“Ah, there’s a big game on, but Tom wanted to watch the news.”
Tom shushed them. Foxhall Edwardes’ sister, a short, dark, overweight woman missing several teeth who spoke in the old native manner, was condemning the way the police had handled her brother’s arrest. “Them had no need to kill he. Him-him was being deep scared, bad. Foxy would be talking with police, them no want talk, them want he dead. Foxy him be doing some badness, but him not being bad in himself. Him and him’s da were close, and when him’s da dies, him-him rob store. Tore he up inside, can you be feeling this? Time has been served. Out of jail three days only, him be seeing police with guns, him thinks they be go putting him-him back there. Fox him no be killing any bodies any time, but police be putting finger on him-him, be saying you our man. Him
“I came down to see if I can make lunch for anybody.” Gloria touched the pearls at her neck.
Victor stood up quickly. “I’ll give you a hand.”
He put his arm around her waist and walked her toward the door.
“Don’t you love the way they talk?” Gloria said. “ ‘Him and him’s da.’ If it was a girl they’d say ‘her and her’s da.’ ” She giggled, and Tom heard one of the central sounds of his life, the hysteria capering beneath her brittle exterior.
Now Captain Fulton Bishop faced a press conference staged in the full congratulatory official manner, from behind a desk in a flag-filled reception room at Armory Place. Captain Bishop’s smooth, suntanned head, as hard and expressionless as a knuckle, tilted toward the bank of microphones. “Of course his sister is distressed, but it would be unwise to take her allegations for anything more than the emotional outburst they are. We gave Mr. Edwardes ample opportunity to surrender. As you know, the suspect chose to respond with fire, and seriously injured the two brave men who were the first to see him.”
“The two officers were injured inside the house?” asked a reporter.
“That is correct. The suspect admitted them to the house for the express purpose of killing them behind closed doors. He was not aware that backup teams had been ordered to the area.”
“Backup teams were ordered before the first shots?”
“This was a dangerous criminal. I wanted my men to have all the protection they could have. No more questions.”
Captain Bishop stood up and turned away from the table in a bubble of noise, but a shouted question reached him.
“What can you tell us about the disappearance of Minister Hasselgard?”
He turned back to the crowd of reporters and leaned over the microphones. Harsh white light bounced off the top of his smooth head. He paused a moment before speaking. “That matter is under full investigation. There will be a full disclosure of the results of that investigation in a matter of days.” He paused again, and cleared his throat. “Let me say this. Certain matters in the Finance Ministry have recently come to light. If you ask me, Hasselgard wasn’t washed off that boat—he jumped off it.”
He straightened up into a roar of questions and smoothed his necktie over his shirt. “I would like to thank someone,” he said, shouting to be heard over their questions. “Some good citizen wrote to me with information that led indirectly to the solution of Miss Hasselgard’s murder. Whoever you are, I think you are watching me at this minute. I would like you to make yourself known to me or anyone here at Armory Place, so that we can demonstrate our gratitude for your assistance.” He marched away from the table, ignoring the shouts of the reporters.
Setting out sandwiches and bowls of soup on the little breakfast table in the kitchen, Gloria reminded Tom of a glamorous mother in a television commercial. She smiled at him, her eyes bright with the effort to demonstrate how good she was being. “I’ll leave some food in the refrigerator for you tonight, Tom, but here’s something nice to tide you over. We’re going out tonight, you know.”
Then he understood—she had dressed for the dinner party as soon as she got out of bed. He sat down and ate. During lunch his father several times said how tasty the soup was, how much he enjoyed the sandwiches. It was a great lunch. Wasn’t it a great lunch, Tom?
“Now they’re claiming that Hasselgard drowned himself,” Tom said. “They’re going to announce that he was stealing from the treasury. If someone hadn’t written to the police, none of this would have happened. If the police had never gotten that letter—”
“They would have nailed him anyway,” his father broke in. “Hasselgard came too far too fast. Now drop the subject.”
He was talking to Tom but watching Gloria, who had raised her sandwich halfway to her mouth, shuddered, and lowered it again to her plate. She looked up, but she did not see them. “ ‘Her and her’s da,’ the servants used to say. Because there were just the two of us in this house.”
“Let me help you upstairs.” Victor shot Tom a dark look, and took his wife’s arm to get her to her feet and lead her out of the room.
When his father came back down, Tom was in the little television room, eating the rest of his sandwich and watching one of the WMIL-TV reporters stand beside the hull of the
“Haven’t you had enough of this?” Victor unceremoniously bent down and turned the channel indicator until a baseball game appeared on the screen. “Where’s my sandwich?”
“On the table.”
He left and returned almost immediately, the big sandwich dripping out of his hand. He lowered himself into his chair. “You’re mother will be fine, no thanks to you.”
Tom went up to his room.
At seven o’clock, his parents came downstairs together, and Tom turned off the television just before they came into the room. His mother looked exactly as she had at noon—dressed to go out in her pearls and high heels. He told them to have a good time, and called Lamont von Heilitz as soon as they walked out the door.
They sat on opposite sides of a leather-topped coffee table stacked with books. Lamont von Heilitz leaned against the high tufted back of a leather sofa and squinted at Tom through cigarette smoke.
“I feel restless, that’s why I’m smoking,” he said. “I never used to smoke when I worked. When I was a young man I used to smoke between cases, waiting to see who might appear on my doorstep. All in all I must be a weaker creature now than I was then. I didn’t enjoy seeing the police in my house this afternoon.”
“Bishop came to see you?” Tom asked. Everything about Mr. von Heilitz seemed different this night.
“He sent two detectives named Holman and Natchez home with me. The same two men invited me along to Armory Place last night to discuss the death of Finance Minister Hasselgard.”
“They consulted you?”
Von Heilitz drew in smoke, then luxuriantly exhaled. “Not quite. Captain Bishop thought I might have written them a certain letter.”
“Oh, no,” Tom said, remembering trying to call the old man after watching the previous night’s news.
“Whatever they were doing down in Weasel Hollow kept interrupting the interrogation. I didn’t get back here until nearly noon, and Detectives Holman and Natchez didn’t leave until after three.”
“They questioned you for another three hours?”
He shook his head. “They were looking for a typewriter that would match up with the letter. The search was slow and industrious. I’d forgotten how many typewriters I had accumulated. Holman and Natchez took it as particularly suspicious that one old upright was hidden away in the filing cabinets.”
“Why did you hide one of your typewriters?”
“Just what Detective Natchez wanted to know. He seemed very distressed, this Detective Natchez. I gather that one of the young officers injured in Weasel Hollow—Mendenhall?—was important to him. In any case, the
