamont von Heilitz in the back room of a shop across the street from the St. Alwyn Hotel. I want to talk about what he was going to tell you."

"He never showed up," Natchez said. "And frankly, I have my doubts about you."

"He's dead," Tom said. "Two policemen must have picked him up as soon as he left the hotel. He was taken to his house and murdered. Then the policemen ransacked his house. Are you interested in this kind of thing, Detective Natchez? I hope you are, because I don't have anyone else to talk to."