Mystery

“That was a long time ago, Dad.”

“Hey—have it your way. What do I know?” He glanced back into the library, where the noises coming from the television had just increased dramatically—squealing tires and more gunshots. “I suppose you did finish your homework, huh?”

“Yes.”

He chewed on some unspoken thought for a second, and looked back into the flickering blue cave. “Step in here for a second, will you? I wasn’t going to say anything about this, but—”

Tom followed his father into the television room. Victor moved to the table beside his chair and picked up a half empty glass. A grinning woman holding up a container of dishwashing liquid filled the screen, and the music suddenly became much louder. Victor took several big swallows, backed into his chair, and sat down without taking his eyes off the television.

“Got a funny call a little earlier. From Lamont von Heilitz. That make any sense to you?”

Tom said nothing.

“I’m waiting, but I’m not hearing anything.”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

“What do you suppose that old coot wanted? He hasn’t called since Gloria’s mother died and we moved in.”

Tom shrugged. “He wanted to invite you for dinner.”

“Lamont von Heilitz never invited anyone for dinner, as far as I know. He sits in that big house all day long, he changes suits to come outside and pull a dandelion out of his lawn—I know because I’ve seen it—and the only time I’ve ever known him to act like a human being was when you had that accident and he gave me books for you to read. Which did you more harm than good, in my opinion.” Victor Pasmore raised his glass to his mouth and gulped, glaring at Tom over the rim as if to challenge him.

Tom was silent.

His father lowered the glass and licked his lips. “You know what they used to call him? The Shadow. Because he doesn’t exist. There’s something wrong with him. Some people have a bad smell that follows them around—you ought to know this, you’re getting out in the world. Some day you’ll have a business, kid, I know it’s a shock, but you’re gonna work for a living, and you’ll have to know that some people it’s better to avoid. Lamont von Heilitz never worked a day in his whole life.”

“Why did he call?”

Victor turned back to the television set. “He called to invite you to dinner. I told him you could make that decision for yourself. I didn’t wanna tell him no straight to his face. Let a couple weeks go by, let him forget about it.”

“I’ll think about it,” Tom said, and began moving toward the door.

“I guess you haven’t been listening to me,” Victor Pasmore said. “I don’t want you to have anything to do with that freak. He’s bad news. Your grandfather would tell you the same thing.”

“I guess I better get going,” Tom said.

“Keep it in your pants.”

Outside in the warm humid darkness, a fat black cat named Corazon, a pet of the Langenheims’, materialized beside him. “Cory, Cory, Cory,” Tom crooned, and bent down to stroke the animal’s silky back. The big cat pushed its heavy body against his shins. Tom scratched its wedge-shaped head, and Corazon looked up at him with uncanny yellow eyes and trotted ahead of him down the path to the sidewalk, her thick tail raised like a flag. When they reached the sidewalk the cat stood beside him for a moment in a round circle of light. Tom took a step left toward An Die Blumen, which led to The Sevens, the street on which the Spences inhabited a thirty-room Spanish extravaganza with an interior courtyard, a fountain, and a chapel that had been converted into a screening room. Corazon tilted her head, and light from the street lamp turned her eyes to transparent mystery. She began moving across the street with a gliding muscular step and disappeared into the darkness between the Jacobs’s house and Mr. von Heilitz’s.

Tom swallowed. He looked at the letter protruding from the book in his hand, then across the street to Mr. von Heilitz’s heavily curtained windows. All evening he had seen the image of Mr. von Heilitz’s pale face, swimming out at him from the back seat of a wrecked green sedan with a look of pure recognition.

Tom walked toward An Die Blumen through pools of light alternating with hour-glass shaped areas of darkness. He came to the red pillar postbox on the corner of An Die Blumen and withdrew the long white envelope from the pages of the novel. The typing on the envelope, Captain Fulton Bishop, Central Police Headquarters, Homicide Division, Armory Place, Mill Walk, District One, looked disturbingly adult and authoritative. Tom pushed the long envelope into the open mouth of the pillar box, pulled it part of the way out again, then pushed it into the box until his fingers touched the warm metal. Then he released the envelope, and a second later heard it fall softly on the mound of mail at the bottom of the pillar box.

In a sudden depression Tom turned around and looked down An Die Blumen to the corner of The Sevens, where an enclosed wooden telephone booth stood half-engulfed by an enormous stand of bougainvillaea. He began to walk slowly down the block.

The inside of the booth was permeated with the thick, heavy perfume of bougainvillaea. Tom hesitated only a moment, wishing that he really had been able to turn into The Sevens and ring Sarah Spence’s doorbell, and then dialed the number for directory inquiries. The operator told him that there were four listings for Lamont von Heilitz. Did he want the listing on Calle Ranelagh, Eastern Shore Road, or—

“That one,” he said. “Eastern Shore Road.”

When he had the number, he dialed again. The phone rang twice, and a surprisingly youthful voice answered.

“Maybe I have the wrong number,” Tom said. “I was trying to reach a Mr. von Heilitz.”

“Is this you, Tom Pasmore?” the voice asked.

“Yes,” Tom said, so softly he could scarcely hear his own voice.

“Your father seems not to want you to accept my invitation to dinner. Are you at home?”

“I’m out on the street,” Tom said. “In a call box.”

“The one around the corner?”

“Yes,” Tom virtually whispered.

“Then I’ll see you in a few seconds,” said the old man’s vibrant voice. He hung up.

Tom replaced the receiver on the hook. He felt intensely afraid and intensely alive.

Scent leaked from the closed-up parchment of the bougainvillaea blossoms. Geckos and salamanders scurried through the grass and flew along dark plaster walls.

Tom came to Eastern Shore Road and turned left. Down behind the houses the water washed rhythmically up on the shoreline. An enclosed horse-drawn carriage came rattling down Eastern Shore Road. The coachman wore a neat grey uniform almost invisible in the night, and the horses were matched bays with sleek muscles and arching necks. The equipage moved smoothly past Tom Pasmore, making surprisingly little sound, like an image from a dream but so secure in its reality that it made Tom feel as if he were the dream. The elegant apparition continued past the corner and rolled north down the drive toward the Redwing compound.

Light escaped in chinks and beams from the curtained windows of Lamont von Heilitz’s house.

When he got to the front door of the von Heilitz house, Tom hesitated as he had before dropping the letter into the pillar box. He wanted to flee across the street and escape upstairs into his room. For a moment Tom regretted everything that had made him commandeer poor Dennis Handley and his car. At that moment, he could have given up and gone home, chosen what he already knew instead of the mystery of what he did not. At a turning point such as this, many people do turn away from what they do not know—their fear, not only of the risk, is too great. They say no. Tom Pasmore wanted to say no, but he raised his hand and knocked on the door.

Of course when he did this, he had no idea at all of what he was doing.

It opened almost immediately, as if the old man had been standing behind it, waiting for Tom to decide.

“Good,” Lamont von Heilitz said. Until this moment, when his eyes met a pair of very pale blue eyes, Tom had never quite realized that the old man was nearly his own height. “Very good, in fact. Please come into my house, Tom Pasmore.”

He moved out of the way, and Tom stepped inside.

For a moment he was too surprised to speak. He had expected what Eastern Shore Road defined as a