Mystery. Part 40

"I saw Magda Upshaw's body at the same time Sam Hamilton did, and what he thought were stab wounds were the marks of the hooks on the drag."

"You think she killed herself."

The old man nodded. "But I don't know why she killed herself. Didn't one of those notes say I know what you are? I know what you are? Maybe Magda found out what he was, and it was too much for her." Maybe Magda found out what he was, and it was too much for her."

"She found out he was a crook. Isn't that what we're saying? He was involved with dirty deals with Maxwell Redwing from the start-he was in Maxwell's pocket, and Fulton Bishop was in his?"

"That's what we're saying, all right, though we're talking about the days before Fulton Bishop."

Some other knowledge flickered in and out of Tom's sight. "Adultery? Younger women?" He groaned. "Actually, Barbara Deane told me that all he ever did with younger women was take them out, so that he could be seen with them."

"Even if he did sleep with them, I don't think that Jeanine would have gotten so excited about it. And is it a secret he'd kill to keep?"

"Not if he went out with them in public," Tom admitted.

The old man crossed his legs and yanked his tie down. "We can use this secret of his without knowing what it is."

"How?"

Von Heilitz stood up, and his knees cracked. He made a pained face. "We'll talk about that after I shower and have a nap. There's a little place to eat downstairs." He bent forward and pushed the folded newspaper across the table. "In the meantime, take a look at this article."

The Shadow stepped away from the table and stretched his long arms above his head. Tom scanned the short article, which was about the arrest of Jerome Hasek, Robert Wintergreen, and Nathan LaBarre, residents of Mill Walk, in Eagle Lake, Wisconsin on charges of housebreaking, burglary, and auto theft. Von Heilitz was looking at him with an overtone of concern that made him feel nervous.

"We already know this," Tom said.

"And now everybody else knows it too. But there's something else you have to know, though I hate to be the one to tell you. Read the last sentence."

"'The three men are a.s.sisting the Eagle Lake police in their investigations of other crimes.'" Tom looked up at von Heilitz. Tom looked up at von Heilitz.

"That little crime you solved is crucial to helping us with all the big ones."

"Does this have to do with what you and Tim Truehart were talking about after I left the hospital? About the man who lives by himself in the woods? Who's down on his luck?"

Von Heilitz unb.u.t.toned his vest and leaned against the frame of the connecting door. "Why do you think your grandfather was in such a hurry to get you up north?"

"To get me off Mill Walk."

"Tell me what were you doing when someone took a shot at you."

"I was talking-" The physical sensations of the knowledge arrived before the knowledge itself. Tom's throat constricted. He felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach.

Von Heilitz nodded, bowing his whole body so that his clothes flapped over his chest. He looked like a sorrowful scarecrow. "So I don't have to tell you."

"No," Tom said. "That can't be true. I'm his grandson." grandson."

"Did he tell you to come back home? Did he even tell you to call the police?"

"Yeah. He did." Tom shook his head. "No. He tried to talk me out of calling them. But after I called them, he told me it was a good idea."

Tell me, what do you see when you look out the window, this time of night? I always liked nights up at Eagle Lake.

"Grand-Dad knew where the phone was," Tom said. The boot was still in his stomach.

"He knew you'd have a light on. He wanted you framed in the window."

"He even made me face forward-he asked me what I saw out the window-but at the last minute I bent to see through my reflection..."

"He had it set up," von Heilitz said, in a voice that would have been consoling if he had been speaking different words. "The man Jerry hired knew when Glen was going to call."

"I knew he killed those two people," Tom said, unable to say their names, "but that was forty years ago. I guess I finally understood that he was mixed up in dirty stuff with Ralph Redwing. But I still thought of him as my grandfather."

"Glen is your grandfather, worse luck," von Heilitz said. "And he's your mother's father. But even when I knew him back in school, other people were never very real to him. They never have been."

Tom stared down at the newspaper without seeing it.

"Do you know what I mean, that other people aren't real to him?"

Tom nodded.

"It's a special kind of mind-it's a sickness. n.o.body can change people like that, n.o.body can help them." He moved into the room. "Will you be all right for an hour or so?"

Tom nodded.

"We'll get him, you know. We'll rattle his cage. This time he went too far, and he'll know it as soon as he sees the paper."

"I guess I'd like to be by myself for a while."

Von Heilitz nodded slowly, and then went into his room and closed the connecting door.

A little while later, Tom heard the drumming of the shower in the next room.

His body felt light and insubstantial, and nothing around him seemed quite real. Everything looked real, but that was a trick. If he knew how, he could walk through the bed, pa.s.s his arm through the table, pierce the telephone with his fingers. He felt as if he could move through the wall-it would flatten itself against him and dissolve, like the smoke rising from Eagle Lake.

I always liked nights, up at Eagle Lake.

Tom stood up with dreamlike slowness and looked out of the window to see if Calle Drosselmayer was still real, or if everything out there was only painted shadows, like himself and the room. Bright automobiles streamed up and down on the street below. A man in a work s.h.i.+rt and wash pants, like Wendell Hasek years ago, cranked up the metal grille over a p.a.w.n shop window, uncovering guitars and saxophones and a row of old sewing machines with foot treadles. A woman in a yellow dress walked past a bar called The Home Plate, turned around, and pressed her face to the window as if she were licking the gla.s.s.

He turned around. He could disappear in this room. Disappearance was what rooms like this were for. They were places in which people had given up, stepped aside, quit-his mother's rooms on Eastern Sh.o.r.e Road and Eagle Lake were disappearance places akin to this hotel room. A green carpet flecked with stains, tired brown furniture, tired brown bed. A seam of pale yellow wallpaper stamped with some indistinct pattern lifted an inch off the wall beside the door.

He laid the suitcase flat on the carpet, opened it, and took out the Shadow's beautiful suits and l.u.s.trous neckties. After he put away the older man's clothes, he undressed, tossed the s.h.i.+rt and underwear back into the case, and hung up the suit he had been wearing-its wrinkles had been shaped by his own knees, shoulders, elbows. Solidity seemed to swim back into his body, and he went into his bathroom and saw another, older person in the mirror. He saw the Shadow's son, a kind of familiar stranger. Thomas Lamont. He would have to get used to this person, but he could get used to him.

He turned on the shower and stepped under the hot water. "We'll get him," he said out loud.

"Glen Upshaw and the island of Mill Walk came together at the moment when he could cause the most damage," von Heilitz said.

They were downstairs in a restaurant called Sinbad's Cavern, a dark hole with tall wooden booths and fishnets hung on the wall like spiderwebs. It had both a lobby and a street entrance, and a long bar ran along one wall. Above the bar hung an immense painting of a nude woman with unearthly flesh tones reclining on a sofa the color of the carpet in Tom's room. At the end of the bar nearest the street door two uniformed policeman with blotchy faces were drinking p.u.s.s.er's Navy Rum out of shot gla.s.ses, neat. Their hats were placed upside down on the bar beside them.

"A generation earlier, he would have been tied in knots-David Redwing would have tossed him in jail or kept him straight. He wouldn't have let Glen start up a system of payoffs and kickbacks, he wouldn't have let him turn the police force into the mess it is."

He took another bite of the seafood omelette both he and Tom had ordered.

"If Glen had been born a generation earlier, he might have seen what would wash and what wouldn't, and imitated a respectable citizen all his life. He wouldn't have had any principles, of course, but he might have seen that he had to keep his vices private. If he'd been born a generation later, he would have been too young to have any influence over Maxwell Redwing. Maxwell was just an opportunistic crook who was lucky enough to be born into a helpful family. He wasn't as smart as Glen-by the time they were in their mid-twenties, Glen was operating almost like an independent wing of the Redwing family. And by the time Ralph came of age, Glen had so much power that he was sort of a permanent junior partner. He had the records and paperwork on every secret deal and illegal operation. If Ralph tried anything, all Glen had to do was leak some of those records to the press to make a stink big enough to drive the Redwings off Mill Walk. People here want to believe that David Redwing's legacy is intact, and they'll go on thinking that something like the Ha.s.selgard scandal is an aberration and Fulton Bishop is a dedicated policeman until they're shown different."

"So what can we do?"

"I told you. We're going to rattle Glendenning Upshaw's cage. He's bothered already-Glen didn't know that Ralph's bodyguards were dumb enough to go around breaking into houses. He isn't going to want to face an extradition order, once Tim Truehart finds the man Jerry hired to kill you. There's already been too much trouble on Mill Walk. Ralph Redwing is waiting things out in Venezuela, and if I were Glen I'd think about going there too."

Von Heilitz dipped his chin in a nod like the period at the end of a sentence, and pushed his empty plate to the side of the table.

Tom shook his head. "I'd like to really hurt hurt him." him."

"Hurting him is what we're talking about."

Tom looked down at the cold eggs on his plate and said, "You don't mean it the way I do."

"Oh, yes, I do. I want to take everything away from Glendenning Upshaw-his peace of mind, his reputation, his freedom-eventually, his life. I want to see him hang in Long Bay prison. I'd be happy to put the rope around his neck myself."

Tom looked up and met the old man's eyes with a shock of shared feeling.

"We have to get him out of the Founders Club," Tom said. "We have to scare him out."

Von Heilitz nodded vehemently, his eyes still locked with Tom's.

"Give me a pen," Tom said. "I'll show you what I'd do." The old man took a fountain pen from his inside pocket and pushed it across the table.

Tom took the paper napkin off his lap and smoothed it out on the table. He unscrewed the cap from the pen and in block letters printed I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE on the rough surface of the napkin. Then he turned the napkin around and showed it to von Heilitz. on the rough surface of the napkin. Then he turned the napkin around and showed it to von Heilitz.

"Exactly," the old man said. "He'll think he's being stung by a thousand bees at once."

"A thousand?" Tom grinned back, imagining his grandfather's living room overflowing with letters repeating the words Jeanine Thielman had written to him.

"Two thousand," von Heilitz said.

They went past the policemen drinking p.u.s.s.er's at the end of the bar out to the Street of Widows. The rolled-up windows of a black and white police car in a no parking zone just outside the entrance reflected a red neon scimitar flas.h.i.+ng on and off in the restaurant's window. To their left, cars, bicycles, and horse-drawn carriages rolled up and down Calle Drosselmayer. The St. Alwyn side of the street was in deep shadow; on the other, the shadow ended in a firm black line that touched the opposite sidewalk, and blazing sunlight fell on a shoeless native dozing on the pavement before a display of hats and baskets on a red blanket. On one side of the vendor was an open market with ranks of swollen vegetables and slabs of fish protected from the sun by a long awning. Melting ice and purple fish guts drizzled on the pavement. On the other side of the vendor, two wide young women in bathrobes sat smoking on the front steps of a tall narrow building called the Traveller's Hotel. They were watching the entrance of Sinbad's Cavern, and when Tom and von Heilitz came out, they looked at them for only seconds before focusing on the door again.

Von Heilitz strode diagonally across the street, came up on the curb just past the steps where the women sat, and turned beneath a gilt sign reading ELLINGTON'S ALLSORTS AND NOTIONS ELLINGTON'S ALLSORTS AND NOTIONS into the entrance of a dark little shop. Tom caught the door behind him, and a bell tinkled as he walked in. into the entrance of a dark little shop. Tom caught the door behind him, and a bell tinkled as he walked in.

Von Heilitz was already moving quickly down an aisle stocked with bottles of hot sauce, canned salmon, cat food, and boxes of cereal with names Tom had never seen in his life-Delilah's Own and Mother Sugar-to a shelf with ballpoint pens, pads of paper, and boxes of envelopes. Von Heilitz picked up a pad of yellow paper and six boxes of variously colored envelopes, swung around and pa.s.sed them to Tom, and whirled away into another aisle.

"I thought you said two thousand," Tom said.

"I said it would feel like two thousand," von Heilitz called from the next aisle.

Tom rounded the top of the aisle and saw him swoop down on a loaf of bread, a bag of potato chips, a wrapped pound of cheddar cheese, a container of margarine, a long salami, a box of crackers, cans, bottles, bags-half of these things he tossed to Tom, and the rest he piled in his arms.

"What's all this food for?"

"Sustenance," the old man said. "What is food usually for?"

When both of them were carrying so much that the stacks of containers threatened to fall out of their arms, von Heilitz came around the last aisle and unceremoniously dumped everything he was carrying on a scarred wooden counter. A small bald man with toffee-colored skin beamed at him from the other side of the counter.

"Hobart, my dear old friend," von Heilitz said, "this is a close friend of mine, Tom Pasmore."

Tom put down his groceries, and the little man grabbed his hand. "Lamont, he looks like you! I declare it! I think he must be your nephew!"

"We use the same tailor." He gave a twinkling glance toward Tom. "Do you think I could use your back room tonight?"

"Tonight, tomorrow, any time." The shopkeeper s.n.a.t.c.hed at von Heilitz's hand and pumped it.

Hobart added up the total on a sc.r.a.p of paper and began putting their goods into bags while von Heilitz counted out bills on the counter. "Someone else will be joining you, Lamont?"

"One other man. Athletic-looking, with dark hair. In his late thirties."

"What time?" He gave a heavy bag to Tom with a conspirator's wink.

"Ten-thirty, eleven o'clock, around then."

Hobart filled the second bag and handed it to von Heilitz. "The lights will be off."

Von Heilitz marched off through the door, saying, "Thank you."

Hobart said, "He is a very great man," and Tom, following the detective, said, "I know!" He came out into the shower of blinding light. Von Heilitz had already carried his shopping bag halfway across the street. Tom stepped down from the curb into the shadow of the St. Alwyn Hotel. The two young women in bathrobes were sitting in the police car with the policemen who had been in the bar.

"Hurry along," von Heilitz said, holding open the door of Sinbad's Cavern. "We have notes to write, if we want to make today's delivery."

"Can you remember the exact words she used?" von Heilitz asked him. "For a second anyhow, we want him to see Jeanine Thielman standing right in front of him, pointing her finger at him."

On the other side of the table with its scratched-in initials, Tom sat with the old man's pen poised over a clean sheet of paper. I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE, he wrote. "That was on the first one, and then there was another phrase."

"Didn't the second note have two phrases too?"

Tom nodded.

"Then write down all four phrases, in any order, as well as you can remember them, and we'll put them together the right way."

"Okay," Tom said. Beneath the first, he wrote, THIS HAS GONE ON TOO LONG THIS HAS GONE ON TOO LONG. Beneath that, he wrote, YOU MUST BE STOPPED YOU MUST BE STOPPED; beneath that, YOU MUST PAY FOR YOUR SINS YOU MUST PAY FOR YOUR SINS. He looked at the list of phrases. "That's pretty much right. Hold on." He crossed out the second MUST MUST and wrote and wrote WILL WILL above it. "That's better." above it. "That's better."

"The first one said 'I know what you are,' and ...?"

"'... and you have to be stopped.' That's right." Tom drew a line between the first and third phrases. "So the second note said, 'This has gone on too long' and 'You will pay for your sins.'" He connected these two with a line.