Mystery. Part 28

"They don't tell me where they go," the waiter said, and placed the enormous menu in his hands.

After lunch, he took a novel out on the deck, and had just sat down on one of the hard wooden chairs when he heard the telephone ringing in his grandfather's study.

"So what happened?" Sarah asked him.

"Where were you?" he asked back. "I called your place, but n.o.body answered. There wasn't even anybody at the club."

"We all went to the White Bear. Ralph and Katinka were very disgruntled all through lunch, though they did their best not to show it, and Buddy told me that you said he was spoiled, lazy, and indifferent. Did you say that?"

"I couldn't help it," Tom said.

"You got two out of three. He's certainly spoiled and lazy, but I wouldn't call him indifferent."

"Did he yell at you?"

"He sort of yelled in whispers. He didn't want his parents to hear. I was at a table with him and Kip, and my parents were at another table with his parents and his aunt. Buddy usually watches himself around his parents, and I think he has to be on his good manners at the White Bear for a while."

"What did you tell him the other night?"

"Just that I wanted him to stop a.s.suming that we were going to get married. I said that I liked you, too, and I said I wasn't sure I wanted to always live on Mill Walk. It was pretty uncomfortable."

"You didn't break off with him."

"I have to spend the whole summer here, Tom. I thought I was pretty good, actually. I told him that being a Redwing is a career, and I wasn't sure it was the one I wanted."

"I told him he should decide that you're not good enough for him."

"I like that," she said, meaning she did not. "Anyhow, will you please please tell me what happened, please?" tell me what happened, please?"

He described as much as he could remember of the scene between himself and Buddy, except for the way it ended.

"Well, well. The compound is almost empty right now. So if you want to see where the bodyguards live, this is the time. The only person in the place should be Aunt Kate, and she takes a long nap every afternoon."

Tom said he'd meet her in front of her lodge.

"I suppose I must be crazy," she said, and hung up.

She stepped out from between the oaks as he walked toward her lodge. He went down the track to join her. She pulled him back between the big oaks and tilted her face toward his and gave him a long kiss. "I had to get out. My mother knows that something went wrong between Buddy and me, and I couldn't stand the interrogation anymore. I called you when she went upstairs to wash her hair."

They walked across the narrow parking area in front of the compound, and Sarah opened the door in the tall fence. "Here we go."

Gravel paths led to three highly ornamented wooden houses with long porches, gables, and dormer windows on the third floor. The houses were so perfectly maintained they looked artificial. Banks of flowers and bright green gra.s.s grew between the gravel paths. The whole thing looked like a toyland, like Disneyland. "Well, here you are," Sarah said. "This is it. The holy of holies. The one on Mill Walk looks just like it, except the houses are newer and they're not all alike."

Sarah led him up the steps of the lodge nearest the compound's lakeside wall. "I'd better stay out here in case they come home early," she said. "I'll bang on the door, or something."

"I won't be long," Tom said, and went inside.

The lodge smelled of cigarettes and grease. Discarded clothes and open magazines lay on the floor of the main downstairs room, and the kitchen was a mound of crusty dishes and empty beer bottles. Tom walked up the steps and peered into the bedrooms. Blue jeans, socks, and T-s.h.i.+rts covered the unmade beds and the bare floors. In the largest of the three bedrooms, a portable television and a tape deck stood on a low table. Tom opened the dresser drawers and found underwear, clean white s.h.i.+rts still in the dry cleaner's wrappings, and clean socks. On a shelf in the closet above two grey suits he saw a stack of p.o.r.nographic magazines and, in a row of books about concentration camps, Hitler, n.a.z.is, and famous criminals, four tattered paperback books called The Torturer's Library The Torturer's Library.

Pictures from muscle magazines decorated Nappy's room. Crumpled O Henry and Twinkies wrappers lay around the bed. Robbie's room was a sty of beer bottles, dirty plates, and wadded-up tissues. A cheap portable record player like the one in Gloria Pasmore's room sat on the floor next to a stack of forty-fives and a full-length mirror where Robbie could watch himself pretend to play guitar.

Tom walked downstairs and went outside.

"I never realized that being lookout was such a tricky job," Sarah said. "I'm sure that several birds gave me very suspicious looks. My hands were clenched so tight I practically gave myself bruises bruises. Did you find anything?"

"About what I expected," Tom said. "A lot of Vivaldi records and books by T.S. Eliot. Let's get out of here."

"Now would you mind telling me why you wanted to do this?"

"I was looking for-"

A car crunched onto the gravel of the little parking area beyond the fence. Car doors slammed shut. Voices floated toward them. Tom and Sarah were in the middle of the compound, halfway to the gate.

"Whoops," Sarah said.

The door in the fence opened, and Katinka Redwing came through, immediately followed by her husband. Both of them froze at the sight of Tom and Sarah.

"Oh, hi!" Sarah said. "I was just showing Tom what the compound looks like. It's so beautiful, isn't it?"

"Beautiful," Tom said. "So peaceful. I can really see why you love it."

Both Redwings stared at them with implacable faces.

"Well," Sarah said. "Tell Buddy I'm looking forward to our drive this afternoon."

They smiled and walked past the staring Redwings.

Outside the tall fence, Jerry Hasek leaned against the Cadillac, smoking. When Tom and Sarah appeared through the door, he took his cigarette out of his mouth and stared at them and bit his lower lip. His jaws worked as if he were chewing gum.

"See you later, Jerry," Sarah said. She and Tom walked across the gravel, and turned onto the path.

"Yeah," Jerry said. "I'll see you later."

At ten minutes to four Tom was standing back in the trees near the rank of mailboxes, and after a little while a blue and white mail van pulled up before the boxes. Joe Truehart jumped out and began sliding advertising circulars, catalogues, and magazines into the Redwings' boxes. Tom walked out of hiding and gave him another long letter to Lamont von Heilitz. The mailman said he would take care of it, and pushed it into his back pocket. Tom walked back down the long hill and went back to his lodge. He read for half an hour, and then walked over to the Deepdale lodge to see Kate Redwing.

Buzz opened the door and said, "Come on in!" His bathing suit was only a narrow strip of blue cloth, and his skin glistened with oil. A red polka dot bandanna was tied around his neck. His perfect teeth shone white. He stepped backwards, and Tom followed him into a long, loftlike room with oatmeal-colored couches and chairs, cut flowers in gla.s.s vases, a piano with framed photographs, and creamy yellow rectangular rugs on the polished wooden floor. A big stone fireplace stood against the back wall. Kate Redwing stood up and smiled from one end of the long couch facing him.

"Kate is having a cup of tea, would you care for one? I can give you a c.o.ke or a 7-Up, or any kind of drink, if you'd prefer."

"Tea would be great," Tom said.

"Roddy and I are working on our tans out on the deck, and Kate says the two of you want to talk about graves and worms and epitaphs, so I'll just give you your tea and go back out, if that's all right." He put his hands on his narrow hips and gave Tom a humorous inspection. "Have you completely recovered from your tumble the other day? You look as if you have."

"I think it's been one long tumble ever since," Tom said, and Buzz laughed and walked into the kitchen to boil up the water.

"Come sit next to me," Kate said. "Are you really all right?"

He walked around to her, nodding. Through the window wall on the far end of the room, Tom waved to Roddy Deepdale, who was lying back in a recliner. He wore the same nearly nonexistent kind of bathing suit as Buzz, and his chest and shoulders were turning a smooth, uniform gold. A brown plastic bottle of suntan lotion and a pile of books stood on the deck beside the recliner. Roddy propped himself up on one elbow and waved back. The kettle whistled in the kitchen.

"You've succeeded in stirring up my nephew and his wife, at any rate," Kate said. "There was some kind of unpleasantness between you and Buddy this morning, wasn't there? Of course everybody's terribly tactful, but I don't suppose you'll be able to keep me entertained at any more family dinners."

Tom said she probably wouldn't be able to entertain him, either.

"Maybe not at dinners, anyhow," she said, and he knew that this wonderful old woman was offering him her friends.h.i.+p. He said he supposed there were other times of the day.

"Well, exactly. Ralph doesn't think much of Roddy and Buzz either, but we never saw any reason for that to interfere with our enjoyment of each other. The world doesn't run according to the rules of a few Redwings." She patted his hand. "I gather that all this has to do with that beautiful young Spence girl. Of course I think it would be a shame for her to get engaged to my grand-nephew. On top of everything else, she's far too young. Ralph and Katinka will get over the shock sooner than you think, and before you know it Buddy will discover some other girl who will turn out to be much more appropriate. You should just be discreet and get as much out of this summer as you can."

"So that's what this talk is all about," Buzz said, returning with a steaming cup of tea. "Now I know I'd better get out of the way!" He set the tea down on the gla.s.s coffee table before them, and padded out through a side door. A minute later, he appeared on the deck, moving past the window toward a lounge chair.

"Does Buzz have a job?" Tom asked.

"He's a doctor." Kate Redwing smiled at him. "An excellent pediatrician, I hear. He had some trouble at the start of his career, when he worked with an important doctor, and he's had some rough patches, but he's doing very well now." She frowned into her cup, and then looked at him with bright lively eyes. "But that's not what you wanted to talk to me about. Weren't you interested in what happened during my first summer up here? When that poor woman was killed?"

"Didn't you and your fiance find her body?" Tom asked.

"I suspect you know very well we did." She smiled at him again. "I wonder why you want to know about all this."

"Well," Tom said, "my mother got much worse during that summer, and I'm sure the murder had a lot to do with the trouble she had."

"Ah," said the old woman.

"And I've been talking about Mrs. Thielman's murder with Lamont von Heilitz ever since I met him."

"So he got you interested in it."

"I guess you could say that. I think there's a lot that's still unknown, or that was never explained, and the more I can find out..." He let the sentence go unfinished. "Maybe I'm not saying this right, but I'm interested in Mill Walk, and that murder involved a whole lot of important people who ran things on the island."

"I'm certainly glad not to be having this conversation at the compound. But I'll confess that it's fascinating. Do you really think that Lamont might have missed something?"

"Probably nothing important." He looked at the fireplace and saw the bare, slightly paler rectangle spot on the creamy wall above it where the portrait had hung.

"Well, I can tell you one thing. Everything about a murder is probably surprising, because all of a sudden you learn about other people's secrets, but it really was a surprise to me that Jeanine Thielman had been seeing Anton Goetz. And if it hadn't been for those curtains-the curtains that were wrapped around her when Jonathan found her underwater-I don't know if I would have believed that he had anything to do with it. That and the fact that he killed himself, of course. But the curtains were really d.a.m.ning, I thought."

"He never expected them to be found," Tom said.

"The lake is surprisingly deep up at that end, and there's a big drop-off where the reeds end. It was just his bad luck that my line snagged, and Jonathan dove underwater and saw something that looked funny to him."

"You didn't think Goetz was her type?"

"Anton Goetz! He seemed so obvious obvious. He wanted to project a sort of terribly romantic masculine toughness, you know, always smoking and squinting his eyes, that sort of thing. That war injury helped. He was an excellent shot, by the way. A real marksman. Under the circ.u.mstances, that's a little ghoulish, isn't it? And he was supposed to own a rather unsavory hotel. Twenty years after all this happened, I thought of Anton Goetz when I saw Casablanca Casablanca. Humphrey Bogart and Rick's Cafe Americain. Except that Goetz had one of those kind of b.u.t.tery German accents."

"He doesn't sound much like an accountant," Tom said.

"Oh, he couldn't have been an accountant." She looked to see if he were teasing. "That's impossible. Do you remember when several people were killed in his hotel? The Alvin? The Albert?"

"The St. Alwyn," Tom said.

"That's it. There was a prost.i.tute, and a musician, I think, and a group of other people? And there was something about the words 'blue rose'? And a detective on Mill Walk killed himself? Being here with Roddy and Buzz is what reminds me of all that, I guess. Anyhow, when I heard about it from my relatives on Mill Walk, I thought it was like Anton Goetz to own a hotel where something like that could happen. He couldn't have been an accountant. Could he?"

"According to Sarah's father, he was," Tom said. "He saw Goetz's name in the corporate ledgers. But it was actually my grandfather who owned the St. Alwyn."

She looked at him fixedly for a second, forgetting about the cup of tea she had lifted from its saucer. "Well now, that's very interesting. That explains something. On the night that it turned out that Jeanine Thielman disappeared, Jonathan and I had dinner with all the Redwings, as we did most of those nights. I was supposed to get to know his uncle Maxwell and the rest and, of course, they were supposed to give me a good looking over, which is certainly what they did did. Those dinners got to be a little nerve-wracking, but I soldiered through, which is what we did in those days. Anyhow, on that night, Jon and I stayed after everyone else went back to the compound. We wanted to be by ourselves, and I asked him if we had to stay the entire summer. Jonathan thought we should, though he was very sympathetic. We didn't have an argument, but we went to and fro for a long time. At one point, I walked away from him and went to the balcony at the front of the club that overlooks the entrance. And I saw your grandfather talking with Anton Goetz."

She looked down and noticed the cup in her hand. She replaced it on the saucer and folded her hands on her lap. "Well, I was kind of startled, I suppose. I didn't know they knew each other that well-they weren't each other's sort at all. Of course I didn't think that Mr. Goetz and Mrs. Thielman were each other's sorts either, and it turned out they were were. During the day, I'd never seen Glen and Anton Goetz do more than nod to each other. And there they were, having this intense conversation. They were each leaning on something-Anton Goetz on his cane and your grandfather on that umbrella he always carried. I guess so he could hit hit somebody with it if he got mad." somebody with it if he got mad."

"Did it look like they were arguing?"

"I wouldn't say so, no. What struck me at the time was that Glen had left Gloria alone in their lodge. At night. And Glen never left Gloria alone, especially at night. He was a very thoughtful father."

Tom nodded. "Goetz always carried a cane?"

"He needed it to stand up. One of his legs was almost useless. He could walk, but only with a p.r.o.nounced limp. The limp rather suited him-it went with his being such a good shot. It added to his aura." aura."

"He couldn't run?"

Kate smiled. "Oh, my goodness, run? He would have fallen splat on his face. He wasn't the kind of man you could imagine running, anyhow." She looked at him with a new understanding clear in her intelligent face. "Did someone tell you that they saw him running? They're nothing but a liar, if they did."

"No, it wasn't that, exactly," Tom said. "My mother saw a man running through the woods on the night Mrs. Thielman was killed, and I thought it had to be Goetz."

"It could have been almost anybody but but him." him."

Out on the deck, Roddy Deepdale stood up and stretched. He picked up his books and disappeared from view for a moment before coming in the side door. Buzz followed him a moment later.

"Anybody for a drink before we get ready to go over to the club?" Roddy said. He smiled brilliantly, and went into his bedroom to put on a s.h.i.+rt.

"Don't you wish we had Lamont von Heilitz here, so we could ask him to sort of explain everything?" Kate said. "I'm sure he could do it."

"Did Roddy say something about a drink?" Buzz asked, coming in the side door.

"Maybe a little one," Kate said. "Everybody over there watches me so carefully, I think they're afraid I'm going to get maudlin."

"I'll get maudlin for you," Buzz said. "I have only another week of lying around on decks and getting tan before I have to go back to St. Mary Nieves."

Tom stayed another half hour. He learned that the Christopher who had said the wicked thing to Roddy Deepdale was Christopher Isherwood, and then had a surprisingly good time while they all talked about Mr. Norris Changes Trains Mr. Norris Changes Trains and and Goodbye to Berlin Goodbye to Berlin and their author, whom Roddy and Buzz considered a cherished friend. It was the first time in his life he had had such a conversation with any adults, and the first proof he'd ever had that literate conversation was a possibility at Eagle Lake, but he left bothered by the feeling that he had missed something crucial, or failed to ask some important question, during his talk with Kate Redwing. and their author, whom Roddy and Buzz considered a cherished friend. It was the first time in his life he had had such a conversation with any adults, and the first proof he'd ever had that literate conversation was a possibility at Eagle Lake, but he left bothered by the feeling that he had missed something crucial, or failed to ask some important question, during his talk with Kate Redwing.

When he got back inside his grandfather's lodge, he tried to write another letter to Lamont von Heilitz, but soon ran dry-he did not really have anything new to tell him, except that he wondered if he should not just go back to Mill Walk and start thinking seriously about becoming an engineer after all. He wondered how his mother was getting on, and if he could do anything to help her if he were at home. Home, just now, did not seem much more homelike than Glendenning Upshaw's lodge.

He took a shower, wrapped a towel around himself, and instead of going immediately back into his bedroom to get dressed, walked past the staircase to Barbara Deane's room. He opened her door and stepped inside the threshold.

It was a neat, almost stripped-down room, two or three times the size of his, with a double bed and a view of the lake through a large window. A half-open door revealed a tiled bathroom floor and the edge of a white tub with claw feet and a drawn shower curtain. The closet doors were shut. A bare desk stood against one wall, and a framed photograph hung above it like an icon. Tom took three steps closer and saw that it was an enlarged photograph of his grandfather, young, his hair slicked back, giving the camera a thousand-candlepower smile that the expression in his eyes made forced and unnatural. He was holding Gloria, four or five years old, in his arms-the chubby, ringleted Gloria Tom had seen in a newspaper photograph. She was smiling as if ordered to smile, and what Tom thought he saw in her face was fear. He stepped nearer and looked more closely, feeling his own vague sorrow tighten itself around him, and saw that it was not fear, but terror so habitual and familiar that even the photographer who had just shouted "Smile!" had not seen it.

Marcello led Tom to the table near the bandstand, dropped the menu in his lap as if he were radioactive, and spun around on his heel to inquire after the Redwings. Buddy scowled, Kip Carson blinked at him through a fog of Baby Dollies, and Ralph and Katinka never saw him at all. Aunt Kate's back was to him, and Sarah Spence sat a mile away, at one of the tables closest to the bar. Mrs. Spence gave him one obsidian glance, then ostentatiously ignored him and spoke in a high-pitched voice that was supposed to show what a good time she was having. Occasional words floated to Tom: trout, water skis, relaxed trout, water skis, relaxed. Sarah turned on her chair to send him a fellow-prisoner look, but her mother snapped her back with a sharp word. Neil Langenheim barely nodded at Tom-he sat upright on his chair, tucked in his chin, and despite the red raw skin on his nose and forehead, looked as rigid and contained as he did on Mill Walk. Only Roddy and Buzz were friendly, but they talked without a pause, in a way that suggested that this night's conversation was one segment of a lifelong dialogue that both of them found amusing and engrossing. They were the best couple in the room. Tom sat at his table and read, wondering how he would get through the rest of the summer.

The Langenheims left; the Spences bustled Sarah away; Roddy and Buzz left. Ralph Redwing glanced sideways at Tom, frozen-faced. Tom closed the Agatha Christie book, signed the check the elderly waiter slid on a corner of the table, and walked out of the dining room with the back of his neck tingling.