The Throat

By this time I was coming into the living room, and Marjorie Ransom leaned forward to look past her husband. "You saw that poor boy too, didn't you, Tim? Did he look like John's student to you?"

Ralph broke in before I could respond. "At this stage of the game, Alan Brookner couldn't tell Frank Sinatra from Gabby Hayes."

"Well, I don't know," I said.

"Mom," John said loudly, carrying a fresh drink in from the kitchen, "Tim has no idea what Grant Hoffman looked like."

"Right," I said. "I'm a stranger here myself."

"Get yourself a drink, son," Ralph said. "It's the Attitude Adjustment Hour."

"That's what they call it at our center," Marjorie said. "Attitude Adjustment Hour. Isn't that cute?"

"I'll get myself something in the kitchen," I said, and went around the back of the couch and looked at the Vuillard over the tops of the Ransoms' heads.

Only one figure on the canvas, a child, looked forward and out of the painting, as if returning the viewer's gaze. Everyone else, the women and the servants and the other children, was caught in the shimmer of light and the circumstances of their gathering. The child who faced forward sat by himself on the lush grass, a few inches from a brilliant smear of golden light. He was perhaps an inch from the actual center of the painting itself, where the shape of a woman turning toward a tea service intersected one of the boughs of the juniper tree. As soon as I had seen him, he became the actual center of the painting, a sober, dark-haired boy of seven or eight looking unhappily but intently out of both the scene and the frame—right at me, it seemed. He knew he was in a painting, the meaning of which he contained within himself.

"Tim only came here to admire my art," John said.

"Oh, it's just lovely," Marjorie said. "That big red one?"

I went into the kitchen and poured a glass of club soda. When I returned, Ralph and Marjorie were talking about something the day had brought back to them, a period that must have been the unhappiest of their lives.

"I'll never forget it," Marjorie said. "I thought I was going to faint."

"That guy at the door," Ralph said. "God, I knew what it was as soon as the car pulled up in front of the house. He got out and stood there, making sure the address was right. Then the other one, the sergeant, got out, and handed him the flag. I didn't know whether to cry or punch him in the mouth."

"And then we got that telegram, and there it was in black and white. Special Forces Captain John Ransom, killed in action at Lang Vei."

"Nobody knew where I was, and another guy was identified as me."

"Is that what happened?" I asked.

"What a foul-up," said Ralph. "If you made a mistake like that in business, you'd be out on your ear."

"It's surprising more mistakes like that weren't made," I said.

"In my opinion, John should have got at least a Silver Star, if not the Medal of Honor," Ralph said. "My kid was a hero over there."

"I survived," John said.

"Ralph broke down and cried like a baby when we found out," Marjorie said.

Ralph ignored this. "I mean it, kid. To me, you're a hero, and I'm damn proud of you." He set down his empty glass, stood up, and went to his son. John obediently stood up and let himself be embraced. Neither of them looked as though he had done much embracing.

When his father let him go, John said, "Why don't we all go out for dinner? It's about time."

"This one's on me," Ralph said, reminding me of his son. "You better get me while you can, I'm not going to be around forever."

When we got back from Jimmy's, I told John that I wanted to take a walk. Ralph and Marjorie headed in for a nightcap before going to bed, and I let myself out, took Damrosch's case from the trunk, and walked on the quiet streets beneath the beautiful starry night to Tom Pasmore's house.

PART SEVEN

TOM PASMORE

1

Familiar jazz music came from Tom's speakers, a breathy, authoritative tenor saxophone playing the melody of "Star Dust."

"You're playing 'Blue Rose,' " I said. "Glenroy Breakstone. I never heard it sound so good."

"It came out on CD a couple of months ago." He was wearing a gray glen plaid suit and a black vest, and I was sure that he had gone back to bed after the service. We emerged from the fabulous litter into the clearing of the sofa and the coffee table. Next to the usual array of bottles, glasses, and ice bucket lay the disc's jewel box. I picked it up and looked at the photograph reproduced from the original album—Glenroy Breakstone's broad face bent to the mouthpiece of his horn. When I was sixteen, I had thought of him as an old man, but the photograph showed a man no older than forty. Of course the record had been made long before I became aware of it, and if Breakstone were still alive, he had to be over seventy.

"I think I'm trying to get inspired," Tom said. He bent over the table and poured an inch of malt whiskey into a thick low glass. "Want anything? There's coffee in the kitchen."

I said that I'd be grateful for the coffee, and he went back into his kitchen and returned a moment later with a steaming ceramic mug.

"Tell me about the morgue." He sat down in his chair and gestured me toward the couch in front of the coffee table.

"They had the man's clothes laid out, and Alan recognized the jacket as one he'd given to this student, Grant Hoffman."

"And you think that's who it was?"

I nodded. "I think it was Hoffman."

Tom sipped the whiskey. "One. The original Blue Rose murderer is torturing John Ransom. Probably he intends to kill him, too, eventually. Two. Someone else is imitatirig the original Blue Rose killer, and he too is trying to destroy John. Three. Another party is using the Blue Rose murders to cover up his real motives." He took another little sip. "There are other possibilities, but I want to stick with these, at least for now. In all three cases, some very determined character is still happily convinced the police think that Walter Dragonette committed his crimes."

Tommy Flanagan began spinning out an ethereal solo on "Star Dust."

I told Tom about April Ransom's interest in the Horatio Street bridge and William Damrosch.

"Did she write up any of her findings?"

"I don't know. Maybe I could look around her office and find her notes. I'm not even sure John really knew anything about it."

"Don't let him know you're interested in the notes," he said. "Let's just do things quietly, for a while."

"You're thinking about it, aren't you? You already have ideas about it."

"I want to find out who killed her. I also want to find out who killed this Grant Hoffman. And I want your help."

"You and John."

"You'll be helping John, too, but I'd rather you didn't tell him about our discussions until I say it's okay."

I agreed to this.

"I said that I want to find out," Tom said. "That's what I meant. I want to know how and why April Ransom and that graduate student were killed. If we can help the police at that point, fine. If not, that's fine, too. I'm not in the justice business."

"You don't care if April's murderer is arrested?"

"I can't predict what will happen. We might learn his identity without being able to do anything about it. That would be acceptable to me."

"But if we find out who he is, we should be able to give our information to the police."

"Sometimes it works out that way." He leaned back in his chair, watching to see how I was taking this.

"What if I can't agree to this? I just go back to John's and forget about this conversation?"

"You go back to John's and do whatever you like."

"I'd never know what happened. I'd never know what you did or what you found out."

"Probably not."

I couldn't stand the thought of walking away without knowing what he would do—I had to know what the two of us could discover.

"If you think I'm going to walk out now, you're crazy," I said.

"Ah, good," he said, smiling. He had never doubted that I would accept his terms. "Let's go upstairs. I'll show you my toys."

2

At the far left of the big downstairs room, past the cabinets for the sound system and the shelves packed with compact discs, a wide staircase led up to the second floor. Tom went up the stairs one step ahead of me now, already talking. "I want us to begin at the beginning," he said. "If nothing else comes out of this, I want to understand the first Blue Rose murders. For a long time, Lamont thought it was solved, I guess—as you did, Tim. But I think it always bothered him." At the top of the stairs, he turned around to look at me. "Two days before his death, he told me the whole history of the Blue Rose murders. We were on the plane back from Eagle Lake, and we were going to stay at the St. Alwyn." He laughed out loud. "A couple of nuns in the seats in front of us almost broke their necks, they were listening in so hard. Lamont said that you could call Damrosch's suicide a sort of wrongful arrest—by then he knew that my grandfather had killed Damrosch. Lamont was doing two things at once. He was preparing me to face the truth about my grandfather."

He stepped back to let me reach the top of the stairs.

"And the second thing Lamont was doing—"

"Was to get me interested in the Blue Rose murders. I think the two of us would have worked on that one next. And do you know what that means? If he hadn't been killed, Lamont and I might have saved April Ransom's life."

His face twitched. "That's something I'd like to be clear about."

"Me, too," I said. I had my own reason for wanting to learn the identity of the original Blue Rose murderer.

"Okay," he said. Now Tom did not look languid, bored, amused, indifferent, or detached. He didn't look lost or unhappy. I had seen all of these things in him many times, but I had never seen him in the grip of a controlled excitement. He had never let me see this steely side of him. It looked like the center of his being.

"Let's get to work." Tom turned around and went down the hallway to what had been the door of Lamont von Heilitz's bedroom and went in.

The old bedroom was dark when I followed him in. My first impression was of a fire-sale chaos like the room downstairs. I saw the dim shapes of desks and cabinets and what looked like the glassy rectangles of several television sets. Books on dark shelves covered most of the walls. A thick dark curtain covered the window. In the depths of the room, Tom switched on a halogen lamp just as I finally grasped that the televisions were computer monitors.

He went methodically around the room, switching on lamps, as I took in that his office served two purposes: the mansion's old master bedroom was a much neater version of the room downstairs. It was where Tom both lived and worked. Against one wall of books, three office workstations held computers; a fourth, larger computer stood on the long wooden desk that faced the curtained window. File cabinets topped with microdiscs in plastic boxes stood beside each workstation and flanked his desk. Next to one of the workstations was a professional copy machine. Sound equipment crowded two tall shelves on the bookcase at the wall to my left. A long red leather chesterfield like Alan Brookner's, a plaid blanket folded over one of its arms, stood before the wall of books. A matching armchair sat at right angles to the chesterfield. Within reach of both was a glass table heaped with books and magazines, with a rank of bottles and ice bucket like the table downstairs. On the glossy white mantel of the room's fireplace, yellow orchids leaned and yawned out of tall crystal vases. Sprays of yellow freesias burst up out of a thick blue vase on a low, black piece of equipment that must have been a subwoofer.

The lamps cast mellow pools of light that burnished the rug lapping against the bookshelves. The orchids opened their lush mouths and leaned forward.

I wondered how many people had been invited into this room. I would have bet that only Sarah Spence had been here before me.

"My father told me something I never forgot, when we were flying back from Eagle Lake. Occasionally, you have to go back to the beginning and see everything in a new way."

Tom set his glass down on his desk and picked up a book bound in gray fabric boards. He turned it over in his hands, and then turned it over again, as if looking for the title. "And then he said, Occasionally, there are powerful reasons why you can't or don't want to do that." He looked for the invisible writing again. Even the spine of the book was blank. "That's what we're going to do to the Blue Rose case. We're going to go back to the beginning, the beginnings of a couple of things, and try to see everything in a new way."

I felt a flicker, no more than that, of an absolute uneasiness. Tom Pasmore placed the peculiar book back down on the desk and came toward me with his hands out, and I picked up the battered old satchel and gave it to him.

The moment of uneasiness had felt almost like guilt. Tom switched on the copy machine. It began to hum. Deep in its interior, an incandescently bright light flashed once.

Tom took a wad of yellowing paper six or seven inches thick out of the satchel. The top page had long tears at top and bottom that looked like they had been made by someone trying to check the pages beneath without removing a rubber band, but there was no rubber band. Part of my mind visualized a couple of stringy, broken forty-year-old rubber bands lying limp in a leather crease at the bottom of the satchel.

He put the documents on the copy machine. "Better err on the side of caution." He lifted off the top sheet and repaired the rips with tape. Then he squared up the stack of pages and inserted the whole thing face down in a tray. He twisted a dial. "I'll make a copy for each of us." He punched a button and stepped back. The incandescent light flashed again, and two clean sheets fed out into trays on the side of the machine. "Good baby," Tom said to it, and turned to me with a wry smile and said, "Don't put your business on the street, as a wise man once said to me."

3

Clean white sheets pumped out of the copier. "Do you know Paul Fontaine or Michael Hogan?" I asked.

"I know a little bit about them."

"What do you know? I'm interested."

Keeping an eye on the machine, Tom backed away and reached for his glass. He perched on the edge of the chesterfield, still watching the pages jump out of the machine. "Fontaine is a great street detective. The man has an amazing conviction record. I'm not even counting the ones who confessed. Fontaine is supposed to be a genius in the interrogation room. And Hogan's probably the most respected cop in Millhaven—he did great work as a homicide detective, and he was promoted to sergeant two years ago. From what I've seen, even the people who might be expected to be jealous are very loyal to him. He's an impressive guy. They're both impressive guys, but Fontaine clowns around to hide it."

"Are there a lot of murders in Millhaven?"

"More than you'd think. It probably averages out to about one a day. In the early fifties, there might have been two homicides a week—so the Blue Rose murders caused a real sensation." Tom stood up to inspect the progress of the old records through his machine. "Anyhow, you know what most murders are like. Either they're drug-related, or they're domestic. A guy comes home drunk, gets into a fight with his wife, and beats her to death. A wife gets fed up with her husband's cheating and shoots him with his own gun."

Tom checked the machine again. Satisfied, he sat back down on the edge of the couch. "Still, every now and then, there's something that just smells different from the usual thing. A teacher from Milwaukee in town to see her cousins disappeared on her way to a mall and wound up naked in a field, with her hands and legs tied together. There was an internist murdered in a men's room stall at the stadium at the start of a ball game. Paul Fontaine solved those cases—he talked to everybody under the sun, tracked down every lead, and got convictions."

"Who were the murderers?" I asked, seeing Walter Dragonette in my mind.

"Losers," Tom said. "Dodos. They had no connection to their victims—they just saw someone they decided they wanted to kill, and they killed them. That's why I say Fontaine is a brilliant street detective. He nosed around until he put all the pieces together, made his arrest, and made it stick. I couldn't have solved those cases. I need a kind of a paper trail. A lowlife who stabs a doctor in a toilet, washes the blood off his hands, buys a hot dog and goes back to his seat—that's a guy who's safe from me." He looked at me a little ruefully. "My kind of investigation sometimes seems obsolete."

Tom took the original stack of papers from the copier and put them back into the satchel. One of the copies he put on his desk, and the other he gave to me.

"Let's leaf through these quickly tonight, just to see if anything will set off some sparks."

I was still thinking about Paul Fontaine. "Is Fontaine from Millhaven?"

"I don't really know where he's from," Tom said. "I think he came here about ten-fifteen years ago. It used to be that policemen always worked in their hometowns, but now they move around, looking for promotions and better pay. Half of our detectives are from out of town."

Tom left the couch and went to the first workstation and turned on the computer by pressing a switch on the surge protector beneath it with his foot. Then he moved to the second and third workstations and did the same at each and finally sat down at his desk and bent over to turn on the surge protector there. "Let's see what we can come up with for that license number of yours."

I took my notebook out of my pocket and went over to the desk to see what he was going to do.

Tom's fingers moved over the keys, and a series of screens flashed across the monitor. The last one was just a series of codes in a single line. Tom put a plastic disc into the B drive—this much I could follow from my own experience—and punched in numbers on the telephone attached to his modem. The screen went blank for a moment and then flashed a fresh C prompt.

After the prompt, Tom typed in a code and pushed ENTER. The screen went blank again, and LC? appeared on the screen. "What was that number?"

I showed him the paper, and he typed in the plate number under the prompt and pushed ENTER again. The number stayed on the screen. He pushed a button marked RECEIVE.

"You're in the Motor Vehicle Department records now?"

"Actually, I got to Motor Vehicles through the computer at Armory Place. It runs on a twenty-four-hour day."

"You got directly into the police department central computer?"

"I'm a hacker."

"Why couldn't you just get the Blue Rose file from the computer?"

"The computerized records only go back eight or nine years. Ah, here we go. It takes the system a little while to work through the file."

Tom's computer flashed READY RECEIVE, and then displayed: ELVEE HOLDINGS, CORP 503 s 4TH ST. MILLHVEN, IL.

"Well, that's who owns your Lexus. Let's see if we can get a little farther." Tom pushed enter again, rattled through a sequence of commands I couldn't follow, and typed in another code. "Now we'll use the police computer to access Springfield, and see what this company looks like."

He bounced past a blur of options and menus, going through different levels of state records, until he came to a list of corporations that filled the screen. All began with the letter A. The names and addresses of the officers followed the corporate names. He scrolled rapidly down the screen, reducing the names and numbers to a blur, until he got to E. EAGAN CORP EAGAN MANAGEMENT CORP EAGLE CORP EBAN CORP. When we got to ELVA CORP., he bumped down name by name and finally reached ELVEE HOLDINGS CORP.

Beneath the name was the same address on South Fourth Street in Millhaven, the information that the company had been incorporated on 23 July 1973, and beneath that were the names of the officers.

ANDREW BELINSKI 503 s 4th st MILLHAVEN, P

LEON CASEMENT 503 s 4th st MILLHAVEN, VP

WILLIAM WRITZMANN 503 s 4th st MILLHAVEN, T

"Mysteriouser and mysteriouser," Tom said. "Who is the fugitive LV? I thought one of these guys would be named Leonard Vollman, or something like that. And does it seem likely that the officers of this corporation would all live together in a little tiny house? Let's take this one step further."

He wrote down the names and the address on a pad and then exited back through the same steps he had used to access the state records. Then he switched from the modem to a program called network. He punched more buttons and pointed at the computer at the first workstation, which began to hum. "I can use all my machines through this one. To keep from having to use a million different floppies, I have different kinds of information stored on the hard discs of these other computers. Over there, along with a lot of other stuff, I have reverse directories for a hundred major cities. Now let's punch up Millhaven in the reverse directory."

"God bless macros." He punched in a few random-looking letters, typed in the South Fourth Street address, and in a couple of seconds the machine displayed: EXPRESSPOST MAIL & FAX, along with a telephone number.

"Damn."

"Expresspost Mail?" I said. "What's that?"

"Probably an office where you rent numbered boxes—like private post office boxes. Considering the address, I think it's a storefront with rows of these boxes and a counter with a fax machine."

"Is it legal to give a place like that as your address?"

"Sure, but we're not done yet. Let's see if these characters ever popped up in the ordinary Millhaven telephone directory over, let's say, the past fifteen years."

He returned to the network slogan, punched in the same terminal code and more internal directory files. He keyed in the number 91, and a long list of names beginning with A followed with addresses and telephone numbers floated up on the monitors of both the first workstation and his desk computer.

"Go over to that station and make sure I don't miss one of these names."

I sat down before the subsidiary computer and watched the screen jump to the B listings. "We want Andrew Belinski," Tom said, and rolled down the Bs until he came to BELI. Then he dropped line by line through BELLIARD, BELLIBAS, BELLICK, BELLICKO, BELLIN BELLINA, BELLINELLI, BELLING, BELLISSIMO, BELMAN.

"Did I miss it, or isn't it there?"

"There's no Belinski," I said.

"Let's try Casement."

He scrolled rapidly to the Cs and flipped down a row of names to case, casement followed, CASEMENT, ARTHUR; CASEMENT,HUGH; CASENENTM ROGER. There was no Leon.

"Well, I think I know what we're going to find, but let's just try the last one."

He jumped immediately to W, and rolled electronically through the pages. One Writzmann was listed in the 1991 Millhaven directory, Oscar, of 5460 Fond du Lac Drive.

"What do you know? Either they don't exist, or they don't have telephones. Which seems more likely to you?"

"Maybe they have unlisted numbers," I said.

"To me, no numbers are unlisted." He smiled at me, proud of his toys.

"Maybe they're hiding—you can get a phone under another name, which makes it impossible to find you this way. But five years ago, maybe they didn't know they wouldn't want anybody to be able to find them in 1991. Let's try the listings for 1986."

Another series of backward steps, another keystroke, and all the listed and unlisted telephone numbers in Millhaven for 1986 came up on both screens.

There were no Belinskis, the same three Casements, and Oscar, but not William, Writmann.

"Let's zip back to 1981, and see if we can find them there."

The 1981 directory contained no Belinski, Casement, Arthur and Roger but not Hugh, and Writzmann, Oscar, at 5460 Fond du Lac Drive.

"I think I get the picture, but just for the hell of it, let's take a look at 1976."

No Belinski. Casement, Arthur, without the company of Roger. Writzmann, Oscar, already at 5460 Fond du Lac Drive.

"We struck out," I said.

"Hardly," Tom said. "We've made great strides. We have discovered the very interesting fact that the car you saw following John is the property of a company incorporated in the State of Illinois under a convenience address and three phony names. I wonder if Belinski, Casement, and Writzmann are phony people, too."

I asked him what he meant by "phony people."

"In order to incorporate, you need a president, a vice president, and a treasurer. Now somebody filed the papers for the Elvee Holding Corporation, or there wouldn't be an Elvee Holding Corporation. If I had to guess right now, I'd say that the person who filed for incorporation back in 1979 was good old LV. Anyhow, filing only takes one man. The filer can make up the names of his fellow officers."

"So one of these three people actually has to exist."

"That's right, but he may exist under some other name altogether. Now think, Tim. During the past few days, has John ever mentioned anyone whose name began with the letter V?"

"I don't think so," I said. "He hasn't really talked about himself very much."

"I don't suppose you ever heard Alan Brookner mention anybody with the initials LV."

"No, I haven't." This was a disturbing question. "You don't think these murders could have anything to do with Alan, do you?"

"They have everything to do with him. Who are the victims? His daughter. His best graduate student. But I don't think Alan is in danger, if that's what you mean."

I felt myself relaxing.

"You're fond of him, aren't you?"

"I think he has enough problems already," I said.

Tom leaned forward, propped his elbows on his knees, and said, "Oh?"

"I think he might have Alzheimer's disease. He managed to get himself together for the funeral, but I'm afraid that he's going to fall apart again."

"Did he teach last year?"

"I guess so, but I don't see how he can do it again this year. The problem is that if he quits, the entire Religion Department at Arkham goes with him, and John loses his job. Even Alan is worried about that—he struggled through last year partly for John's sake." I threw up my hands. "I wish I could do something to help. I did make arrangements for a private duty nurse to come to Alan's place every day, but that's about it."

"Can he afford that?" Tom was looking thoughtful, and I suddenly knew what he was considering. I wondered how many people he helped, quietly and anonymously.

"Alan's pretty well set up," I said quickly. "April saw to that."

"Well, then, John should hardly have to worry, either."

"John has complicated feelings about April's money. I think it's a question of pride."

"That's interesting," Tom said.

He straightened up and looked at his monitor, still displaying Oscar Writzmann's name and address. "Let's run these names through Births and Deaths. It's probably a wild goose chase, but what the hell?"

He began clicking at keys, and the screen before me went momentarily blank. Rows of codes marched across the dark gray background. John typed out Belinski, Andrew, Casement, Leon, and Writzmann, William, and the names appeared on my screen. More codes that must have been instructions to the modem replaced them. The screen went blank, and SEARCHING rose up out of the background and began pulsing on the screen.

"Now we just wait around?"

"Well, I'd like to take a look through the file," Tom said. "But before we do that, let's talk a little bit about the idea of place." He swallowed a little more whiskey, stood up, and walked over to his couch and sat down. I took the chair beside the chesterfield. His eyes almost snapped with excitement, and I wondered how I could ever have thought they looked washed out. "If William Damrosch didn't unite the Blue Rose victims, what did?"

During the brief moment in which Tom Pasmore and I waited for the other to speak, I would have sworn that we were thinking the same thing.

Finally I broke the silence. "The St. Alwyn Hotel."

"Yes," Tom said softly.

4

"When Lamont and I got off the plane from Eagle Lake, we went to the St. Alwyn. We stayed there the last night of his life. The St. Alwyn was where the murders happened—in it, behind it, across the street."

"What about Heinz Stenmitz? His shop was five or six blocks from the St. Alwyn. And there wasn't any connection between Stenmitz and the hotel."

"Maybe there was a connection we don't know yet," Tom said. "And think about this, too. How much time elapsed between the murder of Arlette Monaghan and James Treadwell? Five days. How much time between Treadwell and Monty Leland? Five days. How much time between Monty Leland and Heinz Stenmitz? Almost two weeks. More than twice the time that separated the first three murders. Do you make anything of that?"

"He tried to stop, but couldn't. In the end, he couldn't restrain himself—he had to go out and kill someone again." I looked at Tom glinting at me and tried to imagine what he was thinking. "Or maybe someone else killed Stenmitz—maybe it was like Laing, a copycat murder, for entirely different motives."

He smiled at me almost proudly, and despite myself, I felt gratified that I had guessed what he was thinking.

"I guess that's possible," Tom said, and I knew that I had not followed his thinking after all. My pride curdled. "But I think my grandfather was Blue Rose's only imitator."

"So what are you saying?"

"I think you were half right. It was the same man, but with a different motive."

I confessed that I was lost.

Tom leaned forward, eyes still snapping with excitement. "Here we have a vindictive, ruthless man who does everything according to plan. What's his motive for the first three murders? A grudge against the St. Alwyn?"

I nodded.

"Once every five days for fifteen days, he kills someone in the immediate vicinity of the St. Alwyn, once actually inside the St. Alwyn. Then he stops. By this time, how many people do you suppose are staying in the St. Alwyn? It must be like a ghosttown."

"Sure, but…" I shut up and let him say what he had to.

"And then he kills Stenmitz. And who was Heinz Stenmitz? Pigtown's friendly neighborhood sex criminal. The other three victims could have been anybody—they were pawns. But when somebody goes out of his way to kill a molester of little boys, an active chickenhawk, I think that is not a random murder."

He leaned back, finished. His eyes were still blazing.

"So what you need," I said, "is a vindictive, ruthless man who has a grudge against the St. Alwyn—and—"

"And—"

"And a son."

"And a son," Tom said. "You've got it. The kind of man we're talking about couldn't stand anybody violating his own child. If he found out about it, he'd have to kill the man who did it. The reason nobody ever thought of this before is that it looked as though that was exactly the reason that Stenmitz had been killed." He laughed. "Of course it was the reason he was killed! It just wasn't Damrosch who killed him!"

We looked at each other for a moment, and then I laughed, too.

"I think we know a lot about Blue Rose," Tom said, still smiling at his own vehemence. "He didn't stop because my grandfather had just guaranteed his immunity from arrest by killing William Damrosch. We've been assuming that all along, but, now that I have Blue Rose in a kind of focus, I think he stopped because he was finished—he was finished even before he murdered Heinz Stenmitz. He accomplished what he set out to do— he paid back the St. Alwyn for whatever it did to him. If he thought the St. Alwyn had still owed him something, he would have gone on leaving a fresh corpse draped around the place every five days until he was satisfied."

"So what set him off all over again two weeks ago?"

"Maybe he started brooding about his old grudge and decided to make life miserable for the son of his old employer."

"And maybe he won't stop until he kills John."

"John is certainly the center of these new murders," Tom said. "Which puts you pretty close to that center, if you haven't noticed."

"You mean Blue Rose might decide to make me his next victim?"

"Hasn't it occurred to you that you might be in some danger?"

It sounds stupid, but it had not occurred to me, and Tom must have seen the doubt and consternation I felt.

"Tim, if you want to go back to your life, there's no reason not to. Forget everything we talked about earlier. You can tell John that you have to meet a deadline, fly home to New York, and go back to your real work."

"Somehow," I said, trying to express what I had never put into words until this moment, "my work seems related to everything we've been talking about. Every now and then I get the feeling that some answer, some key, is all around me, and that all I have to do is open my eyes." Tom was looking at me very intently, not betraying anything. "Besides, I want to learn Blue Rose's name. I'm not going to run out now. I don't want to go back to New York and get a phone call from you a week from now telling me John was found knifed to death outside the Idle Hour."

"As long as you remember that this isn't a book."

"It isn't Little Women, anyhow," I said.

"Okay." He looked across the room at the monitor on his desk, where SEARCHING still pulsed on and off. "Tell me about Ralph Ransom."

5

After I described my conversation with John's father at the funeral, Tom said, "I didn't know your father used to work at the St. Alwyn."

"Eight years," I said. "He ran the elevator. He was fired not too long after the murders ended. His drinking got worse after my sister was killed. About a year later, he straightened himself out and got a job on the assembly line at the Glax Corporation."

"Your sister?" Tom said. "You had a sister who was killed? I didn't know about that." He looked at me hard, and I saw consciousness come into his face. "You mean that she was murdered."

I nodded, too moved by the speed and accuracy of his intelligence to speak.

"Did this happen near your house?" He meant: did it happen near the hotel?

I told him where April was murdered.

"When?"

I thought he already knew, but I told him the date and then said that I had been running across the street to help her when I was hit by the car. Tom knew all about that, but he had known nothing else.

"Tim," he said, and blinked. I wondered what was going through his mind. Something had amazed him. He began again. "That was five days before Arlette Monaghan's murder." He sat there looking at me with his mouth open.

I felt as if my mouth, too, was hanging open. I had always been secretly convinced that Blue Rose was my sister's murderer, but until this moment I had never thought about the sequence of the dates.

"That's why you're in Millhaven," he said. Then he stared blindly at the table and said it to himself: "That's why he's in Millhaven." He turned almost wonderingly to me again. "You didn't come back here for John's sake, you wanted to find out who killed your sister."

"I came back to do both," I said.

"And you saw him," Tom said. "By God, you actually saw Blue Rose."

"For about a second. I never saw his face—just a shape."

"You devil. You dog. You—you're a deep one." He was shaking his head. "I'm going to have to keep my eye on you. You've been sitting on this information since you were seven years old, and you don't come up with it until now." He put a hand on top of his head, as if it might otherwise fly off. "All this time, there was another Blue Rose murder that no one knew about. He didn't get to write his slogan, because you came along and got run over. So he waited five days and did it all over again." He was looking at me with undiminished wonder. "And afterward no one would ever connect your sister with Blue Rose because she didn't tie in with Damrosch in any way. You didn't even put it in your book."

He took his hand off the top of his head and examined me. "What else have you got locked up there inside yourself?"

"I think that's it," I said.

"What was your sister's name?"

"April," I said.

He was staring at me again. "No wonder you had to come. No wonder you won't leave."

"I'll leave when I learn who he was."

"It must be like—like all the rest of your childhood was haunted by some kind of monster. For you, there was a real bogeyman."

"The Minotaur," I said.

"Yes." Tom's eyes were glowing with intelligence, sympathy, and some other quantity, something like appreciation. Then the computer made a clicking sound, and both of us looked at the screen. Lines of information were appearing on the gray background. We stood up and went to the desk.

BELINSKI, ANDREW THEODORE 146 TURNER ST VALLEY HILL BIRTH: 6/1/1940 DEATH: 6/8/1940.

CONCLUSION BELINSKI SEARCH.

CASEMENT, LEON CONCLUSION CASEMENT SEARCH.

"We must have been talking when the Belinski information came through. This Andrew Belinski was never an officer of Elvee Holding, though—he was a week old when he died, which is the only reason his death date got into the computer. When they're that close, they usually punch them in. And there's nothing on the computer for Leon Casement. We should be getting Writzmann through in about ten minutes."

We turned away from the machine. I went back to the chair and poured Poland water from a bottle on the coffee table into a glass and added ice from the bucket. Tom was walking backward and forward in front of the table with his hands in his pockets, sneaking little looks at me now and then.

Finally he stopped pacing. "Your father probably knew him."

That was right, I realized—my father had probably known the Minotaur.

"Ralph Ransom couldn't think of anyone else he fired around that time? I think we ought to start with that angle, until we come up with something else. He or one of his managers fired this guy—the Minotaur. And in revenge, the Minotaur set out to ruin the hotel. If you start asking about that, and there was some other motive, it will probably come up."

"You're asking people to remember a long way back."

"I know." He went to the second workstation and sat on the chair in front of the computer. "What was that day manager's name again?"

"Bandolier," I said. "Bob Bandolier."

"Let's see if he's still in the book." Tom called up the directory on the other machine and scrolled down the list of names beginning with B. "No Bandolier. Maybe he's in a nursing home, or maybe he moved out of town. Just for the fun of it, let's look for good old Glenroy."

The blur of names rolled endlessly up the screen for a minute. "This takes too long. I'll access it directly." He made the screen go blank except for the directory code and punched in

BREAKSTONE, GLENROY and ENTER.

The machine ticked, and the name, address, and telephone number appeared on the screen, BREAKSTONE, GLENROY 670 LIVERMORE AVE 542-5500.

He winked at me. "Actually, I knew he was still living at the St. Alwyn. I just wanted to show off. Didn't John's father say that Breakstone knew everybody at the hotel? Maybe you can get him to talk to you." He wrote down the saxophone player's telephone number on a piece of paper, and I walked over to get it from him.

"Hold on, let's find out where this wonderful manager was living when the murders were committed."

I stood behind him while he ordered up the Millhaven directory for 1950 and then jumped to the B listings. He found the address in five seconds.

BANDOLIER, ROBERT 17 S SEVENTH ST LIVermore 2-4581.

"Old Bob had a short commute, didn't he? He lived about a block away from the hotel."

"He lived right behind us," I said.

"Maybe we can work out how long he was there." Tom called up the directory for 1960. Bandolier, Robert was still living on South Seventh Street. "Good stable guy." He called up the 1970 directory and found him still there, same address but with a new telephone number. In 1971, still there, but with yet another new telephone number. "Something funny happened here," Tom said. "Why do you change your phone number? Crank calls? Avoiding someone?"

By 1975, he was out of the book. Tom worked backward through 1974, and 1973, and found him again in 1972. "So he moved out of town or into a nursing home or, if our luck just left us, died sometime in 1972." He wrote the address down on the same slip of paper and handed it to me. "Maybe you could go to the house and talk to whoever lives there now. It might be worth asking some of his old neighbors, too. Somebody'll know what happened to him."

He stood up and took a look at the other computers, which were still searching. Then he went to the table and picked up his drink. "Here's to research." I raised my glass of water.

The computer clicked, and information began appearing on the two monitors.

"Well, what do you know?" Tom went back to his desk. "Births and Deaths is talking to us." He leaned forward and began writing something on his pad.

I got up and looked over his shoulder.

WRITZMANN, WILLIAM LEON 346 N 34TH STREET MILLHAVEN birth: 4/16/48.

"We just found a real person," Tom said. "If this is the mystery man following John in the Elvee company car, I'd be surprised if he doesn't turn up again."

"He already has," I said, and told him what I had seen when I had driven John Ransom and Alan Brookner to the morgue that afternoon.

"And you didn't tell me until now?" Tom looked indignant. "You saw him at the Green Woman, doing something really fishy, and then you keep it to yourself? You just flunked Famous Detective School."

He immediately sat down at the computer and began moving through another series of complicated commands. The modem clucked to itself. It looked to me as though he was calling up the city's registry of deeds.

"Well, for one thing I wasn't sure it was him," I said. "And I forgot about it once you started breaking into every office in the state."

"The Green Woman closed down a long time ago," Tom said, still punching in codes.

I asked him what he was doing.

"I want to see who owns that bar. Suppose it's—"

The screen went blank for a half-second, and RECEIVE flashed on and off. Tom whooped and clapped his hands.

THE GREEN WOMAN TAPROOM 21B HORATIO STREET

PURCHASED 01/07/1980, ELVEE HOLDINGS CORP

PURCHASE PRICE $5,000

PURCHASED 05/21/1935, THOMAS MULRONEY

PURCHASE PRICE $3,200

Tom combed his fingers through his hair so that it looked like a haystack. "Who are these people, and what are they doing?" He wrenched himself away from the screen and grinned at me. "I don't have the faintest idea where we're going, but we're certainly getting somewhere. And you certainly saw our friend in the blue Lexus, you sure did, and I take back every bad thing I ever said about you." He returned to the screen and disarranged his hair a little more. "Elvee bought the Green Woman Taproom, and look how little they paid for it. Maybe, do you think, we could even say he, meaning William Writzmann? Writzmann laid out a paltry five thousand. It was nothing but a leaky shell. What good is it? What could he use it for?"

"It looked like he was moving things into it," I said. "There were cardboard boxes next to the car."

"Or taking something out," Tom said. "The place was a shed. The only thing it's good for is storage. Our boy Writzmann bought a five-thousand-dollar shed. Why?"

All this time, Tom was looking back and forth from the screen to me, torturing his hair. "There's only one reason to buy the place. It's the Green Woman Taproom. Writzmann is interested in the Green Woman."

"Maybe he was Mulroney's nephew, and he was helping out the starving widow."

"Or maybe he was very, very interested in the Blue Rose case. Maybe our mysterious friend Writzmann has some connection to Blue Rose himself. He can't be Blue Rose himself, he's too young, but he could be—"

Tom was looking at me, a wild speculative delight shining out from his entire face.

"His son?" I asked. "You think Writzmann is the son of Blue Rose? On the evidence that he bought a rundown bar and stored boxes in it?"

"It's a possibility, isn't it?"

"Writzmann was two years old at the time of the murders. That's pretty young, even for Heinz Stenmitz."

"I'm not so sure about that. You don't like thinking about someone molesting a two-year-old child, but it happens. All you need is a Heinz Stenmitz."

"Do you think this Writzmann murdered April because he found out about her research? Maybe he even saw her looking around the bridge and the taproom."

"Maybe," Tom said. "But why would he murder Grant Hoffman?" He frowned and ran his hand through his soft blond hair, and it fell back into place. "We have to find out what April was actually doing. We need her notes, or her drafts, or whatever she managed to get done. But before that—"

He left the desk, picked up one of the neat white stacks of copied pages and handed it to me. "We have to start reading."

6

So for another hour I sat in the comfortable leather chair, leafing through the police files on the Blue Rose case, deciphering the handwriting of half a dozen policemen and two detectives, Fulton Bishop and William Damrosch. Bishop, who was destined for a long, almost sublimely corrupt career in the Millhaven police department, had been taken off the case after two weeks: his patrons had been protecting him from what they saw as a kind of tar baby. I wished that they had let him investigate for another couple of weeks. His small, tight handwriting was as easy to read as print. His typed reports looked like a good secretary's. Damrosch scribbled even when he was relatively sober and scrawled when he was not. Anything he wrote after about two in the afternoon was a hodgepodge in which whole words disappeared into wormy knots. He typed the way an angry child plays piano. After ten minutes, my head hurt; after twenty, my eyes ached.

By the time I had gone through all the statements and reports, all I had come up with was a sense that very few people had liked Robert Bandolier. The only new thing I learned was that the killings had not been savage mutilations, like the murder of Grant Hoffman and Walter Dragonette's performances: Blue Rose's victims had been stabbed once, neatly, in the heart, and then their throats had been cut. It was as passionless as ritual slaughter.

"Well, nothing jumped out at me, either," Tom said. "There are a few minor points, but they can wait." He looked at me almost cautiously. "I suppose you're about ready to go?"

"Well, your coffee is going to keep me awake for a while," I said. "I could stay a little longer."

Tom's obvious gratitude at my willingness to stay made him seem like a child left alone in a splendid house.

"How about a little music?" he said, already getting up.

"Sure."

He pulled a boxed set from the rows of CDs, removed one, and inserted the disc in the player. Mitsuko Uchida began playing the Mozart piano sonata in F. Tom leaned back into his leather couch, and for a time neither of us spoke.

Despite my exhaustion, I wanted to stay another half hour, and not merely to give him company. I thought it was a privilege. I couldn't banish Tom's sorrows any more than he could banish mine, but I admired him as much as anyone I've ever known.

"I wish we had discovered some disgruntled desk clerk named Lenny Valentine," he said.

"Do you really think there's some connection between Elvee Holdings and the Blue Rose murders?"

"I don't know."

"What do you think is going to happen?"

"I think a dead body is going to turn up in front of the Idle Hour." He reached for his drink and took another sip. "Let's talk about something else."

I forgot I was tired, and when I looked at my watch I found that it was past two.

After we had gone over what I was going to do the next day, Tom went to his desk and picked up the book with the plain gray binding. "Do you think you'll have time to look through this over the next few days?"

"What is it?" I should have known that the book wasn't on his desk by accident.

"The memoirs of an old soldier, published by a vanity press. I've been doing a lot of reading about Vietnam, and there are some questions about what John actually did during his last few months in the service."

"He was at Lang Vei," I said. "There aren't any questions about that."

"I think he was ordered to say he was there."

"He wasn't at Lang Vei?"

Tom did not answer me. "Do you know anything about a strange character named Franklin Bachelor? A Green Beret major?"

"I met him once," I said, remembering the scene in Billy's. "He was one of John's heroes."

"Read this and see if you can get John to talk about what happened to him, but—"

"I know. Don't tell him you gave me the book. Do you think he's going to lie to me?"

"I'd just like to find out what actually happened."

Tom handed me the book. "It's probably a waste of time, but indulge me."

I turned the book over in my hands and opened it to the title page. WHERE WE WENT WRONG, or The Memoirs of a Plain Soldier, by Col. Beaufort Runnel (Ret.). I turned pages until I got to the first sentence.

I have always loathed and detested deceit, prevarication, and dishonesty in all their many forms.

"I'm surprised he ever made it to colonel," I said, and then a coincidence I trusted was meaningless occurred to me. "Lang Vei starts with the initials LV," I blurted.

"Maybe you didn't flunk out of Famous Detective School after all." He grinned at me. "But I still hope we come across Lenny Valentine one of these days."

He took me downstairs and let me out into the warm night. What looked like millions of stars hung in the enormous reaches of the sky. As soon as I got to the sidewalk, I realized that for something like four hours, Tom had nursed a single glass of malt whiskey.

<2h>7

The lights were turned off in all the big houses along Eastern Shore Road. Two blocks down from An Die Blumen, the taillights of a single car headed toward Riverwood. I turned the corner into An Die Blumen with a mind full of William Writzmann and an empty shell called the Green Woman Taproom.

The long empty street stretched out in front of me, lined with the vague shapes of houses that seemed to melt together in the night. Street lamps at wide intervals cast fuzzy circles of light on the cracked cement. Everything before me seemed deceptively peaceful, not so much at rest as in concealment. The scale of the black sky littered with stars made me feel tiny. I shoved my hands into my pockets and began to walk faster.

I had gone half a block down An Die Blumen before I fully realized what was happening to me—not a sudden descent of panic, but a gradual approach of fear that felt different from the way the past usually invaded me. No men in black flitted unseen across the landscape, no groans leaked out of the earth. I could not tell myself that this was just another bad one and sit down on someone else's grass until it went away. It wasn't just another bad one. It was something new.

I hurried along with my hands in my pockets, unconsciously huddled into myself. I stepped down off a curb and walked across an empty street, and the dread that had come over me slowly focused itself into the conviction that someone or something was watching me. Somewhere in the blanket of shadows on the other side of An Die Blumen, a creature that seemed barely human followed me with its eyes.

Then, with an absolute certainty, I knew: this was not just panic, but real.

I moved down the next block, feeling the eyes claiming me from their hiding place. The touch of those eyes made me feel appallingly dirty, soiled in some way I could not bear to define —the being that looked through those eyes knew that it could destroy me secretly, could give me a secret wound visible to no one but itself and me.

I moved, and it moved with me, sliding through the darkness across the street. At times it lagged behind, leaning against an invisible stone porch and smiling at my back. Then it melted through the shadows and passed among the trees and effortlessly moved ahead of me, and I felt its gaze linger oh my face.

I walked down three more blocks. My palms and my forehead were wet. It was concealed in the darkness in front of a building like a tall blank tomb, breathing through nostrils the size of my fists, taking in enormous gulps of air and releasing fumes.

I can't stand this, I thought, and without knowing I was going to do it, I walked across the street and went up the edge of the sidewalk in front of the frame house. My knees shook. A tall shadow moved sideways in the dark and then froze before a screen of black that might have been a hedge Of rhododendrons and became invisible again. My heart thudded, and I nearly collapsed. "Who are you?" I said. The front of the house was a featureless slab. I took a step forward onto the lawn.

A dog snarled, and I jumped. A section of the darkness before me moved swiftly toward the side of the house. My terror flashed into anger, and I charged up onto the lawn.

A light blazed behind one of the second-floor windows. A black silhouette loomed against the glass. The man at the window cupped his hands over his eyes. Light, pattering footsteps disappeared down the side of the house. The man in the window yelled at me.

I turned and ran back across the street. The dog pushed itself toward a psychotic breakdown. I ran as hard as I could down to the next corner, turned, and pounded up the street.

When I got to John's house, I waited outside the front door for my breathing to level out. I was covered in sweat, and my chest was heaving. I leaned panting against the door. I didn't think the man in the Lexus could have moved that quietly or quickly, so who could it have been?

An image moved into the front of my mind, so powerfully that I knew it had been hidden there all along. I saw a naked creature with thick legs and huge hands, ropes of muscle bulking in his arms and shoulders. A mat of dark hair covered his wide chest. On the massive neck sat the enormous horned head of a bull.

8

When I got into John's office, I turned on some lights, made up my bed, and got Colonel Runnel's book out of the satchel. Then I slid the satchel under the couch. After I undressed I switched off all the lights except the reading lamp beside the couch, lay down, and opened the book. Colonel Runnel stood in front of me, yelling about something he loathed and despised. He was wearing a starchy dress uniform, and rows of medals marched across his chest. After about an hour I woke up again and switched off the lamp. A car went past on Ely Place. Finally I went back to sleep.

9

Around ten-thirty Tuesday morning I rang Alan Brookner's bell. I'd been up for an hour, during which I had called the nursing registry to ensure that they had spoken to Eliza Morgan and that she had agreed to work with Alan, made a quick inspection of April Ransom's tidy office, and read a few chapters of Where We Went Wrong. As a stylist, Colonel Runnel was very fond of dangling participles and sentences divided into thunderous fragments. All three Ransoms had been eating breakfast in the kitchen when I came down, John and Marjorie in their running suits, John in blue jeans and a green polo shirt, as if the presence of his parents had changed him back into a teenager. I got John alone for a second and explained about the nursing registry. He seemed grateful that I had taken care of matters without bothering him with the details and agreed to let me borrow his car. I told him that I'd be back in the middle of the afternoon.

"You must have found some little diversion," John said. "What time did you get home last night, two o'clock? That was some walk." He allowed himself the suggestion of a smirk.

When I told him about the man who had been following me, John looked alarmed and then immediately tried to hide it. "You probably surprised some peeping Tom," he said.

The usual reporters were slurping coffee on the front lawn. Only Geoffrey Bough intercepted me on the way to the car. I had no comments, and Geoffrey slouched away.

Eliza Morgan opened Alan's door, looking relieved to see me. "Alan's been asking for you. He won't let me help him get his clothes on—he won't even let me get near his closet."

"His suit pockets are full of money," I said. I explained about the money. The house still smelled like wax and furniture polish. I could hear Alan bellowing, "Who the hell was that? Is that Tim? Why the hell won't anybody talk to me?"

I opened his bedroom door and saw him sitting straight up in bed bare-chested, glaring at me. His white hair stuck up in fuzzy clumps. Silvery whiskers shone on his cheeks. "All right, you finally got here, but who is this woman? A white dress doesn't automatically mean she's a nurse, you know!"

Alan gradually settled down as I explained. "She helped my daughter?"

Eliza looked stricken, and I hurried to say that she had done everything she could for April.

"Humpf. I guess she'll do. What about us? You got a plan?"

I told him that I had to check out some things by myself.

"Like hell." Alan threw back his sheet and blanket and swung himself out of bed. He was still wearing his boxer shorts. As soon as he stood up, his face went gray, and he sat down heavily on the bed. "Something's wrong with me," he said and held his thin arms out before him to inspect them. "I can't stand up. I'm sore."

"No wonder," I said. "We did a little mountain climbing yesterday."

"I don't remember that."

I reminded him that we had gone to Flory Park.

"My daughter used to go to Flory Park." He sounded lost and alone.

"Alan, if you'd like to get dressed and spend some time with John and his parents, I'd be happy to drive you there."

He started to push himself off the bed again, but his knees wobbled, and he sank back down again, grimacing.

"I'll run a hot bath," Eliza Morgan said. "You'll feel better when you're shaved and dressed."

"That's the ticket," Alan said. "Hot water. Get the soreness out."

Eliza left the room, and Alan gave me a piercing look. He held up his forefinger, signaling for silence. Down the hall, water rushed into the tub. He nodded. Now it was safe to speak. "I remembered this man in town, just the ticket—brilliant man. Lamont von Heilitz. Von Heilitz could solve this thing lickety-split."

Alan was somewhere back in the forties or fifties. "I talked to him last night," I said. "Don't tell anybody, but he's helping us."

He grinned at me. "Mum's the word."

Eliza returned and led him away to the bathroom, and I went downstairs and let myself out of the house.

10

I crossed the street and rang the bell of the house that faced Alan's. Within seconds, a young woman in a navy blue linen suit and a strand of pearls opened the door. She was holding a briefcase in one hand. "I don't know who you are, and I'm already late," she said. Then she gave me a quick inspection. "Well, you don't look like a Jehovah's Witness. Back up, I'm coming out. We can talk on the way to the car."

I stepped down, and she came out and locked her door. Then she looked at her watch. "If you start talking about the Kingdom of God, I'm going to stamp on your foot."

"I'm a friend of Alan Brookner's," I said. "I want to ask you about something a little bit strange that happened over there."

"At the professor's house?" She looked at me quizzically. "Everything that happens over there is strange. But if you're the person who got him to cut his lawn, the whole neighborhood is lining up to kiss your feet."

"Well, I called the gardener for him," I said.

Instead of kissing my feet, she strode briskly down the flagged pathway to the street, where a shiny red Honda Civic sat at the curb.

"Better start talking," she said. "You're almost out of time."

"I wondered if you happened to see someone putting a car into the professor's garage, one night within the past week or so. He thought he heard noises in his garage, and he doesn't drive anymore himself."

"About two weeks ago? Sure, I saw it—I was coming home late from a big client dinner. Someone was putting a car in his garage, and the light was on. I noticed because it was past one, and there are never any lights on in there after nine o'clock."

I followed her around the front of the car. She unlocked the driver's door. .

"Did you see the car or the person who was driving it? Was it a black Mercedes sports car?"

"All I saw was the garage door coming down. I thought that the younger guy who visits him was putting his car away, and I was surprised, because I never saw him drive." She opened the door and gave me another second and a half.

"What night was that, do you remember?"

She rolled her eyes up and jittered on one high heel. "Okay, okay. It was on the tenth of June. Monday night, two weeks ago. Okay?"

"Thanks," I said. She was already inside the car, turning the key. I stepped away, and the Civic shot down the street like a rocket.

Monday, the tenth of June, was the night April Ransom had been beaten into a coma and knifed in room 218 of the St. Alwyn Hotel.

I got into the Pontiac and drove down to Pigtown.

11

South Seventh Street began at Livermore Avenue and extended some twenty blocks west, a steady, unbroken succession of modest two-story frame houses with flat or peaked porches. Some of the facades had been covered with brickface, and in a few of the tiny front yards stood garish plaster animals —Bambi deer and big-eyed collies. One house in twenty had a shrine to Mary, the Virgin protected from snow and rain by a curling scallop of cement. On a hot Tuesday morning in June, a few old men and women sat outside on their porches, keeping an eye on things.

Number 17 was on the first block off Livermore, in the same position as our house, the fifth building up from the corner on the west side of the street. The dark green paint left long scabs where it had peeled off, and a network of cracks split the remaining paint. All the shades had been drawn. I left the car unlocked and went up the steps while the old couple sitting outside on the neighboring porch watched me over their newspapers.

I pushed the bell. Rusting mesh hung in the frame of the screen door. No sound came from inside the house. I tried the bell again and then knocked on the screen door. Then I opened the screen door and hit my fist against the wooden door. Nothing. "Hello, is anybody home?" I hit the door a few more times.

"Nobody's at home in there," a voice called.

The old man on the neighboring porch had folded his newspaper across his lap, and both he and his wife were eyeing me expressionlessly. "Do you know when they'll be back?"

"You got the wrong house," he said. His wife nodded.

"This is the right address," I said. "Do you know the people who live here?"

"Well, if you say it's the right house, keep on pounding."

I walked to the end of the porch. The old man and his wife were no more than fifteen feet away from me. He was wearing a faded old plaid shirt buttoned up tight against the cords in his neck. "What are you saying, no one lives here?"

"You could say that." His wife nodded again.

"Is it empty?"

"Nope. Don't think it's empty."

"Nobody's home, mister," his wife said. "Nobody's ever home."

I looked from husband to wife and back again. It was a riddle: the house wasn't empty, but nobody was ever home. "Could I come over and talk to you?"

He looked at his wife. "Depends on who you are and what you want to talk about."

I told them my name and saw a trace of recognition in the man's face. "I grew up right around the corner, on South Sixth. Al Underhill was my father."

"You're Al Underhill's boy?" He checked with his wife. "Come on up here."

When I got up onto their porch, the old man stood and held out his hand. "Frank Belknap. This is the wife, Hannah. I knew your father a little bit. I was at Glax thirty-one years, welding. Sorry we can't give you a chair."

I said that was fine and leaned against the railing.

"How about a glass of lemonade? We got August in the middle of June, now that the politicians poisoned the weather."

I thanked him, and Hannah got up and moved heavily through the door.

"If your father's still alive and kicking, tell him to drop in sometime, chew the fat. I was never one of the old Idle Hour gang, but I'd like to see Al again." Frank Belknap had worked thirty-one years in the purposeful, noisy roughhouse of the factory, and now he spent all day on the porch with his wife.

I told him that my father had died a few years ago. He looked resigned.

"Most of that bunch died," he said. "What brings you to the place next door?"

"I'm looking for a man that used to live there."

Hannah came back through the door, carrying a green plastic tray with three tall glasses filled with ice and lemonade. I had the feeling that she had been waiting to hear what I was after. I took a glass and sipped. The lemonade was cold and sweet.

"Dumkys lived there," she said, and held the tray out to her husband.

"Them, all their kids, and a couple of brothers."

"Dumkys rented." Hannah took her seat again. "You like the lemonade?"

"It's very good."

"Make up a fresh jug every morning, stays cold all day long."

"It was one of the Dumkys you wanted?"

"I was looking for the man that used to own the house, Bob Bandolier. Do you remember him?"

Frank cocked his head and regarded me. He took a slow sip of the lemonade and held it in his mouth before swallowing. He was not going to say anything until I told him more.

"Bandolier was the manager at the St. Alwyn for a long time."

"That right?"

I wasn't telling him anything he didn't know.

"My father worked there, too, for a while."

He turned his head to look at his wife. "Al Underhill worked at the hotel for a while. Knew Mr. Bandolier."

"Well, well. Guess he would have."

"That would have been before Al came to the plant," Frank said to me.

"Yes. Do you know where I could find Bandolier?"

"Couldn't tell you," Frank said. "Mr. Bandolier wasn't much for conversation."

"Dumkys rented furnished," Hannah said.

"So Mr. Bandolier moved out and left his furniture behind?"

"That's what the man did," said Frank. "Happened when Hannah and me were up at our cottage. Long time ago. Nineteen seventy-two, Hannah?"

Hannah nodded.

"We came back from vacation, there were the Dumkys, every one of them. Dumkys weren't very neighborly, but they were a lot more neighborly than Mr. Bandolier. Mr. Bandolier didn't encourage conversation. That man would look right through you."

"Mr. Bandolier dressed like a proper gentleman, though. A suit and tie, whenever you saw him. When he did work in his garden, the man put on an apron. Kept his sorrows inside himself, and you can't fault him for that."

"Mr. Bandolier was a widower," Frank said. "We heard that from old George Milton, the man I bought this house from. Had a wife who died two-three years before we moved in. I suppose she used to keep things quiet for him."

"The man liked quiet. He'd be firm, but not rude."

"And his upstairs tenants, the Sunchanas, were nice folks, foreigners, but nice. We didn't really know them either, of course, no more than to say hello to. Sunchanas stuck to themselves."

"Talked a little bit funny," Frank said. "Foreign. She was one pretty woman, though."

"Would they know how I could get in touch with Mr. Bandolier?"

The Belknaps smiled at each other. "Sunchanas didn't get on with Mr. Bandolier," Hannah said. "There was bad blood there. The day they moved out, they were packing boxes into a trailer. I came out to say good-bye. Theresa said she hoped she'd never have to see Mr. Bandolier again in all her life. She said they had a tiny little nest egg saved up, and they put a downpayment on a house way on the west side. When Dumkys left, one of the girls told me a young man in a military uniform came around and told them they'd have to pack up and leave. I told her the army didn't act like that in the United States of America, but she wasn't a real intelligent child."

"She didn't know who the soldier was?"

"He just turned up and made them skedaddle."

"There's no sense to it, except that Mr. Bandolier could do things that way," Frank said. "What I thought was, Mr. Bandolier wanted to live there by himself, and he got some fellow to come along and scare off his tenants. So I reckoned we'd be seeing Mr. Bandolier back here. Instead, the place stayed empty ever since. Mr. Bandolier still owns it, I believe—never saw a FOR SALE sign on the place."

I thought about it for a moment while I finished my lemonade. "So the house has been empty all this time? Who cuts the grass?"

"We all do, taking turns."

"You've never seen that soldier the Sunchanas told you about?"

"No," Frank said.

"Well," Hannah said.

"Oh, that old foolishness."

"You have seen him?"

"Hannah didn't see anything."

"It might not have been a soldier," Hannah said. "But it isn't just foolishness, either."

I asked her what she had seen, and Frank made a disgusted noise.

Hannah pointed at him. "He doesn't believe me because he never saw him. He goes to sleep at nine every night, doesn't he? But it doesn't matter if he believes me, because I know. I get up in the middle of the night, and I saw him."

"You saw someone going into the house?"

"In the house, mister."

"Hannah's ghost," Frank said.

"I'm the one who saw him, and he wasn't a ghost. He was just a man." She turned away from Frank, toward me. "Every two or three nights, I get up because I can't sleep. I come downstairs and read."

"Tell him what you read," Frank said.

"Well, it's true, I like those scary books." Hannah smiled to herself, and Frank grinned at me. "I got a whole collection of them, and I get new ones at the supermarket. I always got one going, like now I'm reading Red Dragon, you know that one? I like those real gooshy ones."

Frank covered his mouth and cackled.

"But that doesn't mean I made it all up. I saw that man walking around in the living room next door."

"Just walking around in the dark," Frank said.

"Yep."

"Sometimes he has a little flashlight, but most times, he just goes in there and walks around for a while and sits down. And—"

"Go on," Frank said. "Say the rest."

"And he cries." Hannah looked at me defiantly. "I use this little tiny light to read by, and from where I'm sitting in my chair, I can see him through the window on the side of the house— there's only a net curtain on that window over there. He's there maybe one night every two weeks. He walks around the living room. Sometimes he disappears into some other room, and I think he's gone. But then I look up later, and he's sitting down, talking to himself or crying."

"He never noticed your light?"

"Those red dragons probably don't see real good," Frank said.

"It's little," she said. "Like a pinpoint."

"You never saw him go into the house?"

"I think he goes around the far side and comes in the back," she said.

"Probably he comes down the chimney."

"Did you ever call the police?"

"No." For the first time, she seemed embarrassed.

"Tears from Beyond the Grave,"Frank said, "by I. B. Looney."

"Welders are all that way," Hannah said. "I don't know why, but they all think they're comedians."

"Why didn't you call the police?"

"I think it's one of those poor little Dumkys, all grown up now, come back to a place where he used to be happy."

"Hillbillies don't act like that," Frank said. "And hillbillies is what they were. Even the little ones got so drunk they passed out on the lawn." He grinned at his wife again. "She liked them because they called her ma'am."

She gave him a disapproving look. "There's a big difference between being ignorant and being bad."

"Did you ever ask other people on the street if they saw him, too?"

She shook her head. "There's nobody in this neighborhood is up at night except me."

"Mr. Bandolier lived alone?"

"He did everything alone," Frank said. "He was a whole separate country."

"Maybe it's him," I said.

"You'd need a microscope to find any tears in Mr. Bandolier," Frank said, and for once his wife seemed to agree with him.

Before I left, I asked Hannah Belknap to call me the next time she saw the man in the house next door. Frank pointed out the houses of the two other couples who had been on the block since the Belknaps had moved in, but he didn't think they'd be able to help me find Robert Bandolier.

One of these couples lived up at the end of the block and had only the vaguest memories of their former neighbor. They thought he was, in their words, "a stuck-up snob with his nose in the air," and they had no interest in talking about him. They still resented his renting to the Dumkys. The other couple, the Millhausers, lived two houses up from Livermore, on the other side of the street. Mr. Millhauser came outside the screen door to talk to me, and his wife shouted from a wheelchair stationed far back in a gloomy hallway. They shared the universal dislike of Bob Bandolier. It was a shame that house just sat empty year after year, but they too had no wish to see more of the Dumkys. Mrs. Millhauser bawled that she thought the Sunchanas had moved to, what was that place called, Elm Hill? Elm Hill was a suburb on Millhaven's far west side. Mr. Millhauser wanted to get back inside, and I thanked him for talking to me. His wife shouted, "That Bandolier, he was handsome as Clark Gable, but no good! Beat his wife black and blue!" Millhauser gave me a pained look and told her to mind her own business. "And you might as well mind yours, mister," he said to me. He went back inside his house and slammed the door.

12

I left the car on South Seventh and walked toward the St. Alwyn through the steaming day. Everything I had heard in the past two days went spinning through my head. The farther I got from South Seventh Street, the less I believed that Hannah Belknap had seen anyone at all. I decided to give myself the pleasure of meeting Glenroy Breakstone even though it would probably turn out to be another blind alley, and after that I would try to find the Sunchanas.

My stomach growled, and I realized that I hadn't eaten anything since dinner with the Ransoms at Jimmy's, last night. Glenroy Breakstone could wait until after lunch—he was probably still in bed, anyhow. I got a Ledger from a coin-operated dispenser on the corner of Livermore and Widow Street and carried it through the street entrance of Sinbad's Cavern.

The restaurant had relaxed since the morning of Walter Dragonette's arrest. Most of the booths were filled with neighborhood people and hotel residents eating lunch, and the young woman behind the bar was pulling draft beers for workmen covered in plaster dust. The waitress I had spoken to that morning came out of the kitchen in her blue cocktail dress and high heels. There was a lively buzz of conversation. The waitress waved me toward a table in a rear corner of the room. At a table directly across the room, four men ranging in age from over fifty to about twenty sat around a table, drinking coffee and paying no attention to one another. They were very much like the different men who had been at the same table on the day of April Ransom's murder. One of them wore a summer suit, another a hooded sweatshirt and dirty trousers. The youngest man at the table was wearing baggy jeans, a mesh undershirt, and a heavy gold chain around his neck. They ignored me, and I opened my paper.

Millhaven was still tearing itself apart. Half of the front page dealt with the protest meetings at Armory Place. The Reverend Al Sharpton had appeared as promised and declared himself ready to storm City Hall by himself if the policemen who had failed to respond to calls from Walter Dragonette's neighbors were not put on suspension or dismissed. Pictures of the chief and Merlin Waterford orating at April Ransom's funeral, complete with full texts of both remarks, filled the top of the next page. All three editorials blasted Waterford and the performance of the police department.

While I read all of this and ate a club sandwich, I gradually began to notice what the men across the room were doing. At intervals, they stood up and disappeared through an unmarked door in the wall behind their table. When one came out, another went in. I caught glimpses of a gray hallway lined with empty metal kegs. Sometimes the man coming back out left the restaurant, sometimes he went back to the table and waited. The men smoked and drank coffee. Whenever one of the original men left, another came in from outside and took his place. They rarely spoke. They did not look arrogant enough to be mobsters or furtive enough to be drug dealers making pickups.

When I left, only the man with the gold chain was left of the original four, and he had already been once in and out of the back room. None of them looked at me when I paid up and left through the arched door into the St. Alwyn's lobby.

I forgot about them and went up to the desk clerk to ask if Glenroy Breakstone was in his room.

"Yeah, Gienroy's up there," he said and pointed to a row of house phones. One old man in a gray suit with fat lapels sat on the long couch in the lobby, smoking a cigar and mumbling to himself. The clerk told me to dial 925.

A thick, raspy voice said, "You have reached Glenroy Breakstone's residence. He is home. If you have a message, now's the time."

"Mr. Breakstone?"

"Didn't I say that? Now it's your turn."

I told him my name and said that I was downstairs in the lobby. I could hear the sound of Nat "King" Cole singing "Blame It on My Youth" in the background. "I was hoping that I could come up to see you."

"You some kind of musician, Tim Underhill?"

"Just a fan," I said. "I've loved your playing for years, and I'd be honored to meet you, but what I wanted to talk about with you was the man who used to be the day manager here in the fifties and sixties."

"You want to talk about Bad Bob Bandolier?" I had surprised him, and he laughed. "Man, nobody wants to talk about Bad Bob anymore. That subject is talked out."

"It has to do with the Blue Rose murders," I said.

There was a long pause. "Are you some kind of reporter?"

"I could probably tell you some things you don't know about those murders. You might be interested, if only for James Treadwell's sake."

Another pause while he considered this. I was afraid that I had gone too far, but he said, "You claim you're a jazz fan?"

I said that I was.

"Tell me who played the tenor solo on Lionel Hampton's 'Flyin' Home,' who played tenor for the Billy Eckstine band with Charlie Parker, and the name of the man who wrote 'Lush Life.' "

"Illinois Jacquet, I think both Gene Ammons and Dexter Gordon, and Billy Stray horn."

"I should have asked you some hard questions. What was Ben Webster's birthday?"

"I don't know."

"I don't know, either," he said. "Pick up a pack of Luckies at the desk before you come up."

Before I had taken three steps back toward the desk, the clerk was already holding out a pack of Lucky Strikes. He waved away the bills I offered him. "Glenroy's got an account, but I almost never charge him for cigarettes. What the hell, he's Glenroy Breakstone."

"Don't I know it," I said.

13

On the St. Alwyn's top floor, the dull black door of 925 stood at the end of the long corridor to the right of the elevators. Patterned yellow paper covered the walls. I knocked on the door, and a wiry man of about five-eight with tight, close-cropped white hair and bright, curious eyes opened it and stood before me. He was wearing a black sweatshirt that said LAREN JAZZFEST across its front and loose black trousers. His face was thinner and his cheekbones sharper than when he had recorded Blue Rose. He held out his hand for the cigarettes and smiled with strong white teeth. I could hear Nat Cole singing behind him.

"Get in here, now," he said. "You got me more interested than an old man ought to be." He tossed the pack onto a table and shooed me into the room.

Sun streaming in the big windows at the front of the room fell on a long, colorful Navaho rug, a telescope on a black metal mount, an octagonal table stacked with sheet music, compact discs, and paperback books. Just out of the sunlight, a group of chairs faced a fifteen-foot-long hotel dresser unit flanked with speakers. Two large, framed posters hung on the exposed wall, one for the Grand Parade du Jazz in Nice, the other for a concert at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Glenroy Breakstone's name figured prominently on both. Framed photographs were propped against his shelves of records—a younger Breakstone in a dressing room with Duke Ellington, with Benny Carter and Ben Webster, playing side by side on a stage with Phil Woods and Scott Hamilton.

Two tenor saxophone cases sat on the floor like suitcases, and a baritone saxophone and a clarinet capped with mouthpieces stood upright on a stand beside them. The room smelted faintly of cigarette smoke only partially masked by incense.

I turned around to find Glenroy Breakstone smiling at me and knew that he had seen my surprise. "I didn't know you played clarinet and baritone," I said.

"I don't play them anywhere but in this room," he said. "About 1970, I bought a soprano in Paris, but I got so frustrated with the thing I gave it away. Now I'm thinking of getting another one, so I can get frustrated all over again."

"I love Blue Rose," I said. "I was just listening to it last night."

"Yeah, people go for those ballad albums." He looked at me a second, half-amused. "People like you, you ought to go out and get new records instead of playing the old ones over and over. I made one with Tommy Flanagan in Italy last year. We used Tommy's trio—I like that one." He moved toward the bedroom door. "You want fruit juice or something? I got a lot of good juice in here, mango, papaya, passion fruit, all kinds of stuff."

I said I'd have whatever he was having, and he went into the bedroom. I began inspecting the posters and photographs.

He came back carrying two tall glasses and handed me one. He gestured with his own glass toward what I had been looking at. "See, this is how it goes. Everything's overseas. In a week, I go to France for the festivals. When I'm there I'm gonna make a record with Warren Vache, that's all set up, then I spend the rest of the summer in England and Scotland. If I'm lucky, I get on a cruise and do a couple of the jazz parties. It sounds like a lot, but it ain't. I spend a lot of time in this place, practicing my horns and listening to the people I like. Tell you the truth." He smiled again. "I almost always listen to old records, too. You like that juice?" He was waiting for me to tell him what it was.

I sipped it. I had no idea what it was. "Is it mango?"

He gave me a disgusted look. "You don't know much about fruit juice, I guess. What you have there is papaya. See how sweet that is? That's a natural sweetness."

"How long have you been living at the St. Alwyn?"

He nodded. "Long time. First year I moved in here, in '45, I had a room on the third floor. Little tiny room. I was with Basie in those years, hardly ever got home. When I quit to form my own group, they moved me up to the fifth floor, way at the back, because I wanted be able to have rehearsals in my room. In '61, Ralph Ransom said I could have one of the big rooms on the seventh floor, same rent, after the guy who lived there died. Ralph was being good to me, because right around then the music business went to hell, and sometimes I couldn't make the rent. After Ralph sold out, I made a deal with the new people and moved up here and made the place safe."

I asked him what he meant.

"I got the only rooms in the place with new locks."

I remembered someone telling me that the locks in the St. Alwyn were no good. "So someone could keep his key when he checked out, come back a year later and get back into the same room?"

"All I know is, I lost my Balanced Action tenor and a new clarinet, and that ain't gonna happen anymore. The way things are now, you have one of those locks, you can come home, find a body parked in your bed. And if you're a cop in Millhaven, maybe you're even dumb enough to think a boy called Walter Dragonette put her there." He stepped away from the wall and gestured toward the chairs. "I been doing a lot of talking, but I think it's your turn now, Mr. Underhill."

We sat down on two sides of a low square table with an ashtray, a lighter, a pack of Luckies, and a flat black object that looked like a mirror folded into a case. A picture of Krazy Kat was stamped onto the case. Beside it was a flat wooden box with decorative inserts. Breakstone set his glass beside the box and lit a cigarette. "You think you can tell me something new about the Blue Rose murders? I'd be interested in hearing what that would be." He looked at me without a trace of humor. "For James Treadwell's sake."

I told him about Glendenning Upshaw and Buzz Laing and how I thought William Damrosch had died. Breakstone got more excited as I went along.

"I know damn well everybody was tellin' themselves a lie about Bill Damrosch," he said. "For one thing, Bill used to come to see us now and then, when we were playing in that club on Second Street, the Black and Tan Review Bar. He used to get out there, you know, he'd have blackouts, but I never saw any of that. He just liked our music."

He drew in smoke, exhaled, and looked at me grimly. "So old Upshaw killed Bill. But who killed James? James grew up around the corner from my folks, and when I heard how he could play, I put him in my band. That was forty years ago. Hardly as much as a week goes by without my thinking about James."

"Murder injures the survivors," I said.

He looked up at me, startled, and then nodded. "Yeah. It does that. I was no good for about two months afterward— couldn't touch my horn." He went inward for a moment, and the Nat Cole record stopped playing. Breakstone seemed not to hear it. "Why do you say that the man who killed him probably knew him to look at?"

"I think he worked in the hotel," I said, and went over some of what Tom Pasmore and I had talked about.

He tilted his head and looked at me almost slyly. "You know Tom? You sit around with Tom at his nice crib up there on the lake and talk with the man?"

I nodded, remembering Tom's wink when he looked up Breakstone's address.

"Why didn't you say so? Once every blue moon, Tom and I spend a night hanging out and listening to music. He likes hearing those old Louis Armstrong records I got." He pronounced the final s in Louis. He thought for a second, and then grinned at me, astonished by what had just occurred to him. "Tom's finally going to start thinking about that Blue Rose business. He must have been waiting for you to come along and help him."

"No, it's because of the new murders—the woman left in James's old room, and the other one, downstairs in the alley."

"I knew he'd see that," Breakstone said. "I knew it. The police don't see it, but Tom Pasmore does. And you do."

"And April Ransom's husband. He's the one who called me first."

Glenroy Breakstone asked about that, and I told him about John and The Divided Man and wound up telling him about my sister, too.

"So that little girl was your sister? Then your father was that elevator man, Al." He looked at me wonderingly.

"Yes, he was," I said.

"Al was a nice guy." He wanted to change the subject, and looked toward the bright windows. "I always thought your sister was part of what happened afterward. But when Bill wound up dead, they didn't care if it was right, as long as it was neat."

"Damrosch thought so, too?"

"Told me that right downstairs in the bar." He finished off his juice. "You want me to think about who got fired way back then? First of all, Ralph Ransom never fired anybody directly. Bob Bandolier and the night manager, Dicky Lambert, did that."

So maybe it had been Blue Rose who had forced Bandolier to change his telephone number a couple of times.

"Okay. I remember a bellhop name of Tiny Ruggles, he got fired. Tiny sometimes used to go into empty rooms, help himself to towels and shit. Bad Bob caught him at it and fired him. And there was a guy named Lopez, Nando we used to call him, who worked in the kitchen. Nando was crazy about Cuban music, and he had a couple Machito records he used to play for me sometimes. Bob Bandolier got rid of him, said he ate too much. And he had a friend called Eggs—Eggs Benson, but we called him Eggs Benedict. Bob axed him too, and him and Nando went to Florida together, I think. That happened a month or two before James and the others got killed."

"So they didn't kill anybody."

"Just a lot of bottles." He frowned at his empty glass. "Drinking and stealing, that's what most of 'em got fired for." He looked embarrassed for a moment, then tried to soften it. "Truth is, everybody who works in a hotel helps themselves to stuff now and then."

"Can you think of anyone else who would have had a grudge against Ralph Ransom?"

Glenroy shook his head. "Ralph was okay. The man never had enemies or anything like that. Dicky and Bob Bandolier, they might have made some enemies, because of letting people go and playing a few angles here and there. I think Dicky had a deal going with the laundry, stuff like that."

"What happened to him?"

"Dropped dead right at the bar downstairs twenty years ago. A stroke."

"What about Bandolier?"

Glenroy smiled. "Well, that's the one who should have had the stroke. Dicky was easygoing, but old Bob never relaxed a day in his life. Most uptight guy I ever knew. Heart attack and Vine! Bad Bob, that's right. He had the wrong job—they should of put Bad Bob in charge of the toilets, man, he would of made them sparkle and shine like Christmas lights. He never should of been in charge of people, 'cause people are never gonna be as neat as Bob Bandolier wanted them to be." He shook his head and lit a fresh cigarette. "Bob kept his cool in front of the guests, but he sure raised hell with the staff. The man acted like a little god. He never really saw you, the man never really saw other people, he just saw if you were going to mess him up or not. And once he got going on religion—"

"Ralph told me he was religious."

"Well, there's different ways of being religious, you know. Church I went to when I was a little boy was about being happy. Everybody sang all the time, sang that gospel music. Bob, Bob thought religion was about punishment. The world was nothing but wickedness, according to Bob. He came up with some crazy shit, once he got going."

He laughed, genuinely amused by some memory. "One time, Bad Bob thought everybody on days ought to get together for a prayer meeting at the start of the shift. They had to get together in the kitchen five minutes before work started. I guess most showed up, too, but Bob Bandolier started off telling how God was always watching, and if you didn't do your job right, God was gonna make you spend eternity having your fingernails pulled out. He got so wound up, the shift started ten minutes late, and Ralph told him there wouldn't be any more prayer meetings."

"Is he still alive?"

"Far as I know, the man was too nasty to die. He finally retired in nineteen seventy-one or 'two, sometime around there. 'Seventy-one, I think. Probably went somewhere he could make a whole new lot of people feel miserable."

Bandolier had retired a year before he had vanished and left his house to the Dumkys. "Do you have any idea where I could find him?"

"Travel around until you find a place where you hear the sound of everybody grinding their teeth at once, that's all I can say." He laughed again. "Let's put on some more music. Anything you'd like to hear?"

I asked if he would play his new CD with Tommy Flanagan.

"I can take it if you can." He jumped up and pulled a disc from the shelf, put it in the player, and punched a couple of buttons. That broad, glowing sound floated out of the speakers, playing a Charlie Parker song called "Bluebird." Glenroy Breakstone was playing with all of his old passionate invention, and he could still turn long, flowing phrases over in midair.

I asked him why he had always lived in Millhaven, instead of moving to New York.

"I can travel anywhere from here. I park my car at O'Hare and get to New York in less than two hours, if I have something to do there. But Millhaven's a lot cheaper than New York. And by now I know most of what's going on, you see? I know what to stay away from—like Bob Bandolier. Just from my window I see about half the action in Millhaven."

That reminded me of what I had seen in the restaurant downstairs, and I asked him about it.

"Those guys at the back table? That's what I was talking about, the stuff you want to stay away from."

"Are they criminals?"

He narrowed his eyes and smiled at me. "Let's say, those are guys who know things. They talk to Billy Ritz. He might help them or not, but they all know one thing. Billy Ritz can make sure their lives'll take a turn for the worse, if they hold out on him."

"He's a gangster? Mafia?"

He grinned and shook his head. "Nothing like that. He's in the middle. He's a contact. I'm not saying he doesn't do something dirty from time to time, but mainly he makes certain kinds of deals. And if you don't talk to Billy Ritz, so he can talk to the people he talks to, you could wind up taking a lot of weight."

"What happens if you don't play the game?"

"I guess you could find out you were playing the game all along, only you didn't know it."

"Who does Billy Ritz talk to?"

"You don't want to know that, if you live in Millhaven."

"Is Millhaven that corrupt?"

He shook his head. "Someone in the middle, he helps out both sides. See, everybody needs someone like Billy." He looked at me, trying to see if I was as naive as I sounded. Then he checked his watch. "Tell you what, there's a chance you can get a look at him, you're so curious. Around this time, Billy generally walks across Widow Street and does a little business in the Home Plate Lounge."

He stood up, and I followed him to the window. We both looked down nine stories to the pavement. The shadow of the St. Alwyn darkened Widow Street and fell in a harsh diagonal across the brick buildings on the other side. A dwarf man in a tiny baseball cap walked into the grocery store down the block, and a dwarf woman pushed a stroller the size of a pea toward Livermore Avenue.

"A man like Billy has to be regular," Glenroy said. "You have to be able to find him."

A police car came up from the bottom of Widow Street and parked in front of the old redbrick apartment building on the other side of the pawnshop. One of the uniforms in the car got out and walked up the block to the grocery store. It was Sonny Berenger, the cop who looked like a moving blue tree. The door of the Home Plate swung open, and a barrel of a man in a white shirt and gray trousers stepped outside and leaned against the front of the bar. Sonny walked past without looking at him.

"Is that him?"

"No, that's a guy named Frankie Waldo. He's in the wholesale meat business. Idaho Meat. Except for a couple of years, Idaho used to supply all the meat used in this hotel, back when we had room service. But Billy's late, see, and Frankie wants to talk to him. He's wondering where he is."

Frankie Waldo stared at the entrance of the St. Alwyn until Sonny came back out of the grocery store with two containers of coffee. Before Sonny reached him, Waldo went back into the bar. Sonny returned to his car. A van and a pickup truck went by and turned onto Livermore. The patrol car left the curb and rolled up the street.

"Here he comes," Glenroy said. "Now look out for Frankie."

I saw the top and brim of a dark gray hat tilted back on the head of a man who was crossing the sidewalk in front of the hotel's entrance. Frankie Waldo popped out of the bar again and held the door open. Billy Ritz stepped down off the curb and began moving across Widow Street. He was wearing a loose wide-shouldered gray suit, and he walked without hurrying, almost indolently.

Ritz went up to Waldo and said something that made the other man seem almost to melt with relief. Waldo clapped Ritz on the back, and Ritz marched through the open door like a crown prince. Waldo was after him before the door swung shut.

"See, Billy spread some goodwill." Glenroy moved back from the window. "Anyhow, this is about as close as you want to get to Billy Ritz."

"Maybe he told him the St. Alwyn is going to start delivering room service again."

"I wish they would." We moved away from the window, and Glenroy Breakstone gave me a look that said I had already taken up enough of his time.

I began to go toward the door, and a stray thought came to me. "I guess it was the Idaho Meat Company that sold meat to the hotel at the time of the Blue Rose murders?"

He smiled. "Well, it was supposed to be. But you know who really did it."

I asked him what he meant.

"Remember I said the managers worked a few angles? Lambert got a cut on the laundry work, and Bad Bob worked out a deal on the meat. Ralph Ransom never found out about it. Bob got phony bills printed up, and they were all marked paid by the time they crossed Ralph's desk."

"How did you find out about it?"

"Nando told me, one night when he was loaded. Him and Eggs used to unload the truck every morning, right at the start of their shift. But you knew that already, right?"

"How could I?"

"Didn't you say that the St. Alwyn connected all the Blue Rose victims?"

Then I saw what he was talking about. "The local butcher who took over the meat contract was Heinz Stenmitz?"

"Sure it was. How else could he be connected to the hotel?"

"Nobody ever said anything about it to the police."

"No reason to."

I thanked Glenroy and took a step toward his door, but he did not move. "You never asked me what I thought about the way James died. That's the reason I let you come up here in the first place."

"I thought you let me come up because I knew who wrote 'Lush Life.' "

"Everybody ought to know who wrote 'Lush Life,' " he said. "Are you interested, or not? I can't tell you who was fired right around then, and I can't tell you where to find Bob Bandolier, but I can tell you what I know about James. If you have the time."

"Please," I said. "I should have asked."

He took a step toward me. "Damn right. Listen to me. James was killed in his room, right? In his bed, right? Do you know what he was wearing?"

I shook my head, cursing myself for not having read the police reports more carefully.

"Nothing at all. You know what that means?" He did not give me time to answer. "It means he got up out of bed to open his door. He knew whoever was out there. James might have been young, but he wasn't a fool about anything but one thing. Pussy. James did want to fuck just about anything good-looking that came his way. There used to be some pretty maids in this hotel, and James got tight with one of them, a girl named Georgia McKee, during the time we were playing at the Black and Tan."

"When was that?"

"September 1950. Two months before he got killed. He dropped her, just like he dropped every other girl he used to run with. He started seeing a girl who worked at the club. Georgia used to come around and make trouble, until they barred her from the club. She wanted James back." He was making sure that I understood what he was saying. "I always thought that Georgia McKee went into James's room and killed him and made it look like the same person who did that whore did him, too. He opened the door. Or she let herself in with her key. Either way. James wouldn't make any fuss, if he thought she was coming back to go to bed with him."

"You never told the police?"

"I told Bill Damrosch, but by that time, Georgia McKee was out of here."

"What happened to her?"

"Right after James got killed, she quit the hotel and moved to Tennessee. I guess she had people there. Tell you the truth, I hope she got knifed in a bar."

After that, the two of us stood facing each other for a couple of seconds.

"James should have had more life," Glenroy finally said. "He had something to offer."

14

It was still too early to call Tom Pasmore, so I asked the desk clerk if he had a Millhaven directory. He went into his office and came back with a fat book. "How's Glenroy doing today?"

"Fine," I said. "Isn't he always?"

"No, but he's always Glenroy," the clerk said.

I nodded, and leafed through the book to the S's. David Sunchana was listed at an address on North Bayberry Lane, which sounded like it belonged in Elm Hill. I wrote down the number on the paper Tom had given me, and then, on an afterthought, looked up Oscar Writzmann on Fond du Lac Drive. Maybe he would be able to tell me something about the mysterious William Writzmann.

From the pay phone in the St. Alwyn's lobby, I dialled the Sunchanas' number and let it ring a long time before I hung up. They must have been the only people in Elm Hill who didn't have an answering machine.

I went outside and began walking back toward Bob Bandolier's old house. He must have known something, I thought— maybe he had seen Georgia McKee coming out of James Treadwell's room and blackmailed her instead of turning her over to the police.

I turned into South Seventh, looking down, and walked past the Millhauser place before I saw Frank Belknap waving at me from his front lawn. He motioned for me to stay where I was and began walking quickly down the block. When he got closer, he looked back at his front porch and then motioned me backward, toward Livermore. "Told Hannah I was going out for a walk," he said. "Went up and down the street four times, waiting for you to come back."

He jerked his head toward the avenue, and we walked far enough so he could be sure his wife wouldn't see him talking to me.

"What is it?" I asked.

He was still fighting with himself. "I met that soldier, the one who threw the Dumkys out of the house next door. He came back the day after to check on the place. Hannah was out shopping. I went out to talk to the fella when I saw him leaving, and he was worse than rude, mister. Tell you the truth, he scared me. He wasn't big, but he looked dangerous—that fella would have killed me in a minute, and I knew it."

"What happened? Did he threaten you?"

"Well, he did." Belknap frowned at me. "I think that fella had just got back from Vietnam, and I don't think there was anything he wouldn't have done. I respect our soldiers, I want you to know, and I think what we did to those boys was a damn shame. But this fella, he was something special."

"What did he say to you?"

"He said I had to forget I ever saw him. If I ever let on anything about him or his doings, he'd burn my house down. And he meant it. He looked like he'd burned down a few houses in his time, like you saw them on the news, with their Zippos." Frank moved closer to me, and I could smell his stale breath. "See, he said there'd never be any trouble as long as I acted like he didn't exist."

"Oh," I said. "I see."

"You get the picture?"

"He's the man Hannah sees at night," I said.

He nodded wildly, as if his head were on a,ball bearing. "I keep telling her she's making it all up. Maybe it's not him—that was all the way back in '73, when he warned me off. But I tell you one thing, if it is him, I don't know what he's doing in there, but he sure as hell isn't crying."

"Thanks for telling me," I said.

He looked at me doubtfully, wondering if he had made a mistake. "I was thinking you might know who he is."

"He was in uniform when you met him?"

"Sure. I kind of had the feeling he didn't have civilian clothes yet."

"What kind of uniform was it?"

"He had on a jacket with brass buttons, but all the stuff, the insignia was torn off."

That was no help. "And then there was no sign of him until Hannah saw him in the house at night."

"I was hoping he died. Maybe it's someone else she sees in there?"

I said that I didn't know, and he walked slowly back to his house. He looked back at me a couple of times, still wondering if he'd done the right thing.

15

I got into the white Pontiac and drove back onto Livermore and through the shadow of the valley. I left the freeway at the Elm Hill turnoff and drove randomly through a succession of quiet streets, looking for Bayberry Lane. In Elm Hill, they liked two-story imitation colonials and raised ranch houses with elaborate swing sets in the long backyards and ornate metal nameplates on posts next to the driveway—THE HARRISONS. THE BERNHARDTS. THE REYNOLDS. Almost all of the mailboxes were half the size of garbage cans and decorated with painted ducks in flight, red barns by millponds, or leaping salmon. At the center of Elm Hill, I drove into the parking lot of a semicircle of gray colonial shops. You could tie your car to a hitching rail, if you had a rope. Across the street was the hill where the elms had grown. Now it had a historical marker and two intersecting paths with granite benches. I bought a map at the Booky, Booky Bookshoppe and took it across the street to one of the benches. Bayberry Lane began just behind the shopping center at Town Hall, curved around a pond and wandered for about half a mile until it intersected Plum Barrow Way, which banged straight north back to the freeway.

The first half-dozen houses closest to squat Town Hall, modest, rundown wooden boxes with added porches, were the oldest buildings I had seen in Elm Hill, dating from the twenties and thirties. Once Bayberry Lane got past the pond, I was back among the white and gray colonials. I kept checking the addresses as the numbers went up. Finally I came to a long straight line of oak trees that had once marked the boundary of a farm.

On the other side of the oak border stood a two-story, slightly ramshackle farmhouse with a screen porch, utterly out of character with the rest of the neighborhood. Two gray propane tanks clung to the side of the house, and a rutted driveway went straight from me road to a leaning clapboard garage with a hinged door. The fading number on the plain mailbox matched the number on my piece of paper. The Sunchanas had bought the original farmhouse on this land and then watched an optimistic re-creation of Riverwood grow up around them. I drove up the ruts until I was in front of the garage, turned off the engine, and got out of the car.

I walked along the screen porch and tried the door, which opened. I stepped onto the long narrow porch. Sunbleached wicker chairs stood beneath a window in the middle of the porch. I knocked on the front door. There was no answer. I knew there wouldn't be. After all, I was just getting away from the Ransoms. I turned around and saw a man staring at me from beside the straight row of oaks across the street.

The mesh of the screen door turned him into a standing arrangement of black dots. I felt an instant of absolute threat, and without thinking about it at all, moved sideways and crouched next to one of the wicker chairs. The man had not moved, but he was gone.

I stood up, slowly. My nerves shrieked. The man had vanished into the column of oaks. I went back out the screen door and walked toward Bayberry Lane, looking for movement in the row of great trees. It could have been a neighbor, I thought, wondering what I was doing on the Sunchanas' porch.

But I knew it wasn't any neighbor.

There was no movement in the row of oak trees. I walked across the street on a diagonal, so that I could see between the trees. About six feet of grass separated them. There wasn't another human being in sight. The row of oaks ended at the street behind Bayberry, which must have been the property line of the old farm. Out of sight in the tangled lanes of eastern Elm Hill, a car started up and accelerated away. I turned toward the noise, but all I saw were swing sets and the backs of houses. My heart was still pounding.

I went back across the street and waited in the Pontiac for half an hour, but the Sunchanas did not come home. Finally, I wrote my name and John's phone number at the bottom of a note saying that I wanted to talk with them about Bob Bandolier, tore the page from my notebook, and went back up onto the screened porch. I turned the knob of their front door, and the door opened. A residue of the sense of danger I had just experienced went through me, as if the empty house held a threat. "Hello, anybody home?" I called out, leaning into the room, but I didn't expect an answer. I put the note on the polished floorboards in front of the brown oval rug on the living room floor, closed the door, and went back to the car.

16

Two exits east of the stadium, I took Teutonia Avenue and slanted north, deep into Millhaven's wide residential midsection. I wasn't quite sure of the location of Fond du Lac Drive, but I thought it intersected Teutonia, and I drove along a strip of little shops and fast-food restaurants, watching the street signs. When I came to the traffic light at Fond du Lac Drive, I made a quick guess and turned right.

Fond du Lac Drive was a wide six-lane street that began at the lake before crossing central Millhaven on a diagonal axis. This far west, no trees stood along the white sidewalks, and the sun baked the rows of 1930s apartment buildings and single-family houses that stood on both sides of the street. As I had been doing since leaving Elm Hill, I looked in my rearview mirror every couple of seconds.

One of three identical poured concrete houses, 5460 had black shutters and a flat roof. All three had been painted the same pale yellow. The owners of the houses on either side of it had tried to soften the stark exteriors by planting borders of flowers along their walks and around their houses, but Oscar Writzmann's house looked like a jail with shutters.

Before I knocked on the door, I checked up and down the empty block.

"Who's there?" said a voice on the other side of the door.

I gave my name.

The door opened part of the way. Through the screen I saw a tall, heavyset bald man in his seventies taking a good look at me. Whatever he saw didn't threaten him, because he pulled the door open the rest of the way and came up to the screen. He had a big chest and a thick neck, like an old athlete, and was wearing khaki shorts and a tired blue sweatshirt. "You looking for me?"

"If you're Oscar Writzmann, I am," I said.

He opened the screen door and stepped forward far enough to fill the frame. His shoulder held the door open. He looked down at me, curious about what I was up to. "Here I am. What do you want?"

"Mr. Writzmann, I was hoping that you could help me locate one of the officers of a corporation based in Millhaven."

He rotated his chin sideways, looking skeptical and amused at once. "You sure you want Oscar Writzmann? This Oscar Writzmann?"

"Have you ever heard of a company called Elvee Holdings?"

He thought for a second. "Nope."

"Have you ever heard of an Andrew Belinski or a Leon Casement?"

Writzmann shook his head.

"The other officer was named Writzmann, and since you're the only Writzmann listed in the book, you're sort of my last shot."

"What is this all about?" He leaned forward, not yet hostile but no longer friendly. "Who are you, anyhow?"

I told him my name again. "I'm trying to help an old friend of mine, and we want to acquire more information about this company, Elvee Holdings."

He was scowling at me.

"It looks like the only genuine officer of Elvee Holdings is a man named William Writzmann. We can't go to the offices, because—"

He came out through the open door, stepped down, and jabbed me hard in the chest. "Does Oscar sound like William to you?"

"I thought you might be his father," I said.

"I don't care what you thought." He poked me in the chest again and stepped forward, crowding me backward. "I don't need tricky bastards like you coming around bothering me, and I want you to get off my property before I knock your block off."

He meant it. He was getting angrier by the second.

"I was just hoping you could help me find William Writzmann. That's all." I held my hands up to show I didn't want to fight him.

His face hardened, and he stepped toward me. I jumped back, and an enormous fist filled my vision, and the air in front of my face moved. Then he stood a yard from me, his fists ready and his face burning with rage.

"I'm going," I said. "I didn't mean to disturb you."

He dropped his hands.

He stayed on the lawn until I got into the car. Then he turned himself around and trudged back toward his house.

I went back to Ely Place and my real work.

PART EIGHT

COLONEL BEAUFORT RUNNEL

1

I let myself into the house and called out a greeting. The answering silence suggested that the Ransoms were all napping. For a moment I felt like Goldilocks.

In the kitchen I found the yellow flap of a Post-It note on the central counter beside a bottle of Worcestershire sauce and three glasses smeary with red fluid. Tim—Where are you? We're going to a movie, be back around 7 or 8. Monroe and Wheeler dropped in, see evidence upstairs. John.

I dropped the note into the garbage and went upstairs. Marjorie had arranged little pots and bottles of cosmetics on the guest room table. A copy of the AARP magazine lay splayed open on the unmade bed.

Nothing had been disturbed in John's bedroom, except by John. He had stashed his three-hundred-dollar vodka on the bedside table, no doubt to keep Ralph from sampling it. Shirts and boxer shorts lay in balls and tangles on the floor. Byron Dorian's two big paintings, powerful reminders of April's death, had been taken down and turned to the wall.

On the third floor, Damrosch's satchel still lay underneath the couch.

I crossed the hall into April's office. A pile of corporate reports had been squared away, and old faxes lay stacked on the shelves. I finally noticed that most of the white shelves were bare.

Monroe and Wheeler had packed up most of April's files and papers and taken them away. By nightfall, an Armory Place accountant would be examining her records, looking for a motive for her murder. Monroe and Wheeler had probably emptied her office at Barnett that morning. I pulled open a desk drawer and found two loose paper clips, a tube of Nivea skin cream, and a rubber band. I was a couple of hours too late to discover what April had learned about William Damrosch.

I went back to John's office and picked up Colonel Runnel's book. Then I stretched out on the couch to read until the Ransoms came back from the movies.

2

Happily unaware of the disadvantages of being a terrible writer with nothing to say, Beaufort Runnel had marshaled thirty years of boneheaded convictions, pointless anecdotes, and heartfelt prejudices into four hundred pages. The colonel had ordered himself to his typewriter and carved each sentence out of miserable, unyielding granite, and it must have been infuriating for him when no commercial publisher would accept his masterpiece.

I wondered how Tom Pasmore had managed to find this gem.

Colonel Runnel had spent his life in supply depots, and his most immediate problems had been with thievery and inaccurate invoices. His long, sometimes unhappy experiences in Germany, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, California, Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam had inexorably led him to certain profound convictions.

3

The finest fighting force on the globe is beyond doubt the Army of the United States of America. This is cold fact. Valorous, ready to dig in and fix bayonets at any moment, prepared to fight until the last man, this is the Army as we know and love it. Working on many bases around the world over a long and not undistinguished (though unsung) career, the Army has placed me in many "hot" spots, and to these challenges this humble Colonel of the Quartermaster Corps, with his best efforts, has responded. I have seen our fighting forces worldwide, at ease and under pressure, and never have they deserved less than my best and most devoted efforts.

What makes our Army the foremost in the world? Several factors, each of them important, come into play when we ask this question.

Discipline, which is forged in training.

Loyalty, our American birthright.

Strength, physical and of numbers.

Here I skipped a handful of pages.

I will recount some experiences in setting up a well-stocked, orderly depot in places around the world by way of explanation. I promise the reader that the amusing "touches" are in no way the inventions or embellishments of the author. This is the way it happened, from the twin perspectives of long experience and the front porch of my modest but comfortable retirement home in a racially unified section of Prince George's County, Maryland.

4

Groaning, I turned to Runnel at Cam Ranh Bay, Runnel in Saigon, Runnel in the field. Then a familiar place-name caught in my eye like a fishhook. Runnel had been at Camp White Star, my first stop in Vietnam. I saw another name I knew and started reading in earnest.

5

It was during my overburdened weeks at Camp White Star that one of the single most unpleasant events of my career took place. Unpleasant and revealing it was, for it told me in no uncertain terms that the old army I loved, had fallen prey to unhealthy ideas and influences. Noxious trends were loose in its bloodstream.

Here I began skimming again, and turned a couple of pages.

I had, of course, heard of the Green Berets created by the Catholic demagogue put into office by the corrupt expenditure of his father's ill-gained millions, as who had not? This was trumpeted throughout the land, and many otherwise bright and patriotic young fellows tumbled into the trap. But I had never come into contact with the breed until a certain Captain, later, incredibly, Major, Franklin Bachelor entered my depot at Camp White Star. It was an education.

He strode in, in no discernible uniform but clearly an officer with an officer's bearing. One gave leeway to the men in the field. I should explain the normal procedure, at least as I ran my operations. It can be stated in one simple maxim. Nothing in without paperwork, nothing out without paperwork. That is the basis. Of course, every Quartermaster has known what it is to "improvise," and I, when called upon to do so, acquitted myself splendidly, as in the case of the six oxen of Cho Kin Reservoir. The reader will remember the episode. I rest my case.

In the normal instance, papers are presented at the desk, the goods requested are assembled and then loaded into the waiting vehicle or vehicles, and copies of the forms are sent to the relevant authority. It goes without saying that Captain Bachelor observed none of the usual amenities.

He ignored me and began ordering his minions to take articles of clothing from the shelves. These were, emphatically, not soldiers of the United States Army. Aboriginal in stature, ugly in face and form, some even smeared gaudily with dye. Such were the "Yards," the tribesmen with whom many Green Berets were forced to consort. My command to return the stolen goods to the shelves was completely ignored. I struck my counter and asked, in what I hoped was an ironic tone, if I might see the officer's requisition forms. The man and his goons continued to ignore me. Whirling, bestial little creatures daubed in mud and crested with feathers had taken over my depot.

I emerged from behind the counter, sidearm conspicuously in hand. This, I said, was not acceptable, and would cease forthwith. I approached the officer and as I did so heard from behind me the sound of an Ml6 being readied to fire. The officer advised me to remain calm. Slowly, very slowly indeed, I turned to face one of the most astounding spectacles with which the Asian conflict had thus far provided me. A woman of considerable beauty, dressed in conventional fatigues, held the weapon pointed at my head. She too was a "Yard," but more highly evolved than her scampering compatriots. I knew two things almost at once: this beauty would shoot me where I stood, with the well-known Asian indifference to life. Secondly, she was the mate of the Green Beret officer. I use no more elevated word. They were mates, as creatures of the barnyard are mates. This indicated to me that the officer was insane. I relinquished all resistance to the pair and their tribe. My staff had scattered, and I stood mute.

I proceeded on the instant to the office of the commanding officer, a gentleman who shall remain nameless. He and I had had our disagreements over the course of my reorganization of various matters. Despite our differences, I expected full and immediate cooperation. Restoration of the stolen goods. Full reports and documentation. Disciplinary action appropriate to the deed. To my amazement, the CO at White Star refused to lift a finger.

I had merely been visited by Captain Franklin Bachelor, I was told. Captain Bachelor stopped in once every two years or so to outfit his soldiers. The Captain never bothered with paperwork, the Quartermaster assessed what had been taken and filled out the forms himself. Or he wrote it off to pilferage. My problem was that I tried to stop him—you couldn't stop Captain Bachelor. I enquired why one could not, and received the stupefying reply that the Captain was a legend.

It was this asinine CO who told me that Franklin Bachelor was known as "The Last Irregular." Irregular, indeed, I allowed sotto voce.

As the reader will understand, I thenceforth took a great interest in the developing career of young Captain Franklin Bachelor.

I declared myself a convert to such as Bachelor, a partisan of the "Irregulars." I probed for tales, and heard such stories as those with which the Moor did seduce Desdemona.

The picture that emerged from the tales about Bachelor became disturbing. If so for me, how much more so for Those Who Must Not Be Named, who had encouraged him? Incalculably, yes. It was because of this disturbance, registered in the highest places in the land, that the hapless Jack (I believe) Ransom, a Captain of Special Forces, first became enmeshed in the insane Bachelor's treacherous web, resulting in the final conspiracy—the ultimate conspiracy—of silence. From which silence, leaks an undying shame. I intend to expose it in these pages.

6

The task of a man like Bachelor was to exploit the existing hostility between ordinary Vietnamese and local tribesmen by organizing individual tribal villages into virtual commando units, strike forces capable of the same stealth as our guerilla enemy. Another goal was to win support for our government by actively assisting the life of the villager. To build dams, to dig wells, to develop healthier crops. It was imperative that these men speak the language of their tribesmen, live as they did, eat the food they ate. The goal was the training of guerilla soldiers to be used in guerilla warfare.

Bachelor soon showed his true colors by turning his villagers into a travelling wolf pack. After several months, the pack established permanent camp deep in a valley of the Vietnamese highlands.

It was at this time that Bachelor's reputation was at its peak. The ordinary soldier idealized Bachelor's achievements. His superiors valued him because he consistently provided intelligence on the movements of the enemy. The rogue elephant kept in communication with the pack.

Here we come to the heart of the matter.

It is my belief that Bachelor had begun to dip into that most dangerous of waters, the role of intermediary—you could say, double agent.

Operating first from his secret base in the highlands and then an even more heavily defended redoubt further north, Major Bachelor became a trafficker in information, a source for intelligence about troop movements and military strategy that could be gained in no other way.

Even I, deep in my duties, heard of instances in which our forces went out to surprise a battalion of North Vietnamese, reported (by Whom?) to be making its way south by devious routes, only to encounter no more than a few paltry squads. Were we victorious? Absolutely. On the scale to which we had been led, by our intelligence, to expect? The response is negative. It must have been some such reasoning that caused They Who Must Not Be Named to dispatch a young Special Forces Captain, Jack Ransom, into the highlands to contact Major Bachelor and return him to the leafy vales of suburban Virginia for interrogation and debriefing.

7

My feet hurt, and my back never gives me a moment's peace. Writing is as I have found an activity draining, depleting, and infinitely interruptable. No sooner does a good sentence billow up to the mind's forefront, than some wretch appears at the door of my modest but comfortable retirement cottage in a sensible sector of Prince George's County. He is delivering an unwanted package, he is begging for food, he is looking for some phantom person represented by an illegible name scribbled on a dirty scrap of paper. I return to my desk, attempting to recapture the lost words, and the telephone goes off like an exploding shell. When I answer the demonic thing, a heavily accented voice inquires if I really do wish the delivery of twenty-four mushroom and anchovy pizzas.

And! At all hours a juvenile from the neighboring house, a once presentable house now gone sadly to seed, is likely to be throwing a tennis ball against the wall before my desk, retrieving the ball, hurling it again at my wall, so that a steady drumming of THUMP THUMP THUMP intercedes between me and my thoughts. The child's parents own no sense of decorum, duty, discipline, or neighborly feeling. On the one occasion I visited their pestiferous hovel, they greeted my complaints with jeers. It is, I am certain, from these pathetic folk that the pizza orders, etc, etc, originate. I hereby inscribe their name so that it may reverberate with shame: Dumky. Is this what we fought for, that a whey-faced, slat-sided, smudge-eyed spawn of the Dumkys is free to hurl a tennis ball at my modest dwelling? When a man is trying to write in here, a man already working against backache and sore feet, sweating over his words to make them memorable?

There it goes, the tennis ball. THUMP THUMP THUMP.

8

The reader will forgive the above outburst. It is this damnable subject that raises my ire and my blood pressure, not my squalid neighbors.

I heard from many of my confidants that Ransom and another officer were sent into the highlands to locate Bachelor and bring him, as they say, "in from the cold." They Who Must Not Be Named wished to question the man, but doomed their own venture by permitting word of Ransom's mission to reach Bachelor before the Captain did himself. This can happen in a thousand ways—a whisper in the wrong ear, an overseen cable, an ill-advised conversation in the officers' club. The results were foreseeable but tragic nonetheless.

After a difficult and dangerous journey, Ransom succeeded in locating the degenerate officer's secret encampment. I have heard differing versions of what he came upon, some of which I reject on grounds of sheer implausibility. I believe that Ransom and his fellow officer entered the camp and came upon a scene of mass carnage. Bodies of men and women littered the camp—their prey had fled.

What followed was another strange increment in the legend of Franklin Bachelor. Captain Ransom entered a roofless shed and discovered a Caucasian American male in the remains of a military uniform cradling the stripped and cleaned skull of an Asian female. This man, half-crazed with exhaustion and grief, declared that he was Franklin Bachelor. The skull was his wife's. He and his subordinate, he said, a Captain Bennington, had been away from the encampment when it had been overrun by the Vietcong who had been searching for him for years—the enemy had slaughtered more than half of his people, burned down the camp, and then boiled the bodies, eaten the flesh, and reduced Bachelor's people to skeletons. Bennington had pursued the cadre and been killed.

When Captain Ransom delivered his man to The Shadows, it was discovered that he was in reality the Captain Bennington supposed murdered by the VC. What had happened was that Franklin Bachelor had actually persuaded his subordinate to submit to interrogation and possible arrest in his place, while Bachelor himself fled into the jungle with the remnant of his wolf pack. Bennington was found to be hopelessly insane, and was confined to a military hospital, where I am sure he repines to this day for his lost commander.

The official story stops here. Yet an awkward question must be asked. How likely is it that there would be a VC assault on Bachelor's camp only a short time before the arrival of Captain Ransom? And that Bachelor would behave, in this case, as reported?

Here is what transpired. Bachelor knew that Captain Ransom was on his way to take him back to the United States for questioning. At that point he murdered his own followers. In cold blood, he dispatched those who could not keep up on a high-speed escape through rough terrain. Women. Children. The old and the weak, all were executed or mortally wounded, along with any able-bodied men who opposed Bachelor's scheme. Then Bachelor and his remaining men boiled the flesh off some of the bodies and made a last meal of their dead. I believe it iseven possible that Bachelor's people voluntarily accepted death, cooperated in their own destruction. He held them under his sway. They believed he possessed magical powers. If Bachelor ate their flesh, they would live in him.

9

Bachelor retained his core group of tribesmen, and I have no doubt that not a few of the spinning, whirling savages daubed in mud and covered with feathers who looted my orderly shelves at Camp White Star were among them. Those fellows, barbaric to the core, would be hard to kill and impossible to discourage. To this core group of fanatical savages he had added stray VC and other lawless bandits. They had armed and outfitted themselves so stealthily, and with such deadly force, that the Army that supported it never suspected its existence. What they had been looking for was another secret encampment, far enough north in the rugged, fog-shrouded terrain of I Corps to be safe from accidental discovery by conventional American troops and to be strategically well-positioned for intelligence purposes. Bachelor was now about to begin playing his most dangerous game.

His legend increased when he began again transmitting infallibly accurate reports of North Vietnamese troop movements from his newfound redoubt. To all intents and purposes, "the Last Irregular" had indeed returned from the dead. His reports concerned the North Vietnamese divisions moving toward Khe Sanh and vicinity.

The following is a mere outline of the story of Khe Sanh for those unfamiliar with this unhappy episode. Special Forces set up a camp around a French Fort at Khe Sanh in 1964— CIDG, some say at its best. When its airfield became crucially important in 1965, the marines were sent in to Khe Sanh, and for a time shared it with Special Forces and their ragtag battalion of tribesmen. The marines gradually squeezed out the Green Berets, who were unused to dealing with the efficiency, discipline, and superior organization of the Gyrenes. The "Bru" and their masters relocated in Lang Vei, where they built another camp, despite the existence a mere twenty kilometers away in Lang Vo of another CIDG camp of "Bru," this under the command of Captain Jack Ransom.

Had Ransom succeeded in bringing Bachelor back to mainland America eight months before, he would have been rewarded with a promotion and a more significant post. Having failed, the Shadow Masters had relegated Ransom to a secondary post in I Corps, where his role would have been to ensure that his "Bru" were instructed in matters of personal hygiene and rudimentary agriculture. Now enter Franklin Bachelor.

Some time after the Green Berets and their savages had fortified Lang Vei, the camp was bombed and strafed by a U.S. aircraft. The camp was destroyed, and many women and children killed. The explanation given was that the aircraft had become lost in the foggy mountains. This tale is patently false, though believed to this day. The true story is much worse than this invention of a confused pilot. This time, Bachelor had made a crucial error. The rogue major had long harbored an insane hatred for the Captain who had forced him to leave his own best camp, and provided false information that would lead to the destruction of the Special Forces camp. But the wrong false camp was selected—Bachelor had sent deadly destruction down upon Lang Vei, not Lang Vo, twenty kilometers distant. Ransom still lived, and when he discovered his error, Bachelor's wrath led him into deeper treachery.

By 1968, both Khe Sanh and the lesser-known Lang Vei were under perpetual siege. Then came the assault the world knows well—the North Vietnamese descended on tiny Lang Vei with tanks, troops, and mortars.

What is not known, because this information has been suppressed, is that Lang Vo, an otherwise insignificant Montagnard village under command of a single Green Beret, was likewise attacked, by North Vietnamese tanks and troops, at the same time. Why did this occur? There can be but one answer. Franklin Bachelor had duped his North Vietnamese contacts into believing that Lang Vo would be the next thorn in their side, after the destruction of Khe Sanh. And he sold out his country for one purpose only: the killing of Jack Ransom.

Lang Vo was flattened, and Ransom and most of the hapless "Bru" were trapped in an underground command post. There they were discovered, machine-gunned, and their bodies sealed up.

10

In 1982, five years after my retirement here to an idyllic backwater such as had always been my fondest dream, a much-travelled letter was delivered to my door. I might have committed the ghastly error of pitching it immediately into the trash, had I not noticed the strange assortment of stamps arrayed across its back. By following the travels of this heroic missive, as revealed by the stamps of successive postmasters, I learned that it had passed through army bases in Oregon, Texas, New Jersey, and Illinois before travelling finally to the house of my sister Elizabeth Belle in Baltimore, my first residence upon leaving the security of the United States Army, and where I lived until I relocated to PG County, as we residents know it. It had reached each destination just after my departure from it—a hurried, unhappy, unfortunate departure, in the final case.

My correspondent, a Fletcher Namon of Ridenhour, Florida, had heard many a time during his three hitches in the service of both the elusive Franklin Bachelor and that odd duck, Colonel Runnel of the Quartermaster Corps, who had tirelessly sought out stories of the former. Being so intensely interested in the adventures and lore of "the Last Irregular," he wanted me to be apprised of a story that had come his way. Mr. Namon could vouch for the integrity of the man who told it to him, a top-notch Ridenhour bartender who was like himself a combat veteran, but could not speak for the man who had told it to Namon's own informant.

That man had claimed to be a visitor at Lang Vo on the day before its invasion by the North Vietnamese: a certain Francis Pinkel on the staff of the much-loved Senatorial hawk, Clay Burrman, conducting his yearly tour of his favorite projects in Vietnam. These being so many, he had dispatched Pinkel, his aide, alone, to a CIDG camp assumed to be in no great danger. Pinkel arrived, quickly saw that nothing in Lang Vo would interest the Senator, and penned the usual pack of lies lauding the work of the Special Forces. Pinkel had come to praise Caesar, not to bury him. The helicopter returned to bring Pinkel back to his boss at Camp Crandall, and lifted off before sundown.

Once they were up in the air, Pinkel saw—imagined he saw, as he was later advised—something he did not understand. Beneath the helicopter, less than a kilometer from Lang Vo, was another tribe of "Yards" under the command of a Caucasian male. What were they doing there? Who were they? There was no second officer detailed to Lang Vo, and the tribesmen in the little encampment could not have been so numerous. The tribe and their leader scattered across the ridge where the helicopter had come upon them, fleeing for cover. Pinkel made an addendum to his puff of a report. The next day the North Vietnamese struck. Pinkel mentioned his odd sighting, and was ignored. The Senator mentioned it, to loud protestations of ignorance and impossibility. Fletcher Namon of Ridenhour, FL, wondered if the white man seen by Francis Pinkel—seen lurking on the outskirts of the camp under the command of Captain Ransom—was none other than Franklin Bachelor. Francis Pinkel and Senator Clay Burrman had suggested this possibility, once returned to Washington. They were suggesting that Bachelor had come down from his mountain redoubt to assist a fellow Green Beret in time of trouble. But how could Bachelor have known what the rest of the command did not? Or if he knew, why not issue a warning, as he had done at other times?

The upshot, Pinkel had told the bartender, was that the Shadow Masters had come to unwelcome conclusions and expunged the disaster at Lang Vo from military records. Everybody who had been there was dead, their survivors informed that they had died as a result of enemy action at Lang Vei. Pinkel and Burrman were put under order of silence, in the name of national security.

The letter ended with the wish that I would find this information interesting. It may have been no more than "a tale told over a bar," but if the man Pinkel saw was not Bachelor—who was he?

I did find this "interesting," mild word, interesting indeed. It is the final bit of evidence that locks all else into place. To conceal the treachery of one of its favorite sons, the army instituted a massive cover-up which has been in place to this day.

I replied to my correspondent in Ridenhour, but soon my grateful screed returned to me stamped with the information that no town of that name exists in the state of Florida. And I have since observed that "Namon" is No man spelled backwards. This in no way shakes my belief in the veracity of the much-travelled letter. Mister "Namon" is a man who takes sensible precautions, and I salute him for it!

11

Franklin Bachelor disappeared once again, it was said into North Vietnam. This rumor was false. In 1971 a marine patrol near the DMZ came upon an old camp, long since destroyed, littered with the remains of dead tribesmen. Amongst these bodies lay the severely decomposed corpse of a white male of indeterminate age. Franklin Bachelor had met, too late it is true, his proper fate. His entrails had been picked apart by birds, and wild foxes had torn his flesh. After a fruitless search for his relatives, Bachelor was buried by the army in an unmarked grave—sprung from nowhere, he was returned to the selfsame place.

For of all the oddities we have observed in the case of Major Franklin Bachelor, this is perhaps the oddest of all, that the man never existed at all. It was one of those cases where a lad enlists in the service under a false name, hiding his origins or his identity, and so enters from the dream world, the shadow world, the night world. Though he was responsible for untold tragedy, this figment was tolerated, nay embraced by the army's great sheltering arms, and encouraged toward an unwise independence that led to a dishonorable death. Call me foolish, hidebound, what you will, but in this progression from the dark dream world to success, thence to corruption and a return to nothingness and the dark, I see an epitome. Franklin Bachelor—"Franklin Bachelor," a true unknown soldier, he is the ghost that haunts us when our principles are laid aside.

Here I closed the book to resume my own work.

PART NINE

IN THE RELM OF THE GODS

1

The three Ransoms came in through the front door on a wave of talk a few minutes after eleven. They had seen a double feature of Double Indemnity and Kiss Me Deadly and then stopped in for a drink at Jimmy's. It was the first time I had seen them relaxed and comfortable with each other. "So you finally came home," John said. "What have you been doing all day, shopping?"

"You spent the day shopping, big guy?" Ralph fell into the couch beside me, and Marjorie sat beside him.

"I talked to a few people," I said, looking at John to let him know that I wanted him to stay up after his parents left for bed.

"Just let the cops handle everything, that's what they're paid for," Ralph said. "You should have come to the show with us."

"Honestly, I don't know why we stayed for the whole thing," Marjorie said. She leaned forward to give me the full effect of her eyes. "Gloomy? Oh, Lord."

"Hey!" Ralph said. "Weren't you going to see if old Glen-oy is still at the hotel?"

"Were you?" John said.

"I had a long talk with him, that's right."

"How is old Glenroy?"

"Busy—he's getting ready to go to France."

"What for?" He really could not figure it out.

"He's playing in a jazz festival and making a record."

"The poor bastard." He shook his head, evidently at the notion of an ancient wreck like Glenroy Breakstone trying to play jazz in front of a crowd of French people. Then his eyes lighted up, and he pointed his index finger at me. "Did Glenroy tell you about the time he introduced me to Louis Armstrong? Satchmo? What a thrill. Just a little guy, did you know that? No bigger than Glenroy."

I shook my head, and he dropped his hand, disappointed.

"Ralph," Marjorie said. "It's late, and we're traveling tomorrow."

"You're leaving?"

"Yeah," John said.

"We figure we've done everything we could, here," Ralph said. "There isn't much point in sticking around."

So that was why they had been able to relax.

Marjorie said, "Ralph," and tugged at his arm. Both of them got up. "Okay, guys," Ralph said. Then he looked at me again. "It's probably a waste of time, anyhow, you know. I don't think I ever fired more than one person, myself, and that didn't last long. Bob Bandolier pretty much took care of that kind of thing."

"Who was the person you did fire?"

He smiled. "I remembered it when we were sitting in the movie—it seems kind of funny now, to think of it."

"Who was it?" I asked.

"I bet you could tell me. There were only two people in the hotel that I would fire, me personally, I mean."

I blinked at him, and then understood. "Bob Bandolier and Dicky Lambert. Because they were directly subordinate to you."

"Why is this important?" Marjorie asked.

"John's friend is interested, that's why it's important," Ralph said. "It's research, you heard him."

Marjorie waved a dismissive hand, turned, and walked away from us. "I give up. Come up soon, Ralph, and I mean it."

He watched her walk away and then turned back to me. "It just came to me, watching Double Indemnity. I remembered how Bob Bandolier started shaving hours off his time, coming in late, leaving early, making all kinds of excuses. Finally the guy came out and said his wife was sick and he had to take care of her. Sure surprised me. I didn't even think he was married. That was some thought, Bob Bandolier with a wife, I tell you."

"He came in late because his wife was sick?"

"He damn near missed a couple of days. I told Bob he couldn't do that, and he gave me a lot of guff about how he was a better manager in two hours than anybody else would be in eight, or some crap like that, and finally I fired him. Had no choice." He held his hands out, palms up. "He wasn't doing the job. The guy was a fixture, but he put me over a barrel. So I gave him the axe." The hands went into his pockets and his shoulders went up, in that gesture common to father and son. "Anyhow, I hired him back in a couple of weeks. When Bob was gone, things didn't go right. The meat orders went completely haywire, for one thing."

"What happened to his wife?" John asked.

"She died—during that time before he came back. Dicky Lambert told me, he got it out of him somehow. Bob wouldn't have ever said anything about it to me."

"When was this?" I asked.

Ralph shook his head, amused by my persistence. "Hey, I can't remember everything. In the early fifties sometime."

"When James Treadwell was found dead in his room, did Bandolier handle the details?"

Ralph opened his mouth and blinked at me. "Well. I guess not. I remember wishing that he could handle the details, because I moved Dicky to days, and he was no good at all."

"So you fired Bob Bandolier around the time of the murders."

"Well, yeah, but…" He gave me a sharp, disbelieving look, and then started shaking his head. "No, no, that's way off base. We're talking about Bob Bandolier—this upright character who organized prayer meetings."

I remembered something Tom Pasmore had said to me. "Did he have any children? A son, maybe?"

"God, I hope not." Ralph smiled at the notion of Bob Bandolier raising a child. "See you guys in the morning." He gave us an awkward half-wave and started up the stairs.

John said good night to his father and then turned to me. He looked tense and irritated. "Okay, what have you been doing all day?"

2

"Mostly, I was looking for traces of Bob Bandolier," I said. John uttered a disgusted sound and waved me toward his couch. Without bothering to look at me, he went into his kitchen and returned with a lowball glass filled to the brim with ice and vodka. He came to the chair and sipped, glowering at me all the while. "And what were you up to last night?"

"What's the matter with you, John? I don't deserve this."

"And I don't deserve this." He sipped again, unwilling to sit down until he had come out with whatever it was that troubled him. "You told my mother you were a college professor! What are you these days, some kind of imposter?"

"Oh, John, Joyce Brophy called me Professor Underhill, that's all."

He glared at me, but finally sat down. "I had to tell my parents all about your illustrious academic career. I didn't want them to know you're a liar, did I? So you're a full professor at Columbia, and you've published four books. My parents are proud that I know a guy like you."

"You didn't have to lay it on so thick."

John waved this away. "You know what she said to me? My mother?"

I shook my head.

"She said that some day I'd meet a wonderful young woman, and that she was still hoping to be a grandmother some day. I'm supposed to remember that I'm still a healthy young man with a wonderful house and a wonderful job."

"Well, they're leaving tomorrow, anyway. You're not sorry they came, are you?"

"Hey, I got to hear my father talk about Indian theology with Alan Brookner." He raised his eyebrows and laughed. Then he groaned, and flattened his hands against his temples, as if trying to press his thoughts into order. "You know what it is? I don't have time to catch up with myself. Is Alan okay, by the way? You got him a nurse?"

"Eliza Morgan," I said.

"Swell. We all know what a fine job—" He flapped a hand in the air. "No, I take it back, I take it back. I'm grateful. I really am, Tim."

"I don't really expect you to act as if the worst thing that ever happened to you was a parking ticket," I said.

"The problem is, I'm angry. I hardly even know it most of the time. I only figure it out when I look back and realize that all day I went around slamming doors."

"Who are you angry with?"

He shook his head and drank again. "I guess actually, the person I'm angry with is April. How can I be angry with April?"

"She wasn't supposed to die."

"Yeah, you went to shrink school at the same time you were becoming this English professor at Columbia." He leaned back and gazed at his ceiling. "Which is not to say that I don't think you're right. I just don't want to accept it. Anyhow, I'm grateful that you can overlook my acting like an asshole." He slouched further down in the chair and cocked his feet on the coffee table. "Now will you tell me what happened to you today?"

I took him through my day: Alan, the Belknaps, Glenroy Breakstone, the trip to Elm Hill, the irate old man on Fond du Lac Drive.

"I must have missed something. What made you go to this man's house in the first place?"

Without mentioning Tom Pasmore, I told him about Elvee Holdings and William Writzmann. "The only Writzmann in the book was Oscar, on Fond du Lac. So I stopped in to see him, and as soon as I said that I was looking for William Writzmann, he called me a tricky bastard and tried to clobber me."

"He tried to hit you?"

"I think he was sick of people coming around his place to talk about William Writzmann."

"Isn't William in the phone book?"

"He's listed at Expresspost, on South Fourth. And so are the other two directors of Elvee."

"Who may or may not be real."

"Exactly," I said. "But there was another reason I wanted to find William Writzmann."

John Ransom sat slouched into his chair, his feet up on the table, drink cradled in his lap. He watched me, waiting, still not sure how interesting this was going to be.

I told him about seeing the blue Lexus beside the Green Woman. Before I finished, he lifted his feet off the table and pushed himself upright.

"The same car?"

"It was out of sight before I could be certain. But while I was looking up Elvee Holdings, I thought I might as well find out who owned the Green Woman."

"Don't tell me it's this Writzmann character," he said.

"Elvee Holdings bought the bar in 1980."

"So it is Writzmann!" He put his glass down on the table, looked at me, back at the glass, and picked it up and bounced it on his palm, as if weighing it. "Do you think April was killed because of the damn history project!"

"Didn't she talk to you about it?"

He shook his head. "Actually, she was so busy, we didn't have that much time to talk to each other. It wasn't a problem or anything." He looked up at me. "Well, to tell you the truth, maybe it was a problem."

"Alan knew that it had something to do with a crime."

"Did he?" John visibly tried to remember the conversation we'd had in the car. "Yeah, she probably talked more to him about it."

"More to him than to you?"

"Well, I wasn't too crazy about these projects of April's." He hesitated, wondering how much he should say. He stood up and began yanking his shirt down into the waistband of his trousers. After that he adjusted his belt. These fussy maneuvers did not conceal his uneasiness. John bent down and grabbed the glass from the table. "Those projects got on my nerves. I didn't see why she'd take time away from our marriage to do these screwy little things she'd never even get paid for."

"Do you know how she first got interested in the Blue Rose business?"

He frowned into the empty glass. "Nope."

"Or what she managed to get done?"

"No idea. I suppose Monroe and Wheeler took away the file, or whatever, this morning, along with everything else." He dropped his hands and sighed. "Hold on. I'm going to have another drink."

After John had taken a couple of steps toward the kitchen, he stopped moving and twisted around to say something else. "It's not like we were having trouble or anything—I just wanted her to spend more time at home. We didn't fight." He turned the rest of his body and faced me directly. "We did argue, though. Anyhow, I didn't want to talk about this in front of the cops. Or my parents. They don't have to know that we were anything but happy together."

"I understand," I said.

John took a step forward, gesturing with his glass. "Do you know what it takes to put together an art collection like this? When April had a lull in business, she'd just hop on a plane to Paris and spend a couple of days hunting down a painting she wanted. It was the whole way she was raised—there were no limits for little April Brookner, no sir, April Brookner could do anything that came into her head."

"And you're angry with her because she left you," I said.

"You don't get it." He whirled around and went into the kitchen. I heard rattles and splashes, the big freezer door locking on its seal. John came back and stopped at the same point on the rug, holding his glass out toward me, his elbow bent. Clear liquid slid down the sides. "April could be hard to live with. Something in her was off-balance."

John saw the dark spots on the carpet, wiped the bottom of the glass with his hand, and drank to lower the level. "I was the best thing that ever happened to April, and somewhere inside that head of his, Alan knows it. Once she married me, he relaxed—I did him a real favor. He knew I could keep her from going off the deep end."

"She was a gifted woman," I said. "What did you want her to do, spend all day baking cookies?"

He sipped from the drink again and went back to his chair. "What was this gift of hers? April was good at making money. Is that such a wonderful goal?"

"I thought she didn't care much about the money. Wasn't she the only postmodern capitalist?"

"Don't fool yourself," he said. "She got caught up in it." He held the glass before his face in the tips of his fingers and stared at it. A deep vertical line between his eyebrows slashed up into his forehead.

John let out a huge sigh and leaned forward to rest the cold glass against his forehead.

"I'm sure she was grateful for the stability you gave her," I said. "Think of how long you were married."

His mouth tightened, and he clamped his eyes shut and leaned over, still holding the glass to his forehead. "I'm a basketcase." He laughed, but without any cheer. "How did I ever make it through Vietnam? I must have been a lot tougher then. Actually, I wasn't tougher, I was just a lot crazier."

"So was everybody else."

"Yeah, but I was on a separate track. After I graduated from wanting to put an end to communism, I wanted something I hardly understood." He smiled, wryly.

"What was that?"

"I guess I wanted to see through the world," he said.

3

He exhaled with what seemed his whole being, making a sound like one of Glenroy Breakstone's breathy final notes. "I didn't want any veils between me and whatever reality was. I thought you could sort of burst out into the open." He let out that long, regretful sound again. "You understand me? I thought you could cross the border."

"Did you ever think you got close?"

He jumped up from the chair and turned off the lamp nearest him. "Sometimes I thought I did, yeah." He picked up his glass and turned off the lamp on the far side of the couch. "It's too bright in here, do you mind?"

"No."

John walked around the table and switched off the lamp at my end of the couch. Now the one light left burning was in a tall brass standard lamp near the entrance to the foyer, and the flared, bell-like shape of the lamp threw its illumination into a yellow circle on the ceiling. Dim silver light floated in from the windows across the room.

"There was this time I was doing hard traveling, going way in-country. I was with another man, Jed Champion, superb soldier. We'd been traveling on foot, mostly at night. We had a jeep, but it was way back there, way off the trail, covered up so it'd still be there when we got back."

He was moving to a complicated pattern that sent him from the window to the mantel to his chair, then past the wall of paintings to the open floor near the brass lamp, and finally returning to the window, carving the shape of an arrow into the darkness with his body.

"After two or three days, we stopped talking entirely. We knew what we were doing, and we didn't have to talk about it. If we had a decision to make, we just acted together. It was like ESP—I knew exactly what was going on in his mind, and he knew what was going on in mine."

"We were working through relatively empty country, but there had been some VC activity here and there. We weren't supposed to make any contact. If we saw them we were supposed to just let them go their sweet way. On our sixth night, I realized that I was seeing better than I had the night before—in fact, all of my senses were amazingly acute. I heard everything."

"I could practically feel the roots of the trees growing underground. A VC patrol came within thirty feet of us, and we sat on our packs and watched them go by—we'd heard them coming for about half an hour, and you remember how quiet they could be? But I could smell their sweat, I could smell the oil on their rifles. And they couldn't even see us."

"The next night, I could have caught birds with my bare hands. I was beginning to hear something new, and at first I thought it was some noise made by my own body—it was that intimate. Then, right before dawn, I realized that I was hearing the voices of the trees, the rocks, the ground."

"The night after that, my body did things completely by itself. I was just up there behind my eyes, floating. I couldn't have put a foot wrong if I tried."

Ransom stopped talking and turned around. He had come back to the window, and when he faced into the room, a sheet of darkness lay over his features and the entire front of his body. The cold silver light lay across the top of his head and the tops of his shoulders. "Do you know what I'm talking about? Does this make any sense to you?"

"Yes," I said.

"Good. Maybe the next part won't sound totally crazy to you."

For an uncomfortably long time, he stared at me without saying anything. At last he turned away and went toward the fireplace. Cold light from the window touched his back. "Maybe I wouldn't even want to be that alive anymore. You're right up next to death when you're that alive."

He reached the fireplace, and in the darkness of that part of the room, I saw him raise an arm and caress the edge of the marble. "No, I'm not saying it right. Being alive like that includes death."

He turned from the mantel and walked back into the silver wash of light. He looked as dispassionate as a bank examiner. "Not long before this, I lost a lot of people. Tribesmen. We had two 'A' teams in our encampment, one under me, the other under an officer named Bullock. Bullock and his team went out one night, and none of them ever came back. We waited an extra twelve hours, and then I took my team out to look for them."

He had stepped into the darkness between the windows. "It took three days to find them. They were in the woods not far from a little ville, about a hundred feet off the trail, in only moderately thick growth. Bullock and his five men were tied to trees. They'd been cut open—slashed across the gut and left to bleed to death. One more thing."

He moved past the far window without turning to look at me, and the light turned his shirt and skin to silver again. "Their tongues had been cut out." John began moving toward the brass lamp, and now did turn, half in and half out of the soft yellow light. "After we cut down the bodies and made litters to carry them back, I wrapped their tongues in a cloth and took them with me. I dried them out and treated them, and wore them everywhere after that."

"Who killed Bullock and his team?" I asked.

I saw the flicker of a smile in the darkness. "VC cut out tongues, sometimes, to humiliate your corpse. So did the Yards, sometimes—to keep you silent in the other world."

Ransom walked around the lamp and began heading back to the windows and the wall of paintings.

"So it's about the eighth night out. And then something says Ransom."

"I thought it must have been my partner, but I tuned to his frequency, you know, I focused on him and he wasn't making any more sound than a beetle. He sure as hell wasn't talking."

"Then I hear it again. Ransom."

"I came around the side of a tree about twenty feet wide, and standing off a little way under a big elephant fern like a roof, standing up and looking right at me, is Bullock. Right next to him is his number one guy, his team leader. Their clothes are covered with blood. They just stand there, waiting. They know I can see them, and they're not surprised. Neither am I."

Ransom had made it past the windows again, and now he was stationed before the fireplace, in the darkest part of the room. I could barely make out his big figure moving back and forth in front of the fireplace.

"I was in the place where death and life flow into each other. Those little tongues felt like leaves on my skin. They let me pass through them. They knew what I was doing, they knew where I was going."

I waited for more of the story, but he faced the fireplace in silence. "You're talking about going to bring Bachelor back."

I could hear him smiling. "That's right. He knew I was coming, and he got out way ahead of me." He was softly beating a hand on the fireplace, like a mockery of self-punishment. "That way I was? He was like that all the time. He lived in the realm of the gods."

I was still waiting for the end of the story.

"Have you ever experienced anything like that? Are you qualified to judge it?"

"Something like that," I said. "But I don't know if I'm qualified to judge it."

John pushed himself off the fireplace like a man doing a standing push-up. He switched on the lamp on the end table, and the room expanded into life and color. "I felt extraordinary— like a king. Like a god."

He turned around and gazed at me.

"What's the end of the story?" I asked.

"That is the end."

"What happened when you got there?"

He was frowning at me, and when he spoke, it was to change the subject. "I think I'd like to take a look inside the Green Woman Taproom tomorrow. Want to come with me?"

"You want to break in?"

"Hey, my old man owned a hotel," John said. "I have a lot of skeleton keys."

4

The next morning I learned that while John Ransom and I had talked about seeing death moving through life, Mr. and Mrs. David Sunchana of North Bayberry Lane, Elm Hill, had nearly died in a fire caused by a gas explosion. I remembered the propane tanks and wondered what had caused the explosion. The thought that I might have caused it sickened me. Maybe the person who had followed me to Elm Hill had wanted to keep Bob Bandolier's old tenants from talking to me so badly that he had tried to kill them.

5

Ralph and Marjorie had gone back upstairs after their breakfast to pack for the return to Arizona, and John had gone out. Ralph had left the Ledger folded open to the sports pages, which crowed about the 9 to 4 victory of the Millhaven team over the Milwaukee Brewers. I flipped the paper back to the front page and read the latest dispatches from Armory Place. Local civic and religious leaders had formed the "Committee for a Just Millhaven" and demanded a room at City Hall and secretarial help.

The Reverend Clement Moore was leading a protest march down Illinois Avenue at three o'clock in the afternoon. The mayor had issued a permit for the march and assigned all off-duty policemen to handle security and crowd control. Illinois Avenue would be closed to traffic from one-thirty until five o'clock.

A two-paragraph story on the fifth page reported that the previously unknown man murdered on Livermore Avenue had been positively identified as Grant Hoffman, 31, a graduate student in religion at Arkham College.

I turned the page and saw a small photograph of what looked like a farmhouse that had been half-destroyed by fire. The left side of the house had sunk into a wasteland of ashes and cinders from which protruded a freestanding porcelain sink surrounded by snapped-off metal pipes. The fire had blackened the remaining facade and left standing the uprights of what must have been a sort of porch. Beside the house stood a windowless little garage or shed.

I did not even recognize it until I saw the name Sunchana in the caption beneath the photograph. My breath stopped in my throat, and I read the article.

An Elm Hill patrolman named Jerome Hodges had been driving down North Bayberry Lane at the time of the explosion and had immediately radioed for a fire truck from the joint Elm Hill-Clark Township station. Patrolman Hodges had broken into the house through a bedroom window and led Mr. Sunchana back out through the window while carrying Mrs. Sunchana in his arms. The fire truck had arrived in time to save some of the house and furniture, and the Sunchanas had been released from Western Hills hospital after examination had proven them unharmed. The explosion was not suspected to have been of suspicious origin.

I carried the newspaper to the counter, looked up the number of the Millhaven police headquarters in the directory, and asked to speak to Detective Fontaine. The police operator said she would put me through to his desk.

I shouldn't have been surprised when he answered, but I was.

After I identified myself, he asked, "You get anything out of Damrosch's old records?"

"No, not much. I'll get them back to you." Then something occurred to me. "Didn't you tell me that someone else had been looking through the Blue Rose file?"

"Well, the little case, whatever, was sitting on top of the files down in the basement."

"Did you remove anything from the file?"

"The nude pictures of Kim Basinger will cost you extra."

"It's just that it was obvious that the records had been held together by rubber bands—they were ripped that way—but the rubber bands were gone. So I wondered if whoever looked at the file before me went through it, trying to find something."

"A forty-year-old rubber band was no longer in evidence. Do you have any other gripping information?"

I told him about going out to Elm Hill to talk to the Sunchanas, and that I had seen someone following me.

"This is the couple who had the fire?"

"Yes, the Sunchanas. When I was on the porch, I turned around and saw someone watching me from a row of trees across the street. He disappeared as soon as I saw him. That doesn't sound like much, but someone has been following me." I described what had happened the other night.

"You didn't report this incident?"

"He got away so quickly. And John said he might have been just a peeping Tom."

Fontaine asked me why I had wanted to talk to the Sunchanas in the first place.

"They used to rent the top floor of a duplex owned by a man named Bob Bandolier. I wanted to talk to them about Bandolier."

"I suppose you had a reason for that?"

"Bandolier was a manager at the St. Alwyn in 1950, and he might remember something helpful."

"Well, as far as I know, there wasn't anything suspicious about the explosion out there." He waited a second. "Mr. Underhill, do you often imagine yourself at the center of a threatening plot?"

"Don't you?" I asked.

Overhead, the Ransoms squabbled as Ralph pulled a wheeled suitcase down the hall. "Anything else?"

I felt an unreasonable reluctance to share William Writzmann's name with him. "I guess not."

"Propane tanks aren't the safest things in the world," he said. "Leave the Sunchanas alone from now on, and I'll get back to you if I find out anything you ought to know."

In a bright pink running suit, Ralph came down with the other, smaller suitcase, and carried it to the door, where he set it beside the wheeled case. He came back toward the kitchen and stood in the door. "Are you talking to John?"

"Is John back?" Marjorie said. She came down in pink Reeboks and a running suit that matched her husband's. Maybe that was what the Ransoms had been arguing about. They looked like a pair of Easter Bunnies.

"No," Ralph said. "No, no, no."

"As you could probably guess, things are a little crazy down here," Fontaine was saying. "Enjoy our beautiful city. Join a protest march." He hung up.

Marjorie pushed past Ralph and stood scowling at me through her sunglasses. She put her hands on her pink, flaring hips. "That's not John, is it?" she asked in a loud voice. "If it is, you might remind him that we have to get to the airport."

"I told you," Ralph said. "He's not talking to John."

"You told me John wasn't back," Marjorie said. Her voice was even louder. "That's what you told me." She zoomed out of the kitchen so quickly she nearly left a vapor trail.

Ralph went to the sink for a glass of water, raised the glass, and looked at me with a mixture of bravado and uncertainty. "She's a little on edge. Getting to the airport, getting on the plane, you know."

"It wasn't me," Marjorie called from the living room. "If my son isn't back here in ten minutes, we're going to the airport in a cab."

"I'll drive you," I said. Both of them began refusing before I had finished making the offer.

Ralph glanced toward the living room and then sat at the other end of the kitchen table from me.

"It's about this driving business—John isn't the kind of person who ought to have his license suspended. I asked him what kind of troubles he had that made him get picked up three times for drunken driving. It does you good to talk about these things, get them out in the open."

"He's home," Marjorie announced in a thunderous stage whisper. Ralph and I heard the sound of the front door opening.

"I hope he can put it all behind him," Ralph said.

John's voice, full of loud false cheer, called out, "Is everybody okay? Everything all set?"

Ralph wiped his hand across his mouth and shouted back, "Have a nice walk?"

"Hot out there," John said. He walked into the kitchen, and Marjorie came trailing behind him, smiling and showing all her teeth. John was wearing loose, faded jeans and a dark green linen sports coat buttoned over his belly. His face shone with perspiration. He glanced at me, twisting his mouth to demonstrate his exasperation, and said, "Those two the only bags?"

"That and your mother's carryon," Ralph said. "We're all set, think we ought to get moving?"

"Plenty of time," John said. "If we leave in twenty minutes, you'll still have about an hour before they call your flight."

He sat down between Ralph and myself at the table. Marjorie stood behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. "It's good for you to walk so much," she said. "But, honey, you could sure use a little loosening up. Your shoulders are so tight!" She stood behind him and kneaded his shoulders. "Why don't you take off that jacket? You're all wetl" John grunted and twitched her off.

6

At the airport, Ralph insisted that we not walk them to the gate. "Too much trouble to park—we'll say good-bye here." Marjorie tilted her head for a kiss beside the suitcases. "Just take it easy until your teaching starts again," she said.

Ralph hugged his stiff, resisting son, and said, "You're quite a guy." We watched them go through the automatic doors in their Easter Bunny suits. When the glass doors closed, John got in the passenger seat and cranked down the window. "I want to break something," he said. "Preferably something nice and big." Ralph and Marjorie were moving uncertainly toward the lines of people at the airline desks. Ralph groped in a zippered pocket of the running suit, brought out their tickets, and stooped over to pull his suitcase toward the end of the line. "I guess they'll get there," John said. He leaned back against the seat.

I pulled away from the curb and circled around the terminals back to the access road.

"I have to tell you what happened last night," I said. "The people I went out to see in Elm Hill were nearly killed in a fire."

"Oh, Jesus." John turned to look behind us. "I saw you checking the mirror on the way out here. Did anyone follow us out here?"

"I don't think so."

He was almost kneeling on the seat, scanning the cars behind us. "I don't see any blue Lexus, but probably he's got more than one car, don't you think?"

"I don't even know who he is," I said.

"William Writzmann. Wasn't that the name you said last night?"

"Yes, but who is he?"

He waved the question away. "Tell me about the fire."

I described what I had read in the newspaper and told him about my conversation with Fontaine.

"I'm fed up with these cops." John hoisted himself around, pulled his left leg up onto the seat, and twitched down the hem of the green jacket. "After it turned out that Walter Dragonette's confession was false, all they think of is hauling me down to the station. Whose negligence got her killed in the first place?"

He twitched his jacket down over his belly again and put his left arm up on the back of the seat. He kept an eye on the traffic behind us. "I'm not letting Fontaine stand in my way." He turned his head to give me a hard look. "Still willing to stay and help me?"

"I want to find Bob Bandolier."

"William Writzmann is the one I want to find," John said.

"We're going to have to be careful," I said, meaning no more than that we would have to keep out of Fontaine's way.

"You want to see careful?" John tapped my shoulder. "Look." I turned my head, and he unbuttoned the linen jacket and held it out from his side. The curved handle of a handgun stuck up out of the waistband of his trousers. "After you took it away from Alan, I put it in my safety deposit box. This morning, I went down to the bank and got it out."

"This is a bad idea," I said. "In fact, it's a really terrible idea."

"I know how to handle a firearm, for God's sake. So do you, so stop looking so disapproving."

My effort to stop looking as disapproving as I felt was at least good enough to make him stop smirking at me.

"What were you going to do next?" he asked me.

"If I can find the Sunchanas, I'd like to talk to them. Maybe I could learn something if I knocked on a few more doors on South Seventh Street."

"There's no reason to go back to Pigtown," John said.

"Do you remember my telling you about the old couple I talked to, the ones who lived next to the Bandolier house? The woman, Hannah Belknap, told me that late at night she sometimes sees a man sitting alone in the living room." I then went through Frank Belknap's response to his wife's story and his private words to me on the sidewalk.

"It's Writzmann," John said. "He burns down houses."

"Hold on. This soldier threatened Belknap twenty years ago. Fontaine says propane tanks aren't the safest things in the world."

"Do you really believe that?"

"No," I confessed. "I think somebody followed me to the Sunchanas and decided to stop them from talking to me. That means we're not supposed to learn something about Bob Bandolier."

"I'd like to pay a call on Oscar Writzmann before we do anything else. Maybe I can get something out of him. Will you let me try?"

"Not if you're going to pull that gun on him."

"I'm going to ask him if he has a son named William."

7

Against my better judgment, I left the north-south expressway at the point in downtown Millhaven where it connects with the east-west expressway. Once again I turned west. From the loop of the interchange, the tall square shapes of the Pforzheimer and the Hepton hotels stood like ancient monuments among the scoops and angles, the peaks and slabs of the new buildings east of the Millhaven River.

John watched the skyline as we curved down the ramp into the sparse traffic moving west.

"Every cop in town is going to be watching the marchers this afternoon. I think we could take the Green Woman to pieces and put it back together again without anybody noticing."

At Teutonia, I began the long diagonal north through the strip of Piggly Wiggly supermarkets, bowling alleys, and fast-food franchises. "Do you know if Alan lets anyone use his garage?"

"He might have let Grant use it for storage." John looked at me as if I were playing some game he did not understand yet. "Why?"

"The woman who lives across the street saw someone in his garage on the night April was attacked."

Unconsciously, he touched the butt of the gun through his jacket. His face looked blander than ever, but a nerve under his right eye started jumping. "What did she see, exactly?"

"Only the door going down. She thought it might have been Grant, because she'd seen him around. But Grant was already dead."

"Well, actually, that was me," John said. "I didn't know anybody saw me, or I would have mentioned it before this."

I pulled up at the light and switched on the turn indicator. "You went there the night April disappeared?"

"I thought she might have been over at Alan's—we had a little argument. Anyhow, when I got there, all the lights were off, and I didn't want to make a scene. If April wanted to spend the night there, what the hell?"

The light changed, and I turned toward Oscar Writzmann's cheerless little house.

"We have some old stuff in his garage. I thought I might bring some old photographs, blowups of April, back home with me, so I went in and took a look around, but they were too big to carry, and the whole idea seemed crazy, once I actually saw them." The nerve under his eye was still jittering, and he placed two fingers over it, as if to push it back into place.

"I thought it might have had something to do with her Mercedes," I said.

"That car is probably in Mexico by now."

Out of habit, I checked the rearview mirror. Writzmann's car was nowhere behind us on our three lanes of the drive. Nor was it among the few cars trolling through the dazzle of sunlight ahead of us. I pulled over to the curb in front of the yellow concrete jail.

John put his hand on the door handle.

"I think this is a mistake," I said. "All you're going to do is rile this guy. He isn't going to say anything you want to hear."

John tried to give me his all-knowing look again, but the nerve was still pumping under his eye. "I hate to say this, but you don't know everything." He leaned toward me. His eyes pinned mine. "Give me some rope, Tim."

I said, "Is this about Franklin Bachelor?"

He froze with his hand against the lump in the jacket. His eyes looked like stones. He slowly moved his hand from the gun handle to the door.

"Last night, you didn't tell me the end of that story."

John opened his mouth, and his eyes moved wildly. He looked like an animal in a trap. "You can't talk about this."

"It doesn't matter if it really happened or not," I said. "It was Vietnam. I just want to know the end. Did Bachelor kill his own people?"

John's eyes stopped moving.

"And you knew it," I said. "You knew he was already gone. You knew Bennington was the man you were bringing back with you. I'm surprised you didn't shoot him on the way to Camp Crandall, and then say that he got violent and tried to escape." Then I understood why he had brought Bennington back. "Oh. Jed Champion didn't understand things the way you did. He thought Bennington was Franklin Bachelor."

"I got there two days before Jed," John said in the same small voice. He cleared his throat. "I was moving that much faster, at the end. I could smell the bodies for hours before I got to the camp. The bodies and a… a smell of cooking. Corpses were lying all over the camp. There were little fires everywhere. Bennington was just sitting on the ground. He had been burning the dead, or trying to."

"Was he eating them?"

John stared at me for a time. "Not the people he was burning."

"What about Bachelor's wife?" I said. "Her skull was in the back of your jeep."

"He slit her throat and he gutted her. Her hair was hanging from a pole. He dressed and cleaned her, like a deer."

"Bachelor did," I said.

"He sacrificed her. Bennington was still boiling the meat off her bones when I got there."

"And you ate some of her flesh," I said.

He did not answer.

"You knew it was what Bachelor would do."

"He already had."

"You were in the realm of the gods," I said.

He looked at me through his flat eyes, not speaking. He didn't have to speak.

"Do you know what happened to Bachelor?"

"Some Marines found his body up near the DMZ." Now the pebbles in his eyes shone with defiance.

"Somebody found your body, too," I said. "I'm just asking."

"Who have you been talking to?"

"Ever hear of a colonel named Beaufort Runnel?"

He blinked again, and the defiance left his eyes. "That pompous twerp from the supply depot at Crandall?" He looked at me with something like amazement. "How did you happen to meet Runnel?"

"It was a long time ago," I said. "A veterans' meeting, or something like that."

"Veterans' groups are for bullshit artists." Ransom opened his door. When I got out of the car, he was reaching up under the hips of the buttoned jacket to yank at the waist of the jeans. He did a little wiggle to get everything, presumably including Alan's pistol, into place. Then he pulled the jacket firmly down. He was in control again. "Let me handle this," he said.

8

Ransom plunged across Oscar Writzmann's brittle yellow lawn as if in flight from what he had just said to me.

At the doorstep, I came up beside him, and he glared at me until I stepped back. He hitched his shoulders and rang the bell. I felt a premonition of disaster. We were doing the wrong thing, and terrible events would unfold from it.

"Go easy," I said, and his back twitched again.

From my post one step beneath John, I saw only the top of the front door moving toward John's head.

"You wanted to see me?" Writzmann asked. He sounded a little weary.

"You're Oscar Writzmann?"

The old man did not answer. He shifted sideways and pushed the door fully open, so that John had to move back a step. Writzmann's face was still hidden from me. He was wearing a dark blue sweat suit with a zippered jacket, like the Ransoms' running suits but limp from a thousand trips through the washing machine. His bare feet were heavy, square, and rampant with exploding blue veins.

"We'd like to come in," John said.

Writzmann looked over John's shoulder and saw me. He lowered his cannonball head like a bull.

"What are you, this guy's keeper?" he said. "I have nothing to say to you."

John gripped the door and held it open. "You want to cooperate with us, Mr. Writzmann. It'll go easier for you."

Writzmann surprised me by backing away from the door. John stepped inside, and I followed him into the living room of the yellow house. Writzmann moved around a rectangular wooden table and stood beside a reclining chair. There was a cuckoo clock on the wall, but no pictures. A worn green love seat stood in front of the hatch to the kitchen. On the other side of the love seat stood a rocking chair with a seal set into the headpiece above the curved spindles.

"Nobody's here but me," Writzmann said. "You don't have to mess the place up, looking."

"All we want is information," John said.

"That's why you're carrying a gun. You want information." His fear had left him, and what I saw was the same distaste, nearly contempt, that he had shown before. John had given him a look at the handle of the revolver. He sat down in the recliner, looking hard at us both.

I looked at the seal on the rocker. Around the number 25 the words Sawmill Paper Company were described in an ornate circle full of flourishes and ornamentation.

"Tell me about Elvee, Oscar," John said. He was about four feet from the old man.

"Good luck."

"Who runs it? What do they do?"

"No idea."

"Tell me about William Writzmann. Tell me about the Green Woman Taproom."

I saw something flicker in the old man's eyes. "There is no William Writzmann," he said. He leaned forward and put his hands together. His shoulders bunched. The heavy blue feet slid back under his knees.

John took a step backward, reached into his jacket, and yanked out the pistol. He didn't look much like a gunfighter. He pointed it at the old man's chest. Writzmann exhaled and bit down, pouching out his upper lip.

"That's interesting," John said. "Explain that to me."

"What's to explain? If there ever was a person by that name, he's dead." Writzmann looked straight at the barrel of the pistol. He slid his feet forward slowly and carefully, until only the thick blue-spattered heels touched the floor and the stubby, crooked toes pointed up.

"He's dead," John said.

Writzmann took his eyes from the gun and looked at John's face. He did not seem angry or frightened anymore. "People like you should stay down there on Livermore, where you belong."

John lowered the gun. "What about the Green Woman Taproom?"

"Used to be a pretty seedy place, I guess." Writzmann pulled back his feet and shoved himself upright. "But I don't want to talk about it very much." John raised the gun waist-high and pointed it at his gut. "I don't want to talk about anything with you two." Writzmann stepped forward, and John moved back. I stood up from the rocking chair. "You're not going to shoot me, you sorry piece of shit."

He took another step forward. John jerked up the gun, and a flash of yellow burst from the barrel. A wave of sound and pressure clapped my eardrums tight. Clean white smoke hung between John and Oscar Writzmann. I expected Writzmann to fall down, but he just stood still, looking at the gun. Then he slowly swivelled around to look behind him. There was a hole the size of a golf ball in the wall above the recliner.

"Stay where you are," John said. He had straightened his right arm and was gripping the wrist with his left hand. The ringing in my ears made his voice sound small and tinny. "Don't tell anybody that we came here." John backed up, holding the pistol on Writzmann's head. "You hear me? You never saw us." Writzmann put his hands in the air.

John backed toward the door, and I went outside before him. Heat fell on me like an anvil. I heard John say, "Tell the man in the blue Lexus he's finished." He was improvising. I felt like grabbing him by the belt and throwing him into the street. So far, nobody had come outside to investigate the noise. Two cars rolled down the broad drive. My whole head was ringing.

John walked backward through the door, still holding his arms in the shooter's position. As soon as he was outside, he lowered his arms, turned toward the sidewalk, and began to run. We rushed across the sidewalk and John opened the back door and jumped in. Swearing, I dug the keys out of my pocket and started the Pontiac. Writzmann appeared in the frame when I pulled away from the curb. John was yelling, "Floor it, floor it!" I smashed my foot on the accelerator, and we moved sluggishly down the street.

"Floor it!"

"I am flooring it," I yelled, and the car, though still moving with dreamlike slowness, picked up some speed. Writzmann began walking gingerly across his dry lawn. The Pontiac swayed like a boat, then finally began to charge. When I turned right at the next corner, the car heeled over and the tires squealed.

"Whoo!" Ransom shouted. He leaned over the back of the front seat, still holding the pistol. "Did you see that? Did that stop the bastard cold, or what?" He started laughing. "He came toward me—I just lifted this sucker—and WHAM! Just like that!"

"I could murder you," I said.

"Don't be mad, it was too good," John gasped. "Did you see that fire? Did you see that smoke?"

"Did you mean to fire?" I took a couple more rights and lefts, waiting to hear the sirens.

"Sure. Sure I did. That old thug was going to take it away from me. I had to stop him, didn't I? How else could I show him I meant business?"

"I ought to brain you with that thing," I said.

"You know what that guy was? He used to take guys apart with his bare hands." He sounded hurt.

"He worked in a paper mill for twenty-five years," I said. "When he retired, they gave him a rocking chair."

I could hear John turning the revolver in his hands, admiring it.

I took another turn and saw Teutonia two blocks ahead of me. "Why do you suppose he told us to go back to Livermore Avenue, where we belonged?"