Mystery

His grandfather held it with arms extended, almost cross-eyed with concentration. Tom saw an index finger fat as a trout pulling on the trigger, and Natchez yelled, and the barrel jerked away from his face. It exploded again. Tom jumped backwards with the explosion in his head and saw a black hole appear in his grandfather’s head, just above the bridge of his nose. Flags of red and grey stuff flew out of the back of his head. The gun sank, and his grandfather twitched backwards and righted himself and went down on his knees, still trying to pull the trigger. A ringing clamor filled Tom’s ears like a physical substance. He was dimly aware of David Natchez walking toward him from beneath a walkway. Natchez said something that did not penetrate the molten lead filling his ears. His grandfather settled down into himself and fell foward. A muffle of sound came from Natchez, and all the heads hanging over the railings jerked back, except for that of a woman with a rag-doll face. Carmen Bishop lingered at the railing, looking as if she wanted to fly down at him, and then slowly backed away. Tom wobbled sideways and sat down.

Another muffled pillow of sound came from Natchez. Beneath the fullness in his ears, the words reached him at last. I don’t know how he missed you.

The gun didn’t pull to the left, Tom said, and felt his own words as individual, cottony wads striking his ears from the inside of his head.

Natchez looked puzzled, and Tom felt himself say, It’s an old story. He reached out and touched his grandfather’s back.

He looked back up at the walkways and Carmen Bishop screamed something down at him that disappeared entirely into the noise in his ears. “We’re going to do something with him,” he said, and this time dimly heard his own voice—tinny as an old record heard through a wall, but real words, not bubbles of pressure inside his head.

“I’ll call the station,” Natchez said in a nearly identical voice. “And I’ll send someone out to pick up von Heilitz’s body.”

Tom shook his head. “We’re going to take him with us.”

“Take him where?”

“Back to the bungalow,” Tom said. He leaned forward and picked up his grandfather’s pistol. It seemed surpassingly ugly, and heavy as an iron weight. He put it in his jacket pocket. Two men came through the long tunnel from the street, and Tom and Natchez turned to look at them as they walked into the court. One of them was the man in the white shirt, and the other, a few paces behind him, was Andres. The man in the white shirt looked down at Glendenning Upshaw’s body, glanced at Natchez, and shoved his hands in his pockets. Andres reached down, and Tom took his hand and stood up.

“You could make this a perfect day,” Natchez said, “by telling me you know where this pile of shit hid his papers and records.”

“I do know,” Tom said. “You do too.”

Natchez looked at his own pistol as if it had just been magicked into his hand, and pulled back his jacket to slip it into his holster. “Holman, go up to the third level on this side,” he said to the man in the white shirt. “Captain Bishop’s sister lives up there. I want a box of papers and journals, anything like that. Bishop’s finished.”

“I can see that,” the man said, and began moving toward the stairs. The woman with the rag-doll face was peering down at them again.

“No,” Tom said. “That’s not where they are. My grandfather stopped somewhere on the way here. He gave them to somebody for safekeeping.”

“Who was that?” Natchez asked.

Tom managed to smile at him, and saw understanding gradually cross Natchez’s face.

“You want me to go up?” the other policeman asked.

“No,” Natchez said. “If you want to stay out of jail, go home and keep your mouth shut. I have some business to take care of with this boy here, and then I’ll call you. I’ll pick up the papers, and then you and I are going to take two drunken shit-heads to the Elm Cove station and arrest them for the murder of Lamont von Heilitz.”

The other man swallowed.

“We were never here,” Natchez said. “Is that right?” he asked Tom.

“That’s right,” Tom said.

The other policeman faded away toward the long passage out to the street, and Natchez leaned down to try to pick up Glendenning Upshaw’s body. After a second, Andres bent to help him.

The red taxi with the dangling headlight was parked across the sidewalk from the back end of Maxwell’s Heaven. The two men carried Glendenning Upshaw’s limp body to the rear of the taxi, and Tom opened the trunk. When he slammed it down on the curled-up body, the noise came to him soft and diminished, like the closing of a bank vault.

Andres got behind the wheel. “Maybe I shouldn’t have followed,” he said. “I went out to the Founders Club behind you, five or six cars back, all the way, and I parked where I did yesterday. After you came out, I followed you back here and saw you go into the Courts. I went in behind you, and then I got lost, so I walked around until I found my way back out, and then I drove around to the other side. When I heard the shots, I came in.”

“You did the right thing,” Natchez said. “What I wonder about is whether we’re doing the right thing.”

“Drive,” Tom said, and Andres pulled away from the curb. Natchez flashed his badge at the guardhouse, and the red taxi wound through the palms and sand dunes to Bobby Jones Trail and pulled up in front of the long white bungalow. When the three of them got out of the cab, Kingsley came out through the arch and began making his way down the steps. Tom held up a hand and stopped him. “Get your wife and take her into your quarters. Leave the front door open.”

“But—”

“Stay in your rooms until I tell you to come out. Something is going to happen that you can’t see.”

“What?” Kingsley said, too disturbed to remember his usual formality.

“We’re going to find my grandfather,” Tom said.

“But Master Tom, he—”

“Make sure your wife stays in the room with you,” Tom said.

Kingsley nodded sadly and turned himself around and began tottering back up the steps.

“Kingsley,” Tom said.

The butler sagged aginst the railing and looked back at him.

“Has the mail come yet?”

“It just arrived, Master Tom. I put Mr. Upshaw’s letters on his desk.”

“Fine,” Tom said.

Kingsley gazed at Tom like an old dog that fears a beating, and said, “He was at home that night, Master Tom. You remember—the night you called him from Eagle Lake?”

“I don’t blame you for anything,” Tom said.

The butler nodded again and began toiling up the steps like a marionette with a couple of broken strings. Tom went back to the car and stood beside the two men, who had opened the trunk and were staring down at the swollen black thing inside it. At the back of the trunk, a little fringe of white hair showed above the rucked-up jacket and a bent arm.

“I guess I know what you want to do,” Natchez said. “But why do you want to do it?”

“Poetic justice,” Tom said.

“Does this have anything to do with Damrosch?”

“I don’t know. It might. I think he tried to kill Buzz Laing, and he could have gotten rid of Damrosch to end the investigation. I think Lamont von—I think my father was trying to get me to think about that before he was killed.”

“Are we going to take him out of the car?” Andres asked.

“I’ll help Natchez do it,” Tom said. “Would you wait for us out here, Andres? It’d be better if you didn’t see this.”

“I didn’t see nothing all day except Lamont,” Andres said. He stepped back, and Tom and Natchez leaned into