the card into one of his pockets. When he was sure it was safe, he waved to both of them and drove off.
Tom turned around to look up at the tall facade of the hotel. Once it had been pale blue or even white, but the stone had darkened over time. An arch of carved letters over the entrance spelled out its name. Von Heilitz said, “I divided my clothes up between these bags, so why don’t you just take that one and use what’s in it as long as we’re here?”
Tom lifted the heavy bag and followed him into the dark cavern of the St. Alwyn’s lobby. Brass spittoons stood beside heavy furniture, and on the wall opposite the desk three small stained glass windows glowed dark red and blue, like the window on the staircase at Brooks-Lowood School. A pale man with thinning hair and rimless glasses watched them approach.
Von Heilitz checked in as James Cooper of New York City, and Tom filled out a card for Thomas Lamont, also of New York. The clerk took in his bandaged hand and singed eyebrows, and slid two keys across the desk.
“Let’s go upstairs and talk about your grandfather,” von Heilitz said. The clerk’s eyebrows twitched above the rims of his glasses.
Von Heilitz picked up both keys and bent to put his hand on the suitcase he carried in. “Oh,” he said, having seen a stack of
The clerk peeled two newspapers off the neat stack and pushed them forward in exchange for the two quarters von Heilitz slapped down on the counter, presenting them with the headline in the newspaper’s lower right-hand corner.
The old man folded the papers under his arms, and they each picked up a suitcase and went to the elevator.
In Tom’s room, they sat six feet from the bed in high-backed wooden chairs on opposite sides of a dark wooden table on the surface of which a traveling musician had once scratched PD 6/6/58. Tom reached the end of the article, and immediately began reading it again. The headline said: GLENDENNING UPSHAW’S GRANDSON DEAD IN RESORT FIRE.
The fourth-floor room stretched away from him, lighter than the lobby, but at seven in the morning filled with a twilight murk that obscured the painting above the bed. The other copy of the
“When did you first begin to think that my grandfather murdered Jeanine Thielman?” he asked.
Von Heilitz snapped the paper into a neat rectangle, folded it in half, and set it down between them.
“When one of his employees bought the house on The Sevens. How do you feel, Tom? Must be unsettling, reading about your own death.”
“I don’t know. Confused. Tired. I don’t see what we can do. We’re back on Mill Walk, where even the police work for the people like my grandfather.”
“Not all of them. David Natchez is going to help us, and we are going to help him. We have a rare opportunity. One of the men at the center of power on this island committed a murder with his own hands. Your grandfather is not a man to choose to suffer in silence, any more than the man who killed my parents. If he’s charged with murder, he’ll bring the whole house down with him.”
“But how do we get him charged with murder?”
“We get him to confess. Preferably to David Natchez.”
“He’ll never confess.”
“You forget that we have two weapons. One of them is you.”
“What’s the other one?”
“Those notes you saw in Barbara Deane’s room. They weren’t written to her, of course. She found them in the lodge when Glen sent her over to clean up. He probably left them on top of his desk—or maybe he even showed them to her. He knew that she’d sympathize with anyone falsely accused. He might even have said that the notes referred to his wife’s death. I suppose Barbara got a few anonymous notes herself, back when the paper ran those stories about her.”
“But maybe that’s what they were—notes someone sent to her.”
“I don’t think she would have kept them, in that case. She would have burned them. She kept these because they troubled her. I also think she planned to show them to you.”
“Why?”
“Because when you turned up, asking a lot of questions about Jeanine Thielman and Anton Goetz, you stirred up all the doubts she had about your grandfather.
Von Heilitz leaned back against his chair. A white stubble gleamed on his face, and his eyes were far back in his head. “Afterwards, people all over the mainland asked me to solve murders. I didn’t want to admit I was wrong any more than Barbara Deane did. Anton Goetz had put me on my way.”
“Could we reconstruct what really happened?” Tom asked. “There’s a lot I still don’t understand.”
“I bet you do, though.” Von Heilitz straightened up and rubbed a hand over his face. “Let’s say that Glen knew immediately that Jeanine Thielman had written him those notes. She was threatening him with some kind of exposure. She knew something—something really damaging. Her husband was a business rival of Glen’s, and Goetz might have told her more than he should have about your grandfather’s business. Or, as I think, it might have been another kind of exposure. At any rate, she was telling Glen to stop whatever he was doing. He left a noisy party at the club—I think he had set up this meeting for the day before he was supposed to go to Florida, but I don’t think he planned to kill her. He came to her lodge. She was waiting for him on her deck. He confronted her. Whatever she knew about was serious enough to ruin him. Jeanine refused to cooperate with him, or to believe his denials, and turned her back to go inside. He saw the gun her husband left on the table, picked it up, shot and missed, and then he shot again. Everybody else at the lake except Anton Goetz was at the club, having a good time dancing to a loud band—do you know how music carries, up there?”
Tom nodded. “But he was a bad shot. How did he hit her?”
“Because of the gun—he would have missed her both times, if the gun had been accurate. Anyhow, I don’t think he was very far from her. After that, I think he pulled her off the deck so that she wouldn’t bleed all over it. And then—”
He looked up at Tom, who said, “Then he ran across the little path and went through the woods to get Anton Goetz. My mother saw him through the window in her bedroom, but she wasn’t sure who it was—she only had a glimpse of him. Goetz worked for him, but I bet he wasn’t an accountant, any more than Jerry Hasek was a public relations assistant.”
“He would have been a lot more useful than Jerry Hasek. Goetz could go everywhere, he could talk to people and hear things. Goetz did whatever Glen couldn’t afford to be seen doing. Mainly, I suppose he carried money around for Glen and the Redwings. He was a criminal with a smooth facade. I misunderstood him completely, exactly in the way he wanted to be misunderstood.” Von Heilitz gave Tom an angry, self-disgusted look. “Tell me what they did next.”
“My grandfather and Goetz wrapped her body in the old curtains, weighted her down, and rowed her out into the lake after the party broke up at the club. Then they must have washed off the deck. My grandfather carried my mother over to Barbara Deane’s house early the next morning, and then walked back to Goetz’s lodge and spent the next four nights in the guest room, waiting to see what would happen. Goetz brought them meals back from the club. Everybody knew Grand-Dad was planning to go to Florida, and they just assumed that’s where he was.”
