Mystery

prescription drugs, clothes, cash, anything that might have a resale value. The break-ins began three years before, in July, and took place between June and September; two dogs besides Barbara Deane’s had been killed, both of them family pets. The burglars had begun with the houses of summer residents, but last year had struck several homes in Eagle Lake that belonged to full-time residents. Chet Hamilton’s series elaborately restated the ideas he had described to Tom, and implied that wealthy college-age children of summer residents were committing the crimes.

Because he thought that Lamont von Heilitz would have done it, Tom scanned most of the articles and columns in the recent volumes, reading about property transfers, meetings of the town council, arrests for drunken driving and poaching and assault, new appointments to the Chamber of Commerce and the Epworth League, the 4 -H Club trip to Madison, traffic accidents, hit and run accidents, bar brawls and knifings and gunshot wounds, applications for liquor licenses, and a squash of record size grown in the garden of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Vale. He made a few notes on a sheet of his grandfather’s old stationery he had folded into his shirt pocket, left the bound volumes on the desk, turned off the light, and went downstairs, thinking about Magda Upshaw, Barbara Deane’s Chow dog, and the premises of an out-of-business machine shop on Summers Street that had been leased to the Redwing Holding Company.

On the other side of a thick hedge from the Gazette office, the post office looked like a frontier military post in an old John Ford Western. Tom stood on the sidewalk before it, wondering whether he should just put his letter to von Heilitz in the letterbox in front of the post office, or save it to give to the mailman the following day. It was a few minutes past five o’clock, and half of the tourists on Main Street had gone back to their resorts and fishing camps for the American Plan dinner. A powder blue Cadillac with pointed fins swung across the oncoming lanes to make a U-turn too narrow for its wheelbase. Stalled cars behind it honked, and drivers in the opposite lanes slammed on their brakes and skidded to stops. A man in a pink shirt and red shorts opened the door of the Cadillac and fell out into the street. He picked himself up, waved to the shouting people in the other cars, got uncertainly back behind the wheel and slowly backed up without closing his door. A blue mail van squirted around the front of the Cadillac, wove through the waiting cars, and rolled to a stop in front of the post office. A slim black-haired man in a blue postal service shirt and black jeans jumped out of the van and went around to the back to remove a half-filled mailbag.

Tom took a step nearer, and the mailman glanced at him. “A drunk in a Caddy. I hate to say it, but that’s this town in the summer.” He shook his head, shouldered the bag, and began going up the path to the post office.

“Excuse me,” Tom said, “but do you know a man named Joe Truehart?”

The mailman stopped moving and stared at Tom. He looked neither friendly nor unfriendly. He did not even look expectant. After a beat, he lowered the bag from his shoulder. “Yeah, I know Joe Truehart. Pretty damn well. Who wants to know?”

“My name is Tom Pasmore. I just got here from Mill Walk, and a man named Lamont von Heilitz asked me to say hello to him.”

The mailman grinned. “All right. Why didn’t you say that in the first place? You found your man, Tom Pasmore. You tell him I said hello back.” He stuck out a firm brown hand, and Tom shook it.

“Mr. von Heilitz asked me to write to him, and said that I should give my letters to you personally. He didn’t want anybody to see me doing it, but I don’t think anybody’s looking at us.”

Truehart looked over his shoulder, and grinned another brilliant grin. “They’re all still gaping at the accident that didn’t happen. Mr. von Heilitz told me to look out for you. You got a letter already?”

Tom handed it to him, and Truehart folded the letter into his back pocket. “I thought you’d show up near the mailboxes. I generally get out to Eagle Lake a little past four.”

Tom explained that he had come into town before that, and said he would wait near the mailboxes whenever he had letters in the future.

“Don’t wait out in the open,” the mailman said. “Stick yourself back in the woods until you hear my van. If we’re going to do this, let’s do it right.”

They shook hands again, and Tom began to walk down Main Street toward the crowd of people watching the traffic disentangle itself.

Inside the post office, Joe Truehart shouted hello to the postmaster, who was sorting mail at a long table out of sight behind the wall of boxes. He removed Tom’s letter from his hip pocket and reached up to slide it on top of the parcel shelves, where the postmaster, a peppery grey-haired woman named Corky Malleson who was four-foot eleven and a half, would be unable to see it. Then he carried his bag back to the table and began transferring its contents into other bags for the five-thirty pickup. He helped Corky sort the third-class mail and put it into the boxes, and said good-bye to her when she went home to fix dinner for her husband.

Just before the truck arrived from the central district post office, he heard a knock at the side door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY which admitted himself and Corky into the back of the building. He jumped up from Corky’s desk, where he had been adding up figures and filling out forms, and opened the door. He exchanged a few words with the man on the threshold. Joe Truehart reached up for the letter on top of the parcel shelves and passed it to the man. He locked the door when the man left. Then he sat down again to wait for the arrival of the mail truck.

Grinding noises and the screech of metal against metal came up the street. Two blocks down from the post office, the back half of the powder blue Cadillac jutted out into the traffic. People in bright vacation clothes covered the plank sidewalks on both sides of the street, looking as if they were watching a parade.

Tom walked down the planks and saw that the Cadillac had ploughed into the back ends of several cars, crumpling in the first one so badly that it looked as if it had been hit by a truck. The driver had tried to get out of trouble by bulling through the obstructions, and when that had failed, had backed athwart the traffic halfway across the street, and killed his engine. Tom got to the edge of the growing crowd, and began working his way through. The man in the pink shirt got out of the Cadillac and looked around like a trapped bear. People began shouting. A policeman in a tight blue uniform ran down the middle of the street, yelling, “Break it up! Break it up!” He looked like a hero in a movie, with short blond hair and a square perfect jaw. A scrawny old party in a Hawaiian shirt popped out of the crowd around the wrecked cars and began yelling first at the drunk in the pink shirt, then at the policeman. The policeman strode toward him, put his hands on his hips, and spoke. The old man stopped yelling. The drunk drooped over the side of his car. “It’s all over,” the cop said in a loud voice that was not a shout. “Go back home.”

The drunk in the pink shirt straightened up and tried to explain something to the cop. He pointed his finger at the cop’s wide chest. The cop batted his hand away. He stepped to the side and pushed the drunk into the side of his car and grabbed his wrists and handcuffed him. He opened the Cadillac’s rear door. Then he pulled the man backwards, put his right hand on the top of his head, and propelled him into the back of his car.

A few cheers and one or two scattered boos came from the sidewalks. The policeman straightened his hat, tugged on his Sam Browne belt, and swaggered around the car to get in behind the wheel. Gears ground, and the Cadillac drifted backwards. The cop spun the wheel and pulled forward. The battered Cadillac moved down the street at the head of a row of cars and turned left.

The crowd had turned cheerful and gossipy. It had no intention of leaving the scene. Tom stepped around a family of four that were chewing on sandwiches and staring at the cars beginning to pick up speed, and threaded his way between two couples who were arguing about whether to go into the Red Tomahawk for a beer or to buy a new shirt for someone named Teddy. He stepped into an empty space at the edge of the sidewalk and considered moving across the street, where the crowd looked thinner.

Someone whispered, “Watch it, kid,” and before he could look around someone kicked him hard in his left ankle and someone else banged him in the back and shoved him into the traffic.

His arms flew out before him, and he staggered a few steps before his ankle began to melt. Screams and shouts came from the sidewalk. Horns blew. His heart stopped beating. A man and a woman with wide eyes and