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“You’ll walk. You think just like he does. You’re so worried about Lamont you stay awake a whole night, and you want me to go back to bed. What do you think happens, if I go home? My wife asks me, did you find Lamont? I say, no, I need my sleep. She says, you sleep after you find Lamont!” He shook his head. “It’s not so easy, being his friend. Who do you think found him when he was nearly killed in back of Armory Place? Who do you think took him to the hospital? You think he did that himself?”

“You’re worried too,” Tom said, having just understood this.

“You have not been listening to me,” Andres said. “That is my lot, worrying about Lamont von Heilitz. So let us go to his house, and you will walk in and find him making a cup of tea and he will say, ‘Your grandfather’s horse has thrown its right front shoe,’ and you will go back to the hotel and think about it, and I will go back to bed and not think about it. Because I know better than to think about the kind of things he says.”

Andres turned off Calle Berlinstrasse into Edgewater Trail. Waterloo Parade, Balaclava Lane, Omdurman Road. The houses spread apart and grew larger. Victoria Terrace, Stonehenge Circle, Ely Place, Salisbury Road. Now he was back in the peaceful landscape of his childhood, where sprinklers whirred over long lawns and bright sunlight fell on bougainvillaea and hibiscus trees with lolling red blossoms. Here every child attended Brooks-Lowood School, and a traffic jam was one servant riding a bicycle into another servant’s bicycle, spilling clean laundry into the clean street. Yorkminster Place. Some of the houses had red-tiled roofs and curving white walls, some were of smooth white marble that ate the sunlight, some of grey stone piled into turrets and towers, others of shining white wood, with broad porches and columns and verandas the size of fields. Sprays of water played on the broad green lawns.

Andres turned into The Sevens and pulled up to the curb. He turned around and laid an arm along the top of his seat. “Now I sit here, the way I always did for Lamont, and you go to his place, okay? And see what you see. Then you come back and tell me about it, and we’ll decide what to do after that.”

Tom patted his thick arm and got out of the car. Delicately scented air drifted toward him from Eastern Shore Road and the ocean. Tom walked away from the car and turned toward Eastern Shore Road on Edgewater Trail. His scalp and the back of his neck prickled with the sensation that he was being watched, and he moved quickly up the block. The flat blue line of the sea hung between the great houses.

Dr. Milton’s buggy stood in front of his house, and two men carried a wrapped couch down the Langenheims’ walk toward a long yellow van marked Mill Walk Intercoastal Movers. The feeling that someone was watching him grew stronger. Tom hurried past the Jacobs house and walked up onto Lamont von Heilitz’s concrete drive. On the lawn, fresh cuttings lay amongst the blades of grass. From down near An Die Blumen, no louder than a bee, came the dim whirring of the big mower used by the lawn service. The curtains hung in the windows as always, blocking the secret life of the house’s owner from the eyes of the neighborhood children. He’s okay, Tom thought, I don’t have to go any farther. Von Heilitz would be back in the St. Alwyn, fuming at Tom for disappearing when he needed him to look for purple socks or thrown right front horseshoes. He glanced over his shoulder at his house and went reluctantly up von Heilitz’s drive. At the point where the drive curved around to the back of the house and the empty garage, a flattened cigarette butt lay between a black line of tar and the edge of the concrete. Tom came around the back of the house and saw an oil stain on the concrete halfway between the garage and the back door.

He stopped moving. All old driveways had oil stains. Wherever you had cars, you had oil stains. Even people who didn’t own cars had oil stains on the driveways. The back door would be locked, and he would ring the bell a couple of times, and then go back around the block to reassure Andres. Tom walked around the glistening stain toward the step up to the back door, following faint scuff marks on the concrete.

The small pane of glass nearest the doorknob was smashed in, as if a fist had punched through it to reach inside and open the door. Tom put his hand on the knob, too disturbed now to bother with ringing the bell, turned it, and heard the bolt slide out of the striker plate. He pulled the door toward him. “Hello?” he said, but his voice was only a whisper. He stepped into a coatroom where a lifetime’s worth of raincoats hung on brass hooks. Two or three coats lay puddled on the floor. Tom walked through into the kitchen. A smear of blood lay like a tiny red feather on the counter beside the sink. Water dripped slowly from the tap, one drop hitting the bottom of the sink as another formed and lengthened on the lip of the faucet. A nearly empty pint bottle of Pusser’s Navy Rum stood on the counter back in the shadows beneath the cabinets.

“No,” Tom said, in the same strangled voice.

Here’s to another perfect day.

He came out of the kitchen and stopped short as whatever was in his stomach slammed into his throat. Toppled file cabinets and scattered papers lay all across the floor. Horsehair and curd-colored stuffing foamed from the leather furniture where he and the old man had sat talking. Torn books ruffled like hair on top of the wreckage. Tom took a blind, dazed step into the enormous room. “LAMONT!” he yelled, and this time his voice was as loud as a bugle. “LAMONT!” He stepped forward again, and his foot came down on a thick fan of papers leaking from a yellow file. He bent to pick them up, and more papers streamed from the file, papers marked Cleveland, June 1940, and Crossed Keys Motel, Bakersfield, and covered with a dense, obsessive handwriting he realized he had never seen before. He moved to set them down on the coffee table where he and von Heilitz had put their feet and saw that the table had been broken in half, its filigreed leather surface sagging over the broken wood and stamped with dusty boot prints. There were no paths through the maze now, it was all chaos and obstruction, and he stepped over a file cabinet vomiting old issues of the Eyewitness and sent the wheel of a bicycle ticking around against its frame. Paintings floated atop shoals of papers and books; records torn from their sleeves leaned against paper mountains. Tom wandered through the chaos and saw an empty file marked Glendenning Upshaw, 1938–39. Beside it was another, Blue Rose Affair. The desks had been rifled and overturned, their drawers tossed aside—scissors and bottles of glue surfaced here and there in the litter—the tops of library lamps shattered into green fragments across ripped couches. The sharp, dog-pound smell of urine came from the ruined couches. Beneath the globe that had stood on a filing cabinet he saw the words Blue Rose again and pulled out the sleeve of the Glenroy Breakstone record. “Oh, God,” he said. A red smear in the shape of a hand jumped toward him from the dark paneling on the staircase. Another strong, fetid odor announced itself, and he looked down and saw a massive human turd on a bare patch of carpet. A little scatter of coins lay beside it. He scrambled over a series of files and reached the bottom of the staircase. On the tread beneath the handprint was a dark sprinkle of dots.

Tom ran up the staircase and threw open a bedroom door. The stench of blood and gunpowder hung in the room, along with some other, more domestic stink. The mattress had been pulled off the bed, and both bed and mattress had been slashed again and again.

In the middle of the floor, a pool of blood sent out rays and streamers extending beneath the mattress and toward the closet doors. Red footprints and red dots and splashes covered the carpet. Another impatient handprint blared from a white closet door. Tom felt the shimmer of violence all about him, and moved across the slippery floor to the closet. He pulled it open, and his father’s body fell out into his arms.