Mystery

into the window beside the front door, but the boy disappeared around the side of the house. Behind the wheel of the Corvette, Dennis felt fat and hot and conspicuous. He imagined that he heard someone creeping up behind his car, but when he stuck his head through the window, it was only the dog thrashing its legs in its sleep. Dennis looked at his watch, and saw that four minutes had passed. He closed his eyes and moaned. Then he heard footsteps crackling through the brittle grass and opened his eyes to the sight of Tom Pasmore walking back toward the car.

Tom was walking very quickly, his face as closed as a fist. He folded himself in half and dropped into the other seat without looking at Dennis. “Go around the corner.”

Dennis twisted the key in the ignition, lifted his foot from the clutch, and the car jerked forward.

“La Bamba” came from one of the shuttered native houses, and for a moment Dennis thought of how like paradise it would be to stretch out his legs on a couch and take a long swallow of a gin and tonic.

“Into the alley,” Tom said. “Slow.”

Dennis turned into the narrow walled alley; the Corvette shuddered down the narrow space between crumbling walls.

“Stop.” Tom said. They had drawn up to a collapsed portion of the wall, and Tom leaned his head through the passenger window to peer into a thicket of waist-high yellow grass. “Farther,” Tom said. Dennis let the car roll forward.

After a moment they came to the green doors of a one-horse stable converted into a garage. Two dusty windows covered with spiderwebs faced the narrow alley. “Here,” Tom said, and jumped out of the car. He shielded his eyes to look through one of the windows. He immediately moved to the other, then back again. He straightened himself up to his full height and then covered his face with his hands.

“Is this over now?” Dennis asked.

Tom folded himself back into the car.

“I’m going to take you home,” Dennis said.

“Mr. Handley, you are going to drive me around the block. We are going to go up and down every street and every alley in this part of Weasel Hollow, if that is what we have to do.”

No, I’m going to take you home, Dennis said very clearly in his mind, but his mouth said, “If that’s what you want,” and he rolled forward to the end of the narrow alley, and turned deeper into Weasel Hollow.

At the next corner he turned right onto a street lined with shacks, rusting cars up on their rims, and a few native houses set far back on dead yellow lawns. Goats nibbled weeds in front of dwellings that were blankets slung tepee-style around leaning poles. Tom uttered a noise that sounded amazingly like a purr. Twenty yards ahead and across the street, partially obscured by a mound of garbage—tin cans, empty bottles, rotting onion peels, and slimy bits of fly-encrusted meat—was a car identical to his, so highly polished that it sparkled.

“Let me off here,” Tom said. He was opening the door before Dennis came to a stop.

Tom ran toward the sleek black car and laid his hands on the hood.

For a moment—a long moment, but no more than that—Tom experienced a sensation something like deja vu, an echo of a sensation more than the sensation itself, that he had become invisible to the ordinary physical world and had entered a realm in which every detail spoke of its true essence: as if he had slipped beneath the skin of the world. A sweet, dangerous familiarity filled him. Sweat seemed to have risen up out of every pore of his body. Tom slowly moved around to the driver’s side. He bent down. A neat bullet hole half an inch wide perforated the driver’s window. The driver’s seat was spattered with blood. A thick film of blood covered the passenger seat.

Tom moved to the back of the car and fiddled with the trunk for a moment, then succeeded in opening it. Here, too, was a quantity of blood, though much less than on the seats. For a hallucinatory second he saw the pudgy corpse wadded into this small space. Finally he went to the passenger door, opened it, and knelt down. He ran his hands over the smooth black leather. Flakes of dried blood shredded onto the ground. Again he gently passed his fingers over the leather and near the bottom of the door touched a clump of dried fuzz stained black with blood. He delicately prodded. Beneath the shredded leather he felt a hard round nugget of metal.

Tom exhaled and stood up. His body seemed oddly light, as if it might continue to rise and leave the ground entirely. A vanishing glow momentarily touched the mound of bald tires in the front yard of the pink house across the street, also an old green sedan down the street. Tom looked toward Dennis Handley, who was wiping his forehead with a large white pocket handkerchief, and felt a goofy smile spread across his face. He began to walk toward Handley on legs that seemed immensely long. A movement where there should have been none caught his eye like a waving flag, and Tom swiveled his head to look at the green sedan parked by the opposite curb. Lamont von Heilitz leaned toward the window of its back seat. A moment of total recognition passed between them, and then the old man raised a gloved finger to his lips.

Dennis Handley drove his best and most puzzling student home in a silence that was broken only by his increasingly hesitant questions and the boy’s monosyllabic answers. Tom seemed pale and exhausted during the drive, and Dennis had the odd feeling that he was saving himself for one further effort. When Dennis tried to picture the nature of this effort, he could do no better than to picture Tom Pasmore seated before an old Underwood upright—a typewriter very like the one on which he typed out his end-of-term comments—and typing with one finger upon the middle of a page of good bond the cornball motto THE CASE OF THE BLOODY CAR SEAT. In ten minutes he was turning off An Die Blumen into Eastern Shore Road, and thirty seconds after that he sat in his car and watched Tom’s tall, wide-shouldered figure move up the path toward the front door of his house.

Dennis was halfway home before he realized that he was driving twenty miles an hour over the speed limit. He realized he was angry only after he had nearly run down a bicyclist.

Two weeks later Dennis met a definitely tipsy Gloria Pasmore at a dinner party at the Thielmans’ and said that he didn’t think there was anything to worry about. The boy was just going through some sort of adolescent phase. And, in answer to a question from Katinka Redwing, no, he had not been following any of the stories in the Eyewitness about Finance Minister Hasselgard—that sort of thing did not interest him at all, not at all.

Tom did spend the evening of that day typing on a small green Olivetti portable his parents had been persuaded to give him the year before, but what he wrote was a letter, not the awkward beginning of a detective novel. This letter was addressed to Captain Fulton Bishop, the detective named in the Eyewitness. He rewrote it before dinner, then rewrote it again at night. He signed the letter “A Friend.”

It was nine o’clock at night when he folded the letter and sealed it inside the envelope. The telephone had rung twice while he wrote, but he had not been interrupted at his work. He had heard the back door close and the noises of a car starting up and driving away, so only one of his parents was still in the house. He thought he had a good chance of getting out without having to answer any questions, but just in case, he slid the letter into a copy of The Lady in the Lake and anchored the book under his arm before he left his room.

From the top of the stairs Tom saw that the lights were burning in the living room, and the doors of the room on the other side of the staircase were closed. The sound of amplified voices drifted toward him.

Tom moved quietly down the stairs. Only a few yards from the bottom, he heard the rattle of the library doorknob and unconsciously straightened up as the door opened on a wave of shouts and gunshots. His father stood outlined against a smoky, flickering pale blue background, like a figure at the mouth of a cave.

“You think I’m deaf?” his father asked. “Think I can’t hear you creeping downstairs like a priest in a brothel?”

“I was just going out for a little bit.”

“What the hell is there to do outside, this time of night?”

Victor Pasmore had crossed over the line between a little bit drunk and a little bit drunker, which meant moving from a sort of benevolent elation to surliness.

“I’m supposed to take this book over to Sarah Spence.” He held it out toward his father, who glanced at the cover and squinted up at his son. “She asked me to bring it over once I was through with homework.”

“Sarah Spence,” his father said. “You two used to be pretty good friends.”