Mystery

Tom suddenly realized why Lamont von Heilitz always wore gloves, and nearly blurted it out.

Von Heilitz saw Tom looking at his hands, and folded his hands before him on the table. “I rode over to Judge Backer’s lodge, and saw Wendell Hasek tinkering with the Judge’s coupe. Hasek was no more than eighteen, and he began to look guilty the second he saw me—he didn’t want to lose his job, and he was afraid of what I might get out of him.”

“What did you do?” Tom asked, unable not to look at the old man’s hands in their neat blue gloves, unable not to see blood on the hands of the boy the old man had been.

“I told him that I already knew that Truehart had sold the long-barreled Colt to his boss, and that the Judge had given it to Arthur Thielman for some reason. I just wanted to know the reason. I promised him—not entirely forthrightly—that the Judge’s ownership of the gun would never become public knowledge.

“ ‘No one will know about the Judge?’ he asked me. ‘No one will know I told you?’ ‘No one,’ I said. ‘Judge Backer wanted to get rid of that gun,’ Hasek said. ‘Fired off to the left. Made him madder than a hornet that a halfbreed got good money for a bad gun. So he sold it to Mr. Thielman, who’s such a bad shot he doesn’t know enough to blame the gun.’ ”

“Okay!” Tom said. “You had him!” He began to laugh. “Arthur Thielman was such a bad shot he had to sneak up behind his wife and put the barrel two inches from her head to be sure of hitting her at all!”

The old man smiled. “Arthur Thielman wasn’t his wife’s murderer, but the real killer would not have been at all unhappy to have me think he was. The murderer knew that he had furnished Arthur with one of the most traditional motives for murder.” His smile deepened at the expression on Tom’s face. “Jeanine had not only been unfaithful to her husband, but her lover thought that she was going to leave Arthur for him. And Arthur thought she had left him—he thought she had run off with the other man.”

For the second time that night, Tom was too surprised to speak. At length he said, “That was the deeper embarrassment you were talking about?”

Von Heilitz nodded. “So all I had to do was learn which of the men visiting Eagle Lake that summer had been away from the lake on the day of Jeanine’s disappearance. I went back to the Truehart cabin to see if anyone had canceled a date with the guide. If that didn’t work, I intended to question the other two or three men who worked as guides for the summer people, but I didn’t have to go any further. Minor’s wife worked as a cleaning woman for most of the same people her husband guided. On the sixteenth of June, she had two cleaning jobs. She went to the first lodge at eight in the morning, but the man who lived there didn’t get up to answer the door. She thought he must have been sleeping off a heavy night, and went through the woods to the second job, where she cleaned house until about two in the afternoon. Then she returned to the first house. Again, no one answered her knock—no one came even when she called out. She decided that he had left for town, or some other destination, without bothering to tell her that he wouldn’t be home. She scribbled a note that she would be back the next day, and walked back through the woods to her cabin. When she came back on the seventeenth, he opened the door to her, saying that he was very sorry but that he’d had to take a sudden business trip to Hurley, a larger town about twenty miles south. He’d taken the six-thirty train, and hadn’t returned until after nightfall. He paid her double for the day, and asked her not to mention his absence to any of her other customers—his business involved a real estate matter that he wanted kept secret.”

“But if he was going to run away with her and killed her instead, why did he leave by himself?”

“He hadn’t gone anywhere. Arthur Thielman just thought he had. Mrs. Truehart found two empty whiskey bottles in his trash, another half-empty on the kitchen counter, and the remains of several packs of Lucky Strikes in the wastebaskets. He’d holed up in his lodge, drinking himself into a stupor. She was told to stay out of the guest room, and she thought he must have had some woman’s belongings in there that he didn’t want her to see. He was a sentimental man. He shot his lover in the back of the head when she refused to leave with him, and then spent the rest of the night and the next day mourning her. Sentimentality is a mask for violence.”

“Who was he? What was his name?”

“Anton Goetz.”

Tom felt a decided letdown. “I’ve never heard of him.”