“Wasn’t there a murder there once?” Tom could remember some story from his childhood—lurid headlines in newspapers his mother had snatched away. Kate Redwing had mentioned it too.
“Two,” von Heilitz said. “In fact, it was probably the most famous murder case in the history of Mill Walk, and I had nothing to do with it at all. A novelist named Timothy Underhill wrote a book called The Divided Man about it—you never read it?”
Tom shook his head.
“I’ll loan it to you. Good book—good fiction—but misguided about the case, exactly in the way that most people were. A suicide was generally taken as a confession. We have about twenty minutes left up in this limbo, why don’t I tell you the story?”
“I think you’d better!”
“The body of a young prostitute was discovered in the alley behind the hotel. Above her body, two words had been chalked on the wall. Blue Rose.”
The nuns in the seats in front of them had ceased talking to each other, and now and then glanced over the top of their seats.
“A week later, a piano player who worked in some of the downtown clubs was found dead in a room at the St. Alwyn. His throat was slit. The murderer had printed the words Blue Rose on the wall above his bed. In the early days, he had played with Glenroy Breakstone and the Targets—the Blue Rose record is a kind of memorial to him.”
Tom remembered his mother and von Heilitz playing the record—the soft, breathy saxophone making compelling music out of the songs mangled by Miss Gonsalves at dancing class.
“So far, the victims were marginal people, half-invisible. The police on Mill Walk couldn’t get excited about a whore and a local jazz musician—it wasn’t as though respectable citizens had been killed. They just went through the motions. It seemed pretty clear that the young man had been killed because he’d witnessed the girl’s murder—even Fulton Bishop could work that one out, because the piano player’s window in the St. Alwyn was on the second floor overlooking the brick alley. A short time after that, a young doctor was attacked, same thing, Blue Rose, but when it turned out that he was homosexual—”
The pilot asked all passengers to fasten their seat belts in preparation for landing on the island of Mill Walk, where the skies were cloudless and the temperatures in the low nineties. The nuns pulled the belts taut and craned their necks.
“Well, Fulton Bishop’s patron, your grandfather, asked that he be assigned to a more salubrious case, and—”
“My grandfather?”
“Oh, Glen was very important to Captain Bishop, still is. Took an interest in his career from the beginning. Anyhow, Bishop was promoted, and a detective named Damrosch got the case. By now it looked like a curse. The Eyewitness was full of it, and the people were in the condition newspapers like to call ‘up in arms.’ What that really means is that they were titillated—they felt a kind of awful fascination. Now Damrosch was a talented detective, but an unstable man. Professionally, he was completely honest, and if he’d been a real straight arrow in every way, he could have gathered a nucleus of other honest policemen around him, the way David Natchez seems to have done. But he was a blackout drinker, he beat people up now and then, he’d had a very troubled youth, and he was a closet homosexual. None of this side of his life emerged until later. But even so, he had no friends in the department, and they gave him the case to make him the scapegoat.”
“What happened?” Tom asked.
“There was another murder. A butcher who lived near the old slave quarter. And when that happened, the case virtually closed itself. No more Blue Rose murders.”
The nuns were listening avidly now, their heads nearly touching in the gap between their seats.
“The butcher had been one of Damrosch’s foster fathers—a violent, abusive man. Worked the boy nearly to death until young Damrosch finally got into the army. Damrosch hated him.”
“But the others—the doctor, and the piano player, and the girl.”
“Damrosch knew two of them. The girl was one of his informants, and he’d had a one-night stand with the piano player.”
“What do you mean, the case virtually closed itself?”
“Damrosch shot himself. At least, it certainly looked that way.”
The plane had been moving steeply down as von Heilitz talked, and now the palm trees and bright length of ocean alongside the runways whizzed and blurred past their windows: the wheels brushed against the ground, and all of the plane’s weight seemed to strain backwards against itself.
A stewardess jumped up and announced over the loudspeaker that passengers were requested to remain in their seats, with seat belts fastened, until the vehicle had stopped moving.
“You could say that his suicide was a sort of wrongful arrest.”
“Where were you during all this?”
“In Cleveland, proving that the Parking Lot Monster was a gentleman named Horace Fetherstone, the regional manager of the Happy Hearts Greeting Card Company.”
The airplane stopped moving, and most of the passengers jumped into the aisle and opened overhead compartments. Tom and the Shadow stayed in their seats, and so did the nuns.
“By the way, was it clear that one of the victims survived? In Underhill’s book they were all killed, but the real case was different. One of them made it. He’d been attacked from behind in the dark, and he didn’t even get a glimpse of his attacker, so he was no use in the case, but he knew enough medicine to stop his bleeding.”
“Medicine?”
“Well, he was a doctor, wasn’t he? You met him this summer,” said von Heilitz. “Nice fellow.” He stood up, stooping, and moved out into the aisle. “Buzz Laing. Did you notice? He always wears something around his neck.”
Tom looked straight ahead of him and saw the brown right eye of one nun and the blue left eye of another staring at him through the gap between their seats.
“Oh, one little thing.” Von Heilitz leaned down beneath the overhead compartments. “Damrosch shot himself in the head at a desk in his apartment. There was a note saying Blue Rose in front of him on the desk. Case closed.”
He smiled, and all the fine horsehair lines around his mouth cut deeper into his skin. He turned away and started moving up the aisle toward the front of the plane. Tom scrambled out of his seat.
“Occasionally,” von Heilitz said, “what you have to do is go back to the beginning and see everything in a new way.”
They passed through the open door of the airplane and entered the annihilating sunlight of the Caribbean, pouring down from a hazy sun in an almost colorless sky.
“Occasionally,” von Heilitz said, “there are powerful reasons why you can’t or don’t want to do that.”
The stewardess who had told them she liked the way they dressed stood at the bottom of the metal staircase, handing white printed cards to the passengers. A long way away, goats pushed their heads through a wire fence. The smell of salt water mingled with the airport smell of jet fuel.
“The handwriting on the note in front of Damrosch,” Tom said.
“Printed in block letters.” He accepted one of the cards from the stewardess.
Tom took one too, and realized that it was a landing card. The first line was for his name, and the second for his passport number.
He gaped at the stewardess, and she said, “Gee, what happened to your eyebrows?”
Von Heilitz tugged at his sleeve. “The boy was in a fire. He just realized that he doesn’t have his passport.”
“Gee,” she said. “Will you have any trouble?