Mystery

“This sounds kind of stupid—probably I just forgot something.”

“Ask me anyhow.”

“You said that Arthur Thielman left the gun on a table near the dock, and that Anton Goetz picked it up and shot Jeanine in the back of the head from thirty feet away. How did Goetz know that the gun pulled to the left? You can’t tell that just by looking at a gun, can you?”

Von Heilitz lowered his legs and leaned forward over the table, extending his hand. He gave Tom’s hand a surprisingly firm grip, and laughed out loud.

“So I didn’t miss anything?”

Von Heilitz was still pumping his hand. “Nothing at all. In fact, you saw what was missing.” He released Tom’s hand and leaned back, placing his hands on his knees. “Goetz knew that the gun pulled to the left because he took two shots. The first one hit the Thielman lodge. Goetz corrected instantly, and hit her with the second. I dug the first bullet out of the lodge myself.”

“So you knew where Goetz had been standing. You figured out where the pistol had to be by backtracking from the bullet. Like with Hasselgard’s car.”

Von Heilitz smiled and shook his head.

“There were spent cartridges under the table.”

“There were no spent cartridges.”

“You saw it happen,” Tom said. “No. You saw the gun on the table.” He thought about this. “No. I can’t figure it out.”

“You were close. Another summer resident of Eagle Lake saw the gun on the table that evening. A single man in his mid-twenties, like myself. A widower with a young daughter, living alone in his family’s lodge. He left Eagle Lake the morning after Jeanine was killed.”

An unpleasant thrill went through Tom’s body. “Who was it?”

“He was probably the only person to have heard the shots that night, because his was the next lodge in line. And there was a Redwing family party at the club that night, celebrating Jonathan Redwing’s engagement to Kate Duffield. They had a band in from Chicago—Ben Pollack. Made a lot of noise.”

In a quiet voice, Tom asked, “Was he building a hospital in Miami?”

“One of Mill Walk Construction’s first big contracts. You saw the clipping in my book, did you? He had set up a separate office in Miami even then. I gather it still does a great deal of business.”

“So my grandfather heard the shots. He must have thought …”

“That Arthur had killed Jeanine?” The Shadow crossed one leg over the other and interlaced his fingers over his nonexistent stomach. “I stopped off to see him in Miami after I made sure that Minor Truehart was out of jail. I wanted him to know what had happened up in Eagle Lake after he left. In fact, I brought him copies of all the Eagle Lake papers that covered the murder.”

Some message was being passed to him, but Tom could not read it in either von Heilitz’s words or his manner—it could not be that Glendenning Upshaw had witnessed a murder and calmly left the scene.

“The balcony of your grandfather’s lodge overlooked the lake. He used to spend his evenings out there, thinking about how he could get a better discount on cement than Arthur Thielman, or whatever it was he thought about. From his balcony, Glen could see the Thielmans’ dock as well as his own.”

“He ran away the next morning?”

Von Heilitz snorted. “Glen Upshaw never ran away from anything in his life. I think he just never considered altering arrangements he had already made. In any case, that was the last summer he spent at Eagle Lake—the last time any member of your family was at the lake.”

“No, no,” Tom said. “It was grief. He stopped going to the lodge because of grief. My grandmother drowned that summer. He couldn’t stand to see the place again.”

“Your grandmother lost her life in 1924, the year before all this. It wasn’t grief that made your grandfather leave Eagle Lake. It was business—the hospital was a lot more important to him than a marital dispute between a competitor and his wife.”

“He would have let the guide be executed?”

“Well, all he told me was that he saw a long-barreled Colt lying on the table. The shots could have been anything—on a lake, it can be next to impossible to know where sounds are coming from. You do hear shots up there; people have guns. It’s possible that he didn’t know that Jeanine was dead.”

“It’s possible he did, you mean.”

“How often do you see your grandfather?”

“Maybe once or twice a year.”

“You’re his only grandchild. He lives about fifteen miles from your house. Has he ever thrown a ball to you? Taken you riding or sailing? To a movie?”

Any such suggestion would have been ridiculous, and Tom’s response must have shown in his face.

“No,” said the old man. “I didn’t think so. Glen is an aloof man—preposterously aloof. There’s something missing in him, you know.”

“Do you know how my grandmother happened to drown? Did she go out by herself at night? Was she drunk?”