Tom nodded. “You came to the English hospital. And you brought books.” Now Tom grinned. “Sherlock Holmes. And the Poe novel, Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
“There was an earlier time, but that’s not important now.” Before Tom could question him about this statement, he said, “And of course we saw each other this morning. You know who shot Miss Hasselgard?”
“Her brother.”
Mr. von Heilitz nodded. “And of course she was sitting in the passenger seat of his Corvette when he killed her.”
“And he put her body in the trunk because he had to drive to Weasel Hollow, and she was so big that otherwise everybody who looked at the car would have seen her,” Tom said. “He was born in Weasel Hollow, wasn’t he?”
“How did you work that out?”
“The Eyewitness,” Tom said. “I really knew it all along, but this afternoon, I remembered that one of the articles said that he had gone to—”
“The Ziggurat School. Very good.”
“Who was the woman who hid the money for him?”
“She was his aunt.”
“I suppose Hasselgard stole—what do you call it, embezzled the money, or took it as a bribe—”
“We don’t know yet. But my feeling is that it was a bribe.”
“—and Marita learned about it—”
“She must have actually seen him take the money, because she felt she had a claim on it.”
“—and she demanded half of it or something, and he told her to get into his car—”
“Or she got into it, demanding that he take her to the money.”
“And he leaned in the driver’s window and shot her in the head. He rolled up the driver’s window and shot through it to make it look as if Marita had been behind the wheel. Then he put her body in the trunk and drove to the native district. He abandoned his car and made his way home. And a week later, the old lady was killed for the money.”
“And the same money is confiscated by the government of Mill Walk, which turns it over to Friedrich Hasselgard, the Minister of Finance.”
“What were you waiting for, this morning?” Tom asked.
“To see who would come. In the best of all worlds, Finance Minister Hasselgard would have appeared, and dug the first bullet out of the door with a pocket knife.”
“What would you have done, if he had?”
“Watched him.”
“I mean, would you have gone to the police then?”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t even have written the police about what you knew?”
Mr. von Heilitz tilted his head and looked at Tom in a way that made him uncomfortable—it had too many shades and meanings, and it went straight through him to his deepest secrets. “You wrote to Fulton Bishop, didn’t you?”
Tom was surprised to see Mr. von Heilitz now looking at him with undisguised impatience.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“What did your father tell you about me? When he said that I’d called? He must have warned you off.”
“Well … he did, yes. He said that it might be better to avoid you. He said you were bad luck. And he said that you used to be called the Shadow.”
“Because of my first name, of course.”
Tom, who was trying to figure out why the old man was irritated, looked blank.
“Lamont Cranston?”
Tom raised his eyebrows.
“My God.” Mr. von Heilitz sighed. “Back in pre-history, a fictional character named Lamont Cranston was the hero of a radio series called ‘The Shadow.’ That was my bad luck, if you like. But what your father was talking about is something else.”
The old man sipped his wine, and again regarded Tom with what looked like irritated impatience. “When I was twelve years old, both of my parents were murdered. Butchered, really. I came home from school and found their bodies. My father was lying dead in this room. He had been shot several times, and there was a tremendous amount of blood. As well as what is still probably called ‘gore.’ I found my mother near the back door, in the kitchen. She had obviously been trying to escape. I thought she might still be alive, and I rolled her body over. Suddenly my hands were red with blood. She had been shot in the chest and the stomach. Until I rolled her over and saw what they had done to her, I hadn’t even noticed all the blood on the floor.”
“Did they ever find who did it?”
“I found out who did it, years later. When this house was closed, I went to live with an aunt and uncle while the police investigated my parents’ murders. I don’t suppose you knew that my father was David Redwing’s Minister of Internal Affairs after Mill Walk became independent? He was an important man. Not as important as David Redwing, but important all the same. So a vigorous investigation took place. It went nowhere, and its failure was an ongoing sorrow. As if in recompense for the inability of the police to solve his murder, my father was posthumously awarded the Mill Walk Medal of Merit. I have it in a desk drawer somewhere over there—I could show it to you.” He was staring off into some internal space now, not looking at Tom at all.
“I waited nearly ten years,” he finally continued. “I inherited this house and everything in it. After I graduated from Harvard, I came back here to live. I had enough money not to have to worry about it for the rest of my life. I wondered what I was going to do. I could have gone into business. If I had been a different sort of person, I could have gone into local politics. My father was a local martyr, after all. But I had another purpose, and I set about it. Almost immediately I discovered that the police had learned very little. So I turned to the only sources I had, the public record. I obtained a complete file of the Eyewitness. I examined everything—property transfers, land deals, steamship arrivals, court records, death notices. I had so much material that I had to alter the house in order to be able to store it all. I was looking for patterns that no one else had seen. And, after three years, I began to find them. It was the most tedious and frustrating work I had ever done, but also the most satisfying. I felt that I was saving my own life. Eventually I was concentrating on a single man—a man who had come and gone from Mill Walk many times, a former member of our secret police who went into retirement when the secret police were disbanded. He had houses here and in Charleston. I went to Charleston and followed him. The man who had murdered my father and mother seemed ordinary—he might have been a property developer who had made enough money to devote all his time to golf. I had thought I might kill him, but found that I was no murderer. I came back to Mill Walk and presented my research to the Secretary of Internal Defense, Gonzalo Redwing, who had been a friend of my father’s. A week later, the murderer returned to Mill Walk to attend a charity function, and the militia arrested him on the dock at Mill Key. He was jailed, tried, convicted, and eventually executed on the gallows at the Long Bay prison Compound.”
Mr. von Heilitz turned to Tom with an expression the boy could not read at all. “It should have been a moment of triumph for me. I had found out who I was. I had discovered my life’s work. I was an amateur detective—an amateur of crime. But my triumph almost immediately did worse than go sour. It turned into disgrace. During the months between his arrest and execution, the man I had found never stopped talking. He implicated my father in his own murder.”