She frowned, but said nothing.
“You see how they act? How they do things? They don’t even sneak it away on the back of a truck—they just douse it with gasoline and burn the shit out of it. They solve everything with sledgehammers. The people around here certainly aren’t going to say anything, are they? Because they know if they do, their own houses’ll burn up. It wouldn’t even be on the news.”
“Are you saying that the police burned Hasselgard’s car?”
“Didn’t I make that clear?”
“But, Tom, why—”
It seemed, at last, that he had to tell her: the words nearly marched out of his mouth by themselves. “I wrote the letter the police got—the letter was supposed to be about that ex-con, Foxhall Edwardes. Fulton Bishop talked about it at his press conference. It was an anonymous letter, because I didn’t want them to know a kid wrote it. I told them how and why Hasselgard killed his own sister. The next day, all hell broke loose. They killed Hasselgard, they killed this guy Edwardes, they killed a cop named Mendenhall, and injured his partner, Klink, they let loose this huge black cloud—”
He threw up his arms, stopped short by the incongruity of saying these terrible things to a beautiful girl in a blue shirt and white shorts who was thinking about a lost dog. “It’s this whole place,” he said. “Mill Walk! We’re supposed to believe every word they say and keep on taking dancing lessons, we’re supposed to keep on going to Boney Milton when we’re sick, we’re supposed to get excited about a picture book of every house the Redwings ever lived in!”
She took a step nearer to him. “I’m not saying I understand everything, but are you sorry you wrote the letter?”
“I don’t know. Not exactly. I’m sorry those two men died. I’m sorry Hasselgard wasn’t arrested. I didn’t know enough.”
Then she said something that surprised him. “Maybe you just wrote to the wrong person.”
“You know,” he said, “maybe I did. There’s a detective named Natchez—I used to think he was one of the bad guys, but a friend of mine told me that he was close to Mendenhall. And this morning at the hospital I thought I saw that he and some of his friends …”
“Why don’t you go to him?”
“I need more. I need to have something he doesn’t already know.”
“Who’s this friend? The one who told you about Natchez and Mendenhall?”
“Somebody wonderful,” he said. “A great man. I can’t tell you his name, because you’d laugh at me if I did. But someday I’d like you to meet him. Really meet him.”
“Really meet him? This isn’t Dennis Handley, is it?”
Tom laughed. “No, not Handles. Handles has given up on me.”
“Because he didn’t get you into bed.”
“What!”
She smiled at him. “Well, I’m glad it’s not him anyhow. Are we still going to the old slave quarter?”
“Do you still want to?”
“Of course I do. In spite of what my parents want for me, I still haven’t completely given up hoping I might have an interesting life.” She moved nearer to him, and looked up with an expression that reminded him of the first time Miss Ellinghausen had brought them together. “I really do wonder where you’re going. I wonder where you and I are going too.”
She did not want him to kiss her, he saw—it was just that she saw more of him than he had ever expected her to see. She had not questioned or disbelieved him; he had not shocked her: she had taken every step with him. This girl he had just mentally accused of thinking of nothing more than a lost dog suddenly seemed surpassing, immense. “Me too,” he said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you all this stuff.”
“You had to tell somebody, I suppose. Isn’t that why you invited me on this excursion?”
And there she was again: in his very footsteps, this time before he had even made them.
“Are you going to introduce me to this Hattie Bascombe, or not?”
They smiled at each other and turned back to the car.
“I’m glad you’re coming to Eagle Lake,” she said, when they were both in their seats. “I have the feeling you might be safer there.”
He thought of Fulton Bishop’s face, and nodded. “I’m safe now, Sarah. Nothing’s going to happen.”
“Then if you’re this great detective and all, find Bingo for me.” She gunned the engine and shot forward.
Tom had been half-fearing, half-expecting that another spell of illness would overtake him as they approached Goethe Park; by now, he scarcely knew what he expected from a visit to Hattie Bascombe, but was certain at least that he did not want to get sick in front of Sarah Spence. He still had not told her that all he knew of the old nurse’s whereabouts was that she lived in the old slave quarter, and that was embarrassment enough.
The street numbers marched from the twenties into the thirties as they drove down Calle Burleigh, and he was relieved to feel no symptoms of distress. Neither of them spoke much. When the row of houses and shops before them yielded to the great cream-colored façade of a church, and after that to trees and open ground, he told her to turn left at the next block, and Sarah went around the nose of a dray horse and through a cloud of bicycles into 35th Street.
To their right, children pulled their parents forward toward hot dog vendors and balloon men. Exhausted tigers and panthers lay flattened on the stone floors of their cages; some other animal howled in the maze of trails between cages. Tom closed his eyes.
For two blocks past the south end of Goethe Park, where young men in jeans and T-shirts played cricket before an audience of small children and wandering dogs, the houses continued neat and sober, with their porches and dormer windows and borders of bright flowers. Bicycles leaned against the palm trees on the sidewalks. Then Sarah drove up a tiny hill where a clump of cypress trees twisted toward the sun, and down into a different landscape.
Beside the grimy red brick and broken windows of an abandoned factory came a stretch of taverns and leaning edifices much added to at their back ends and connected by ramshackle passages and catwalks. On both sides of the street, handwritten signs in the windows advertised ROOMS T? LET and ALL SORTS OF JUNK PURCHASED AT GOOD PRICES. OLD CLOATHES CHEAP. HUMIN HAIR BOUGHT AND SOLD. The wooden buildings on both sides of the street blotted out the afternoon sun. At intervals, archways and passages cut into the tenements gave Tom glimpses of sunless courtyards in which lounging men passed bottles back and forth. From the windows a few faces stared out as blankly as the signs: BONES. WARES BOUGHT.
“I feel like a tourist here,” Tom said.
“I do too. It’s because we’re never supposed to see this part of the island. We’re not supposed to know about Elysian Courts, so it’s kind of invisible.”
Sarah drove around a hole in the middle of the narrow street.
“Is that what this is called?”
“Didn’t you know about the Elysian Courts? They were built to get people out of the old slave quarter—because the quarter was built on a marsh, and it turned out to be unhealthy. Cholera, influenza, I don’t know what. These tenements were put up in a hurry, and pretty soon they were even worse than the slave quarter.”
“Where did you hear about them?”
“They were one of Maxwell Redwing’s first projects, around 1920 or so. Not one of his most successful. Except financially, of course. I guess the people who live there call it Maxwell’s Heaven.”
Tom turned around on the seat to look back at the leaning tenements: their outer walls formed a kind of fortress, and through the arches and passages he could see dim figures moving within the mazelike interior.