Mystery

He came out of the kitchen and stopped short as whatever was in his stomach slammed into his throat. Toppled file cabinets and scattered papers lay all across the floor. Horsehair and curd-colored stuffing foamed from the leather furniture where he and the old man had sat talking. Torn books ruffled like hair on top of the wreckage. Tom took a blind, dazed step into the enormous room. “LAMONT!” he yelled, and this time his voice was as loud as a bugle. “LAMONT!” He stepped forward again, and his foot came down on a thick fan of papers leaking from a yellow file. He bent to pick them up, and more papers streamed from the file, papers marked Cleveland, June 1940, and Crossed Keys Motel, Bakersfield, and covered with a dense, obsessive handwriting he realized he had never seen before. He moved to set them down on the coffee table where he and von Heilitz had put their feet and saw that the table had been broken in half, its filigreed leather surface sagging over the broken wood and stamped with dusty boot prints. There were no paths through the maze now, it was all chaos and obstruction, and he stepped over a file cabinet vomiting old issues of the Eyewitness and sent the wheel of a bicycle ticking around against its frame. Paintings floated atop shoals of papers and books; records torn from their sleeves leaned against paper mountains. Tom wandered through the chaos and saw an empty file marked Glendenning Upshaw, 1938–39. Beside it was another, Blue Rose Affair. The desks had been rifled and overturned, their drawers tossed aside—scissors and bottles of glue surfaced here and there in the litter—the tops of library lamps shattered into green fragments across ripped couches. The sharp, dog-pound smell of urine came from the ruined couches. Beneath the globe that had stood on a filing cabinet he saw the words Blue Rose again and pulled out the sleeve of the Glenroy Breakstone record. “Oh, God,” he said. A red smear in the shape of a hand jumped toward him from the dark paneling on the staircase. Another strong, fetid odor announced itself, and he looked down and saw a massive human turd on a bare patch of carpet. A little scatter of coins lay beside it. He scrambled over a series of files and reached the bottom of the staircase. On the tread beneath the handprint was a dark sprinkle of dots.

Tom ran up the staircase and threw open a bedroom door. The stench of blood and gunpowder hung in the room, along with some other, more domestic stink. The mattress had been pulled off the bed, and both bed and mattress had been slashed again and again.

In the middle of the floor, a pool of blood sent out rays and streamers extending beneath the mattress and toward the closet doors. Red footprints and red dots and splashes covered the carpet. Another impatient handprint blared from a white closet door. Tom felt the shimmer of violence all about him, and moved across the slippery floor to the closet. He pulled it open, and his father’s body fell out into his arms.

Too shocked to scream, he pulled the limp body from the enclosure of the closet and sagged to the floor. Tom hugged the body and kissed the matted hair. It seemed to him that he left his body: part of him separated cleanly out of himself and floated and saw the whole room, the ripped bed and the bloody footprints like a dance pattern leading toward and away from the closet, the clear round dots made by some round thing dipped in his father’s blood. He saw himself shaking and crying over the body of Lamont von Heilitz. He said to himself, “The point of an umbrella,” but these words were as pointless and absent of meaning as “purple socks” or “thrown horseshoe.”

After a long time, the back door slammed shut. Someone called his name, and his name brought his floating mind back into his body. He gently laid his father’s head on the bedroom carpet, and moved backwards until he struck the frame of the bed. Footsteps came up the stairs. Tom gathered his legs beneath him and listened to the footsteps coming toward the door. A man appeared in the door, and Tom sprang forward and caught the man around the waist and brought him down and wrestled himself on top of him and raised his fist.

“It’s me,” Andres yelled. “Tom, it’s me.”

Tom rolled off Andres, panting. “He’s in there,” he said, but Andres was already on his feet and moving into the bedroom. He knelt beside the body and stroked the old man’s face and closed his eyes. Tom got up on watery legs. Von Heilitz’s face had changed in some unalterable fashion that had nothing to do with the disordered hair or the suddenly smooth cheeks—it had become another face altogether, a face with nothing in it.

“This is hard,” Andres said. “Hard for you and me both, but we have to get out of here. They come back and find us here, they’ll gun us both down and claim we killed Lamont.”