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
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 bloody 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
“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 snatched 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 passageway 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
