Mystery

“What do they do for the Redwings?” He remembered something Sarah had said that afternoon. “Oh—they’re bodyguards.”

“I suppose that’s what they’re called.”

“And what about Robyn?”

Von Heilitz smiled and shook his head. “Robyn got a job taking care of a sick old woman. When the old woman died while they were on a trip to the mainland, Robyn inherited her entire estate. The family took her to court on the mainland, but Robyn won the case. Now she’s just spending her money.”

“Hasek recognized me,” Tom said. “That’s why he sent for the Cornerboys. A few days before, he came to our house. He must have tracked down my grandfather—and he must have stopped at a couple of bars too, because he was smashed. Anyhow, he was shouting and throwing rocks, and my grandfather went outside to handle him. I followed him, and Hasek saw me. My grandfather ran him off, and I went back inside, and when Grand-Dad came back he went upstairs. They were all talking about it. I heard my mother screaming, Where did that man come from? What did he want? And my grandfather answered, He came from the general vicinity of 44th and Auer, if you’re interested. As for what he wants, what do you think he wants? He wants more money.”

“And you overheard, and a few days later you went out there—across the island by yourself, at ten years of age. Because you’d heard enough to think that if you went to that place, you’d be able to understand everything. And instead you were almost killed, and wound up in the hospital.”

“And that’s why everybody kept asking me what I was doing out there,” Tom said, and another level of confusion fell away from him. “Why were you at the hospital today?”

“I wanted to see for myself what you learned from Nancy Vetiver. I knew that poor Michael Mendenhall couldn’t have much more time, and I spent a couple of hours a day in the lobby—in the disguise you saw—to see what would happen when he died. And I learned that my impression of David Natchez was correct—he’s a real force for good. That he’s stayed alive all this time means that he’s also a resourceful character. Someday, Tom, we’re going to need that man—and he is going to need us.”

Von Heilitz stood up and pushed his hands into his pockets. He began pacing back and forth between his chair and the table. “Now let me ask you another one. What do you know about Wendell Hasek?”

“He was wounded once,” Tom said. “In a payroll robbery from my grandfather’s company. The robbers were shot to death, but the money was never found.”

Von Heilitz stopped pacing, and fixed his eyes on the Degas painting of a ballet dancer. He seemed to be listening very intently to the music. “And does that remind you of anything?”

Tom nodded. “It reminds me of lots of stuff. Hasselgard. The Treasury money. But what—”

Von Heilitz whipped around to face him. “Wendell Hasek, who was at Eagle Lake the summer Jeanine Thielman was murdered, came to your house looking for your grandfather. He wanted money, or so it seems. We can speculate that he felt he deserved more money for having been wounded in the payroll robbery, even though he had already been given enough to buy a house. When you turn up a short time later, he is anxious enough to send out his son, and to summon his son’s friends, to see what you’re doing there. Doesn’t that suggest that he is concealing something?” He fixed Tom with his eyes.

“Maybe he organized the robbery,” Tom said. “Maybe he was getting money from my grandfather for a deliberate injury.”

“Maybe.” Von Heilitz leaned against the back of his chair, and looked at Tom with the same excitement in his eyes. He was keeping something to himself, Tom understood: Maybe hid another possibility, one he wanted Tom to discover for himself. His next words seemed like a deliberate step away from the unspoken subject. “I want you to watch what is going on around you at Eagle Lake very carefully, and to write me whenever you see anything that strikes you. Don’t just put your letters in your grandfather’s mailbox. Give them to Joe Truehart—Minor’s son. He works for the Eagle Lake post office, and he remembers what I did for his father. But don’t let anybody see you talking to him. You can’t take any unnecessary risks.”

“All right,” Tom said. “But what kind of risks could there be?”

“Well, things are reaching a certain pitch,” von Heilitz said. “You may stir up something just by being there. At the very least, you have to expect that Jerry Hasek and his friends might recognize you. They’ll certainly recognize your name—they must have thought they killed you. If they were helping Wendell Hasek hide something seven years ago, it or its traces may still be hidden.”

“The money?”

“When I watched his house from the top floor of my place on Calle Burleigh, twice I saw a car pull up in front of Hasek’s. A man carrying a briefcase got out and was let into the house. The second time it was a different car, and a different man. Hasek went out his back door, unlocked a shed in his back garden, and came back with small packages in his hands. His visitors left, still carrying their briefcases.”

“Why did he give the money away?”

“Payoffs.” Von Heilitz raised his shoulders, as if to say: What else? “Certainly the police got some of that money, but who else did is a matter we can’t answer yet.”

“He was protecting stolen money,” Tom said.

“The payroll money.” And here again was the flavor of the unspoken subject. The old man lowered his head and seemed to examine his gloved hands, which rested on the curved back of the chair. “One thing you told me is very sinister, and another puts several crucial pieces into the whole puzzle of Eagle Lake. And do you know what I realized tonight? What only my vanity kept me from seeing before this?”

Too agitated to remain seated, von Heilitz had jumped to his feet in the middle of this surprising announcement, and was now pacing behind the chair again.

“What?” Tom said, alarmed.

“That I need you more than you need me!” He stopped, whirled to face Tom, and threw out his arms. His handsome old face blazed with so many contradictory feelings—astonishment, outrage, self-conscious despair, also a sort of goofy pleasure—that Tom smiled at this display. “It’s true! It’s absolutely true!” He lowered his arms theatrically. “All of this—this immense case, absolutely depends on you, Tom. It’s probably the last, and certainly the most important, thing like it that I’ll ever work on, it’s the culmination of my life, and here it is the first real thing you’ve ever done, and without you I’d still be pasting clippings in my journals, wondering when I’d get what I needed to show my hand. I’m upstaged at my own final bow!” He laughed, and turned to the room, asking it to witness his comeuppance. He laughed again, with real happiness.

Von Heilitz put his hands in the small of his back and arched himself backwards. He sighed, and his hair dripped over his collar. “Ah, what’s to become of us?”

He moved slowly around the chair and the table and sat beside Tom on the couch. He patted him on the back, twice. “Well, if we knew that, there’d be no sense in going on, would there?”

Von Heilitz propped his feet on the edge of the table, and Tom did the same. For a moment they sat in the identical posture, as relaxed as a pair of twins.

“Can I ask you something?” Tom finally said.

“Anything at all.”

“What did I tell you that put another piece of the puzzle in place?”

“That your grandfather took your mother to a house owned by Barbara Deane for a few days, immediately after Jeanine Thielman’s death. And that your mother saw a man running into the woods.”

“She didn’t recognize him.”

“No. Or she did, but didn’t want to, and told herself she didn’t. There would have been few men up there that your mother didn’t know.”

“And what was the sinister thing I told you?”

“That Ralph Redwing paid a flattering call on your father.” Von Heilitz lowered his legs and sat up straight. “I find that distressing, all things considered.” He stood up decisively, and Tom did the same, wondering what was coming next. Von Heilitz looked at him in a way that was brimming with unspoken speech: but unlike Victor Pasmore, he did not utter the words that had come to him.

“You’d better be off,” von Heilitz said instead. “It’s getting late, and we don’t want you to have to answer any awkward questions.”

They began to move through the files and other clutter to the door. For a moment, two months seemed almost dangerously long, and Tom wondered if he would ever see this room again.