Mystery

“Well, maybe we like it here,” she said. The nurse put down the chart and came up the side of the bed. A single long hypodermic needle, a cotton swab, and a brown bottle of alcohol lay on the tray. “Can you roll over for me? This is our last injection of antibiotics before we go home.”

“The parting shot,” Tom said. He rolled over, and the nurse separated the back of his robe. The alcohol chilled a stripe on his left buttock, as if a fresh layer of skin had been exposed to the air; the needle punched into him and lingered; another cold swipe of alcohol.

“Your grandfather looks so distinguished,” the nurse said. “Is he in the theater?”

Tom said nothing. The nurse switched on the television set before she left the room, not with the remote but by reaching up and twisting the ON button, almost brutally, as if it were a duty he had neglected.

As soon as she was out of the room, Tom pointed the remote at the blaring set and zapped it.

“Up here, our victims aren’t usually so well dressed,” said Tim Truehart, standing in his leather jacket by the open door of an old blue Dodge as Tom and von Heilitz came out of the hospital’s front entrance.

“I’m not usually so well dressed,” Tom said, looking down at the suit the old man had brought for him. It was a grey and blue windowpane plaid, with the label of a London tailor, and except for being a little tight across the shoulders, fit him better than any of his own suits. Von Heilitz had also loaned him a white shirt, a dark blue figured tie, and a pair of well-shined black shoes, also his size, that felt stiff and resentful on his feet. Tom had expected the detective to show up with cheap new clothes, not his own, and when he had looked at himself in the mirror that hung in his room’s tiny bathroom, he had seen a well-dressed stranger in his mid-twenties. The stranger had stubby eyelashes and only a few bristles for eyebrows. The stranger’s face looked peeled. If he had seen himself in the dark, he would have thought he was Lamont von Heilitz.

Tom got in the back seat with the suitcases, and von Heilitz sat in the front with Truehart.

“I don’t suppose you saw anybody around your lodge before the fire started,” the policeman said.

“I didn’t even know that Barbara Deane was there.”

“The fire was started at both the front and the back of the lodge at roughly the same time—it wouldn’t take more than a cup of gasoline and a match to get those old places going.” Truehart sounded as if he were talking to himself. “So we know Tom didn’t do it accidentally, and it didn’t start in the kitchen, or anything like that. That fire was deliberately set.”

For an instant Tom wished he were back in his bed in the kindergarten room, safe with his injections of antibiotics and the perpetual television.

Von Heilitz said, “Somewhere in Eagle Lake or Grand Forks, there’s a man who is down on his luck. He probably has a prison record. He will do certain things for money. He lives off in the woods, and he doesn’t have too many friends. Jerry Hasek learned this man’s name by asking around in bars and making a few telephone calls. You ought to be able to do the same.”

“There’s probably fifty guys like that around here,” Truehart said. “I’m not a famous private detective, Lamont, I’m a small-town Chief of Police. I don’t usually play games like this, and Myron Spychalla is after my job. I’d hate to have to go to work.”

Tom could not stop himself from yawning.

“You have Nappy LaBarre and Robbie Wintergreen in your jail,” von Heilitz said. “That’s all you really need. I think one of them will be happy to work out a little trade.”

“If they know about it.”

“Sure,” von Heilitz said. “If they know about it. I’m not telling you anything new. I’m not a famous private detective, either. I’m a retired old man who has the leisure to sit back and watch things happen.”

“And that’s what you were doing up here, I guess.” They passed the airport sign, and Truehart flicked on his turn signal.

“Semi-retired,” von Heilitz said, and the two men grinned at each other.

“All right,” said Truehart, “but this boy’s mother is going to go through hell when she hears that her son died in a fire. That’s the part that bothers me.”

“She won’t.”

“She won’t what?”

“Won’t hear. Her husband is off in Alabama for a couple of weeks, and she never watches television or reads the papers. She’s an invalid. If her father finds out somehow, he won’t tell her right away, and maybe he would never tell her. He has a history of protecting her from bad news.”

That was right, Tom realized—if he had died in the fire, he would never have existed. His grandfather would never speak his name, and his mother would be forbidden to mention it. It would be the way his grandfather had wanted it all along. Her and her’s Da.