The fourth-floor room stretched away from him, lighter than the lobby, but at seven in the morning filled with a twilight murk that obscured the painting above the bed. The other copy of the
“When did you first begin to think that my grandfather murdered Jeanine Thielman?” he asked.
Von Heilitz snapped the paper into a neat rectangle, folded it in half, and set it down between them.
“When one of his employees bought the house on The Sevens. How do you feel, Tom? Must be unsettling, reading about your own death.”
“I don’t know. Confused. Tired. I don’t see what we can do. We’re back on Mill Walk, where even the police work for the people like my grandfather.”
“Not all of them. David Natchez is going to help us, and we are going to help him. We have a rare opportunity. One of the men at the center of power on this island committed a murder with his own hands. Your grandfather is not a man to choose to suffer in silence, any more than the man who killed my parents. If he’s charged with murder, he’ll bring the whole house down with him.”
“But how do we get him charged with murder?”
“We get him to confess. Preferably to David Natchez.”
“He’ll never confess.”
“You forget that we have two weapons. One of them is you.”
“What’s the other one?”
“Those notes you saw in Barbara Deane’s room. They weren’t written to her, of course. She found them in the lodge when Glen sent her over to clean up. He probably left them on top of his desk—or maybe he even showed them to her. He knew that she’d sympathize with anyone falsely accused. He might even have said that the notes referred to his wife’s death. I suppose Barbara got a few anonymous notes herself, back when the paper ran those stories about her.”
“But maybe that’s what they were—notes someone sent to her.”
“I don’t think she would have kept them, in that case. She would have burned them. She kept these because they troubled her. I also think she planned to show them to you.”
“Why?”
“Because when you turned up, asking a lot of questions about Jeanine Thielman and Anton Goetz, you stirred up all the doubts she had about your grandfather.
Von Heilitz leaned back against his chair. A white stubble gleamed on his face, and his eyes were far back in his head. “Afterwards, people all over the mainland asked me to solve murders. I didn’t want to admit I was wrong any more than Barbara Deane did. Anton Goetz had put me on my way.”
“Could we reconstruct what really happened?” Tom asked. “There’s a lot I still don’t understand.”
“I bet you do, though.” Von Heilitz straightened up and rubbed a hand over his face. “Let’s say that Glen knew immediately that Jeanine Thielman had written him those notes. She was threatening him with some kind of exposure. She knew something—something really damaging. Her husband was a business rival of Glen’s, and Goetz might have told her more than he should have about your grandfather’s business. Or, as I think, it might have been another kind of exposure. At any rate, she was telling Glen to stop whatever he was doing. He left a noisy party at the club—I think he had set up this meeting for the day before he was supposed to go to Florida, but I don’t think he planned to kill her. He came to her lodge. She was waiting for him on her deck. He confronted her. Whatever she knew about was serious enough to ruin him. Jeanine refused to cooperate with him, or to believe his denials, and turned her back to go inside. He saw the gun her husband left on the table, picked it up, shot and missed, and then he shot again. Everybody else at the lake except Anton Goetz was at the club, having a good time dancing to a loud band—do you know how music carries, up there?”
Tom nodded. “But he was a bad shot. How did he hit her?”
