Mystery

who else I can trust.”

“Maybe you can’t trust him,” 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 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.”

“Who are you?”

Tom said, “I’m the person who wrote to Captain Bishop about Hasselgard.”

There was a long silence.

“I guess I owe it to myself to get a look at you,” Natchez said.

“I’m at the little—”

“I know the place,” Natchez said, and hung up.

Tom returned to his booth and sat facing the door. Something was going to happen now; it almost did not matter what. One man would come through the door, or a dozen. Someone would listen to him, or someone would take him out and kill him. There would be an interesting problem when they discovered that he was already dead, but it would not be interesting for long. A day later they would be sitting in another bar, drinking Pusser’s Navy Rum and talking about perfect days. All of his life to this moment slammed shut behind him, separated, and floated off, self-sufficient and uninhabitable, as his conscious self had taken leave of him in his father’s bloody bedroom. What was left was the part of him that had held Lamont von Heilitz’s body, for now he had to do Lamont von Heilitz’s job. He swallowed cooling coffee and waited to see what would happen.

In about six minutes, the amount of time it would take a man to hang up a telephone and walk down from an upper floor of police headquarters, then down the broad stone steps to Armory Place and through narrow lanes with the old names of colonial Mill Walk—an island that no longer existed—to Sugarcane Alley, a sturdy-looking man in a dark blue suit came past the window of the cafe and turned to come in the door.

He saw Tom instantly, and Tom saw that he took in everything else too, and at the same moment: the unshaven counterman, the mummy-sized slab of pork revolving on a skewer in the window, the telephone and the doors to the toilets, the enlarged black and white photographs of Poros above the booths, and the old woman and child seated together past the curve of the counter at the front of the cafe—everything Tom himself had not really observed until this second. All of this information swam into the focus of his attention, because it was his attentiveness that kept him alive.

He strode down the row of booths with the crisp athletic muscularity Tom had seen once before, an ordinary- looking man with short dark hair and large features. A fatalistic electricity crackled about him, a sort of self-referring reflexive command that denied ambiguities and shades of grey. An absolute gulf separated someone like him from Lamont von Heilitz: Tom understood that there were two ways of being a detective, and that men like David Natchez would always find people like von Heilitz too whimsical, intuitive, and theatrical to be taken seriously.

Natchez ordered a cup of coffee with a gesture and slid into the booth opposite Tom. In the next ninety seconds, he destroyed most of the preconceptions Tom had just formed.

“You’re sure that von Heilitz is dead?”

“I just saw his body. My name is Tom Pasmore, by the way.”

“I know that,” Natchez said, and smiled. “You were at the hospital the day Mike Mendenhall died. You had some kind of conversation with Dr. Milton and Captain Bishop.”

“I didn’t know you noticed me.”

“I don’t know why not—you saw me notice everything when I came in here.” The counterman brought his coffee to the booth, and Natchez acknowledged it without ever taking his eyes off Tom’s face. “The prevailing opinion is that you died of smoke inhalation in a hospital up north. I guess you came back here with the old man.” He sipped the coffee, still keeping his eyes on Tom. “For what it’s worth, I envy you your relationship with him. I didn’t know anything about Lamont von Heilitz until Captain Bishop sent me to his house to roust out the typewriter used for that note, but after I’d met him I checked back into his history. He was a great man, and I don’t use that term loosely. I respect him more than I can say. The man was a natural resource. I wish that I’d had the chance to get to know him.”

Tom’s own emotions embarrassed him in the midst of these astonishing words, and he turned his head away to hide the fresh tears that had come to his eyes. His chin trembled like a baby’s. A very firm hand gripped the wrist of the hand he was using to hide his face.

“Look, Tom, a lot of what happens on this island is wellnigh intolerable to me, but when Fulton Bishop’s goons kill the greatest detective in maybe a century five minutes before I have a meeting with him, I take it as a personal affront. You and I are going to sit here until you tell me everything you know. I don’t have Lamont von Heilitz to work with anymore, and you don’t either, but I think we can do each other a lot of good.”

He released Tom’s wrist. “Tell me about the letter you wrote.”

“I have to go back to the time when Wendell Hasek showed up drunk in front of our house carrying a bag of rocks,” Tom said, and Natchez propped his elbows on the table and hunched forward to rest his chin on his interlaced fingers.

Half an hour later, Tom said, “And on the floor of the bedroom where I found him I saw these little round stamped-out red stains from where my grandfather’s umbrella must have touched the blood. And I smelled his cigars. So I thought he must have stood there watching while they killed him and pushed him into the closet, and I sort of went crazy for a couple of minutes, thinking about how I got mad at him just because he’d shown me the truth. Anyhow, after Andres dragged me out and dressed me in clothes that weren’t all covered with his blood, all I could think to do was to call you.”

“So you really did it all,” Natchez said. “I’ll be damned.”

“No, I just stumbled along,” Tom said. “I never even wanted to admit that it must have been my grandfather who killed Jeanine Thielman and Anton Goetz.”

“But you knew it anyway. And you figured out who shot Marita Hasselgard. And it was your idea to send the notes that spooked Glen Upshaw—”

“Into killing my father.”

“Upshaw would have killed you too, if you had gone with von Heilitz. And anyhow, from the way you describe it, he had the same idea.”

But he would never have known about the notes if I hadn’t found them, Tom thought, and the names of all the people who would still be alive if he had gone to Dennis Handley’s apartment and looked at a typescript of The Spoils of Poynton marched through his mind: Foxhall Edwardes, Friedrich Hasselgard, Michael Mendenhall and Roman Klink, Barbara Deane, Lamont von Heilitz.

“The only mistake you made was to send your letter to the wrong cop,” Natchez said. “Let’s go out to the Founders Club and break some bad news to Glendenning Upshaw.” He stood up and put three dollars on the