Mystery

From Minneapolis they flew to Houston. Tom awakened once, choking on wood smoke, and saw the dark tubular shape of a jet cabin before him. For a second he thought he was flying toward Eagle Lake again, and fell instantly back into sleep.

Between Houston and Miami Tom came awake with his head on the Shadow’s bony shoulder. He straightened up in his seat and looked across at his father, who slept on, his head tilted and his mouth open. He was breathing deeply and regularly, and his face, smoothed by the darkness of the cabin, was that of a young man.

A stewardess who looked like Sarah Spence’s older sister walked past, looked down, saw that Tom was awake, and knelt beside him with an expectant, curious smile. “The other girls are wondering about something— well, I am too,” she whispered. Her Texas voice put a slow, bottom-heavy spin on every vowel. “Is he somebody famous?”

“He used to be,” Tom said.

In Miami they had to run to their gate, and minutes after they had strapped themselves into their seats, the plane rolled down the runway and picked itself into the air to fly south across hundreds of miles of water to Mill Walk. A group of nuns filled the seats in front of them, and whenever the pilot announced that they were flying over an island, they all crowded into the seats on that side of the plane, to see Puerto Rico and Vieques, and the specks named St. Thomas and Tortola and Virgin Gorda, and the little afterthoughts of Anguilla, St. Martin, Montserrat, and Antigua.

“Am I going to stay with you?” Tom asked.

Another stewardess placed trays with scrambled eggs, bacon, and fried potatoes before them. Von Heilitz made a face and waved his away, but Tom said, “Keep it, I’ll eat that one too,” and the stewardess replaced the tray and gave them the usual curious look. “I love the way you guys dress,” she said.

Tom began devouring his eggs.

“No, I think you shouldn’t,” von Heilitz said. “I don’t think you should go home, either.”

“Then where should I go?”

“The St. Alwyn.” Von Heilitz smiled. “Which Mr. Goetz claimed to own. I’ve already booked you a room, under the name Thomas Lamont. I thought you’d be able to remember that.”

“Why don’t you want me to stay at your place?”

“I thought you’d be safer somewhere else. Besides, the St. Alwyn is an interesting place. Do you know anything about it?”

“Wasn’t there a murder there once?” Tom could remember some story from his childhood—lurid headlines in newspapers his mother had snatched away. Kate Redwing had mentioned it too.

“Two,” von Heilitz said. “In fact, it was probably the most famous murder case in the history of Mill Walk, and I had nothing to do with it at all. A novelist named Timothy Underhill wrote a book called The Divided Man about it—you never read it?”

Tom shook his head.

“I’ll loan it to you. Good book—good fiction—but misguided about the case, exactly in the way that most people were. A suicide was generally taken as a confession. We have about twenty minutes left up in this limbo, why don’t I tell you the story?”

“I think you’d better!”

“The body of a young prostitute was discovered in the alley behind the hotel. Above her body, two words had been chalked on the wall. Blue Rose.”

The nuns in the seats in front of them had ceased talking to each other, and now and then glanced over the top of their seats.

“A week later, a piano player who worked in some of the downtown clubs was found dead in a room at the St. Alwyn. His throat was slit. The murderer had printed the words Blue Rose on the wall above his bed. In the early days, he had played with Glenroy Breakstone and the Targets—the Blue Rose record is a kind of memorial to him.”

Tom remembered his mother and von Heilitz playing the record—the soft, breathy saxophone making compelling music out of the songs mangled by Miss Gonsalves at dancing class.

“So far, the victims were marginal people, half-invisible. The police on Mill Walk couldn’t get excited about a whore and a local jazz musician—it wasn’t as though respectable citizens had been killed. They just went through the motions. It seemed pretty clear that the young man had been killed because he’d witnessed the girl’s murder— even Fulton Bishop could work that one out, because the piano player’s window in the St. Alwyn was on the second floor overlooking the brick alley. A short time after that, a young doctor was attacked, same thing, Blue Rose, but when it turned out that he was homosexual—”

The pilot asked all passengers to fasten their seat belts in preparation for landing on the island of Mill Walk, where the skies were cloudless and the temperatures in the low nineties. The nuns pulled the belts taut and craned their necks.

“Well, Fulton Bishop’s patron, your grandfather, asked that he be assigned to a more salubrious case, and —”

“My grandfather?”

“Oh, Glen was very important to Captain Bishop, still is. Took an interest in his career from the beginning. Anyhow, Bishop was promoted, and a detective named Damrosch got the case. By now it looked like a curse. The Eyewitness was full of it, and the people were in the condition newspapers like to call ‘up in arms.’ What that really means is that they were titillated—they felt a kind of awful fascination. Now Damrosch was a talented detective, but an unstable man. Professionally, he was completely honest, and if he’d been a real straight arrow in every way, he could have gathered a nucleus of other honest policemen around him, the way David Natchez seems to have done. But he was a blackout drinker, he beat people up now and then, he’d had a very troubled youth, and he was a closet homosexual. None of this side of his life emerged until later. But even so, he had no friends in the department, and they gave him the case to make him the scapegoat.”

“What happened?” Tom asked.

“There was another murder. A butcher who lived near the old slave quarter. And when that happened, the case virtually closed itself. No more Blue Rose murders.”

The nuns were listening avidly now, their heads nearly touching in the gap between their seats.

“The butcher had been one of Damrosch’s foster fathers—a violent, abusive man. Worked the boy nearly to death until young Damrosch finally got into the army. Damrosch hated him.”

“But the others—the doctor, and the piano player, and the girl.”

“Damrosch knew two of them. The girl was one of his informants, and he’d had a one-night stand with the piano player.”

“What do you mean, the case virtually closed itself?”

“Damrosch shot himself. At least, it certainly looked that way.”

The plane had been moving steeply down as von Heilitz talked, and now the palm trees and bright length of ocean alongside the runways whizzed and blurred past their windows: the wheels brushed against the ground, and all of the plane’s weight seemed to strain backwards against itself.

A stewardess jumped up and announced over the loudspeaker that passengers were requested to remain in their seats, with seat belts fastened, until the vehicle had stopped moving.

“You could say that his suicide was a sort of wrongful arrest.”

“Where were you during all this?”

“In Cleveland, proving that the Parking Lot Monster was a gentleman named Horace Fetherstone, the regional manager of the Happy Hearts Greeting Card Company.”

The airplane stopped moving, and most of the passengers jumped into the aisle and opened overhead compartments. Tom and the Shadow stayed in their seats, and so did the nuns.

“By the way, was it clear that one of the victims survived? In Underhill’s book they were all killed, but the real case was different. One of them made it. He’d been attacked from behind in the dark, and he didn’t even get a glimpse of his attacker, so he was no use in the case, but he knew enough medicine to stop his bleeding.”

“Medicine?”

“Well, he was a doctor, wasn’t he? You met him this summer,” said von Heilitz. “Nice fellow.” He stood up, stooping, and moved out into the aisle. “Buzz Laing. Did you notice? He always wears something around his