Mystery

Any other man, Tom thought, who invariably dressed in a black suit, worn always with a stiff white shirt, a black necktie, a black hat, and a loose black umbrella, would look so much like a priest that strangers on the street would call him “Father.” Yet Glen Upshaw had never looked priestly. He looked like a bank vault or some forbidding public building, and the aura of the world, of money and luxurious rooms, of first-class suites on liners and large expensive appetites indulged behind closed doors, hung about him like a cloud. He made all of the other men in the photograph seem insignificant.

Tom turned the page.

Here was more chaos. Steamship arrivals and society parties, obituaries—Judge Morton Backer had died, and Tom stared at the name until he remembered that Judge Backer had been the man who had sold Arthur Thielman the long-barreled Colt pistol with which Jeanine Thielman had been murdered. Governmental appointments, long ago elections, business promotions, wedding announcements. Mill Walk Construction built a five-hundred-bed hospital in Miami. Here were his own parents, Victor Pasmore and Gloria Ross Upshaw, among a dozen other eastern shore residents of their age and station. Garden parties, lawn parties, Christmas parties, and New Year’s parties, and country club balls.

Then his eye moved to yet another photograph he had seen before. His mother in her early twenties, splendidly dressed, stepping down from a carriage as she arrived at the Founders Club for a charity ball. It was of this picture that the photograph of Jeanine Thielman had reminded him. The pose was identical, a good-looking blond woman stepping down from a carriage with a long, elegant leg protruding from a whirl of clothing. Gloria Upshaw Pasmore, too, seemed to be grimacing instead of smiling, but she was fifteen years younger than Jeanine Thielman, less encrusted with jewelry, altogether less sleek. Because of the contrast with the photograph of the murdered woman, it struck Tom that his mother looked vulnerable even then. Just dimly visible behind her, bending forward to help her get out of the carriage, was her father, whose tuxedo made him seem to melt backwards into the darkness of the interior.

Lamont von Heilitz had tracked the most trivial events of Mill Walk life in the hope that some day a name here, a date there, would intersect to lead him to a conclusion. He had cast out his nets day after day, and hauled in these minnows. The last ten pages of the big journal were a fact collection, no more.

Various names caught his eye. Maxwell Redwing and family went to Africa on safari and returned intact. Maxwell’s son, Ralph, announced that, like his father, he had no political ambitions and would devote his energies to “the private sphere, where so much remains to be done.” He pledged “all my efforts to the improvement of the quality of life on our beloved island.” The Redwing Holding Company put in a successful bid to purchase the Backer mansion, known as “The Palms,” located in a section of Mill Key now too close to the growing downtown and business district to be fashionable, gutted and renovated it and then sold it to the Pforzheimer family for use as a luxury hotel.

Maxwell Redwing retired as president of the Redwing Holding Company and appointed his son, Ralph, as its new chief officer.

A man named Wendell Hasek, a night security guard at Mill Walk Construction, was wounded in a payroll robbery and retired on full salary for the remainder of his life. Tom struggled to remember where he had heard the name before, and then did remember—Hasek had been Judge Backer’s valet and driver, and had told Mr. von Heilitz about the sale of a pistol.

Two days later, the bank robbers were shot to death by police in a gun battle in the streets of the old slave quarter, but none of the stolen money, estimated to be in excess of thirty thousand dollars, was recovered.

Mill Walk Construction announced plans for an extensive housing development on the island’s far west end, near Elm Cove.

Two days after selling his own construction company to Mill Walk Construction, Arthur Thielman died in his sleep, attended by his family and Dr. Bonaventure Milton.

Judge Backer, Wendell Hasek, Maxwell Redwing, and Arthur Thielman—Tom finally understood. Mr. von Heilitz was doing no more than following the careers of those who had been linked to the murder of Jeanine Thielman in Eagle Lake. That case, even more than the solution to the deaths of his parents, had determined the rest of his life. He had come into what became twenty years of prominence and activity because of it: in a way, Tom remembered, he had come fully to life at Eagle Lake. It was no surprise that he should never really let go of the case.

Tom undressed, turned off his lights, and got into bed, deciding to ask his grandfather about Lamont von Heilitz and the old days on Mill Walk. It was a strange thought—his grandfather and the Shadow must have grown up together.

PART FIVE

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