Mystery

lift my head again and steered toward Goetz’s dock, while still more or less lying down in the boat. At the dock I killed the motor and jumped out—the boat was about one-quarter full of water, and I just left it to fill up and sink. I ran up to the house, knowing that I’d made a terrible fool of myself—not only had he nearly killed me, but he had obviously managed to get away. I had to admit what I’d done and persuade the police to start looking for him. By the time I got to a telephone, Goetz could have been twenty miles away.

“But he hadn’t gone anywhere. His door was wide open. I rushed in and threw myself on the floor, just in case he was waiting for me. Then I heard something dripping onto the wooden floor. I looked up and saw him. He was hanging from one of the crossbeams in his living room, with a length of high-test fishing line around his neck that had nearly taken his head off.”

“He could have killed you!” Tom said.

“The funny thing was, he hadn’t even stolen the Colt from Arthur Thielman. It was lying on a table outside near the Thielmans’ dock the night Goetz thought he and Jeanine were going to run off. When she told him she had no intention of leaving her husband and turned away to go back inside, he picked it up and shot her in the back of the head. The next day, he thought that he could put the blame on Minor Truehart, and after Truehart’s wife left his house to do her next job, he went out through the woods, dead drunk, to their cabin, and threw it under the bed. Arthur Thielman was careless with everything, including his wife and his weapons.”

“Then who shot at you? It must have been Goetz.”

Mr. von Heilitz smiled at Tom, then knitted his fingers behind the back of his head and yawned. “Your grandfather’s lodge was about forty yards to the left of the Thielmans’. About the same distance to the right, in the direction of the club, was the boundary of the Redwing compound. This was only a year after I had exposed my parents’ murderer, who had spoken at great length about corruption on Mill Walk. Of course, it might have been Goetz. He could have fired at me, tossed the rifle into the lake, and then hanged himself. But Goetz was a very good shot—from at least thirty feet away, he killed Jeanine with a pistol that pulled badly to the left.”

He turned to the next page of the scrapbook. MYSTERY RESOLVED IN TRAGEDY read the banner across the top of the Eagle Lake Gazette. Two single-column articles on either side were headed GUIDE TRUEHART RELEASED TO SOBBING WIFE, CHILDREN and SHADOW STRIKES AGAIN! In the middle of the page was a two-column picture of a strikingly handsome man with wide-set clear eyes and a dark little gigolo’s mustache above the caption Killer Anton Goetz Confessed to Private Sleuth Minutes Before Grisly Suicide. Beside this was another, smaller photograph, of a slim young man in a Norfolk jacket and a plaid shirt with an open collar. The young man looked as if he wished the photographer would point his camera at some more willing object. The caption beneath this photograph was Twenty-jive-Year-Old Amateur Detective von Heilitz, Known as “The Shadow,” Seeks to Avoid Publicity. Tom stared at the picture of the young man his neighbor had been, once again struck by the dreamlike familiarity of the page. MYSTERY. RESOLVED. TRAGEDY. Connected to these words, as to so much of his childhood, was the image of his mother locked into her encompassing misery.

The young Lamont von Heilitz had worn his hair shorter, though not as short as was the fashion at Brooks- Lowood School at the end of the 1950s, but the high cheekbones and intelligent, thin hawk’s face was the same. What was different was the sense of taut nerves and tension that came from the young man’s face and posture: he looked like a human seismograph, a person whose extreme sensitivity made much of ordinary daily life a nearly intolerable affair.

Tom looked up into the older face, affectionately regarding him from the other side of the big journal, and felt as if he had been given some enigmatic clue about his own life—some insight he had just failed to catch.

“I’ll let you borrow that, if you like,” von Heilitz said. “We’ve spent a lot of time together, and too much of it was spent with your being polite while I indulged myself with old memories. Next time, it’s your turn to talk.”

He slammed the old journal shut, picked it up with both hands and offered it to Tom, who took it gladly.

They moved toward the door through the aisles of the crowded room. Tom had one more question, which he asked as von Heilitz opened his front door.

Before him was the familiar world of Eastern Shore Road, almost a surprise: Tom had been so engrossed in the story of Jeanine Thielman and Anton Goetz that, without knowing it, he had half-expected to find a starry woods of Norway spruce and tall oak trees beyond the door, a wide blue lake and paths between big lodges with porches and balconies. “You know,” Tom said, realizing that he was not after all asking a question, “I don’t think ‘The Shadow’ was on the radio in 1925. I bet they named that program after you.”

Lamont von Heilitz smiled and closed the door. Tom looked at his watch. It was nearly eleven o’clock. He walked back across the street in the darkness.

Without quite knowing that a new era of his life had begun, Tom lay on his bed until one o’clock, flipping through the thick leather-bound journal. Columns of newsprint from different newspapers covered each page. There were headlines from New Orleans, from California, from Chicago and Seattle. Sometimes the articles concerned the murders of prominent people, sometimes those of prostitutes, gamblers, homeless wanderers. Interspersed with the articles were telegrams sent to Lamont von Heilitz of Eastern Shore Road, Mill Walk.

WISH TO ENGAGE YOUR SERVICES ON MATTER OF GREAT DELICACY AND IMPORTANCE STOP

MY HUSBAND HAS UNJUSTLY BEEN PLACED UNDER SUSPICION STOP I PLEAD WITH YOU TO GIVE YOUR HELP STOP YOU ARE MY LAST RESORT STOP

IF YOU ARE AS GOOD AS PEOPLE SAY WE NEED YOU FAST STOP

Tom looked at pictures of his neighbor in clippings from newspapers in Louisiana, Texas, and Maine—in the latter, his left arm was encased in plaster and canvas, and his haggard face looked as white as the sling, completely out of key with the triumphant caption. Famous Sleuth Unmasks, Kills Red Barn Murderer.

The headlines from all these cities and towns celebrated his triumphs. THE SHADOW SUCCEEDS WHERE POLICE FAIL. VON HEILITZ UNCOVERS LONG HELD SECRET, REVEALS KILLER. TOWN CELEBRATES SHADOW’S VICTORY WITH BANQUET. And here was the young Lamont von Heilitz, impeccable and taut as ever, looking straight ahead with a ghostly smile as a hundred men at long tables washed down venison and roast boar with magnums of champagne. He had managed to avoid photographers on all but two other occasions, on each of which he faced the camera as if it were a firing squad. He had captured or revealed the identity of The Roadside Strangler, The Deep River Madman, The Rose of Sharon Killer, and The Terror of Route Eight. The Hudson Valley Poisoner had been proven to be a poetic-looking young pharmacist with complicated feelings about the six young women to whom he had proposed marriage. The Merry Widow, whose four wealthy husbands had suffered domestic accidents, turned out to be a doughy, uninspiring woman in her sixties, unremarkable in every way except for having both a brown and a blue eye. A Park Avenue gynecologist named Luther Nelson was the murderer who had written to The New York Times identifying himself as “Jack the Ripper’s Grandson.” The Parking Lot Monster, of Cleveland, Ohio, had been one Horace M. Fetherstone, the father of nine daughters and the regional manager of the Happy Hearts Greeting Card Company. In all these cases, Lamont von Heilitz, the “renowned amateur consulting detective and resident of the island of Mill Walk,” had “offered invaluable assistance to the local police” or had “been helpful in providing evidence” or “by use of brilliant ratiocination, had advanced a coherent theory of the true nature and cause of the baffling crimes”—in other words, had done the work of the police for them.

Page after page, the cases went by. Mr. von Heilitz had worked ceaselessly during the late twenties and throughout the thirties. At a certain point in the late thirties, some of the news stories began referring to him as “the real-life counterpart of radio’s most famous fictional detective, the Shadow.” He camped in hotel rooms and the libraries and newspaper offices in which he did his research. The last of the detective’s photographs contained in the book accompanied an article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch entitled ECCENTRIC RENOWNED SLEUTH POUNDS BOOKS, NOT PAVEMENT and showed a man with greying hair seated at a desk buried under rifts of newspapers, notebooks, and boxes of papers. Except for the gloves on his hands, the excellence of his suit, and his habitual air of distinction, he looked like an overworked high school teacher.

The Shadow had abruptly left St. Louis after solving the murders of a brewer and his wife, refusing to grant any further interviews. (The Post-Dispatch: AFTER DEDUCTIVE TRIUMPH, ECCENTRIC