“Think about my situation,” the old man said, ignoring this. “It was a year after I had seen my parents’ murderer executed. I had almost inadvertently solved a very minor case several months before—I had noticed a detail, nothing more, a question of the shoes a certain man had worn on the day of the murder—which added to my reputation, but left me feeling flat and dull. I had gone to Eagle Lake to forget the world, and to try to plan what I might do for the rest of my life. And here this murder is thrust in my face from the moment I reached my lodge, in the person of the unpleasant Arthur Thielman, sitting on my porch with his huge dog, seething with impatience, all willing to buy my time and attention, to buy me, in fact.…” ‘You’re the Shadow, aren’t you?’ I wished I were a shadow, so I could slip by him and lock him out of my house! I was so exhausted I said I’d help him just so he’d leave me alone. I thought it was very likely that she had simply run away from him. As soon as I had had a good night’s rest, I determined to have nothing to do with either of the Thielmans. I would ignore the entire matter.”
“But then the body was discovered,” Tom said.
“And the guide was arrested. And Arthur Thielman told me that he did not want my services anymore. I was to stop going around talking to all these people. He seemed particularly distressed that I’d spoken to Wendell Hasek, the Judge’s valet.”
“I told you,” Tom said. “He wanted to get rid of you. He was afraid of what you’d discover.”
“In a way. Remember my saying that I had a feeling he thought she might be somewhere in the Eagle Lake area, after all?”
“Of course. He knew she was deep in the lake, rolled up in an old curtain.”
The old man smiled and coughed into his fist. “Perhaps. It’s an intelligent supposition, in any case.”
Tom felt enormously complimented.
“Remember that he saw me as a kind of private detective, one unaccountably of his own class. He would not want to admit to any stranger that his wife had probably run away from him. And when she was found murdered, that put an end to that embarrassment—he didn’t need me to save him from it anymore. And he certainly wished no deeper embarrassment.”
“Wait a second,” Tom said. “What deeper embarrassment? He killed her.”
“I said that I wanted you to think about my situation, and I want you now to consider my state of mind. Once the body had been discovered, I noticed a change in everything about me. I could say that I had become more alert, more involved in things, or that Eagle Lake had become more interesting. But it was much more than that. Eagle Lake had become more beautiful.”
Tom wanted to shake him. “How did you get him to confess?”
“Listen to me. The solution is not what I am talking about here. I am describing a sudden change in my most basic feelings. When I walked beside my lodge and looked at the lake and the lodges scattered around it, at the docks, at the pilings outside the Redwing compound, the tall Norway pines and enormous oaks, it all seemed—charged. Every bit of it spoke to me. Every leaf, every pine needle, every path through the woods, every bird call, had come alive, was vibrant, full of meaning. Everything promised. Everything chimed. I knew more than I knew. There was a secret beating away beneath the surface of everything I saw.”
“Yes,” Tom said, not knowing why this raised goose bumps on his arms.
“Yes,” the old man said. “You have it too. I don’t know what it is—a capability? A calling?”
Tom suddenly realized why Lamont von Heilitz always wore gloves, and nearly blurted it out.
Von Heilitz saw Tom looking at his hands, and folded his hands before him on the table. “I rode over to Judge Backer’s lodge, and saw Wendell Hasek tinkering with the Judge’s coupe. Hasek was no more than eighteen, and he began to look guilty the second he saw me—he didn’t want to lose his job, and he was afraid of what I might get out of him.”
“What did you do?” Tom asked, unable not to look at the old man’s hands in their neat blue gloves, unable not to see blood on the hands of the boy the old man had been.
“I told him that I already knew that Truehart had sold the long-barreled Colt to his boss, and that the Judge had given it to Arthur Thielman for some reason. I just wanted to know the reason. I promised him—not entirely forthrightly—that the Judge’s ownership of the gun would never become public knowledge.
“ ‘No one will know about the Judge?’ he asked me. ‘No one will know I told you?’ ‘No one,’ I said. ‘Judge Backer wanted to get rid of that gun,’ Hasek said. ‘Fired off to the left. Made him madder than a hornet that a halfbreed got good money for a bad gun. So he sold it to Mr. Thielman, who’s such a bad shot he doesn’t know enough to blame the gun.’ ”
“Okay!” Tom said. “You had him!” He began to laugh. “Arthur Thielman was such a bad shot he had to sneak up behind his wife and put the barrel two inches from her head to be sure of hitting her at all!”
The old man smiled. “Arthur Thielman wasn’t his wife’s murderer, but the real killer would not have been at all unhappy to have me think he was. The murderer knew that he had furnished Arthur with one of the most traditional motives for murder.” His smile deepened at the expression on Tom’s face. “Jeanine had not only been unfaithful to her husband, but her lover thought that she was going to leave Arthur for him. And Arthur thought she had left him—he thought she had run off with the other man.”
For the second time that night, Tom was too surprised to speak. At length he said, “That was the deeper embarrassment you were talking about?”
Von Heilitz nodded. “So all I had to do was learn which of the men visiting Eagle Lake that summer had been away from the lake on the day of Jeanine’s disappearance. I went back to the Truehart cabin to see if anyone had canceled a date with the guide. If that didn’t work, I intended to question the other two or three men who worked as guides for the summer people, but I didn’t have to go any further. Minor’s wife worked as a cleaning woman for most of the same people her husband guided. On the sixteenth of June, she had two cleaning jobs. She went to the first lodge at eight in the morning, but the man who lived there didn’t get up to answer the door. She thought he must have been sleeping off a heavy night, and went through the woods to the second job, where she cleaned house until about two in the afternoon. Then she returned to the first house. Again, no one answered her knock—no one came even when she called out. She decided that he had left for town, or some other destination, without bothering to tell her that he wouldn’t be home. She scribbled a note that she would be back the next day, and walked back through the woods to her cabin. When she came back on the seventeenth, he opened the door to her, saying that he was very sorry but that he’d had to take a sudden business trip to Hurley, a larger town about twenty miles south. He’d taken the six-thirty train, and hadn’t returned until after nightfall. He paid her double for the day, and asked her not to mention his absence to any of her other customers—his business involved a real estate matter that he wanted kept secret.”
“But if he was going to run away with her and killed her instead, why did he leave by himself?”
“He hadn’t gone anywhere. Arthur Thielman just thought he had. Mrs. Truehart found two empty whiskey bottles in his trash, another half-empty on the kitchen counter, and the remains of several packs of Lucky Strikes in the wastebaskets. He’d holed up in his lodge, drinking himself into a stupor. She was told to stay out of the guest room, and she thought he must have had some woman’s belongings in there that he didn’t want her to see. He was a sentimental man. He shot his lover in the back of the head when she refused to leave with him, and then spent the rest of the night and the next day mourning her. Sentimentality is a mask for violence.”