Mystery

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 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 damn 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 Cokes 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 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 sunglasses 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, nobody 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. 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 assure 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 Berlinstrasse 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 Shore Road and the ocean. Tom walked away from the car and turned toward Eastern Shore Road on Edgewater Trail. His scalp and the back of his neck prickled 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 grass. 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, Tom thought, 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 butt 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 reassure 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 glass nearest the doorknob was smashed in, as if a fist had punched through it to reach inside and open the door. Tom put his hand on the knob, 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. “Hello?” he said, but his voice was only a whisper. He stepped into a coatroom where a lifetime’s worth of raincoats hung on brass 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 Pusser’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.