Mystery

typewriter was a souvenir of the Jack the Ripper’s Grandson business—did you read about it last night? It was the machine on which Dr. Nelson wrote his letters to the New York police.” Von Heilitz smiled and smoked, sprawled out on his chesterfield, his feet up on the coffee table. He had spent a night at police headquarters, and a morning watching detectives paw through his files. He had showered, shaved, napped, and changed clothes, but he still looked exhausted to Tom.

“Nothing happened the way I thought it would,” Tom said. “They keep you overnight—”

The old man shrugged.

“—and this man Edwardes is killed, and two policemen were shot, and Hasselgard killed himself—”

“He didn’t kill himself,” von Heilitz said, squinting at Tom through a cloud of smoke. “He was executed.”

“But what did Foxhall Edwardes have to do with it?”

“He was just—what was the word his sister used? A convenience. He’s the way they close the books.”

“That means I killed him too. Hasselgard and Edwardes would still be alive if I hadn’t written that letter.”

“You didn’t kill them. The system killed them to protect itself.” He lowered his legs, sat up, and ground out the cigarette in an ashtray. “Do you remember my saying that the man who killed my parents told one lie? The lie, of course, was about my father’s involvement in the corruption on Mill Walk—I think the truth was that he hated what had become of the island. And I think he must have gone to his friend David Redwing, and told him what he had discovered and what he planned to do about it. Let’s say that David Redwing was as shocked as my father had been. He might have talked about my father’s charges to the wrong person. Consider that for a second. If my father and mother were killed soon after David Redwing heard my father’s tale, wouldn’t he be suspicious of their deaths? The answer’s obvious—of course he would. Unless someone he trusted absolutely had assured him that my father had been wrong in his allegations, and that an ordinary criminal had murdered my parents.”

“Who do you think it was?”

“His own son. Maxwell Redwing. Until his resignation, Maxwell was his father’s right-hand man.”

Tom thought of Maxwell Redwing on the terrace of the club at Eagle Lake, entertaining young nieces and nephews who were old people now; he remembered the obituary in the Eyewitness.

“Tell me, what do you think I am working on these days?”

“I don’t know,” Tom said. “You were working on Hasselgard, but I suppose that’s over now.”

“Our late Finance Minister was only a little piece of it. It’s my last case—I could even say the case. In fact, it goes all the way back to Jeanine Thielman.”

He had done nothing but lead Tom back into the circle of his obsession with the Redwings. “Look,” Tom began, “I don’t want you to think—”

Von Heilitz stopped him by holding up a gloved hand. “Before you say anything, I want you to think about something. Do you imagine that anyone looking at you would guess what happened to you seven years ago?”

It took Tom a long time to realize that, like his mother that afternoon, von Heilitz was referring to his accident. It seemed utterly disconnected to him—buried within his recent life, as clay pipes and old bottles were now and then found buried in old back gardens.

“That is an essential part of who you are. Who you are.”

Tom wanted to get out of the old man’s house—it was as bad as being caught in a spiderweb.

“You nearly died. You had an experience most people have only once in their lives, and which very few live to remember or talk about. You’re like a person who saw the dark side of the moon. Few people have been privileged to go there.”

“Privileged,” Tom said, thinking: Jeanine Thielman, what makes her a part of this stuff?

“Do you know what some people have reported of that experience?”

“I don’t want to know,” Tom said.

“They felt they were moving down a long tunnel in darkness. At the end of the tunnel was a white light. They report a sense of peace and happiness, even joy—”

Tom felt as though his heart might explode, as though everything in his body had misfired at once. He literally could not see for a moment. He tried to stand up, but none of his muscles obeyed him. He could not draw breath. As soon as he became aware that he was blind, he could see again, but panic still surged through his body. It was as if he had been blown apart into scattered atoms and then reassembled.

“Tom, you are a child of the night,” von Heilitz said.

The words triggered something new in him. Above him Tom saw the vault of the night sky, as if the roof had been lifted off the house. Only a few widely scattered stars pierced the endless blackness. Tom remembered Hattie Bascombe saying, “The world is half night.” Layer after layer of night, layer after layer of stars and darkness.

He said, “No more, I can’t take any more of this—” He looked at his body, arranged loosely in Lamont von Heilitz’s leather chair. It was the body of a stranger. His legs looked impossibly long.

“I just wanted you to know that you have all of that inside you,” the old man said. “Whatever it is—pain, terror, wonder too.”

Tom smelled gunpowder, then realized he was smelling himself. He felt that if he started, he would never stop crying.

The old man smiled at him. “What do you think you were doing on that day? Way out on the far west end?”

“I had a friend in Elm Cove. I guess I was going there.” It sounded false the instant he said it.

For a moment neither spoke.

“I can remember this feeling—of having to get somewhere.”

Von Heilitz said, “There.”

“Yes. There.”

“Have you ever been back to the Goethe Park area?”

“Once. I almost threw up. I couldn’t stay there—anywhere around there. It was that day I saw you.”

He was struck by the way the Shadow was looking at him—as if he were figuring out a thousand different things at once.

He fought to recover himself. “Could I ask you something about Jeanine Thielman?” he asked.

“You’d better.”

“This sounds kind of stupid—probably I just forgot something.”

“Ask me anyhow.”

“You said that Arthur Thielman left the gun on a table near the dock, and that Anton Goetz picked it up and shot Jeanine in the back of the head from thirty feet away. How did Goetz know that the gun pulled to the left? You can’t tell that just by looking at a gun, can you?”

Von Heilitz lowered his legs and leaned forward over the table, extending his hand. He gave Tom’s hand a surprisingly firm grip, and laughed out loud.

“So I didn’t miss anything?”

Von Heilitz was still pumping his hand. “Nothing at all. In fact, you saw what was missing.” He released Tom’s hand and leaned back, placing his hands on his knees. “Goetz knew that the gun pulled to the left because he took two shots. The first one hit the Thielman lodge. Goetz corrected instantly, and hit her with the second. I dug the first bullet out of the lodge myself.”

“So you knew where Goetz had been standing. You figured out where the pistol had to be by backtracking from the bullet. Like with Hasselgard’s car.”

Von Heilitz smiled and shook his head.

“There were spent cartridges under the table.”

“There were no spent cartridges.”

“You saw it happen,” Tom said. “No. You saw the gun on the table.” He thought about this. “No. I can’t figure it out.”

“You were close. Another summer resident of Eagle Lake saw the gun on the table that evening. A single man in his mid-twenties, like myself. A widower with a young daughter, living alone in his family’s lodge. He left Eagle Lake the morning after Jeanine was killed.”