Mystery

He stood up and looked at Tom. “I don’t know where you plan on going now, but you’d better change your clothes. Be arrested in a second, go out looking like that.”

Tom looked down and saw red blotches and smears covering the pale blue linen. His knees were red circles.

Andres took a suit on a hanger out of the closet and came toward the door.

“What do you smell in here?” Tom asked.

Puzzled, Andres stopped and sniffed the air. “You know what I smell. Did you go crazy?”

“I’m not crazy now. Tell me what you smell.”

“You’re like him.” Andres glanced down at the body. “I smell what you smell when someone is shot to death.”

“Isn’t there something else?”

Andres’s face contracted into a knot of worry and despair. “What?”

“Cigars,” Tom said.

“A lot of cops smoke cigars,” Andres said, and took Tom’s arm and began marching him down the hall to the stairs.

“Take off your shoes,” Andres said in the kitchen. He peeled the jacket off the hanger and hung the trousers over his arm.

“Here?”

“Take off the shoes,” Andres said. “You’re too big to change clothes in a car.”

Tom unlaced the shoes and slipped them off. He handed the bloodied pants, vest, and jacket to Andres, and Andres balled them up under his arm. He handed the fresh trousers to Tom like a tailor, and then snatched them back. “Wait. Rinse your hands at the sink.”

Tom obediently went to the sink and for the first time noticed that his hands were smeared with blood. He looked at Andres, and saw red stains on his shirt. “Go ahead,” Andres said, and Tom washed the blood from his hands. After he put on the clean trousers and tied his shoes, Andres handed him a belt, and watched with patient concentration as he worked it through the loops. Another vest, another jacket. “Your card,” Tom said, and Andres smacked his forehead and rooted through the pockets of the blood-soaked jacket until he found the card. He put it in his shirt pocket, and then deliberated and handed it back to Tom.

They went past the side of the garage and came out into the backyard of a long white manor two houses down from the Spences. In what seemed another life, a family named Harbinger had lived in this house. Now it was as empty as their lodge at Eagle Lake, while the Harbingers took their twenty-year-old daughter to Europe to make her forget the mechanic she had rashly married.

“If I had an idea, I’d give it to you,” Andres said.

“There’s a policeman I have to talk to,” Tom said.

“The police! The police did this!”

“Not this one,” Tom said.

Down at the lower end of Calle Hoffmann, a concrete plaza called Armory Place, with benches, rows of palms, and big oval planters of bougainvillaea, sat between the pair of symmetrical stone steps leading up to police headquarters and the Mill Walk courthouse. Both of these buildings were cubes of a stark, dazzling white that stood out against the washed-out sky. On the far side of Armory Place, crowded into a row of pastel Georgian buildings with fanlights and three ranks of windows, were the Treasury, Parliament House, the old Governor’s Residence, and the Government Printing Office. A network of narrow streets lined with restaurants, coffee shops, bars, drugstores, stationers, law offices, and secondhand bookstores radiated out from Armory Place, and it was to one of these, a passageway called Sugarcane Alley, that Andres reluctantly drove Tom.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked.

“No, but Lamont was going to meet with this man before the other policemen picked him up. I don’t know who else I can trust.”

“Maybe you can’t trust him,” Andres said.

Tom remembered Hobart Ellington telling him that Natchez had waited an hour in his back room, and said, “I have to start somewhere.”

Andres said he would wait around the corner, and Tom walked into a small Greek café and ordered a cup of coffee and took it to a booth along the wall. He sat down and sipped the hot coffee. For a moment the shock and misery of Lamont von Heilitz’s death caught up with him, and he bent over the steaming cup to hide his tears from the counterman.

I am an amateur of crime. An absurd phrase, of course.

He wiped off his tears and went to the pay telephone at the back of the café. A ragged Mill Walk directory with a photograph of Armory Place on its cover hung beside the phone on a fraying cord. The photograph seemed to be of a beautiful tropical square—white buildings and palm trees against a pale blue sky. Tom dialed the police department number listed on the inside of the front cover.

It took a long time to get David Natchez, and he was abrupt and unfriendly when he finally came to the phone. “This is Detective Natchez, and what do you want?”

“I want to talk to you. I’m in a Greek coffee shop just behind Armory Place.”

“You want to talk to me. You couldn’t be a little more specific, could you?”