Mystery

Glendenning Upshaw had married an uneducated foreign woman much older than himself, pushed her into class-conscious, snobbish, Anglophile Mill Walk, and almost immediately began being unfaithful to her.

The whiff of a conviction came to Tom from the old newspapers: that his grandfather had been just as comfortable after his wife’s death as before it. He had everything the way he wanted it: his business—his quasi-secret partnership with Maxwell Redwing, his first building contracts—his daughter, his privacy, the house on Eastern Shore Road.

Samuel Larabee Hamilton had turned up at Eagle Lake shortly after the discovery of Magda’s body. The body had been pulled up with a drag after five days in the water, and the metal hooks of the drag, the rocks on the bottom of the lake, and the fish had all left their marks. The editor had thought that not all the wounds visible on the body had been due to these causes. What outraged him was that the body had been cremated after a perfunctory autopsy, and what looked at the least like a suicide had been whitewashed as an accidental death. Island justice; thugs in the backyard.

A week after Magda Upshaw’s ashes had been returned to her parents, the management of the Eagle Lake clubhouse had replaced every waiter, busboy, cook, and bartender in the building with men from Chicago. No clubhouse employee would telephone the fractious local editor if another member should die under circumstances that might be misunderstood.

Not long after, Hamilton learned that gangsters were buying cabins and hunting lodges in the county, and he was off on another crusade.

In the next volume, Tom reread the accounts of Jeanine Thielman’s death he had already seen at Lamont von Heilitz’s house. MILLIONAIRE SUMMER RESIDENT DISAPPEARS FROM HOME. JEANINE THIELMAN FOUND IN LAKE. LOCAL MAN CHARGED WITH THIELMAN MURDER. MYSTERY RESOLVED IN TRAGEDY. Pictures of Mrs. Thielman, Minor Truehart, Lamont von Heilitz, Anton Goetz. What Tom had not understood, reading over his neighbor’s shoulder, was how rapturously S.L.H. had greeted the appearance of Lamont von Heilitz. The Shadow was not only a celebrity, he was a hero. His investigation had saved an innocent local man, and rescued the reputation of the town of Eagle Lake in a way that might have been calculated to sell the maximum number of newspapers. He was the top: he was the Louvre Museum, the Coliseum, he was Mickey Mouse. He was just what S.L.H. had been waiting for.

Hamilton had sponsored a Lamont von Heilitz day; he had published the Shadow’s opinions on great unsolved mysteries of the past; he had run a column that invited people to ask the famous detective whatever they most wanted to know about him; and the reclusive detective had submitted to both the Ionization and the assault on his privacy. He had shaken hundreds of hands, had volunteered his favorite color (cobalt blue), music (a dead heat between Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Haydn’s The Creation), tailor (Huntsman’s of Savile Row), novel (The Golden Bowl), and city (New York). He felt that good detectives were not born, like good artists, nor made, like good soldiers, but were produced by a combination of the two.

Tom searched the more recent volumes for articles about burglaries and break-ins around Eagle Lake. He learned which houses had been burgled and what had been stolen—a Harmon Karden amplifier and a Technics turntable here, a jade ring and Kerman rug there, television sets, musical instruments, paintings, antique furniture, prescription drugs, clothes, cash, anything that might have a resale value. The break-ins began three years before, in July, and took place between June and September; two dogs besides Barbara Deane’s had been killed, both of them family pets. The burglars had begun with the houses of summer residents, but last year had struck several homes in Eagle Lake that belonged to full-time residents. Chet Hamilton’s series elaborately restated the ideas he had described to Tom, and implied that wealthy college-age children of summer residents were committing the crimes.