Mystery

“The only man I ever had to kill was the one who broke my arm. That was in 1941. The end of every investigation brings a depression, but that one was my worst. I came back to Mill Walk with my arm in a cast, and I refused to answer my phone or go out of this house for two months. I scarcely ate. I suppose it was a kind of breakdown. In the end I checked myself into a clinic, and stayed there another two months. ‘Why do you always wear gloves?’ the doctors asked me. ‘Is the world so dirty?’ ‘I’m at least as dirty as the world,’ I remember saying; ‘maybe I want to keep from contaminating it, instead of the other way around.’ I can remember catching sight of my face in the mirror one day and being shocked by what I saw—I saw an adult, the person I had become. Soon my depression began to lift. I came back here. I found that I was refusing many more cases on the mainland than I accepted. After a while, my reputation wasn’t even a dim memory, and I was free to live as I wished.” He took his hand from Tom’s shoulder and pulled back his chair. “And some years ago, I saw you in an unexpected place. And I knew that we would meet some day and have this conversation.”

He sat down, with an old man’s briskness, on his chair. “I wanted to show you the first pages in this book, and instead I talked your ear off. Let’s take a look at this before you fall asleep.”

Tom had never felt less sleepy. He looked at Lamont von Heilitz sitting a yard away from him with his eyebrows raised and his gloved fingers just opening the big leather journal. The old man looked drawn and noble, the refinement of his face starker than ever in the soft light, the grey wing of hair on the side of his head glowing silver. Tom realized that he was looking at the real thing. Seated a yard away from him, slightly imperious and slightly ravaged, more than slightly diminished by age, was a great detective, the actuality behind literally thousands of novels, movies, and stage plays. He did not raise orchids, inject a seven percent solution of cocaine, or say things like “Archons of Athens!” He was an old man who seldom left his father’s house. All Tom’s life, he had lived across the street.

The book, a more elegant version of his scrapbook, lay open on the table. Tom read the huge headline on the left-hand page. MILLIONAIRE SUMMER RESIDENT DISAPPEARS FROM HOME. Beneath the headline ran the subhead: Jeanine Thielman, Mill Walk Figure, Last Seen Friday. Beneath this was a grainy picture of a blond woman in a fur coat stepping down from a coach-and-four. A diamond necklace glittered at her throat, and her hair was swept back from her forehead. She looked sleek, rich, and powerful, stepping down from the platform with a long, outstretched leg. Her smile for the camera was a grimace of willed artifice. Tom understood immediately that the woman had been photographed arriving at a charity ball. She reminded him of his mother, in old photographs taken when she had been Gloria Upshaw, a member of Mill Walk’s Junior League.

Tom looked at the name and date of the newspaper—the Eagle Lake Gazette of June 17, 1925.

“The seventeenth of June was the day after I arrived in Eagle Lake that year. Jeanine Thielman, who was the first wife of our neighbor’s father, Arthur Thielman, had disappeared during the night of the fifteenth. Arthur found her missing when he looked into her bedroom in the morning, sent a messenger around to the other lodges, including the Redwing compound, to see if she had been visiting one of her friends, found that no one had seen her since a dinner party at the senior Langenheims’ the night before, and waited through all of the sixteenth before riding over to the police station in the town of Eagle Lake. See? It looks like nothing more than newspaper hysteria over a rich woman. People gossiped about this young couple sleeping in separate bedrooms.”