Mystery

The Shadow smiled at him, patted his knee, and took his cup out into his kitchen. He returned with a snifter of brandy and set it on the table, then turned over the Glenroy Breakstone record and filled the room with the confidential, passionate sounds that Tom would associate with both this moment and his mother for the rest of his life.

He sat down again across from Tom and looked at him steadily—with what looked to the boy like steady unambiguous affection, as he swirled the brandy in his glass. “Just now, you told me two very useful bits of information, and confirmed something that I have always thought to be true—that you went out to the Goethe Park area seven years ago for the same reason that you made your English teacher drive you to Weasel Hollow. I saw you that day, and I knew that you saw me too. You didn’t recognize me, but you saw me.”

Mr. von Heilitz seemed very excited, and his excitement infected Tom. “You were there? You told me—that first time I came here, you asked if I remembered the first time—”

“And that was it, Tom! Think!”

And then Tom did remember a gloomy Gothic house, and a face that had looked skull-like peering through the curtains. His mouth dropped open. Von Heilitz was grinning at him. “You were in that house on Calle Burleigh!”

“I was in that house.” His eyes glowed at Tom from over the top of the snifter as he drank. “I saw you coming down the block, looking between the houses to see 44th Street.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I rent houses and apartments in various places on Mill Walk, and I use them when I have to keep an eye on things and stay out of sight. That place was as close as I could get to Wendell Hasek’s house on 44th Street. From the top floor, I could see that whole block of 44th Street.”

“Wendell Hasek,” Tom said, and then saw him: a fat man with a crewcut leaning against a bay window in the brown and yellow house, and the same man appearing on its porch, signaling with his hand.

“He was there,” he said. “He must have seen me. He sent out—” Tom stopped talking, seeing an older boy and a dark-haired girl in his memory. Jerry Fairy. And what are you gonna do now, Jerry Fairy? “He sent his children out to get me. Jerry and Robyn. They wanted to know—”

You want to know what’s going on? Why don’t you tell me, huh? What are you doing here?

“—what I was doing there. And then—”

He saw two other older boys, a fat boy who already looked angry and a boy as thin as a skeleton, rounding the corner of a native house. The whole crowded, frightening scene of those few minutes came back to him in a rush: he remembered Jerry hitting him, and the sudden flash of pain, and how he had lashed out and broken Jerry’s nose—

Nappy! Robbie! Get him!

He remembered the knives. Running. Remembered seeing Wendell Hasek come out on his front steps and winding his hand in the air. The fear of it, and the sense of uncanniness: of being trapped in a movie, or a dream.

“Jerry must have sent for his friends,” he said.

Tom began to shake. Now he could remember everything: the gleam bouncing off one of the knives, the insolent way the one called Robbie had lounged before he began running, the white street name in the purple air, AUER, the certainty that Robbie was going to shove his long knife into him, the traffic on Calle Burleigh suddenly dividing around him and a grey-haired man on a bicycle swooping toward the ground like a trick rider in a circus. He put his hands over his eyes. The mesh of a grille, and a face pointed toward him.

“Nappy and Robbie,” he said.

“Nappy LaBarre and Robbie Wintergreen. That’s right. The Cornerboys.”

Tom’s shaking had gradually subsided, and he stared at von Heilitz.

“That was what they called themselves,” the detective said. “They all dropped out of school at fourteen, and they did a few things for Wendell Hasek. They stole. They kept a lookout for police. In general, they got up to no good until they reached their early twenties, when they suddenly turned respectable and started working for the Redwing Holding Company.”

“What do they do for the Redwings?” He remembered something Sarah had said that afternoon. “Oh—they’re bodyguards.”

“I suppose that’s what they’re called.”

“And what about Robyn?”

Von Heilitz smiled and shook his head. “Robyn got a job taking care of a sick old woman. When the old woman died while they were on a trip to the mainland, Robyn inherited her entire estate. The family took her to court on the mainland, but Robyn won the case. Now she’s just spending her money.”