Mystery

“—and she demanded half of it or something, and he told her to get into his car—”

“Or she got into it, demanding that he take her to the money.”

“And he leaned in the driver’s window and shot her in the head. He rolled up the driver’s window and shot through it to make it look as if Marita had been behind the wheel. Then he put her body in the trunk and drove to the native district. He abandoned his car and made his way home. And a week later, the old lady was killed for the money.”

“And the same money is confiscated by the government of Mill Walk, which turns it over to Friedrich Hasselgard, the Minister of Finance.”

“What were you waiting for, this morning?” Tom asked.

“To see who would come. In the best of all worlds, Finance Minister Hasselgard would have appeared, and dug the first bullet out of the door with a pocket knife.”

“What would you have done, if he had?”

“Watched him.”

“I mean, would you have gone to the police then?”

“No.”

“You wouldn’t even have written the police about what you knew?”

Mr. von Heilitz tilted his head and looked at Tom in a way that made him uncomfortable—it had too many shades and meanings, and it went straight through him to his deepest secrets. “You wrote to Fulton Bishop, didn’t you?”

Tom was surprised to see Mr. von Heilitz now looking at him with undisguised impatience.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“What did your father tell you about me? When he said that I’d called? He must have warned you off.”

“Well … he did, yes. He said that it might be better to avoid you. He said you were bad luck. And he said that you used to be called the Shadow.”

“Because of my first name, of course.”

Tom, who was trying to figure out why the old man was irritated, looked blank.

“Lamont Cranston?”

Tom raised his eyebrows.

“My God.” Mr. von Heilitz sighed. “Back in pre-history, a fictional character named Lamont Cranston was the hero of a radio series called ‘The Shadow.’ That was my bad luck, if you like. But what your father was talking about is something else.”

The old man sipped his wine, and again regarded Tom with what looked like irritated impatience. “When I was twelve years old, both of my parents were murdered. Butchered, really. I came home from school and found their bodies. My father was lying dead in this room. He had been shot several times, and there was a tremendous amount of blood. As well as what is still probably called ‘gore.’ I found my mother near the back door, in the kitchen. She had obviously been trying to escape. I thought she might still be alive, and I rolled her body over. Suddenly my hands were red with blood. She had been shot in the chest and the stomach. Until I rolled her over and saw what they had done to her, I hadn’t even noticed all the blood on the floor.”

“Did they ever find who did it?”

“I found out who did it, years later. When this house was closed, I went to live with an aunt and uncle while the police investigated my parents’ murders. I don’t suppose you knew that my father was David Redwing’s Minister of Internal Affairs after Mill Walk became independent? He was an important man. Not as important as David Redwing, but important all the same. So a vigorous investigation took place. It went nowhere, and its failure was an ongoing sorrow. As if in recompense for the inability of the police to solve his murder, my father was posthumously awarded the Mill Walk Medal of Merit. I have it in a desk drawer somewhere over there—I could show it to you.” He was staring off into some internal space now, not looking at Tom at all.

“I waited nearly ten years,” he finally continued. “I inherited this house and everything in it. After I graduated from Harvard, I came back here to live. I had enough money not to have to worry about it for the rest of my life. I wondered what I was going to do. I could have gone into business. If I had been a different sort of person, I could have gone into local politics. My father was a local martyr, after all. But I had another purpose, and I set about it. Almost immediately I discovered that the police had learned very little. So I turned to the only sources I had, the public record. I obtained a complete file of the Eyewitness. I examined everything—property transfers, land deals, steamship arrivals, court records, death notices. I had so much material that I had to alter the house in order to be able to store it all. I was looking for patterns that no one else had seen. And, after three years, I began to find them. It was the most tedious and frustrating work I had ever done, but also the most satisfying. I felt that I was saving my own life. Eventually I was concentrating on a single man—a man who had come and gone from Mill Walk many times, a former member of our secret police who went into retirement when the secret police were disbanded. He had houses here and in Charleston. I went to Charleston and followed him. The man who had murdered my father and mother seemed ordinary—he might have been a property developer who had made enough money to devote all his time to golf. I had thought I might kill him, but found that I was no murderer. I came back to Mill Walk and presented my research to the Secretary of Internal Defense, Gonzalo Redwing, who had been a friend of my father’s. A week later, the murderer returned to Mill Walk to attend a charity function, and the militia arrested him on the dock at Mill Key. He was jailed, tried, convicted, and eventually executed on the gallows at the Long Bay prison Compound.”

Mr. von Heilitz turned to Tom with an expression the boy could not read at all. “It should have been a moment of triumph for me. I had found out who I was. I had discovered my life’s work. I was an amateur detective—an amateur of crime. But my triumph almost immediately did worse than go sour. It turned into disgrace. During the months between his arrest and execution, the man I had found never stopped talking. He implicated my father in his own murder.”

“How could he do that?” Tom asked.

“I don’t mean he said that my father wanted to be killed, but that he was executed. According to this man, my father had participated in certain arrangements that were set up just around the time of Mill Walk’s independence. He was an active partner in these arrangements. The arrangements had to do with the sugar revenues, with the way tax revenues were handled, with the bidding on road construction and garbage disposal, with water allocations, the banks, with certain fundamental structures that were set up at that time. There were irregularities, and my father was deeply involved in them. According to the murderer, my father had ceased to be cooperative. He wanted a disproportionate share of all these fundamental arrangements. And so this man had been hired to kill him. It was supposed to look like a robbery.”

“But who was supposed to have hired him?”

“He never knew. He was given instructions through a Personals ad in the Eyewitness, and money was paid into his Swiss bank account. Of course the implication was that the highest officials in Mill Walk were involved, and the more he said, the more the public was outraged— he was obviously clouding the issue, trying to take the spotlight off himself and blame everybody else. The secret police were suspect anyhow, and had been disbanded shortly after independence. When this man’s record was made public, even those who had thought there might be something to his charges turned against him. His own stories counted against him, in the end. I myself had a certain amount of fame, as the one who had led to his arrest.”

“Then why …?”

“Why did I end up living like this? Why do I object to your writing to Captain Bishop?”

“Yes,” Tom said.

“First of all, I’d like to know if you signed the letter.”

Tom shook his head.

“It was an anonymous letter? Good boy. Don’t be surprised if nothing is done. You know what you know, and that is enough.”

“But after the police read the letter, they at least have to look at the car more carefully, instead of just taking Hasselgard’s story as fact. And when they find the bullet, they’ll know that Hasselgard’s story wasn’t the truth.”

“Captain Bishop already knows it wasn’t,” said the old man.