Samuel Larabee Hamilton had turned up at Eagle Lake shortly after the discovery of Magda’s body. The body had been pulled up with a drag after five days in the water, and the metal hooks of the drag, the rocks on the bottom of the lake, and the fish had all left their marks. The editor had thought that not all the wounds visible on the body had been due to these causes. What outraged him was that the body had been cremated after a perfunctory autopsy, and what looked at the least like a suicide had been whitewashed as an accidental death. Island justice; thugs in the backyard.
A week after Magda Upshaw’s ashes had been returned to her parents, the management of the Eagle Lake clubhouse had replaced every waiter, busboy, cook, and bartender in the building with men from Chicago. No clubhouse employee would telephone the fractious local editor if another member should die under circumstances that might be misunderstood.
Not long after, Hamilton learned that gangsters were buying cabins and hunting lodges in the county, and he was off on another crusade.
In the next volume, Tom reread the accounts of Jeanine Thielman’s death he had already seen at Lamont von Heilitz’s house. MILLIONAIRE SUMMER RESIDENT DISAPPEARS FROM HOME. JEANINE THIELMAN FOUND IN LAKE. LOCAL MAN CHARGED WITH THIELMAN MURDER. MYSTERY RESOLVED IN TRAGEDY. Pictures of Mrs. Thielman, Minor Truehart, Lamont von Heilitz, Anton Goetz. What Tom had not understood, reading over his neighbor’s shoulder, was how rapturously S.L.H. had greeted the appearance of Lamont von Heilitz. The Shadow was not only a celebrity, he was a hero. His investigation had saved an innocent local man, and rescued the reputation of the town of Eagle Lake in a way that might have been calculated to sell the maximum number of newspapers. He was the top: he was the Louvre Museum, the Coliseum, he was Mickey Mouse. He was just what S.L.H. had been waiting for.
Hamilton had sponsored a Lamont von Heilitz day; he had published the Shadow’s opinions on great unsolved mysteries of the past; he had run a column that invited people to ask the famous detective whatever they most wanted to know about him; and the reclusive detective had submitted to both the Ionization and the assault on his privacy. He had shaken hundreds of hands, had volunteered his favorite color (cobalt blue), music (a dead heat between Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Haydn’s The Creation), tailor (Huntsman’s of Savile Row), novel (The Golden Bowl), and city (New York). He felt that good detectives were not born, like good artists, nor made, like good soldiers, but were produced by a combination of the two.
Tom searched the more recent volumes for articles about burglaries and break-ins around Eagle Lake. He learned which houses had been burgled and what had been stolen—a Harmon Karden amplifier and a Technics turntable here, a jade ring and Kerman rug there, television sets, musical instruments, paintings, antique furniture, prescription drugs, clothes, cash, anything that might have a resale value. The break-ins began three years before, in July, and took place between June and September; two dogs besides Barbara Deane’s had been killed, both of them family pets. The burglars had begun with the houses of summer residents, but last year had struck several homes in Eagle Lake that belonged to full-time residents. Chet Hamilton’s series elaborately restated the ideas he had described to Tom, and implied that wealthy college-age children of summer residents were committing the crimes.
Because he thought that Lamont von Heilitz would have done it, Tom scanned most of the articles and columns in the recent volumes, reading about property transfers, meetings of the town council, arrests for drunken driving and poaching and assault, new appointments to the Chamber of Commerce and the Epworth League, the 4-H Club trip to Madison, traffic accidents, hit and run accidents, bar brawls and knifings and gunshot wounds, applications for liquor licenses, and a squash of record size grown in the garden of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Vale. He made a few notes on a sheet of his grandfather’s old stationery he had folded into his shirt pocket, left the bound volumes on the desk, turned off the light, and went downstairs, thinking about Magda Upshaw, Barbara Deane’s Chow dog, and the premises of an out-of-business machine shop on Summers Street that had been leased to the Redwing Holding Company.
On the other side of a thick hedge from the Gazette office, the post office looked like a frontier military post in an old John Ford Western. Tom stood on the sidewalk before it, wondering whether he should just put his letter to von Heilitz in the letterbox in front of the post office, or save it to give to the mailman the following day. It was a few minutes past five o’clock, and half of the tourists on Main Street had gone back to their resorts and fishing camps for the American Plan dinner. A powder blue Cadillac with pointed fins swung across the oncoming lanes to make a U-turn too narrow for its wheelbase. Stalled cars behind it honked, and drivers in the opposite lanes slammed on their brakes and skidded to stops. A man in a pink shirt and red shorts opened the door of the Cadillac and fell out into the street. He picked himself up, waved to the shouting people in the other cars, got uncertainly back behind the wheel and slowly backed up without closing his door. A blue mail van squirted around the front of the Cadillac, wove through the waiting cars, and rolled to a stop in front of the post office. A slim black-haired man in a blue postal service shirt and black jeans jumped out of the van and went around to the back to remove a half-filled mailbag.
Tom took a step nearer, and the mailman glanced at him. “A drunk in a Caddy. I hate to say it, but that’s this town in the summer.” He shook his head, shouldered the bag, and began going up the path to the post office.
“Excuse me,” Tom said, “but do you know a man named Joe Truehart?”
The mailman stopped moving and stared at Tom. He looked neither friendly nor unfriendly. He did not even look expectant. After a beat, he lowered the bag from his shoulder. “Yeah, I know Joe Truehart. Pretty damn well. Who wants to know?”
“My name is Tom Pasmore. I just got here from Mill Walk, and a man named Lamont von Heilitz asked me to say hello to him.”
The mailman grinned. “All right. Why didn’t you say that in the first place? You found your man, Tom Pasmore. You tell him I said hello back.” He stuck out a firm brown hand, and Tom shook it.
“Mr. von Heilitz asked me to write to him, and said that I should give my letters to you personally. He didn’t want anybody to see me doing it, but I don’t think anybody’s looking at us.”
Truehart looked over his shoulder, and grinned another brilliant grin. “They’re all still gaping at the accident that didn’t happen. Mr. von Heilitz told me to look out for you. You got a letter already?”
Tom handed it to him, and Truehart folded the letter into his back pocket. “I thought you’d show up near the mailboxes. I generally get out to Eagle Lake a little past four.”
Tom explained that he had come into town before that, and said he would wait near the mailboxes whenever he had letters in the future.
“Don’t wait out in the open,” the mailman said. “Stick yourself back in the woods until you hear my van. If we’re going to do this, let’s do it right.”
They shook hands again, and Tom began to walk down Main Street toward the crowd of people watching the traffic disentangle itself.
Inside the post office, Joe Truehart shouted hello to the postmaster, who was sorting mail at a long table out of sight behind the wall of boxes. He removed Tom’s letter from his hip pocket and reached up to slide it on top of the parcel shelves, where the postmaster, a peppery grey-haired woman named Corky Malleson who was four-foot eleven and a half, would be unable to see it. Then he carried his bag back to the table and began transferring its contents into other bags for the five-thirty pickup. He helped Corky sort the third-class mail and put it into the boxes, and said good-bye to her when she went home to fix dinner for her husband.