Mystery

Hunger awakened him at ten. He left the bed and looked into the next room. Von Heilitz had not returned. Tom showered and put on clean underclothes and socks from the suitcase. He dressed in a pale pink shirt and blue linen suit he remembered from his first visit to von Heilitz’s house. Before he buttoned the double-breasted vest, he knotted a dark blue tie around his neck. In von Heilitz’s clothes, he walked back into the other room, thinking that the detective might have come in and gone out again while he was asleep, but there was no explanatory note on the table or the bed.

The owner of the pawnshop was pushing up the metal grille, and the man in the white shirt, like von Heilitz, had not returned.

Tom sat on the end of his bed, almost dizzy with worry. It seemed to him that he would have to stay in this little room forever. His stomach growled. He took out his wallet and counted his money—fifty-three dollars. How long could he stay at the St. Alwyn on fifty-three dollars? Five days? A week? If I go downstairs and eat, he’ll be here when I come back, Tom thought, and let himself out into the hall.

The day clerk rolled his eyes when Tom asked if any messages had been left for him, and laboriously looked over his shoulder at a rank of empty boxes. “Does it look to you like there are any messages?” Tom bought a thick copy of the Eyewitness.

Tom went into Sinbad’s Cavern and ate scrambled eggs and bacon while a hunchback mopped spilled beer off the wooden floor. The paper said nothing about the fire at Eagle Lake or Jerry Hasek and his partners. A paragraph on the society page told Mill Walk that Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Redwing had decided to spend the rest of the summer at Tranquility, their beautiful estate in Venezuela, where they expected to be entertaining many of their friends during the coming months. Tranquility had its own eighteen-hole golf course, both an indoor and an outdoor pool, a tennis court, a thirteenth-century stained glass window Katinka Redwing had purchased in France, and a private library of eighteen thousand rare books. It also housed the famous Redwing collection of South American religious art. The street door opened, and Tom looked over his shoulder to see the same two policemen who had been there the day before easing their bellies up to the bar. “Usual,” one of them said, and the barman put a dark bottle of Pusser’s rum and two shot glasses in front of them. “Here’s to another perfect day,” one of the cops said, and Tom turned back to his eggs, hearing the clink of the shot glasses meeting.

He went back to the lobby and climbed the stairs, praying that he would find the old man in his room, pacing impatiently between the bed and the window, demanding to know where he had gone. Tom came down the hall and put his key in the lock. Please. He turned the key and swung the door open. Please. He was looking into an empty room. The food in his stomach turned into hair and brick dust. He walked inside and leaned against the door. Then he moved to the connecting door—this room, too, was empty. Fighting off the demon of panic, Tom went to the closet and put his hand in the pocket of the suit he had worn the day before. He found the card, and went to the table and dialed Andres’s number.

A woman answered, and when Tom asked to speak to Andres, said that he was still asleep.

“This is an emergency,” Tom said. “Would you please wake him up?”

“He worked all night long, Mister, it’ll be an emergency if he don’t get his rest.” She hung up.

Tom dialed the number again, and the woman said, “Look, I told you—”

“It’s about Mr. von Heilitz,” Tom said.

“Oh, I see,” she said, and put down the telephone. A few minutes later, a thick voice said, “Start talking, and you better make it good.”

“This is Tom Pasmore, Andres.”

“Who? Oh. Lamont’s friend.”

“Andres, I’m very worried about Lamont. He went out to a meeting with a policeman early last night, and he never showed up for the meeting, and he’s still not back.”

“You got me up for that? Don’t you know Lamont disappears all the time? Why do you think they call him the Shadow, man? Just wait for him, he’ll turn up.”

“I waited up all night,” Tom said. “Andres, he told me he’d be back.”

“Maybe that’s what he wanted you to think.” It was like talking to Hobart Ellington.

Tom did not say anything, and finally Andres yawned and said, “Okay, what do you want me to do about it?”

“I want to go to his house,” Tom said.

Andres sighed. “All right. But give me an hour. I have to make a pot of coffee before I do anything else.”

“An hour?”

“Read a book,” Andres said.

Tom asked him to pick him up outside the entrance of Sinbad’s Cavern at eleven-thirty.