Mystery

Tom’s grandfather whirled sideways in his chair and looked through the window and out across the terrace. Tom’s heart slid up into his throat and stayed there until Upshaw slowly revolved back to the note. He stared at it for another second. Then he pushed the yellow paper to a corner of his desk and picked up the envelope to look at the handwriting and the postmark. He turned his head to make sure the door was closed, and then looked back out the window. He pulled all the rest of the letters toward him and shuffled through them, setting before him on the desk a grey envelope and two white envelopes, set down the others, and held each of the three up to examine the printed address and the postmark. One by one, he slit them open and read the notes. He leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling for a moment before reading the notes again. He pushed his chair away from the desk, and then stood and moved to the window and looked both right and left with an unconscious furtiveness Tom had never before seen in him.

The pink line across the top of von Heilitz’s cheeks had heated up like an iron bar. “Not going to get much sleep tonight, is he?”

“He really did kill her,” Tom said. “I don’t know if—”

Von Heilitz put a finger to his lips.

Tom’s grandfather was walking around his study, describing an oval that took him to the glass-fronted bookcases and back to his desk. Every time he returned to his desk, he looked down at the notes. The third time he had done this, he grabbed the notes, and went around the back of his chair to throw them into the wastebasket. Then he leaned heavily on the back of the chair, pulled it out and sat down, and leaned over to retrieve the notes. He shoved them into the top drawer of the desk along with the envelopes. He opened another drawer, removed a cigar, bit off the end, and spat it into the wastebasket.

“Saint Nicotine,” von Heilitz said. “Concentrates the mind, soothes the nerves, eases the bowels.”

Tom realized that they had been watching his grandfather for only something like fifteen minutes. It felt as if they had been there for hours. The misery that had been gathering in him ever since Glendenning Upshaw read the first note swam up out of his own bowels like a physical substance. He stretched out in the tall grass and the sand and rested his head on his hands. Von Heilitz gently patted his back.

“He’s figuring out what to do—trying to work out what he risks by telling somebody.”

Tom raised his head and saw his grandfather exhaling a cloud of white smoke. He plugged the cigar back in his mouth, and began turning it around and around with his fingers, as if trying to screw it into place. Tom lowered his head again.

“Okay, he’s reaching for the phone,” von Heilitz said. “He’s still not too sure about this, but he’s going to do it.”

Tom looked up. His grandfather sat with the receiver in his left hand and his right barely touching the dial. The cigar sent up a column of white smoke from an ashtray. He began dialing. He pressed the receiver to his ear. After a moment, he spoke a few words into the phone, waited, snatched at his cigar, and leaned back in his chair to say a few more words. He held the cigar in toward his chest like a poker hand. Then he hung up.

“Now what?” Tom asked.

“That depends on what he does. If it looks like he’s expecting someone right away, we stay here. If not, we’ll go to the hotel and come back here when it gets dark.”

His grandfather opened the desk drawer and peered down at the notes. He lifted out the envelopes and considered the postmarks before putting them back and closing the drawer.

“It’s what he does now that tells us,” von Heilitz said.

Tom’s grandfather looked at his watch, stood up, and began pacing back and forth. He sat down at the far end of the room and worked at the cigar; in a moment, he got to his feet again.

“It won’t be long,” von Heilitz said.

A slender brow lizard with a stubby tail and a Pleistocene head padded toward them across the sand, its splayed feet lifting and falling like hammers. When it saw them, it raised its snout—one forefoot poised in the air. A vein beat visibly in its neck. The lizard skittered around and darted toward the next clump of palms. The mailman worked his way between the bungalows on the street in back of Bobby Jones way. Tom sweated into his suit. Sand leaked into his shoes. He rubbed his shoulder, which was still sore. A white-haired man and woman in golfing clothes came out on a terrace behind the farthest bungalow in the third row and stretched out on loungers to read magazines.

“Have you ever tasted lizard?” von Heilitz asked.

“No.” Tom propped his head on his cupped hand and looked up at the old man. He was leaning sideways against a palm with his knees drawn up, his whole body contracted into the spider-shaped shadow of the palm’s crown, his face youthful and alight. “How does it taste?”