Mystery

He reached out and wrapped his fingers around the old man’s linked hands.

“Let me tell you about Jerry Hasek and Robbie Wintergreen.” Von Heilitz gripped Tom’s fingers in his gloved hands: it was a gesture of reassurance, but somehow of reassurance in spite of everything, and Tom felt an unhappy wariness awaken in him. “They stole a car on Main Street, and drove it into an embankment outside Grand Forks. A witness said he saw them shouting at each other in the car, and the driver took his hands off the wheel to hit the other man. The car hit the embankment, and both of them almost went through the windshield. They’re being held in the jail here in town.”

“That’s Jerry,” Tom said.

“All this happened about eight o’clock yesterday night.”

“No, it couldn’t have. It must have been today,” Tom said. “Otherwise, they couldn’t have …”

“They didn’t,” von Heilitz said, and squeezed Tom’s hand. “Jerry didn’t set the fire. I don’t think Jerry shot at you, either.”

He let go of Tom’s hand and stood up. “I’ll be back in under an hour. Remember, you’re posthumous now, for a day or two. Tim Truehart knows you’re alive, but I was able to persuade him not to tell anyone until the time is right.”

“But the hospital—”

“I gave your name as Thomas von Heilitz,” the old man said.

He left the room, and for a time Tom did nothing but stare at the wall. Remember, you’re posthumous now. The second shift nurse bustled into the room carrying a tray, smiled briskly at him, looked at his chart, and said, “I bet we’re happy to be going home, aren’t we?” She was a stout red-haired woman with orange eyebrows and two small protuberant growths on the right side of her face, and she gave him a comic frown when he did not respond. “Aren’t you going to give me a smile, honey?”

He would have spoken to her, but he could not find a single thing to say.

“Well, maybe we like it here,” she said. The nurse put down the chart and came up the side of the bed. A single long hypodermic needle, a cotton swab, and a brown bottle of alcohol lay on the tray. “Can you roll over for me? This is our last injection of antibiotics before we go home.”

“The parting shot,” Tom said. He rolled over, and the nurse separated the back of his robe. The alcohol chilled a stripe on his left buttock, as if a fresh layer of skin had been exposed to the air; the needle punched into him and lingered; another cold swipe of alcohol.

“Your grandfather looks so distinguished,” the nurse said. “Is he in the theater?”

Tom said nothing. The nurse switched on the television set before she left the room, not with the remote but by reaching up and twisting the ON button, almost brutally, as if it were a duty he had neglected.

As soon as she was out of the room, Tom pointed the remote at the blaring set and zapped it.

“Up here, our victims aren’t usually so well dressed,” said Tim Truehart, standing in his leather jacket by the open door of an old blue Dodge as Tom and von Heilitz came out of the hospital’s front entrance.

“I’m not usually so well dressed,” Tom said, looking down at the suit the old man had brought for him. It was a grey and blue windowpane plaid, with the label of a London tailor, and except for being a little tight across the shoulders, fit him better than any of his own suits. Von Heilitz had also loaned him a white shirt, a dark blue figured tie, and a pair of well-shined black shoes, also his size, that felt stiff and resentful on his feet. Tom had expected the detective to show up with cheap new clothes, not his own, and when he had looked at himself in the mirror that hung in his room’s tiny bathroom, he had seen a well-dressed stranger in his mid- twenties. The stranger had stubby eyelashes and only a few bristles for eyebrows. The stranger’s face looked peeled. If he had seen himself in the dark, he would have thought he was Lamont von Heilitz.

Tom got in the back seat with the suitcases, and von Heilitz sat in the front with Truehart.

“I don’t suppose you saw anybody around your lodge before the fire started,” the policeman said.

“I didn’t even know that Barbara Deane was there.”

“The fire was started at both the front and the back of the lodge at roughly the same time—it wouldn’t take more than a cup of gasoline and a match to get those old places going.” Truehart sounded as if he were talking to himself. “So we know Tom didn’t do it accidentally, and it didn’t start in the kitchen, or anything like that. That fire was deliberately set.”

For an instant Tom wished he were back in his bed in the kindergarten room, safe with his injections of antibiotics and the perpetual television.

Von Heilitz said, “Somewhere in Eagle Lake or Grand Forks, there’s a man who is down on his luck. He probably has a prison record. He will do certain things for money. He lives off in the woods, and he doesn’t have too many friends. Jerry Hasek learned this man’s name by asking around in bars and making a few telephone calls. You ought to be able to do the same.”

“There’s probably fifty guys like that around here,” Truehart said. “I’m not a famous private detective, Lamont, I’m a small-town Chief of Police. I don’t usually play games like this, and Myron Spychalla is after my job. I’d hate to have to go to work.”

Tom could not stop himself from yawning.

“You have Nappy LaBarre and Robbie Wintergreen in your jail,” von Heilitz said. “That’s all you really need. I think one of them will be happy to work out a little trade.”

“If they know about it.”

“Sure,” von Heilitz said. “If they know about it. I’m not telling you anything new. I’m not a famous private detective, either. I’m a retired old man who has the leisure to sit back and watch things happen.”

“And that’s what you were doing up here, I guess.” They passed the airport sign, and Truehart flicked on his turn signal.

“Semi-retired,” von Heilitz said, and the two men grinned at each other.

“All right,” said Truehart, “but this boy’s mother is going to go through hell when she hears that her son died in a fire. That’s the part that bothers me.”

“She won’t.”

“She won’t what?”

“Won’t hear. Her husband is off in Alabama for a couple of weeks, and she never watches television or reads the papers. She’s an invalid. If her father finds out somehow, he won’t tell her right away, and maybe he would never tell her. He has a history of protecting her from bad news.”

That was right, Tom realized—if he had died in the fire, he would never have existed. His grandfather would never speak his name, and his mother would be forbidden to mention it. It would be the way his grandfather had wanted it all along. Her and her’s Da.

Tim Truehart pulled up beside a long building with a grey metal skin, and Tom stepped out of the car after the men. The yellow light of a sodium lamp ate into everything like acid. Tom’s hands were sickly yellow, and Lamont von Heilitz’s hair turned a dead yellow-grey. Tom carried one of the old man’s bags around the open front of the long metal building and saw a dismantled airplane on the yellow-grey concrete floor, a glass bubble rearing out of lifeless canvas, and an engine in parts like a diagrammed sentence, bolts like punctuation marks, the exclamation point of the propeller.

Von Heilitz asked him if he were all right.

“Pretty much,” he said.

Truehart’s plane had been pulled to the side of the hangar. The bags went through a narrow opening like an oven door. You climbed on the wing to get into the cockpit, and Tom slipped downwards before Truehart clutched his wrist and pulled him up. He sat in a single back seat, and von Heilitz sat beside the pilot.

The engine sputtered and roared, and the plane rolled forward into the emptiness before lifting into the greater emptiness of the air.

In Minneapolis he trudged down a long hallway lined with shops alongside von Heilitz. People moving the other way cast amused looks at them, an erect old man and a tottering boy without eyelashes dressed like actors on a stage, both of them a head taller than anyone else.