Mystery. Part 34

"What's he talking about? All that c.r.a.p he wrote?"

Tom began looking out of his window. The car was creeping up Main Street in heavy traffic, and sunburned people in T-s.h.i.+rts and visored caps filled the sidewalks. They pa.s.sed Maple Street, which was wrong. Ahead he saw Tamarack Street, also wrong. "It started with an S. Think of street names that could start with the letter S."

"Suspicious Street."

"s.h.i.+thole Street."

"That sounded just like Buddy."

"Street names!"

"Satyriasis Street. Scintillation Street. Sevens! Where I live!"

"I give up," Fritz said.

"Season Street."

"Ah," Tom said, and kissed her.

"I got it?"

"Yes," he said, and kissed her again. "You're brilliant."

"It was really Season Street?"

"It was Summers Street. Now all we have to do is find it."

Fritz protested that he could not find a street in a town he had never seen before, and Tom said that it was a small town, all they had to do was drive around for a while and they would run right into it.

"What's this about, anyhow?"

"I'll tell you after we find the place. If I'm right, that is."

"Don't you get the feeling that he's right?" Sarah said.

"No. I get the feeling I'm going to be sorry I'm doing this."

"You'll be a hero, Fritz," Tom said. "Wait. Slow down."

Tom had seen the newspaper editor walking up the sidewalk on his side of the street, and he put his head through the window. "Mr. Hamilton! Mr. Hamilton!"

Chet Hamilton looked over his shoulder, then looked across the street. Tom called his name again and waved, and the editor saw him and waved back. "How's the research going? You having a good summer?"

"Fine," Tom yelled. "Can you tell us how to find Summers Street?"

"Summers Street? Let's see. It's a little ways out of town. Just keep on going straight past town hall, take the first right, the second left, go over the railroad tracks, pa.s.s the Authentic Indian Settlement, and you'll run right into it. It's about four, five miles." He looked at Tom curiously, as did a number of other people on the sidewalk. "There's not much out there."

Tom thanked him and pulled himself back into the car. "You got that?" he asked Fritz.

"First right past the town hall, second left, railroad tracks, Indians," Sarah said. "What are we supposed to find, once we get there?"

"A whole lot of stolen property," Tom said.

"What!" Fritz screamed. Fritz screamed.

"That's my boy," Sarah said.

"What stolen property?" Fritz demanded to know.

Tom told him about the burglaries that had been taking place around Eagle Lake and other resort towns over the past few years. "If you walk away from people's houses with that much stuff, you need a place to store it until you get it to whoever you know who buys it from you. I think they must have to go a long way to get rid of it, and they can't get away all that often, so they need a big place."

They drove past the town hall and the police station, past the signs at the edge of town, and Sarah said, "Here's the first right."

Fritz hauled on the wheel, and turned into a two-lane blacktop road. At first they drove past tarpaper shacks on lawns littered with bald tires and junked cars. FREE PUPPIES FREE PUPPIES, read rain-streaked lettering on a crude sign. The shacks grew more widely s.p.a.ced, and the land stayed empty. Narrow trees stood at the edge of a muddy field. Far off, a stooped figure moved toward a farmhouse.

"Fritz, your uncle would never buy or rent anything up here-in fact, he enjoys turning down deals, even when they might be good for him, because of the way the local newspaper treated his family."

"Well, here's the first left," Sarah said.

"I see it," Fritz grumbled, and turned into another two-lane blacktop road. Another sequence of muddy fields, these enclosed by collapsing wooden fences, rolled past them. They pa.s.sed a large white sign reading 2 MILES TO AUTHENTIC MILES TO AUTHENTIC I INDIAN SETTLEMENT.

"So what?" Fritz asked.

"Two years ago, the Redwing Holding Company rented a machine shop on Summers Street. I saw it in a column in the Eagle Lake Gazette Eagle Lake Gazette on my first day here." on my first day here."

"A machine shop?" Fritz said.

"It was an empty building-they probably rented it for a hundred dollars a month, or something like that."

"Oh," Sarah said.

Fritz groaned. He put his forehead against the top of the steering wheel. "What am I-what are you trying-"

"It's Jerry," Sarah said, once again arriving instantly at an insight.

"Jerry and his Mends probably didn't know that the paper listed things like that, but they wouldn't have cared even if they did. They knew no Redwing would ever see it. And on the other side, the name protected them. The police would never suspect the Redwing company of being involved in a bunch of crummy burglaries."

A lonely set of train tracks crossed the road, coming from nowhere, going nowhere. The Lincoln b.u.mped over them.

Five hundred yards farther on in an empty field, shabby tepees circled a low windowless building of split logs with a sod roof. The hides of the tepees had split and fallen in, and tall yellow weeds grew in all the open places. No one said anything as they drove past.

After another hundred yards, a road intersected theirs. A green metal street sign, almost surreal in the emptiness, said SUMMERS STREET SUMMERS STREET. The road past the abandoned tourist stop was not identified in any way.

"So where is it?" Fritz asked.

Sarah pointed-far down to the right, almost invisible against a thick wall of trees, a building of concrete blocks painted brown stood at the far end of an empty parking lot.

Fritz turned into Summers Street, and drove reluctantly toward the building. "But why would they do burglaries?" burglaries?"

"They're bored," Tom said. "They like the feeling of having a little edge."

The big car drove into the parking lot. Close up, the machine shop looked like the police station that clung to the side of Eagle Lake's town hall-it needed another building to complete it. Fritz said, "I'm not getting out of the car. In fact, I think we ought to leave right now and go swimming in the lake." He looked at Tom. "I don't like this at all. We shouldn't be doing this."

"They shouldn't be doing it," Tom said. shouldn't be doing it," Tom said.

"Hurry up," Sarah said.

Tom patted her knee, got out of the car, and walked to the front of the machine shop. Above the door was a stenciled sign that said PRYZG.o.dA BROS. TOOL & DIE CO PRYZG.o.dA BROS. TOOL & DIE CO. He leaned forward and peered into a window beside the door. A green chair with padded arms was pushed against one of the walls of an otherwise empty office. A few pieces of paper lay on the floor.

Tom turned around and shrugged. Fritz waved him back to the car, but Tom walked around to the side of the building, where a row of reinforced windows sat high in the wall. Some of the brown paint had separated cleanly from the concrete, and leaned out away from the wall, as stiff as a dried sail. The windows came down to the level of his chin. Tom looked in the first of them and saw only geometrical shadows. Most of the interior was filled with boxes and unidentifiable things stacked on top of the boxes.

Tom put his hands to the sides of his head and bent closer to the window. One of the objects stacked on top of the first row of boxes was faced with brown cloth framed by an inch of dark wood. On top of it, half lost in the darkness at the top of the room, sat another object like like it. Then he recognized them: stereo speakers. Tom turned his head and grinned at Fritz and Sarah, and Fritz swept his hand back toward himself again: Come on! Come on!

Tom moved down to the next window in line, blocked his face with his hands, and leaned forward. Propped against the row of boxes, the faces of Roddy Deepdale and Buzz Laing looked up at him from the chairs in which they had been painted by a man named Don Bachardy. Tom lowered his hands and stepped back from the window, and in that moment, an overweight figure in a grey suit too small to contain a watermelon belly walked around the back of the tall boxes, shaking something in an open cardboard box and peering down into it like a man panning for gold. Tom jumped back from the window, and a row of white rectangles reflected in Nappy's sungla.s.ses as he looked up.

Tom bent beneath the windows and ran toward the car. He threw himself into the open door, and Fritz scattered dirt and stones with the back tires, yelling "They saw you! Dammit!" The car jolted forward. Tom reached for the open door and pulled it shut as they shot out on Summers Street. "Duck," Tom said to Sarah, and she bent forward beneath the dashboard. Tom slid down on the seat and looked out of the back window. Fritz stamped on the accelerator, and the Lincoln's tires squealed on the blacktop. Nappy LaBarre threw open the front door of the building and ran heavily into the parking lot on his short legs. He waved his short thick arms and yelled something. In a second the wall of trees cut him off.

"He saw us," Fritz wailed. "He saw the car! You think he doesn't know who we are? He knows who we are."

"He's alone," Tom said, helping Sarah sit up straight again. "There wasn't any phone in there, I don't think."

"You mean he can't call Jerry," Sarah said.

"I think he was putting some of the stuff in boxes for their next trip," Tom said. "Unless he walks back, he has to wait until Jerry comes by to pick him up."

Fritz turned left on another unmarked road, trying to find his way back to the village and the highway.

"The further adventures of Tom Pasmore," Sarah said.

"I want to say something," Fritz said. "I had nothing to do with this. All I wanted to do was go back to the lake, okay? I never looked in the windows, and I never saw any stolen stuff-I don't even think I saw Nappy."

"Oh, come on," Tom said.

"All I saw was a fat guy."

"Have it your way," Tom said.

"My Uncle Ralph is not just an ordinary guy," said Fritz. "Remember I said that, okay? He is not an ordinary guy."

Fritz drove along the b.u.mpy road, gritting his teeth. He turned right on a three-lane road marked 41 and drove through a section of forest. Thick trees, neither oaks nor maples, but some gnarly black variety Tom did not know, stood at the border of the road, so close together their trunks nearly touched. Fritz ground his teeth, making a sound like a file grating across iron. They burst out into emptiness again.

"I didn't see Nappy," he said.

There was another long term of silence. Fritz came to a crossroads, looked both ways, and turned left again. On both sides muddy-looking fields stretched off to rotting wooden fences like match sticks against the dense forest.

The road went up over a rise and came down on a glossy black four-lane highway across from a sign that said LAKE DEEP-DALE-DEEPDALE ESTATES LAKE DEEP-DALE-DEEPDALE ESTATES. Fritz ground his teeth again, cramped the wheel, and turned in the direction of Eagle Lake.

"I don't know what you're so upset about," Tom said.

"You're right, you don't. You don't have the slightest idea." He turned into the narrow track between the trees that led to the lake, and when they reached the bench, he stopped the car. "This is where we picked you up, and this is where we're dropping you off."

"Are you going to call the police?" Sarah asked Tom.

"Get out of the car if you want to talk like that," Fritz said.

"Don't be a baby," Sarah snapped at him.

"You don't know either, Sarah."

Tom opened the door and got out. He did not close the door. "Of course I'm going to call them," he said to Sarah. "These people have been robbing houses for years." Fritz gunned the engine, and Tom leaned into the car. He looked at Fritz's furious profile. "Fritz, if you knew you had to see someone again, right after you learned something that made you pretty sure they'd committed murder, what would you do? Would you say anything?"

Fritz kept staring straight ahead. His teeth made the file-on-iron sound.

"Would you try to forget about it?"

Sarah gave him an anxious smile. "I'll come over tonight-I'll get put somehow."

Fritz pulled ahead, and Tom waved at Sarah. Fritz pushed the accelerator, and the car left Tom standing on the side of the road. After a couple of seconds, Sarah reached over to close the door. The car picked up speed as it went over the rise, and then it disappeared.

As soon as he got back to the lodge, Tom went into the study and found the number of the Eagle Lake Police Department in the telephone book.

A male voice answered, and Tom asked to speak to Chief Truehart.

"The Chief's out of the office until tonight," said the voice, and Tom saw Spychalla leaning back in his boss's chair, pumping his muscles to make his belt creak.

"Could you give me a time?"

"Who is this?" Spychalla asked.

"I want to give you some information," Tom said. "The stereo equipment and everything else stolen in the burglaries this year is being stored in an old tool and die shop on Summers Street. There's a Polish name over the door."

"Who are you?" Spychalla asked.

"One of the guys is still there, so if you go to Summers Street you can get him."

"I'm unable to respond to anything but emergencies, on account of being alone here, but if you'll leave your name and tell me how you got this information...."

Tom took the phone away from his ear and stared at it in frustration. He heard Spychalla's voice saying, "This is that kid out at Eagle Lake, isn't it? The one who thinks the Chief's mother is a burglar."

He put the phone to his mouth and said, "No, my name is Philip Marlowe."

"Where are you, Mr. Marlowe?"

Tom hung up. He wanted to go upstairs and hide under the bed.

He locked the front door, then walked across the length of the lodge and locked the door to the deck. Then he walked nervously around the sitting room for a time, and when the house made its noises, looked out the front windows to see if Jerry had come up on the porch. He went back into the sitting room and called Lamont von Heilitz, who was not at home.