Mystery

“He never knew. He was given instructions through a Personals ad in the Eyewitness, and money was paid into his Swiss bank account. Of course the implication was that the highest officials in Mill Walk were involved, and the more he said, the more the public was outraged—he was obviously clouding the issue, trying to take the spotlight off himself and blame everybody else. The secret police were suspect anyhow, and had been disbanded shortly after independence. When this man’s record was made public, even those who had thought there might be something to his charges turned against him. His own stories counted against him, in the end. I myself had a certain amount of fame, as the one who had led to his arrest.”

“Then why …?”

“Why did I end up living like this? Why do I object to your writing to Captain Bishop?”

“Yes,” Tom said.

“First of all, I’d like to know if you signed the letter.”

Tom shook his head.

“It was an anonymous letter? Good boy. Don’t be surprised if nothing is done. You know what you know, and that is enough.”

“But after the police read the letter, they at least have to look at the car more carefully, instead of just taking Hasselgard’s story as fact. And when they find the bullet, they’ll know that Hasselgard’s story wasn’t the truth.”

“Captain Bishop already knows it wasn’t,” said the old man.

“I don’t believe that.”

“I discovered, soon after the execution of my father’s murderer, that except for one detail the man had been telling the truth all along. My father’s death had been ordered by the highest levels of our government. Corruption was a fact of life on Mill Walk.”

“Well, that was a long time ago,” Tom said.

“Nearly fifty years ago. There have been many, many changes on Mill Walk since then. But the Redwings still exert a large influence.”

“They’re not even in government anymore,” Tom protested. “They just do business. They’re social. Half of them are too wild to do anything but race cars and throw parties, and the other half is so respectable they don’t do anything but go to church and clip coupons.”

“Such are our leaders,” the old man said, smiling. “We will see what happens.”

A few minutes later Lamont von Heilitz stood up from the table, and walked into the maze of files. Tom heard the opening of a metal drawer. “Have you ever been to Eagle Lake, in Wisconsin?” he called to Tom, who could just see the top of his silvery head over a stack of papers atop an iron-grey cabinet.

“No, I haven’t,” Tom called back.

“You may be interested in this.” He reappeared with a large leather-bound book under his arm. “I own a lodge in Eagle Lake—it was my parents’, of course. We spent our summers ‘up north,’ as Mill Walk says, all during my boyhood, and after I had returned from Harvard I used the lodge for a number of years.” He put the thick book down on the table before Tom and leaned over his shoulder. His index finger rested on the book’s wide brown cover, and when Tom looked he saw that the old man was smiling. “The way you’ve been talking—the way I can see that you feel—all of that, even though you haven’t said half of what’s been going through your head—reminded me of this case. It must have been the third or fourth time I used my methods to discover the identity of a murderer, and it was one of the first times I made the results of my investigations public. As you will see.”

“How many cases have you investigated?” Tom suddenly wanted to know.

Von Heilitz lifted his hand from the book and put it on Tom’s shoulder. “I’ve lost count now. Something over two hundred, I think.”

“Two hundred! How many of those did you solve?”

The old detective did not answer the question directly. “I once spent a very interesting year in New Orleans, looking into the poisoning deaths of a series of prominent businessmen. I was poisoned myself, in fact, but had taken the precaution of supplying myself with a good supply of the antidote.” He nearly laughed out loud at the expression on Tom’s face. “I regret to say that the antidote did not save me from an extremely uncomfortable week in the hospital.”

“Was that the only time you were injured?”

“I was shot once—in the shoulder—and shot at four times. A bear of a man in Norway, Maine, broke my right arm when he found me photographing a Mercedes-Benz that was up on blocks in a shed out behind his house. Two men have cut or stabbed me with knives, one in a native house a block from where we saw each other in Weasel Hollow and the other in a motel called The Crossed Keys in Bakersfield, California. I was beaten up seriously only once, by a man who jumped me from behind in an alley off Armory Place, near police headquarters. But in Fort Worth, Texas, a state senator who had killed nearly a dozen prostitutes nearly killed me too, by hitting me in the back of my head with a hammer. He fractured my skull, but I was out of the hospital in time to see him hanged.”

He patted Tom’s shoulder. “It’s a sorry calling at times, I fear.”

“Have you ever killed anyone?”