“Okay!” Tom said. “You had him!” He began to laugh. “Arthur Thielman was such a bad shot he had to sneak up behind his wife and put the barrel two inches from her head to be sure of hitting her at all!”
The old man smiled. “Arthur Thielman wasn’t his wife’s murderer, but the real killer would not have been at all unhappy to have me think he was. The murderer knew that he had furnished Arthur with one of the most traditional motives for murder.” His smile deepened at the expression on Tom’s face. “Jeanine had not only been unfaithful to her husband, but her lover thought that she was going to leave Arthur for him. And Arthur thought she had left him—he thought she had run off with the other man.”
For the second time that night, Tom was too surprised to speak. At length he said, “That was the deeper embarrassment you were talking about?”
Von Heilitz nodded. “So all I had to do was learn which of the men visiting Eagle Lake that summer had been away from the lake on the day of Jeanine’s disappearance. I went back to the Truehart cabin to see if anyone had canceled a date with the guide. If that didn’t work, I intended to question the other two or three men who worked as guides for the summer people, but I didn’t have to go any further. Minor’s wife worked as a cleaning woman for most of the same people her husband guided. On the sixteenth of June, she had two cleaning jobs. She went to the first lodge at eight in the morning, but the man who lived there didn’t get up to answer the door. She thought he must have been sleeping off a heavy night, and went through the woods to the second job, where she cleaned house until about two in the afternoon. Then she returned to the first house. Again, no one answered her knock—no one came even when she called out. She decided that he had left for town, or some other destination, without bothering to tell her that he wouldn’t be home. She scribbled a note that she would be back the next day, and walked back through the woods to her cabin. When she came back on the seventeenth, he opened the door to her, saying that he was very sorry but that he’d had to take a sudden business trip to Hurley, a larger town about twenty miles south. He’d taken the six-thirty train, and hadn’t returned until after nightfall. He paid her double for the day, and asked her not to mention his absence to any of her other customers—his business involved a real estate matter that he wanted kept secret.”
“But if he was going to run away with her and killed her instead, why did he leave by himself?”
“He hadn’t gone anywhere. Arthur Thielman just thought he had. Mrs. Truehart found two empty whiskey bottles in his trash, another half-empty on the kitchen counter, and the remains of several packs of Lucky Strikes in the wastebaskets. He’d holed up in his lodge, drinking himself into a stupor. She was told to stay out of the guest room, and she thought he must have had some woman’s belongings in there that he didn’t want her to see. He was a sentimental man. He shot his lover in the back of the head when she refused to leave with him, and then spent the rest of the night and the next day mourning her. Sentimentality is a mask for violence.”
“Who was he? What was his name?”
“Anton Goetz.”
Tom felt a decided letdown. “I’ve never heard of him.”
“I know you haven’t, but he was an interesting figure—a German who had come to Mill Walk some fifteen years earlier and made a lot of money. He bought into the St. Alwyn Hotel, and then developed some tracts of land on the west side of the island. He never married. Excellent manners. Good stories—most of them entirely invented, I think. He built that huge Spanish house around the corner, on The Sevens. The Spence house. I’ve always thought that it revealed the man very exactly—all that grandiosity, the sort of overreaching quality of the house.” He took in Tom’s expression again, and quickly added, “Perhaps you think it’s beautiful. It is rather beautiful, in its way. And of course we’re all used to it now.”
“Did you have any proof against Goetz?”
“Well, I had the curtain, of course. He would have been caught sooner or later, because he’d had his lodge decorated that spring, just after he began his affair with Jeanine Thielman. The old curtains were stored in one of the outbuildings next to his lodge. Until she refused to leave with him, Goetz had imagined that she would get divorced and marry him, and that they would return to Mill Walk and live as a couple. Jeanine may have gone along with this fantasy, but she never took it seriously.”
“But how did you know they were having an affair? Just because the cleaning woman didn’t get into his house?”
“Aha! One night the previous summer, I went into the club late, and met Jeanine rushing down the stairs from the bar in the dining room. She didn’t say anything to me, just went past me with an embarrassed smile. When I got upstairs, I saw Goetz at the bar by himself, in front of two glasses and an ashtray full of cigarettes. He told me a story about having met her there by accident, which I took at face value. But for the rest of that summer, I never saw the two of them saying anything at all to each other in public. They even went out of their way to avoid being seen together in public, and I wouldn’t have suspected anything at all if it hadn’t been for that one time when they had clearly spent an hour or two together. So it seemed to me that they were doing everything they could not to attract suspicion, and of course it had the opposite effect on me.”
He stood up and began pacing with slow strides back and forth alongside the table. “There was a party scheduled at the Eagle Lake Club the night after I spoke to Mrs. Truehart. Of course it had been canceled, but a lot of people were planning to stop in there anyhow to talk things over, have a few drinks, that sort of thing. More from the lack of anything better to do than anything else. I walked over to the club about six in the evening, and I was still in the grip of that feeling I described—of a kind of radiance of significance shining through everything I saw. But when I went to the upstairs bar and saw Anton Goetz on the terrace, what I mainly felt was sorrow. Goetz had been taking his meals home for a few days, staying out of sight. He was sitting at a table with Maxwell Redwing, David’s son, and some of the younger Redwing cousins. Maxwell was the Redwing patriarch of those days—the one who really took the family out of public life. He was something like your grandfather, in fact.
“To tell the truth, I don’t know if my sorrow was for poor Goetz, who looked flushed and hectic and was obviously struggling to resemble his old self in the midst of this attractive crowd, or for myself, because it was all coming to an end. I went to the end of the bar and ordered a drink. I stared at Goetz until he looked up and noticed me. I nodded, and he looked away. I kept on staring at him—it seemed to me that I could see his entire life. Everything, all the emotions and excitement that had swirled around me in the past few days, had come down to this one wretched human being, who was trying to ingratiate himself with Maxwell Redwing. He kept looking up, seeing me, and turning away to gulp his drink.
“At last Goetz excused himself and stood up. He walked across the terrace and stood beside me at the bar, fidgeting. He was waiting for me to say something. When he pulled out one of his Luckies, I lit it for him. He exhaled and took a step backward. ‘What’s your game, sport?’ he finally asked me.
“ ‘You are,’ I said. ‘You don’t have a chance. Even if I hadn’t figured it out, sooner or later someone would start to think about that length of curtain. They’d check to see if you ever took that train to Hurley. There’ll be someone who saw you and Jeanine together. They’ll examine your boat, and they’ll find threads from the carpet, or a bloodstain, or one of Jeanine’s hairs …’
“His face had gone bright red. He looked back out at the veranda, toward that group of chattering Redwing cousins. He literally straightened his back. Then he asked me what I intended to do. I said that I wanted to take him into town, and get Minor Truehart out of jail as soon as possible. ‘You really are the Shadow, aren’t you?’ he asked me. Then he turned toward me so his back would be to the veranda. He leaned forward to whisper, and his face was already pleading. ‘Give me one more night,’ he said. ‘I won’t try to get away. I just want to have one last night here at Eagle Lake.’ He was a sentimentalist, you see. I told him I’d give him until nightfall.”
“Why until nightfall? Why give him any time at all?”
“Well, it might sound funny, but I wanted to give him some time to think about things while he was still a free man. Only he and I knew what he had done, and that changed everything for both of us. If I gave him only the hour or two until nightfall, I could make sure that he didn’t escape after it got dark. I intended to keep watch on his house, of course. So I agreed. I left the club and trotted home, ran down to my dock, untied my boat, and started across the lake. I thought my little outboard motor could get me to Goetz’s dock before he got home. When I was in the middle of the lake, someone took a shot at me.”
Tom opened his mouth in surprise, imagining himself out in the middle of a lake while Anton Goetz fired at him with a rifle.
“The shot hit the water about a foot from the dinghy. I cursed myself for letting him go and lay down in the bottom of the boat, soaking my clothes. A second later, there was another shot, and this one struck the side of the dinghy and went straight through to the bottom of the boat, about an inch from my head. I scrunched backwards, but I didn’t dare lift my head for another minute or so. I was going around and around in a big circle. Finally I dared
