Mystery

Tom sipped from a Coca-Cola the old man had poured into a crystal glass, so exquisite it was nearly weightless, etched with gauzy images of women in flowing robes.

Mr. von Heilitz was leaning forward slightly in one of the chairs around the massive table. His back was very straight, and he was twirling in the gloved fingers of his right hand the stem of a wine glass etched like Tom’s goblet. “You’re something like me, you know,” he said in his incongruously vibrant voice. His eyes seemed very kind. “Do you remember seeing me, when you were a child? I don’t mean the times I chased you and the other ruffians off my lawn, though I ought to tell you, I suppose, that I couldn’t afford—”

“To have us look in your windows,” Tom said, suddenly understanding.

“Exactly.”

“Because we would talk about—well, about all this after we got home.” Tom paused. “And you probably thought that you …”

Von Heilitz waited for him to finish. When Tom did not complete his sentence, he said, “That my reputation was already peculiar enough?”

“Something like that,” Tom said.

Mr. von Heilitz smiled back at him. “Doesn’t it seem to you that much of what people call intelligence is really sympathetic imagination? And that sympathetic imagination virtually …? Well, in any case, you know why I became the neighborhood grouch.” He lifted his wine glass, glanced at Tom, and sipped. “I am still curious as to whether you remember the first time I saw you—really saw you. It took place on a significant day for you.”

Tom nodded. “You came to the English hospital. And you brought books.” Now Tom grinned. “Sherlock Holmes. And the Poe novel, Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

“There was an earlier time, but that’s not important now.” Before Tom could question him about this statement, he said, “And of course we saw each other this morning. You know who shot Miss Hasselgard?”

“Her brother.”

Mr. von Heilitz nodded. “And of course she was sitting in the passenger seat of his Corvette when he killed her.”

“And he put her body in the trunk because he had to drive to Weasel Hollow, and she was so big that otherwise everybody who looked at the car would have seen her,” Tom said. “He was born in Weasel Hollow, wasn’t he?”

“How did you work that out?”

“The Eyewitness,” Tom said. “I really knew it all along, but this afternoon, I remembered that one of the articles said that he had gone to—”

“The Ziggurat School. Very good.”

“Who was the woman who hid the money for him?”

“She was his aunt.”

“I suppose Hasselgard stole—what do you call it, embezzled the money, or took it as a bribe—”

“We don’t know yet. But my feeling is that it was a bribe.”

“—and Marita learned about it—”

“She must have actually seen him take the money, because she felt she had a claim on it.”

“—and she demanded half of it or something, and he told her to get into his car—”

“Or she got into it, demanding that he take her to the money.”

“And he leaned in the driver’s window and shot her in the head. He rolled up the driver’s window and shot through it to make it look as if Marita had been behind the wheel. Then he put her body in the trunk and drove to the native district. He abandoned his car and made his way home. And a week later, the old lady was killed for the money.”

“And the same money is confiscated by the government of Mill Walk, which turns it over to Friedrich Hasselgard, the Minister of Finance.”

“What were you waiting for, this morning?” Tom asked.

“To see who would come. In the best of all worlds, Finance Minister Hasselgard would have appeared, and dug the first bullet out of the door with a pocket knife.”

“What would you have done, if he had?”

“Watched him.”

“I mean, would you have gone to the police then?”

“No.”

“You wouldn’t even have written the police about what you knew?”

Mr. von Heilitz tilted his head and looked at Tom in a way that made him uncomfortable—it had too many shades and meanings, and it went straight through him to his deepest secrets. “You wrote to Fulton Bishop, didn’t you?”

Tom was surprised to see Mr. von Heilitz now looking at him with undisguised impatience.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“What did your father tell you about me? When he said that I’d called? He must have warned you off.”

“Well … he did, yes. He said that it might be better to avoid you. He said you were bad luck. And he said that you used to be called the Shadow.”

“Because of my first name, of course.”

Tom, who was trying to figure out why the old man was irritated, looked blank.

“Lamont Cranston?”

Tom raised his eyebrows.

“My God.” Mr. von Heilitz sighed. “Back in pre-history, a fictional character named Lamont Cranston was the hero of a radio series called ‘The Shadow.’ That was my bad luck, if you like. But what your father was talking about is something else.”