The Throat

"No offense, but it's not the classiest part of town." I did not say another word until I turned into Ely Place, and then what made me speak was not forgiveness but shock. A police car was pulled up in front of John's house. "He got your license number," I said.

"Shit," John said. He bent over, and I heard him sliding the pistol under the passenger seat. "Keep going."

It was too late to keep going. The driver's door of the police car swung open, and a long blue leg appeared. A giant blue trunk appeared, and then a second giant leg emerged from the car. It was like watching a circus trick—the enormous man could not have fit into the little car, but here he came anyhow. Sonny Berenger straightened up and waited for us to park in front of him. "Deny everything," John said. "It's our only chance."

I got nervously out of the car. I did not think denial would do much good against Sonny. He towered over his patrol car, watching us coldly.

"Hello, Sonny," I said, and his face hardened. I remembered that Sonny had good reason to dislike me.

He looked from me to John and back. "Where is it?" he asked.

John couldn't help taking a quick look back at the Pontiac.

"You have it in the car?"

"There's a reason for everything," John said. "Don't fly off the handle until you hear our side of the story."

"Get it for me, please. Sergeant Hogan wants it back today."

John started walking back to the Pontiac, and as Sonny's last sentence sank in, his steps became slower. I thought he nearly staggered. "Oh, did I say it was in the car?" He stopped and turned around.

"What does Sergeant Hogan want you to give him?" I asked.

Sonny looked from me to John and back to me. He stood up even straighter. His chest looked about two axe handles wide. "An old case file. Will you get it for me, sir, wherever it happens to be?"

"Ah," John said. "Yes. You saw it last, didn't you, Tim?"

Sonny focused on me.

"Wait right here," I said, and started up the path with John right behind me. I waited by the door while John fumbled for his key. Sonny crossed his arms and managed to lean against the patrol car without folding it in half.

As soon as we got inside, John let out a whoop of laughter. He was happier than I had seen him during all the rest of my stay in Millhaven.

"After that speech about denying everything, you were all set to hand him the gun."

"Trust me," he said. "I would have figured something out." We started up the stairs. "Too bad Hogan didn't wait another couple of hours before sending Baby Huey over. I wanted to look at the file."

"You still can," I said. "I made a copy."

John followed me up to the third floor and stood in the door of his study while I reached under the couch and pulled out the satchel. I wiped off some of the dust with my hands and opened the satchel to take out the thick bundle of the copy. I handed this to John.

He winked at me. "While I start reading this, why don't you stop off and see how Alan is doing?"

Sonny was still leaning against the car with his arms crossed when I closed the door. His immovability powerfully communicated the message that I was worth no extra effort. When I held the satchel out toward him, he uncoiled and took it from me in one motion.

"Thank Paul Fontaine for me, will you?"

Sonny's reply consisted of getting into the patrol car and placing the satchel on the seat beside him. He pushed the key into the ignition.

"In the long run," I said, "you did everybody a favor by talking to me that day."

He regarded me from what seemed a distance of several miles. He didn't even bother getting me into focus.

"I owe you one," I said. "I'll pay you back when I can."

The expression in his eyes changed for something like a nanosecond. Then he turned the key and whipped the patrol car around into a U-turn and sped away toward Berlin Avenue.

9

Talking softly, Eliza Morgan led me to the living room. "I just got him settled down with lunch in front of the TV. Channel Four is having a discussion with the press, and then they're showing live coverage of the march down Illinois Avenue."

"So that's where all the reporters went," I said.

"Would you like some lunch? Mushroom soup and chicken salad sandwich? Oh, there he goes."

Alan's voice came booming down the hall. "What the dickens is going on?"

"I'm starved," I told Eliza. "Lunch sounds wonderful."

I followed her as far as the living room. Alan was seated on the chesterfield, threatening to upset the wooden tray on his lap as he twisted to look at me. A small color television on a wheeled stand stood in the middle of the room. "Ah, Tim," Alan said. "Good. You don't want to miss this."

I sat down, taking care not to upset his tray. Beside the bowl of soup and a small plate containing the crusts of what had been a sandwich stood a bud vase with a pink, folded rose. A linen napkin was flattened across Alan's snowy white shirt and dark red tie. He leaned toward me. "Did you see that woman? That's Eliza. You can't have her. She's mine."

"I'm glad you like her."

"Splendid woman."

I nodded. Alan leaned back and started on his soup.

Geoffrey Bough, Isobel Archer, Joe Ruddier, and three reporters I did not recognize sat at a round table under Jimbo's kindly, now slightly uncertain gaze.

"—extraordinary number of brutal murders in a community of this size," Isobel purred, "and I wonder at the sight of Arden Vass parading himself in front of television cameras during the funerals of persons whose murders may as yet be unsolved, despite—"

"Despite what, get your foot out of your mouth,"Joe Ruddier yelled, his red face exploding up from his collar without the usual buffer provided by the neck.

"—despite the ridiculous readiness of certain of my colleagues to believe everything they're told," Isobel smoothly finished.

Eliza Morgan handed me a tray identical to Alan's, but without a rose. A delicious odor of fresh mushrooms drifted up from the soup. "There's more, if you'd like." She crossed in front of me to sit in a chair near Alan.

Jimbo was trying to wrestle back control of the panel. Joe Ruddier was bellowing, "If you don't like it here, Miss Archer, try it in Russia, see how far you get!"

"I guess it's interesting to imagine, Isobel," said Geoffrey Bough, but got no further.

"Oh, we d all imagine that, if we could!"yelled Ruddier.

"Miss Archer," Jimbo desperately interposed, "in the light of the widespread civic disturbance in our city these days, can you think it is responsible to bring further criticism against—"

"Exactly!"Ruddier bellowed.

"Is it responsible not to?" Isobel asked.

"I'd shoot myself right now if I thought it would protect one good cop!"

"What an interesting concept," Isobel said, with great sweetness. "More to the point, and for the moment setting aside the two recent Blue Rose murders, let's consider the murder of Frank Waldo, a local businessman with an interesting reputation—"

"I'm afraid you're getting off the subject, Isobel."

"We'll get 'em and put 'em away! We always do!"

"We always put somebody away." Isobel turned, grinning Geoffrey Bough into a smoking ruin with a glance.

"Who?" I asked. "What was that?"

"Are you done, Alan?" Eliza asked. She stood up to remove his tray.

"Who did she say was killed?" I asked.

"A man named Waldo," Eliza said, returning to the room. "I read about it in the Ledger, one of the back pages."

"Was he found dead on Livermore Avenue? Outside a bar called the Idle Hour?"

"I think they found him at the airport," she said. "Would you like to see the paper?"

I had read only as far as the article about the fire in Elm Hill. I said that I would, yes, and Eliza left the room again to bring me the folded second section.

The mutilated body of Francis (Frankie) Waldo, owner and president of the Idaho Wholesale Meat Co., had been found in the trunk of a Ford Galaxy located in the long-term parking garage at Millhaven airport at approximately three o'clock in the morning. An airport employee had noticed blood dripping from the trunk. According to police sources, Mr. Waldo was nearing criminal indictment.

I wondered what Billy Ritz had done to make Waldo look so happy and what had gone wrong with their arrangement.

"Oh, Tim, I suppose you'd be interested in that thing April was writing? The bridge project?"

Alan was looking at me hopefully. "You know, the history piece about the old Blue Rose murders?"

"It's here?" I asked.

Alan nodded. "April used to work on it in my dining room, off and on. I guess John hardly let her work on it at home, but she could always tell him she was coming over here to spend time with the old man."

I remembered the dust-covered papers on Alan's dining room table.

"I plain forgot about the whole thing," he said. "That cleaning woman, she must have thought they were my papers, and she just picked 'em up, dusted underneath, and put 'em back. Eliza asked me about them yesterday."

"I'll get them for you, if you like," Eliza said. "Have you had enough to eat?"

"Yes, it was wonderful," I said, and lifted the tray and hitched forward.

In seconds, Eliza returned with a manila folder in her hands.

10

The manuscript was not the chronological account of the Blue Rose murders I had assumed it would be, given my stereotypical preconceptions concerning the sorts of books likely to be written by stockbrokers. April Ransom's manuscript was an unclassifiable mix of genres. The Bridge Project was the book's actual title, not merely a convenient reference. It was clear that April intended this title to mean that the book itself was a bridge of sorts—between historical research and journalism, between event and setting, between herself and the boy in the painting called The Juniper Tree, between the reader and William Damrosch. She had taken an epigraph from Hart Crane.

Through the bound cable strands, the arching path

Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings,—

….........................................................................................

As though a god were issue of the strings…

April had begun by examining the history of the Horatio Street bridge. In 1875, one citizen had complained in the columns of the Ledger that a bridge connecting Horatio Street to the west side of the Millhaven River would carry the infections of crime and disease into healthy sections of the city. One civic leader referred to the bridge as "That Ill-Starred Monstrosity which has supplanted an honest Ferryman." Immediately upon completion, the bridge had been the site of a hideous crime, the abduction of an infant from a carriage by a wild, ragged figure on horseback. The man boarded the carriage, snatched the child from its nurse, and then remounted his horse, which had kept pace. The kidnapper had spun his mount around and galloped off into the warren of slums and tenements on the east side of the river. Two days later, an extensive police search discovered the corpse on a crude altar in the Green Woman's basement. The abductor was never identified.

April had uncovered the old local story of the ancient man with battered white wings discovered in a packing case on the riverbank by a band of children who had stoned him to death, mocking the creature's terrible, foreign cries as the stones struck him. I too had run across the story, but April had located old newspaper accounts of the legend and related the angel figure to the epidemic of influenza which had killed nearly a third of the Irish population that lived near the bridge. Nonetheless, she reported, an individual known only as M. Angel had been listed in police documents from 1911 as a death, from stoning and had subsequently been buried in the city's old potter's field (now vanished beneath a section of the east-west freeway).

The Green Woman Taproom, originally the ferryman's shanty, made frequent appearances in the police documents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Apart from being the scene of the occasional brawls, stabbings, and shootings not uncommon in rough taverns of the period, the Green Woman had distinguished itself as the informal headquarters of the Illuminated Ones, the most vicious gang in the city's history. The leaders of the Illuminated Ones, said to be the same men who as children had killed the mysterious M. Angel, organized robberies and murders throughout Millhaven and were said to have controlled criminal activity in both Milwaukee and Chicago. In 1914, the taproom burned down in a suspicious fire, killing three of the five leaders of the Illuminated Ones. The remaining two appeared to divert themselves into legal activity, bought vast houses on Eastern Shore Drive, and became active in Millhaven politics.

It was from the steps of the rebuilt Green Woman Taproom that a discharged city clerk shot and wounded Theodore Roosevelt; and the psychotic city employee who shot at, but failed to hit, Dwight D. Eisenhower, stepped out from the shadows of the Green Woman when he raised his pistol.

The god who had issued from these strings, April Ransom implied, spoke most clearly through the life and death of William Damrosch, originally named Carlos Rosario. As an infant, he had been carried to the foot of the Horatio Street bridge by his mother, who had been summoned there by her murderer.

For weeks after the discovery of the living baby and the dead woman on the frozen riverbank beneath the Green Woman, wrote April, the old legend of the winged man resurfaced, changed now to account for the death of Carmen Rosario: this time the angel was robust and healthy instead of weakened by age, his golden hair flowed in the dark February wind, and he killed instead of being killed.

How did April know that the old legend had returned? On the second Sunday following the discovery of the infant, two churches in Millhaven, Matthias Avenue Methodist and Mt. Horeb Presbyterian, had advertised sermons entitled, respectively, "The Angel of Death, A Scourge to the Sinful" and "The Return of Uriel." An editorial in the Ledger advised residents of Millhaven to remember that crimes of violence have human, not supernatural, origins.

Three weeks after the murder of his mother, the child was released into the first of the series of orphanages and foster homes that would lead him in five years to Heinz Stenmitz, a newly married young butcher who had recently opened a shop beside his house on Muffin Street in the section of Millhaven long known as Pigtown.

At this stage of his life, April wrote, Stenmitz was a striking figure who, with his long blond hair and handsome blond beard, bore a great resemblance to the conventional Christian portrait of Jesus; moreover, he conducted informal church services in his shop on Sundays. Long after, at his trial for child abuse, it was introduced as evidence of the preacher-butcher's good character that he had often sought his parishioners at the train and bus stations and had given special attention to those frightened and confused immigrants from Central and South American countries who were handicapped by an ignorance of English as well as poverty.

April Ransom was quietly making the case that Heinz Stenmitz had murdered William Damrosch's mother. She believed that, on a dark cold night in February, gullible and intoxicated witnesses had seen the butcher's flowing hair and remembered the old stories of the persecuted angel.

I looked up to see that Alan had returned from his nap. His hands were clasped at his waist, his chin was up, and his eyes were bright and curious. "Do you think it's good?"

"It's extraordinary," I said. "I wish she had been able to finish it. I don't know how she ever managed to get even this much together."

"Efficiency. And she was my daughter, after all. She knew how to do research."

"I'd like to be able to read the whole thing," I said.

"Keep it as long as you like," Alan said. "For some reason, I can't seem to make much headway on it."

For a moment I was unable to keep from registering the shock of the understanding Alan had just given me. He could not read his daughter's manuscript, which meant that he could no longer read at all. I turned to the television to hide my dismay. The screen showed a long view of Illinois Avenue. People stood three and four deep along the sidewalks, yelling along with someone chanting through a bullhorn.

"Oh, my God," I said, and looked at my watch. "I have to meet John." I stood up.

"I knew it'd be good," Alan said.

PART TEN

WILLIAM WIRTZMANN

1

In shirtsleeves, Ransom motioned me inside and went into the living room to turn off the television, which showed the same roped-off stretch of Illinois Avenue I had just seen on Alan's set. The books had been pushed to the side of the coffee table, and loose pages of the Blue Rose file lay over the rest of its surface. The green linen jacket was draped over the back of the couch. Just before John reached the television, a slightly breathless Isobel Archer appeared on its screen, holding a microphone and saying, "The stage is set for an event unlike any which has occurred in this city since the early days of the civil rights movement, and which is sure to inspire controversy. As the tensions in Millhaven grow more and more intense, religious and civic leaders demand—"

John bent over to turn the set off. "I thought you'd be back before this." He noticed the thick folder in my hand. "What's that, the other part of the file?"

I placed the folder beside the telephone. "April's manuscript has been at Alan's house all this time."

He lifted the green jacket off the couch and slipped it on. "You must have taken a look at it, then."

"Of course I did," I said, opening the upside-down file to its last pages. I had looked through only something like the first quarter of The Bridge Project, and I wondered what April had written last. A letterhead was darkly visible through the paper on the top of the pile, and, curious, I lifted up the sheet and turned it over. It was a sheet of April's personal stationery, and the letterhead was her name and address. The letter had been dated some three months ago and was addressed to the chief of police, Arden Vass.

John came toward me from the living room, adjusting the linen jacket.

The letter explained that April Ransom had become interested in writing a paper that would touch upon the Blue Rose murders of forty years before and hoped that Chief Vass would give her permission to consult the original police files for the case.

I turned over the next letter, dated two weeks later, expressing the same desire in somewhat stronger terms.

Beneath this was a letter addressed to Sergeant Michael Hogan and dated five days after the second letter to Arden Vass. April wondered if the sergeant might assist her in her research— the chief had not responded to her requests, and if Sergeant Hogan had any interest in this fascinating corner of Millhaven history, Ms. Ransom would be most grateful. Sincerely yours.

Another letter to Michael Hogan followed, regretting what might seem the writer's bad manners, but hoping to make amends for them by her willingness to spend her own time trying to locate a forty-year-old file in whatever storage facility it was kept.

"Hogan knew she was interested in the old Blue Rose case," I said. John was reading the letter over my shoulder. He nodded. "He plays it pretty close to the vest, doesn't he?"

John stepped beside me and turned over the next sheet, also a letter. This was to Paul Fontaine.

Dear Detective Fontaine: I turn to you in something like desperation, after failing to receive replies from Chief Vass and Sergeant Michael Hogan. I am an amateur historian whose latest project concerns the history and origins of the Horatio Street bridge, the Green Woman Taproom, and among other topics, the connections of these sites to the Blue Rose murders that took place in Millhaven in 1950. I would very much like to see the original police file for the Blue Rose case, and have already expressed my absolute willingness to search for this file myself, wherever it may be stored.

Detective Fontaine, I am writing to you because of your splendid reputation as an investigator. Can you see that I too am talking about an investigation, one back into a fascinating time? I trust that you will at least give me the courtesy of a reply.

Yours in hope,

April Ransom

"She was jiving him," John said. "Yours in hope? April would never say anything like that."

"Do you think she might ever have taken a look at the Green Woman?"

He straightened up and looked at me. "I'm beginning to wonder if I was ever qualified to answer questions like that." He threw up his arms. "I didn't even really know what she was working on!"

"She didn't either, exactly," I said. "It was only partly a historical paper."

"She couldn't be satisfied!" John said, stepping toward me. "That's it. She wasn't satisfied with being a star at Barnett, she wasn't satisfied with doing the same kind of articles anybody else would write, she wasn't…" He clamped his mouth shut and looked moodily at the manuscript file. "Well, let's get downtown before the damn march is all over." He threw open the door and stormed outside.

As soon as he was in the car, he bent over, placed a hand on my thigh and his head on my knee, and reached under my seat. "Oh, no," I said.

"Oh, yes." John straightened up, holding the revolver. "I hate to say it, but we might need this."

"Then count me out."

"Okay, I'll go alone." He leaned back, held in his stomach, and slid the gun into his trousers. Then he looked back at me. "I don't think we'll need a gun, Tim. But if we meet someone, I want to have something to fall back on. Don't you want to take a look at the place?"

I nodded.

"This is just backup."

I started the car, but did not take my eyes off him. "Like at Writzmann's?"

"I made a mistake." He grinned, and I turned the car off. He held up his hands, palms out. "No, I mean it, I shouldn't have done that, and I'm sorry. Come on, Tim."

I started the car again. "Just don't do that again. Ever."

He was shaking his head and hitching the jacket around the curved tusk of the handle. "But suppose some guy walks in when we're there. Wouldn't you feel easier if you knew we had a little firepower?"

"If it were in my hands, maybe," I said.

Wordlessly, John opened his jacket, pulled the gun out of his trousers, and handed it to me. I put it on the seat beside me and felt it press uncomfortably into my thigh. When I came to a red light, I picked it up and pushed the barrel into the left side of my belt. The light turned green, and I jerked the car forward.

"Why would Alan buy a gun?"

John smiled at me. "April got it for him. She knew he kept a lot of cash in the house, in spite of her efforts to get the money into the bank. I guess she figured that if someone broke in, all Alan had to do was wave that cannon around, and the burglar would get out as soon as he could."

"If he was just supposed to wave it around, she shouldn't have bought him any bullets."

"She didn't," John said. "She just told him to point the gun at anyone who broke in. One day last year when she was out of town, Alan called, all pissed off that April didn't trust him enough to give him bullets, he could handle a gun better than I could—"

"Is that true?" Alan Brookner did not seem like a man who would have spent a great deal of time firing guns.

"Got me. Anyhow, he chewed me out until I gave up and took him to a shop down on Central Divide. He bought two boxes of hollow points. I don't know if he ever told April, but I sure didn't."

As I drove down Horatio Street, distant crowd noises came to us from the direction of Illinois Avenue and the other side of the river. Voices shouting slogans into bullhorns rose above mingled cheers and boos.

I looked south toward Illinois at the next cross street. A thick pack of people, some of them waving signs, blocked the avenue. As gaudy and remote as a knight in armor, a mounted policeman in a riot helmet trotted past them. As soon as I got across the street, the march vanished again into distant noise.

The tenements along this section of Horatio Street looked deserted. A few men sat drinking beer and playing cards in parked cars.

"You looked through that file?" I asked.

"Funny, isn't it?"

"Well, they never did ask about who had been fired recently."

"You didn't notice? Come on." He sat up on the car seat and stared at me to see if I was just pretending to be unobservant. "Who is the one guy they should have talked to? Who knew more about the St. Alwyn than anyone else?"

"Your father."

"They talked to my father."

I remembered that and tried another name. "Glenroy Breakstone, but I read his statements, too."

"You're not thinking."

"Then tell me."

He sat there twisted sideways, looking at me with an infuriating little smile on his lips. "There are no statements from the famous Bob Bandolier. Isn't that a little bit strange?"

2

"You must be mistaken," I said. He snorted. "I'm sure I read about Bob Bandolier in those statements."

"Other people mention him from time to time. But he wasn't working in the hotel when the murders took place. So for Damrosch—probably Bandolier never crossed his mind at all."

With the bridge directly before us, I turned left onto Water Street. Forty feet away, the Green Woman Taproom sat on its concrete slab across from the tenements. Pigeons waddled and strutted over the slashes of graffiti.

Ten feet beyond the front of the bar, a fifteen-foot section of the concrete sloped down smoothly to meet the roadbed. Pigeons ambled and flapped away from my tires. I drove slowly up past the left side of the bar. The second, raised section of the tavern ended in a flat frame wall with an inset door.

I swung around the back of the building and swerved in behind it. Tarpaper covered the back of the building. Above the back door, two windows were punched into the high blank facade. Ransom and I softly closed our doors. Now nearly at the Illinois Avenue bridge, cut from view by the curve of the river and the prisonlike walls of an abandoned factory, the army advanced. An outsize, brawling voice bellowed, "Justice for all people! Justice for all people!"

Pigeons moved jerkily across SKUZ SUKS and KILL MEE DEATH.

A blaze of whiteness caught my eye, and I turned toward it —the harsh sunlight poured down like a beam onto a dove standing absolutely still on the concrete.

I looked at Ransom's white, shadowless face across the top of the car. "Maybe someone took those pages out of the file."

"Why?"

"So April wouldn't see them. So we wouldn't see them. So nobody would ever see them."

"Suppose we try to get inside this place before the march breaks up?" Ransom said.

3

John pulled open the screen door and fought with the knob. Then he banged his shoulder against the door. I pulled out the revolver and came up beside him. He was fighting the knob again. I got closer and saw that he was pulling on a steel padlock. I pushed him aside and pointed the gun barrel at the lock.

"Cool it, Wyatt." John pushed down the barrel with a forefinger. He went back to the car and opened the trunk. After an excruciating period that must have been shorter than it seemed, he pushed down the lid and came toward me carrying a jack handle. I stepped aside, and John slid the rod into the shackle of the padlock. Then he twisted the rod until the lock froze it and pulled down heavily on the top end of the rod. His face compressed, and his shoulders bulged in the linen jacket. His face turned dull red. I pulled up on the bottom of the rod. Something between us suddenly went soft and malleable, like putty, and the shackle broke.

John staggered forward, and I almost fell on my backside. He dropped the rod, yanked the broken lock away from the clip and set it on the concrete beside the jack handle. "What are you waiting for?" he said.

I pushed the door aside and walked into the Green Woman Taproom.

4

We stood in a nearly empty room about ten feet square. On the far wall, a staircase with a handrail led up to the room above. A brown plastic davenport with a slashed seat cover stood against the far wall, and a desk faced out from the wall to my left. A tattered green carpet covered the floor. Another door faced us from the far wall. John closed the door, and most of the light in the old office disappeared.

"Was this where you saw Writzmann taking stuff out of his car?" John asked me.

"His car was pulled up alongside the place, and the front door was open."

Something rustled overhead, and both of us looked up at the pockmarked ceiling tiles.

"You want to look in front, and I'll check up there?" I nodded, and Ransom moved toward the stairs. Then he stopped and turned around. I knew what was on his mind. I tugged the Colt out of my waistband and passed it to him, handle first.

He carried the pistol toward the staircase. When he set his foot on the first tread, he waved me into the next rooms, and I went across the empty office and opened the door to the intermediate section of the building.

A long wooden counter took up the middle of the room. Battered tin sinks and a ridged metal counter took up the far wall. Once, cabinets had been attached to thick wooden posts on the rough plaster walls. Broken pipes jutting up from the floor had fed gas to the ovens. A beam of buttery light pooled on the far wall. Upstairs, Ransom opened a creaking door.

An open hatch led into the barroom. Thick wads of dust separated around my feet.

I stood in the hatch and looked around at the old barroom. The tinted window across the room darkened the day to an overcast afternoon in November. Directly before me was the curved end of the long bar, With a wide opening below a hinge so the bartender could swing up a section of the wood. Tall, ornate taps ending in the heads of animals and birds stood along the bar.

Empty booths incongruously like seventeenth-century pews lined the wall to my right. A thick mat of dust covered the floor. As distinct as tracks in snow, a double set of footprints led up to and away from a three-foot-square section of the floor near the booths. I stepped through the hatch. When I looked down, I saw tiny, long-toed prints in the dust.

The sense came to me of having faced precisely this emptiness at some earlier stage of my life. I took another step forward, and the feeling intensified, as if time were breaking apart around me. Some dim music, music I had once known well but could no longer place, sounded faintly in my head.

A chill passed through my entire body. Then I saw that someone else was in the empty room, and I went stiff with terror. A child stood before me on the dusty floor, looking at me with a terrible, speaking urgency. Water rushed beneath Livermore Avenue's doomed elms and coursed over dying men screaming in the midst of dead men dismembered in a stinking green wilderness. I had seen him once before, long ago. And then it seemed to me that another boy, another child, stood behind him, and that if this child should reach out for me, I myself would instantly be one of the dismembered dead.

The Paradise Garden, the Kingdom of Heaven.

I took another step forward, and the child was gone.

Another step took me closer to the window. Two square outlines had been stamped into the cushion of felt near the window. Brown pellets like raisins lay strewn over the streaky floor.

Heavy footsteps came through the old kitchen. Ransom said, "Something chewed a hole the size of Nebraska in the wall up there. Find the boxes?"

"They're gone," I said. I felt light-headed. "Shit." He came up beside me. "Well, that's where they were, all right." He sighed. "The rats went to work on those boxes—maybe that's why Writzmann moved them."

"Maybe—" I didn't finish the sentence, and it sounded as if I were agreeing with him. I didn't want to say that the boxes might have been moved because of his wife.

"What's over here?" John followed the double trail of footprints to the place where they reversed themselves. The pistol dangled from his hand. He bent down and grunted at whatever he saw.

I came up behind him. At the end of a section of boards, a brass ring fit snugly into a disc.

"Trap door. Maybe there's something in the basement." He bent down and tugged at the ring. The entire three-foot section of floor folded up on a concealed hinge, revealing the top of a wooden ladder that descended straight down into darkness. I smelled blood, shook my head, and smelled only must and earth.

I had already lived through this moment, too. Nothing on earth could get me to go into that basement.

"Okay, it doesn't seem likely," John said, "but isn't it worth a look?"

"Nothing's down there but…" I could not have said what might be down there.

My tone of voice caught his attention, and he looked at me more closely. "Are you all right?"

I said I was fine. He pointed the revolver down into the darkness underneath the tavern. "You have a lighter, or matches, or anything?"

I shook my head.

He clicked off the safety on the revolver, bent over and put a foot on the second rung. With one hand flat on the floor, he got his other foot on the first rung, and then almost toppled into the basement. He let go of the pistol and used both hands to steady himself as he took another couple of steps down the ladder. When his shoulders were more or less at the level of the opening, he snatched up the pistol, glared at me, and went the rest of the way down the ladder. I heard him swear as he bumped against something at the bottom.

The ripe odor of blood swarmed out at me again. I asked him if he saw anything.

"To hell with you," he said.

I looked at his thinning hair swept backward over pink, vulnerable-looking scalp. Below that his right hand ineffectually held out the pistol at the level of his spreading belly. Beside one of his feet was a bar stool with a green plastic seat. He had stepped on it when he came down off the ladder. "Way over at the side are a couple of windows. There's an old coal chute and a bunch of other shit. Hold on." He moved away from the opening.

I bent over, put my hand on the floor, and sat down and swung my legs into the abyss.

John's voice reached me from a hundred miles away. "They kept the boxes down here for a while, anyway. I can see some kind of crap…" He kicked something that made a hollow, gonging sound, like a barrel. Then: "Tim."

I did not want to put my feet on the rungs of the ladder. My feet put themselves on the ladder. I swung the rest of myself around and let them lead me down.

"Get the hell down here."

As soon as my head passed beneath the level of the floor, I smelled blood again.

My foot came down on the same bar stool over which Ransom had almost fallen, and I kicked it aside before I stepped down onto the packed earth. John was standing with his back to me about thirty feet away in the darkest part of the basement. The dusty oblong of a window at the side let in a beam of light that fell onto the old coal chute. Beside it, a big wooden keg lay beached on its side. A few feet away was a mess of shredded cardboard and crumpled papers. Half of the distance between myself and John, a druidical ring of bricks marked the site where the tavern's furnace had stood. The smell of blood was much stronger.

John looked over his shoulder to make sure I had come down the ladder.

I came toward him, and he stepped aside.

An old armchair drenched in black paint stood like a battered throne on the packed earth. Black paint darkened the ground in front of it. I held my breath. The paint glistened in the feeble light. I came up beside John, and he pointed the Colt's barrel at three lengths of thick, bloodstained rope. Each had been cut in half.

"Somebody got shot here," Ransom said. The whites of his eyes flared at me.

"Nobody got shot," I said. The eerie rationality of my voice surprised me. "Whoever he was, he was probably killed with the same knife they used to cut the ropes." This came to me, word by word, as I was saying it.

He swallowed. "April was stabbed with a knife. Grant Hoffman was killed with a knife."

And so were Arlette Monaghan and James Treadwell and Monty Leland and Heinz Stenmitz.

"I don't think we'd better tell the police about this, do you? We'd have to explain why we broke in."

"We can wait until the body turns up," I said.

"It already did. The guy in the car at the airport."

"A guard found him because blood was dripping out of the trunk," I said. "Whoever killed him put him in the trunk alive."

"So this is someone else?"

I nodded.

"What the hell is going on around here?"

"I'm not sure I want to know anymore," I said, and turned my back on the bloody throne.

"Christ, they might come back," John said. "Why are we standing around like chumps?" He moved toward the ladder, shooting wild glances at me over his shoulder. "What are you doing?"

I was walking toward the rubble of cardboard and crumpled paper near the side of the basement.

"Are you crazy? They might come back."

"You have a gun, don't you?" Again, the words that came out of my mouth seemed to have no connection to what I was actually feeling.

Ransom stared at me incredulously and then went the rest of the way to the ladder and began going up. He gained the top of the ladder about the time I reached the mess of chewed paper. John sat down on the edge of the opening and raised his legs. I heard him scramble to his feet. His footsteps thudded toward the kitchen.

The impressions of two boxes, partially obscured by bits of ragged cardboard, were stamped like footprints into the basement floor. The rats searching for food or insulation had left largely untouched whatever had been inside the boxes, but a few scraps of paper lay among the bits of tattered cardboard.

I squatted to poke through the mess. Here and there a fragment of handwriting, no more than two or three letters, was visible on some of the scraps. I flattened out one of these. Part of what looked like the letter a was connected to an unmistakable letter r. ar. Harp? Scarf? Arabesque? I tried another, vu. Ovum? Ovulate? A slightly larger fragment lay a few feet away, and I stretched to reach it. John thudded toward the rear of the building. The quality of his impatience, a sweaty anxious anger, permeated the sound of his footsteps.

I flattened out the section of paper. Compared to the other scraps, it was as good as a book. I stood up and tried to make out the writing as I went toward the ladder.

At the top of the paper, in capitals, was Alle (gap) to (gap) n. I had the feeling, like the sense of the uncanny, that it meant something to me. After another missing section appeared the numerals 5,77. Beneath this legend had been written: 5-10, 120. 26. Jane Wright. Near tears, brave smile in par (gap) tight jeans, cowboy boots, black tank top. Appealing white trash trying val (gap) to move up. No kids, husband (here the paper ended).

I folded the paper in half and slid it into my shirt pocket. Afraid that John might really have driven away, I went straight up the ladder without touching its sides and jumped off the final rung onto the floor.

Outside, he was walking around in circles on the cement, banging the car keys against his leg and gripping the Colt with his free hand. He tossed me the keys, too forcefully. "Do you know how close you came?" he said, and picked up the broken lock and the jack handle. He meant: how close to being left behind. A few blocks east of us, the crowd bellowed and chanted. John clipped the lock's shackle through the metal loop.

In spite of his panic, I felt no urgency at all. Everything that was going to happen would happen. It already had. Things would turn out, all right, but whether or not they turned out well had nothing to do with John Ransom and me.

When I got into the car, John was drumming on the dashboard in frustration. I pulled around the corner of the tavern. John tried to look two or three directions at once, as if a dozen men carrying guns were sneaking up on us. "Will you get us out of here?"

"Do you want me to drop you at home?" I asked.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"I want to go to Elm Hill to find the Sunchanas."

He groaned, extravagantly. "What's the point?"

I said he knew what the point was.

"No, I don't," he said. "That old stuff is a waste of time."

"I'll drop you at Ely Place."

He collapsed back into the seat. I made the light onto Horatio Street and turned onto the bridge. John was shaking his head, but he said, "Okay, fine. Waste my gas."

I stopped at a gas station and filled the tank before I got back on the east-west expressway.

5

Plum Barrow Lane intersected Bayberry at a corner where a tall gray colonial that looked more like a law office than a house lorded it over the little saltbox across the street. What we had seen inside the tavern made Elm Hill ugly and threatening.

The houses with their nameplates, huge mailboxes, and neat lawns faced the narrow streets bluntly, like the tenements along Horatio Street. They might have been as empty as the tenements. The garage doors had been sealed tight to the asphalt driveways by remote control. Ours was the only car in sight. Ransom and I could have been the only people in Elm Hill. "Do you really know where you're going?" This, the first sentence Ransom had spoken since inviting me to waste his gasoline, was a grudging snarl directed to the side window. His entire upper body was twisted to rest his head on his right shoulder.

"This is their street," I said.

"Everything looks alike." He had transferred his anger to our surroundings. Of course, he was correct: all the streets in Elm Hill did look very much alike.

"I hate these brain-dead toytowns." A second later: "They put their names on those signs so they can come home to the right house at night." After another pause: "You know what I object to about all this? It's so tacky."

"I'll drive you home and come back by myself," I said, and he shut up.

From the end of the block, the house looked almost undamaged. A woman in jeans and a gray sweatshirt was shoving a cardboard box into the rear of an old blue Volvo station wagon drawn up onto the rutted tracks to the garage. A tall, curved lamp ending in a round white bubble stood on the grass behind her. Her short white hair gleamed in the sun.

I pulled the Pontiac onto the tracks and parked behind the Volvo. John pushed the Colt under his seat. The woman moved away from the station wagon and glanced at the house before coming toward us. When I got out of the car, she gave me a shy, almost rueful smile. She thought we were from the fire department or the insurance company, and she gestured at her house. "Well, there it is." A light, vaguely European accent tugged at her voice. "It wouldn't have been so bad, except the explosion buckled the floor all the way into the bedroom."

The prettiness her old neighbors had mentioned was still visible in her round face, clean of makeup, beneath the thick cap of white hair. A streak of black ash smudged her chin. She wiped her hands on her jeans and stepped forward to take my hand in a light, firm handshake. "The whole thing was pretty scary, but we're doing all right."

A thin man with an angular face and a corona of graying hair came off the porch with a heap of folded clothes in his arms. He said he'd be right with us and went to the back of the Volvo and pushed the pile of clothes in next to the box.

John came up beside me, and Mrs. Sunchana turned with us to look at what had happened to her house. The explosion had knocked in the side of the kitchen, and the roof had collapsed into the fire. Roof tiles curled like leaves, and wooden spars jutted up through the mess. Charred furniture stood against the far wall of the blackened living room. A glittering chaos of shattered glass and china covered the tilted floor of the living room. The heavy, deathlike stench of burned fabric and wet ash came breathing out of the ruin.

"I hope we can save the sections of the house left standing," said Mr. Sunchana. He spoke with the same slight, lilting accent as his wife, but not as idiomatically. "What is your opinion?"

"I'd better explain myself," I said, and told them my name. "I left a note yesterday, saying that I wanted to talk to you about your old landlord on South Seventh Street, Bob Bandolier. I realize that this is a terrible time for you, but I'd appreciate any time you can give me."

Mr. Sunchana was shaking his head and walking away before I was halfway through this little speech, but his wife stayed with me to the end. "How do you know that we used to live in that house?"

"I talked to Frank and Hannah Belknap."

"Theresa," said her husband. He was standing in front of the ruined porch and the fire-blackened front door. He gestured at the rubble.

"I found your note when we came home, but it was after ten, and I thought it might be too late to call."

"I'd appreciate any help you can give me," I said. "I realize it's an imposition."

John was leaning against the hood of the Pontiac, staring at the destruction.

"We have so much to do," said her husband. "This is not important, talking about that person."

"Yesterday, someone followed me out here from Millhaven," I told her. "I just caught a glimpse of him. When I read about your house in the paper this morning, I wondered if the explosion was really accidental."

"What do you mean?" Mr. Sunchana came bristling back toward his wife and me. His hair looked like a wire brush, and red veins threaded the whites of his eyes. "Because you came here, someone did this terrible thing to us? It's ridiculous. Who would do that?"

His wife did not speak for a moment. Then she turned to her husband. "You said you wanted to take a break."

"Sir," David said, "we haven't seen or spoken to Mr. Bandolier in decades." He pushed his fingers through his hair, making it stand up even more stiffly.

His wife focused on me again. "Why are you so interested in him?"

"Do you remember the Blue Rose murders?" I asked. The irises snapped in her black eyes. "I was looking for information that had to do with those killings, and his name came up in connection with the St. Alwyn Hotel."

"You are—what? A policeman? A private detective?"

"I'm a writer," I said. "But this is a matter of personal interest to me. And to my friend too." I introduced John, and he moved forward to nod hello to the Sunchanas. They barely looked at him.

"Why is it personally interesting to you?"

I couldn't tell what was going on. Theresa and David Sunchana were both standing in front of me now, David with a sort of weary nervousness that suggested an unhappy foreknowledge of everything I was going to say to him. His wife looked like a bird dog on point.

Maybe David Sunchana knew what I was going to say, but I didn't. "A long time ago, I wrote a novel about the Blue Rose murders," I said. David looked away toward the house, and Theresa frowned. "I followed what I thought were the basic facts of the case, so I made the detective the murderer. I don't know if I ever really believed that, though. Then Mr. Ransom called me about a week ago, after his wife was nearly murdered by someone who wrote Blue Rose near her body."

"Ah," Theresa said. "I am so sorry, Mr. Ransom. I saw it in the papers. But didn't the Dragonette boy kill her?" She glanced at her husband, and his face tightened.

I explained about Walter Dragonette.

"We can't help you," David said. Frowning, Theresa turned to him and then back to me again. I still didn't know what was going on, but I knew that I had to say more.

"I had a private reason for trying to find out about the old Blue Rose murderer," I said. "I think he was the person who killed my sister. She was murdered five days before the first acknowledged victim, and in the same place."

John opened his mouth, then closed it, fast.

"There was a little girl," Theresa said. "Remember, David?"

He nodded.

"April Underhill," I said. "She was nine years old. I want to know who killed her."

"David, the little girl was his sister."

He muttered something that sounded like German played backward.

"Is there somewhere in Elm Hill where I could get you a cup of coffee?"

"There's a coffee shop in the town center," she said.

"David?"

He glanced at his watch, then dropped his hand and carefully, almost fearfully, inspected my face. "We must be back in an hour to meet the men from the company," he said. His wife touched his hand, and he gave her an almost infinitesimal nod.

"I will put my car in the garage," David said. "Theresa, will you please bring in the good lamp?"

I moved toward the lamp behind the Volvo, but he said, "Theresa will do it." He got into the car. Theresa smiled at me and went to pick up the lamp. He drove the station wagon into the wooden shell of the garage with excruciating slowness. She followed him in, set the lamp down in a corner, and went up beside the car. They whispered to one another before he got out of the car. As they came toward me, Theresa's eyes never left my face.

John opened the back door of the Pontiac for them. Before they got in, David took a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the smudge from his wife's chin.

6

As if by arrangement, the Sunchanas did not mention either their former landlord or the Blue Rose murders while we were in the car. Theresa described how the policeman had miraculously walked into the smoke to carry them out through the bedroom window. "That man saved our lives, really he did, so David and I can't be too tragic about the house. Can we, David?"

She was their public voice, and he assented. "Of course we cannot be tragic."

"Then we'll live in a trailer while we build a new one. We'll put it on the front lawn, like gypsies."

"They'll love that, in Elm Hill," John said.

"Are you staying in a hotel?" I asked.

"We're with my sister. She and her husband moved to Elm Hill years before us—that's why we came here. When we bought our house, it was the only one on the street. There were fields all around us."

Other questions drew out the information that they had moved to Millhaven from Yugoslavia, where in the first days of their marriage they had rented out rooms in their house to tourists while David had gone to university. They had moved to America just before the war. David had trained as an accountant and eventually got a job with the Glax Corporation.

"The Glax Corporation?" I remembered Theresa's saying "the Dragonette boy." On our left, sunlight turned half the pond's surface to a still, rich gold. Mallards floated in pairs on the gilded water. "You must have known Walter Dragonette."

"He came to my department a year before I retired," David said. I didn't want to ask the question anyone with even a tenuous connection to a famous or infamous person hears over and over. Neither did John. There was silence in the car for a few seconds.

Theresa broke it. "David was shaken when the news came out."

"Were you fond of him?" I asked.

"I used to think I was fond of Walter, once." He coughed. "He had the manner of a courteous young man. But after three or four months, I began to think that Walter was nonexistent. His body was there, he was polite, he got his work done even though he sometimes came in late, but he was not present."

We drove past the low, red town hall. Visible around a bend in the road, the bare hill that gave the suburb its name raised itself into the sunlight. Mica glittered and dazzled in the gray paths that crossed its deep green.

"Don't you think they suffer, people like that?" asked Theresa.

Her question startled me with its echo of some barely conscious thought of my own. As soon as she spoke, I knew I agreed with her—I believed in the principle behind her words.

"No," her husband said flatly. "He was not alive. If you're not alive, you do not feel anything."

I moved my head to see Theresa in the rearview mirror. She had turned toward her husband, and her surprisingly sharp, clear profile stood out like a profile on a coin. She moved her eyes to meet mine in the mirror. I felt a shock of empathy.

"What do you think, Mr. Underhill?"

I wrenched my eyes away to check for traffic before turning into the parking lot of the little shopping center. "We saw part of his interrogation," I said. "He said that he had been sexually abused by a neighbor when he was a small boy. So yes, I do think he suffered once."

"That is not an excuse," David said.

"No," Theresa sighed. "It is not an excuse."

I pulled into a space, and David said something to her in the language they had spoken in their garage. Whatever he said ended with the word Tresich. I am spelling it the only way I can, phonetically. She had anglicized her name for the sake of people like me and the Belknaps.

We got out of the car.

John said, "If that communication was too private to disclose, please tell me, but I can't help but be curious about what you just said."

"It was—" David stopped, and raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

"My husband mentioned to me how awful it is, that we have known two murderers." That same forceful compassion came out of her again, straight at me. "When we lived upstairs from Mr. Bandolier, he killed his wife."

7

"We didn't know what to do," Theresa said. Cups of coffee steamed on the pale wood of the window table between us. She and I sat beside the window onto the parking lot, David and John opposite each other. Two children rolled down the long green hill across the street, spinning through the grass with flying arms and legs. "We were so frightened of that man. David is right. He was like a Nazi, a Nazi of the private life. And we were so new in America that we thought he could put us in jail if we went to the police. We lived in his house, we didn't know what rights he had over us."

"Violent," David said. "Always shouting, always yelling."

"Now we would know what to do," she said. "In those days, we didn't think anyone would believe us."

"You have no doubt that he killed his wife?"

David shook his head emphatically, and Theresa said, "I wish we did." She picked up her coffee and sipped it. "His wife was named Anna. She was a beautiful woman, blond, always very quiet and shy. He didn't want her talking to anyone. He didn't want people to know that he beat her." Her eyes met mine again. "Especially on weekend nights, when he was drunk."

"Drunker," said David. "On the weekends, he drank more, even more than usual. Then began the yelling, yelling, yelling. And it got louder and louder, until the screaming began."

"I would see Anna outside in back when we hung up our wash, and she had so many bruises. Sometimes it hurt her to raise her arms."

"He beat her to death?" I asked.

She nodded. "One night, I think in October, we heard the shouts, the curses. She was crying so pitifully. He started smashing furniture. They were in their bedroom, just below ours. That big loud voice, cursing at her. It went on and on, and then it just stopped. There was silence." She glanced at her husband, who nodded. "Their fights usually ended with Anna crying, and Mr. Bandolier, Bob, calming down and… crooning at her. This time the noise just stopped." She was looking down at the table. "I felt sick to my stomach."

"But you didn't go downstairs?" John asked.

"No," David said. "Bob would not permit that."

"What did he do, call an ambulance?" I asked.

Theresa shook her head vigorously. "I think Anna was in a coma. The next morning, he must have put her in bed and cleaned up the room."

This description was so close to what had happened to April Ransom that I looked to see how John was taking it. He was leaning forward with his chin propped on his hand, listening calmly.

"We never saw Anna anymore. He began doing all the washing. Eventually, he washed her sheets every night, because we could see them on the line in the mornings. And a smell began to come from their apartment. That smell got worse and worse, and finally I stopped him one day and asked about Anna. He said she was ill, but he was taking care of her."

David stirred. "Theresa told me he was home all day, and I was worried because of the thought of my wife in the same house with that, that mad creature."

"But I was fine, he never bothered me."

"Bandolier stayed home all day?" I asked.

"I think he must have been fired."

"He was," I said. "Later, his boss took him back because he was good at his job."

"I can imagine," Theresa said. "He probably made the trains run on time." She shook her head and sipped her coffee again. "One day, David and I couldn't take it anymore, thinking about what was going on downstairs. David knocked on their door, and when it opened, we could see straight through into their bedroom—and then we really knew."

"Yes," David said.

"Her face was covered in blood. There was a smell of—of rot. That's what it was. He didn't know enough to turn her in bed, and she had bedsores. Her sheets were filthy. It was obvious that she was dying. He came out bellowing and ordered us upstairs."

"And a little while after that, we saw a doctor come to their door," said David. "A terrible doctor. I knew she was dead."

"I thought he must have finally understood that she was dying and decided to get real medical help. But David was right. A little while after the doctor left, two men came and took her out. She was covered in a sheet. There was never an obituary, there was no funeral, nothing."

Theresa put her chin in her hand, like John, and turned her head to look out of the big bright window. She sighed, distancing herself from what she was remembering, and leaned back and pushed her hair off her forehead with one hand. "We didn't know what could happen next. It was a terrible time. Mr. Bandolier had some kind of job, because he went out of the house dressed in his suits. We thought the police would come for him. Even a doctor as terrible as that man who came to his apartment must have known how Mrs. Bandolier had died. But nothing happened, and nothing happened. And then something did happen, Mr. Underhill. But it was nothing like what we expected."

She looked straight into my eyes again. "Your sister was killed outside the St. Alwyn Hotel."

Though she had been leading me toward this connection all the way through her story, I still could not be certain that I understood her. I had become interested in Bob Bandolier, but chiefly as a source for other information and only secondarily as himself, and therefore my next question sounded doubtful. "You mean, you thought that he was the person who murdered my sister?"

"Not at first," she said. "We did not think that at all. But then about a week later, maybe less—" She looked at her husband, and he shrugged.

"Five days," I said. My voice did not seem to be working properly. They both looked at me, and I cleared my throat. "Five days later."

"Five days later, after midnight, the sound of the front door of the building opening and closing woke us both up. Maybe half an hour later, the same sound woke us up again. And when we read the papers the next day—when we read about that woman who was killed in the same place as the little girl, your sister, we wondered."

"You wondered," I said. "And five nights later?"

"We heard the same thing—the front door opening and closing. After David went to work, I went out to buy a newspaper. And there it was. Another person, a musician, had been killed right in the hotel. I ran home and locked myself in our apartment and called David at work."

"Yes," David said. "And what I said to Theresa was, you cannot arrest a man for murder because he leaves his house at night." He seemed more depressed by what he had said forty years ago than by what had happened to his house within the past twenty-four hours.

"And five days later?"

"It was the same," David said. "Exactly the same. Another person is killed."

"And you still didn't go to the police?"

"We might have, even though we were so frightened," Theresa said. "But the next time someone was attacked, Mr. Bandolier was home."

"And what about the time after that?"

"We heard him go out, exactly as before," said David. "Theresa said to me, what if another person tried to kill the young doctor? I said, what if the same person tried to kill the doctor, Theresa? But on the weekends, we began looking for another place to live. Neither of us could sleep in that house anymore."

"Someone else tried to kill Dr. Laing," I said. My feelings were trying to catch up with my mind. I thought that there must be hundreds of questions I should ask these two people. "What did you think after the detective was found dead?"

"What did I think? I did not think. I felt relief," David said.

"Yes, tremendous relief. Because all at once, everyone knew that he was the one. But later—"

She glanced at her husband, who nodded unhappily.

"You had doubts?"

"Yes," she said. "I still thought that some other person might have tried to kill the doctor. And the only person that poor policeman really had any reason to hate so much was that terrible man, the butcher on Muffin Street. And what we thought, what David and I thought—"

"Yes?" I said.

"Was that Mr. Bandolier had murdered people because the hotel had fired him. He could have done a thing like that, he was capable of that. People didn't mean anything to him. And then, of course, there were the roses."

"What roses?" John and I said this more or less in unison.

She looked at me in surprise. "Didn't you say you went to the house?"

I nodded.

"Didn't you see the roses at the front of the house?"

"No." I felt my heart begin to pound.

"Mr. Bandolier loved roses. Whenever he had time, he was out in front, caring for his roses. You would have thought they were his children."

8

Time should have stopped. The sky should have turned black. There should have been a bolt of lightning and crashes of thunder. None of these things happened. I did not pass out, I didn't leap to my feet, I didn't knock the table over. The information I had been searching for, consciously or unconsciously, all of my life had just been given to me by a white-haired woman in a sweatshirt and blue jeans who had known it for forty years, and the only thing that happened was that she and I both picked up our cups and drank more steaming coffee.

I knew the name of the man who had taken my sister's life —he was a horrible human being named Bob Bandolier, Bad Bob, a Nazi of the private life—I might never be able to prove that Bob Bandolier had killed my sister or that he had been the man who called himself Blue Rose, but being able to prove it was weightless beside the satisfaction of knowing his name. I knew his name. I felt like a struck gong.

I looked out of the window. The children who had been rolling down the hill were scampering up over the dense green, holding their arms out toward their parents. Theresa Sunchana reached out to rest her cool hand on my hand.

"I guess the neighbors pulled out the roses after he left," I said. "The house has been empty for years." This statement seemed absurdly empty and anticlimactic, but so would anything else I could have said. The children rushed into the arms of their parents and then spun away, ready for another long giddy flip-flop down Elm Hill. Theresa's hand squeezed mine and drew away.

If he was still alive, I had to find him. I had to see him put in jail, or my sister's hungry spirit would never be free, or I free of it.

"Should we go to the police now?" David asked.

"We must," said Theresa. "If he's still alive, it isn't too late."

I turned away from the window, able to look at Theresa Sunchana now without disintegrating. "Thank you," I said.

She slid her hand across the table again. I put mine on top of it, and she neatly revolved her hand to give me another squeeze before she took her hand back. "He was such a completely terrible human being. He even sent away that adorable little boy. He banished him."

"The boy was better off," David said.

"What little boy was that?" I thought they must have been talking about some boy from the neighborhood, some Pigtown boy like me.

"Fee," she said. "Don't you know about Fee?"

I blinked at her.

"Mr. Bandolier banished him, he cast out his own son," she said.

"His son?" I asked, stupidly.

"Fielding," said David. "We called him Fee—a sweet child."

"I loved that little boy," Theresa told me. "I felt so sorry for him. I wish David and I could have taken him."

Theresa looked down into her cup when the inevitable objection came from David. When he had finished listing the reasons why adopting the child had been an impossibility, she raised her head again. "Sometimes I would see him sitting on the step in front of the house. He looked so cold and abandoned. His father made him go to the movies alone—a five-year-old boy! Sending him to the movies by himself!"

All I wanted to do was to get out of the coffee shop. A number of distressing symptoms had decided to attack simultaneously. I felt hot and slightly dizzy. My breath was caught in my throat.

I looked across the table, but instead of the reassuring figure of Theresa Sunchana, saw the boy from the Green Woman Taproom, the imagined boy who was fighting to come into this world. Behind every figure stood another, insisting on being seen.

9

Allerton, I remembered. Or Allingham, on the side of a stalled truck. Where I dip my buckets, where I fill my pen. David Sunchana's polite, unswervably gentle voice brought me back to the table. "The insurance men. And we have so many things to take from the house."

"Oh, we have a thousand things to do. We'll do them." She was still sitting across from me, and the sun still fell on the scene across the street, where a boy carried a big kite shaped like a dragon uphill.

Theresa Sunchana had not taken her eyes from me. "I'm glad you found us," she said. "You needed to know."

I looked around for the waitress, and John said, "I already paid." He looked a little smug about it.

We stood up from the table and, with the awkwardness and hesitancies of a party of four, moved toward the door.

When I pulled back out of the lot, I found Theresa's eyes in the rearview mirror again. "You said Bandolier sent Fee away. Do you know where he sent him?"

"Yes," she said. "I asked him. He said that Fee went to live with Anna's sister Judy in some little town in Iowa, or somewhere like that."

"Can you remember the name of the town?"

"Is that of any importance, at this point?" David asked.

We drove around the pretty little pond. A boy barely old enough to walk clapped his hands at a foot-high sailboat. We followed the meandering curves of Bayberry Lane. "I don't think it was Iowa," she said. "Give me a minute, I'll remember it."

"This woman remembers everything," said David. "She is a phenomenon of memory."

From this end of Bayberry Lane, their house looked like a photograph from London after the blitz. A long length of glinting rubble led into a room without an exterior wall. Both of the Sunchanas fell silent as soon as it came into view, and they did not speak until I pulled up behind the station wagon. David opened the door on his side, and Theresa leaned forward and patted my shoulder. "I knew I'd remember. It was Ohio—Azure, Ohio. And the name of Anna's sister was Judy Leatherwood."

"Theresa, you amaze me."

"Who could forget a name like Leatherwood?" She got out of the car and waved at us as David put his fingers in his wiry hair and walked toward what was left of his house.

11

"Bob Bandolier?" John said. "That asshole, Bob Bandolier?"

"Exactly," I said. "That asshole, Bob Bandolier."

"I met him a couple of times when I was a little boy. The guy was completely phony. You know how when you're a kid you can sometimes see things really clearly? I was in my father's office, and a guy with a waxy little mustache and slicked-down hair comes in. Meet the most important man in this hotel, my father says to me. I just do my job, young man, he says to me— and I can see that he does think he's the most important man in the hotel. He thinks my father's a fool."

"All killers can't be as congenial as Walter Dragonette."

"That guy," John said again. "Anyhow, you were brilliant, coming up with that sister."

"I was telling them the truth. He murdered my sister first."

"And you never told me?"

"John, it just never—"

He muttered something and moved away from me to lean against the door, indications that he was about to descend into the same wrathful silence of the journey out to the suburbs.

"Why should you be upset?" I asked. "I came here from New York to help you with a problem—"

"No. You came here to help yourself. You can't concentrate on the problems of another person for longer than five seconds, unless you have some personal interest in the matter. What you're doing has nothing to do with me. It's all about that book you're writing."

I waited until my impatience with him died down. "I suppose I should have told you about my sister when you first called. I wasn't hiding it from you, John. Even I couldn't really be sure that the man who had killed her had done the other murders."

"And now you know."

"Now I know," I said, and felt a return of that enormous relief, the satisfaction of being able to put down a weight I had carried for four decades.

"So you're done, and you might as well go back home."

He flicked his eyes in my direction before looking expressionlessly out the car window again.

"I want to know who killed your wife. And I think it might be safer if I stay with you for a while."

He shrugged. "What are you going to do, be my bodyguard?"

"I don't think anybody is going to try to take me to the Green Woman and tie me up in a chair. I can protect myself from Bob Bandolier. I know what he looks like, remember?"

"I'd like to see what else I can turn up," I said.

"I guess you're pretty much free to do whatever you want."

"Then I'd like to use your car this evening."

"For what? A date with that gray-haired crumpet?"

"I ought to talk to Glenroy Breakstone again."

"You sure don't mind wasting your time," he said, and that was how we left it for the rest of the drive back to Ely Place.

John pulled the Colt out from under the seat and took it into the house with him.

12

I made a right turn at the next corner, went past Alan's house, and saw him walking up the path to his front door beside Eliza Morgan. It was getting a little cooler by now, and she must have taken him for a walk around the block. He was waving one arm in big circles, describing something, and I could hear the boom of his voice without being able to distinguish the words. They never noticed the Pontiac going down the street behind them. I turned right again at the next corner and went back

to Berlin Avenue to go back downtown to the east-west expressway.

Before I saw Glenroy I wanted to fulfill an obligation I had remembered in the midst of the quarrel with John.

At the time I had spoken to Byron Dorian, my motive for suggesting a meeting had been no more than my sense that he needed to talk; now I actively wanted to talk to him. The scale of what April Ransom had been trying to do in The Bridge Project had given me a jolt. She was discovering her subject, watching it unfold, as she rode out farther and farther on her instincts. She was really writing, and that the conditions of her life meant that she had to do this virtually in secret, like a Millhaven Emily Dickinson, made the effort all the more moving. I wanted to honor that effort—to honor the woman sitting at the table with her papers and her fountain pen.

Alan Brookner had been so frustrated by his inability to read April's manuscript that he had tried to flush thirty or forty pages down the toilet, but what was left was enough to justify a trip to Varney Street.

13

I had been relying on my memory to get me there, but once I turned off the expressway, I realized that I had only a general idea of its location, which was past Pine Knoll Cemetery, south of the stadium. I drove past the empty stadium and then the cemetery gates, checking the names on the street signs. One Saturday a year or two after my sister's death, my father had taken me out to Varney Street to buy a metal detector he had seen advertised in the Ledger—he was between jobs, still drinking heavily, and he thought that if he swept a metal detector over the east side beaches, he could find a fortune. Rich people didn't bother picking up the quarters and half dollars that dropped out of their pockets. It was all lying there to be picked up by a clever entrepreneur like Al Underhill. He had steered his car to Varney Street unhesitatingly—we had gone past Pine Knoll, made a turn, perhaps another. I remembered a block of shops with signs in a foreign language and overweight women dressed in black.

Varney Street itself I remembered as one of the few Millhaven neighborhoods a step down from Pigtown, a stretch of shabby houses with flat wooden fronts and narrow attached garages. My father had left me in the car, entered one of the houses, and come out twenty minutes later, gloating over the worthless machine.

I turned a corner at random, drove three blocks while checking the street signs, and found myself in the same neighborhood of little shops I had first seen with my father. Now all the signs were in English. Spools of thread in pyramids and scissors suspended on lengths of string filled the dusty window of a shop called Lulu's Notions. The only people in sight were on a bench in the laundromat beside it. I pulled into an empty place behind a pickup truck, put a quarter in the meter, and went into the laundromat. A young woman in cutoff shorts and a Banana Republic T-shirt went up to the plate-glass window and pointed through houses at the next street down.

I went to the back of the laundromat, took the paper on which I had written Dorian's phone number and address from my wallet, and dialed the number.

"You're who?" he asked.

I told him my name again. "We spoke on the phone once when you called the Ransom house. I'm the person who told you that she had died."

"Oh. I remember talking to you."

"You said I might come to your place to talk about April Ransom."

"I don't know… I'm working, well, I'm sort of trying to work…"

"I'm just around the corner, at the laundromat."

"Well, I guess you could come over. It's the third house from the corner, the one with the red door."

The dark-haired, pale young man I had seen at April's funeral cracked open the vermillion door in the little brown house and leaned out, gave me a quick, nervous glance, and then looked up and down the block. He was dressed in a black T-shirt and faded black jeans. He pulled himself back inside. "You're a friend of John Ransom's, aren't you? I saw you with him at the funeral."

"I saw you there, too."

He licked his lips. He had fine blue eyes and a handsome mouth. "Look, you didn't come here to make trouble or anything, did you? I'm not sure I understand what you're doing."

"I want to talk about April Ransom," I said. "I'm a writer, and I've been reading her manuscript, 'The Bridge Project.' It was going to be a wonderful book."

"I guess you might as well come in." He backed away.

What had been the front room was a studio with drop cloths on the floor, tubes of paint and a lot of brushes in cans strewn over a paint-spattered table, and a low daybed. At its head, large, unframed canvases were stacked back to front against the wall, showing the big staples that fastened the fabric to the stretchers; others hung in an uneven row along the opposite wall. An opening on the far side of the room led into a dark kitchen. Tan drop cloths covered the two windows at the front of the house, and a smaller cloth that looked like a towel had been nailed up over the kitchen window. A bare light bulb burned on a cord in the middle of the room. Directly beneath it, a long canvas stood on an easel.

"Where did you find her manuscript? Did John have it?"

"It was at her father's house. She used to work on it there."

Dorian moved to the table and began wiping a brush with a limp cloth. "That makes sense. You want some coffee?"

"That would be nice."

He went into the kitchen to pour water into an old-fashioned metal percolator, and I walked around the room, looking at his paintings.

Nothing like the nudes in the Ransoms' bedroom, they resembled a collaboration between Francis Bacon and panels from a modernist graphic novel. In all of the paintings, dark forms and figures, sometimes slashed with white or brilliant red, moved forward out of a darker background. Then a detail jumped out at me from the paintings, and I grunted with surprise. A small, pale blue rose appeared in each of the paintings: in the buttonhole of the suit worn by a screaming man, floating in the air above a bloody corpse and a kneeling man, on the cover of a notebook lying on a desk beside a slumped body, in the mirror of a crowded bar where a man in a raincoat turned a distorted face toward the viewer. The paintings seemed like responses to April's manuscript, or visual parallels to it.

"Sugar?" Dorian called from the kitchen. "Milk?" I realized that I had not eaten all day, and asked for both. He came out of the kitchen and gave me, a cup filled to the top with sweet white coffee. He turned to look at the paintings with me and raised his cup to his lips. When he lowered the cup, he said, "I've spent so much time with this work, I hardly know what it looks like anymore. What do you think?"

"They're very good," I said. "When did you change your style?"

"In art school, this was at Yale, I was interested in abstraction, even though no one else was, and I started getting into that flat, outlined, Japanese-y Nabi kind of work right around the time I graduated. To me, it was a natural outgrowth of what I was doing, but everybody hated it." He smiled at me. "I knew I wouldn't have a chance in New York, so I came back here to Millhaven, where you can live a lot cheaper."

"John said that a gallery owner gave your name to April." He looked away abruptly, as if this was an embarrassing subject. "Yeah, Carol Judd, she has a little gallery downtown. Carol knew my work because I took my slides in when I first got back. Carol always liked me, and we used to talk about my having a show there sometime." He smiled again, but not at me, and the smile faded back into his usual earnestness when I asked another question.

"So that was how you first met April Ransom?" He nodded, and his eyes drifted over the row of paintings. "Uh huh. She understood what I was after." He paused for a second. "There was a kind of appreciation between us right from the start. We talked about what she wanted, and she decided that instead of buying any of the work I'd already done, she would commission two big paintings. So that's how I got to know her."

He took his eyes off the paintings, set his cup on the table covered with paints and brushes, and swung around a sway-backed chair in front of the easel so that it faced the bed. Two tapestry cushions were wedged into the tilted back support. When I sat down, the cushions met my back in all the right places.

Dorian sat on the camp bed. Looking at his paintings had comforted him, and he seemed more relaxed.

"You must have spent a lot of time talking with her," I said.

"It was wonderful. Sometimes, if John was out of town or teaching late, she'd invite me to her house so I could just sit in front of all those paintings she had."

"Didn't she want you to meet John?"

He pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, as if he were working out a problem. "Well, I did meet John, of course. I went there for dinner twice, and the first time was all right, John was polite and the conversation was fine, but the second time I went, he barely spoke to me. It seemed like their paintings were just possessions for him—like sports cars, or something."

I had the nasty feeling that, for John, having Byron Dorian around the house would have been something like an insult. He was young and almost absurdly good-looking while appearing to be entirely without vanity—John would have accepted him more easily if his looks had been undermined by obvious self-regard.

Then something else occurred to me, something I should have understood as soon as I saw the paintings on the walls.

"You're the one who got April interested in the Blue Rose case," I said. "You were the person who first told her about William Damrosch."

He actually blushed.

"That's what all these paintings are about—Damrosch."

His eyes flew to the paintings again. This time, they could not comfort him. He looked too anguished to speak.

"The boy in the Vuillard painting reminded you of Damrosch, and you told her about him," I said. "That doesn't make you responsible for her death."

This sentence, intended to be helpful, had the opposite effect.

Like a girl, Dorian pushed his knees together, propped his elbow on them, and twisted sideways with his chin in his hand. An almost visible cloud of pain surrounded him.

"I'm fascinated by Damrosch, too," I said. "It's hard not to be. When I was in Vietnam, I wrote two novels in my head, and the second, The Divided Man, was all about Damrosch."

Dorian shot me a blue-eyed glance without altering his posture. "I must have looked at that boy in the Vuillard three or four times before I really saw him—it's so subtle. At first, you just take him for granted, and then the way he's looking out at you takes over the whole painting."

He paused to struggle with his feelings. "That's how we started talking about Bill Damrosch and everything. She was excited about the idea of the bridge, that he was found under a bridge. That sort of ignited her."

I asked him how he had first become interested in Damrosch's story.

"Oh, I heard about him from my father. Lots and lots of times. They were partners for a long time. My dad didn't get on very well with his first wife, so he spent a lot of time with Bill Damrosch. I guess you could say he loved him—he used to say he tried everything he could think of to stop Bill from drinking, but he couldn't, so he started drinking with him." He gave me a frank look. "My father was an alcoholic, but after Bill died, he straightened himself out. In the sixties, when he was getting close to retirement age, he met my mother in a grocery store. Even she says she picked him up. She was twenty-five years younger, but they got married, and a year later I happened along, not exactly according to plan, I gather."

It made sense, if Dorian took after his father—as long as he didn't get fat, women would be trying to pick him up for the next three decades.

"Your father must have been disturbed about the outcome of the Blue Rose case."

He gave me a fierce look. "What outcome? You mean the junk in the papers? That drove him crazy. He almost quit the force, but he loved the work too much." He had calmed down, and now I was getting the frank, level look again. This time there was a touch of censure in it. "He hated your book, by the way. He said you got everything wrong."

"I guess I did."

"What you did was irresponsible. My father knew that Bill Damrosch never killed anybody. He was set up."

"I know that now," I said.

Dorian hooked one foot around his other ankle and started looking stricken again. "I should never have mentioned Damrosch to her. That's how everything started."

"The only people who knew what she was doing with her spare time were one or two brokers at Barnett and the police."

"I told her she should write to the police department."

"It should have worked." I told him what Paul Fontaine had done for me.

Outrage and scorn darkened his face. "Then they're as fucked up as my father said they were. That doesn't make any sense. They should have let her see those records." He glared at the paint-spattered floor for a couple of seconds. "My dad told me he didn't like what happened to the force after he retired— all the new people, like Fontaine. He didn't like the way they worked. He didn't trust their methods. Except for Mike Hogan. My dad thought Mike Hogan was a real cop, and he had a lot of respect for him." Dorian looked suspiciously back up at me.

"So your father was still alive when Fontaine and Hogan joined the force." He was describing any veteran's natural resentment of a brilliant new arrival.

"He's still alive, period. My father is eighty-five, and he's as strong as an ox."

"If it's any consolation, Paul Fontaine told me that he liked my book because it was so ridiculous."

"I'll tell him that." He flashed me a nice white smile. "No, on second thought, maybe I won't."

"Do you think I could talk to your father?"

"I guess." Dorian rubbed his face and looked at me grudgingly for a moment before reaching down behind the end of the day bed to pick up a spiral notebook with a ballpoint pen clipped into its metal rings. He flipped to an empty page and wrote something down. Then he ripped out the page and walked across the floor to hand it to me.

He had printed the name George Dubbin above an address and telephone number.

"George Dubbin?"

"That's his name." Dorian sat down on the bed again. "My name used to be Bryan Dubbin. I thought I could never be a famous painter with a name like that. Francesco Clemente and Bryan Dubbin? As soon as I graduated from UI-Millhaven, I changed it to something that sounded better to me. You don't have to tell me that I was being silly. But it could have been worse—the other name I was considering was Beaumont Darcy. I guess my head was in a pretty decadent place back then."

We both smiled.

"You actually had your name changed officially? You went to city hall, or wherever?"

"It's easy to change your name. You just fill out a form. I did the whole thing through the mail."

"Your father must have been a little…"

"He was, a lot. Big time upset. I see his point. I even agree with him. But he knows I wouldn't do it all over again, and that helps. He says, Well, kid, at least you kept your goddamn initials." This was delivered in a forceful raspy growl that communicated both affection and exasperation and summoned up George Dubbin with eerie clarity.

"That was good," I said. "I bet he sounds just like that."

"I was always a good mimic." He smiled at me again. "At school, I used to drive the teachers crazy."

The revelation about his name had dissipated the tension between us.

"Talk to me about April Ransom," I said.

14

Instead of answering, Byron reached for his cup, stood up, and walked to the table, where he began lining up the bottles filled with brushes. He got them all into a nice straight row at the far end of the table. In order to be able to see him, I stood up, too, but all I could see was his back.

"It's hard to know what to say." Next he started lining up the tubes of paint. He looked over his shoulder and seemed surprised to see me up on my feet, looking at him. "I don't think I could just sum her up in a couple of sentences." He turned all the way around and leaned back against the table. The way he did it made the table seem as if it had been built specifically for this purpose, to be leaned against in precisely that easy, nonchalant way.

"Try. See what comes out."

He looked up, elongating his pale neck. "Well, at first I thought she was a sort of ideal patron. She was married, she lived in a good house, she had a lot of money, but she wasn't even a little bit snobbish—when she came here, the first time I met her, she acted like ordinary people. She didn't mind that I lived in a dump, by her standards. After she was here about an hour, I realized that we were getting along really well. It was like we turned into friends right away."

"She was perceptive," I said.

"Yeah, but it was more than that. There was a lot going on inside her. She was like a huge hotel, this place with a thousand different rooms."

"She must have been fascinating," I said. He walked to the covered windows and brushed the drop cloths with the side of his hand. Once again, I could not see his face.

"Hotel."

"Excuse me?"

"I said hotel. I said she was like a hotel. That's kind of funny, isn't it?"

"Have you ever been to the St. Alwyn?"

He turned around, slowly. His shoulders were tight, and his hands were slightly raised. "What's that supposed to mean? Are you asking if I took her there and beat her up and knifed her?"

"To tell you the truth, that thought never occurred to me."

Dorian relaxed.

"In fact, I don't think she was assaulted in the hotel."

He frowned at me.

"I think she was originally injured in her Mercedes. Whoever assaulted her probably left a lot of blood in the car."

"So what happened to it?"

"The police haven't found it yet."

Dorian wandered back to the daybed. He sat down and drank some of his coffee.

"Do you think her marriage was happy?"

His head jerked up. "Do you think her husband did it?"

"I'm just asking if you thought she had a happy marriage."

Dorian did not speak for a long time. He swallowed more coffee. He crossed and uncrossed his legs. He grazed his eye along the row of paintings. He put his chin in his hand. "I guess her marriage was okay. She never complained about it."

"You thought about it for a long time."

He blinked at me. "Well, I had the feeling that if April weren't so busy, she would have been lonely." He cleared his throat. "Because her husband didn't really share her interests, did he? She couldn't talk to him about a lot of stuff."

"Things she could talk about with you."

"Well, sure. But I couldn't talk with her about her business—whenever she started up about puts and calls and all that, the only words I ever understood were Michael and Milken. And her job was tremendously important to her."

"Did she ever say anything to you about moving to San Francisco?"

He cocked his head, moving his jaw as if he were chewing on a sunflower seed. "Did you hear something about that?" His eyes had become cautious. "It was more like a remote possibility than anything else. She probably just mentioned it once, when we were out walking, or something." He cleared his throat again. "You heard something about that, too?"

"Her father mentioned it to me, but he wasn't too clear about it, either."

His face cleared. "Yeah, that makes sense. If April had ever moved anywhere, she would have brought him along. Not to live with her, I mean, but to make sure she could still take care of him. I guess he's getting kind of out of it."

"You said you went for walks?"

"Sure, sometimes we'd just go walk around."

"Did you go out for drinks, or anything like that?"

He pondered that. "When we were still talking about the paintings, we went out for lunch a couple of times. Sometimes we went for drives."

"Where would you go?"

He threw up his hands and looked rapidly from side to side.

I asked if he minded my asking these questions.

"No, it's just hard to answer. It's not like we went for drives every day or anything. Once we went to the bridge, and April told me about what used to go on at that bar on Water Street, right next to the bridge."

"Did you ever try to go in there?"

He shook his head. "It's closed up, you can't go in."

"Did she ever mention someone named William Writzmann?"

He shook his head again. "Who's he?"

"It probably isn't important."

Dorian smiled at me. "I'll tell you a place we used to go. I never even knew it existed until she showed it to me. Do you know Flory Park, way out on Eastern Shore Drive? There's a rock shelf surrounded by trees that hangs out over the lake. She loved it."

"Alan took me there," I said, seeing the two of them going down the trail to the little glen above the lake.

"Well, then, you know."

"Yes," I said. "I know. It's very private."

"It was private," he said. He stared at me for a moment, chewing on the nonexistent seed, and jumped up again. He carried the cup into the kitchen. I heard him rinse the cup and open and close the refrigerator. He came out carrying a bottle of Poland Water. "You want some of this?"

"I still have some coffee left, thanks."

Dorian went to his table and poured bottled water into his cup. Then he moved one of the tubes of paint a fraction of an inch. "I ought to get back to work soon." He closed both hands around the cup. "Unless you want to buy a painting, I don't think I can spare much more time."

"I do want to buy one of your paintings," I said. "I like your work a lot."

"Are you trying to bribe me, or something like that?"

"I'm trying to buy one of your paintings," I said. "I've been thinking about doing that since I first saw them."

"Really?" He managed to smile at me again. "Which one do you want?" His hands were all right now, and he moved toward the paintings on the wall.

"The men in the bar."

He nodded. "Yeah, I like that one, too." He turned doubtfully to me. "You really want to buy it?"

I nodded. "If you can pack it for shipping."

"I can do that, sure."

"How much do you want?"

"God. I never thought about that yet." He grinned. "Nobody but April ever even saw them before this. A thousand?"

"That's fine," I said. "I have your address, and I'll send you a check from John's house. Have UPS ship it to this address." I took one of my cards from my wallet and gave it to Dorian.

"This is really nice of you."

I told him I was happy to have the painting, and we went toward the door. "When you looked up and down the street before you let me in, did you think that John might be out there?"

He stopped moving, his hand already on the doorknob. Then he opened the door and let in a blaze of sudden light.

"Anything you did is okay with me, Byron," I said. He looked as if he wanted to flee back into the artificial light. "You were tremendously helpful to her."

Dorian shuddered, as if a winter wind were streaming through the open door. "I'm not going to say any more to you. I don't know what you want."

"All I want from you is that painting," I said, and held out my hand. He hesitated a second before taking it.

15

After all that, I did not want to just drive back to Ely Place. I had to let everything sort itself out in my mind before I went back to John's house. The satisfaction of knowing that Bob Bandolier was the Blue Rose murderer had left me. Before anything like it could return, I had to know who had killed April Ransom. I sat behind the wheel of the Pontiac until I noticed that Dorian was peeking out at me through a dimple in one of the drop cloths.

I drove away without any idea of where I would go. I would be like April Ransom, I thought, like April Ransom at the wheel of her Mercedes, Byron Dorian in the other seat. I'd just drive, and see where I wound up.

16

I had gone no more than five blocks when it occurred to me that I had, in effect, done no more than to swap one ghost for another. Where I had seen April Underhill's disgruntled spirit, now I would find myself seeing April Ransom's.

A series of images marched across my inner eye. I saw Walter Dragonette sitting across the battered table from Paul Fontaine, crying victim, victim, victim; then saw Scoot, my old partner in the body squad at Camp White Star, bending to dismember the corpse of Captain Havens. I saw the human jigsaw puzzles sealed up in the body bags; the boy in the hut at Bong To; April Ransom and Anna Bandolier lying unconscious on their beds, separated by space and time. A meaning which seemed nearly close enough to touch connected these images. The figure with an outstretched hand stepping out of death or the imaginative space offers the pearl. On the open palm is written a word no one can read, a word that cannot be spoken.

17

I had returned on automatic pilot to my old neighborhood and was turning from South Sixth Street onto Muffin Street. It was one of those sleepy pockets of commerce that had long ago inserted itself into a residential area, like the row of shops near Byron Dorian's studio but even less successful, and two little shops with soaped windows flanked a store where bins of bargain shoes soaked up sunlight on the pavement.

On the other side of the shoe store was the site of Heinz Stenmitz's two-story frame house. A wide X of boards blocked the entrance to the porch, and vertical pallets of nailed boards covered the windows. On the other side of the house, the site of the butcher shop with its triangular sign, was an empty lot filled with skimpy yellow ragweed and bright sprays of Queen Anne's lace. The weeds led down into a roughly rectangular hollow in the middle of the lot. Red bricks and gray concrete blocks lay among the weeds around the perimeter of the hollow. That vacancy seemed right to me. No one had debased the site with an apartment building or a video shop. Like his house, it had been left to rot away.

At the end of the block, I turned onto South Seventh Street. Next to Bob Bandolier's empty house, the Belknaps were drinking Hannah's lemonade and talking to one another on their porch. Hannah was smiling at one of Frank's jokes, and neither of them noticed me driving past. I stopped at Livermore Avenue, turned right on Window Street, parked in an empty spot a block away from the St. Alwyn, and walked past Sinbad's Cavern to the hotel.

The same old man I had seen before sat smoking a cigar in the lobby; the same feeble bulb burned behind its green shade beside the same worn couch; but the lobby seemed bleaker and sadder.

Under the lazy scrutiny of the desk clerk, I walked toward the pay phone and dialed the number on the slip of paper in my wallet. I spoke for a short time to a gruff, familiar voice. George Dubbin, Byron's father, told me that Damrosch had questioned Bob Bandolier—"Sure he did. Bill was a good cop." Then he said, "I wish my kid would go out with women his own age." When the conversation was over, I went across the lobby to the house phone and punched Glenroy Breakstone's room number.

"You again. Tom's friend."

"That's right. I'm down in the lobby. Can I come up for a short talk?"

He sighed. "Tell me the name of the great tenor player in Cab Calloway's band."

"Ike Quebec," I said.

"You know what to get before you come up." He put the phone down.

I went up to the clerk, who had recognized me and was already bending under the desk. He came up with two packs of Luckies and rapped them down on the counter. "Surprised he let you come up. Bad day for old Glenroy, bad day."

"I'll watch my back."

"Better watch your head, because that's what he's gonna mess with." He raised his right hand and shot me with his index finger.

When I knocked on Breakstone's door, loud jazz muffled his voice. "What'd you do, fly? Give me a minute."

Under the music, I heard the sound of wood clicking against wood.

Glenroy opened the door and scowled at me with red-rimmed eyes. He was wearing a thin black sweatshirt that said SANTA FE JAZZ PARTY. "You got 'em?" He held out his hand.

I put the cigarettes in his hand, and he wheeled away from me, jamming one pack into each of his pockets, as if he thought I might try to steal them. He took two steps and stopped, pointing an imperious finger into the air. The music surrounded us, as did a faint trace of marijuana. "You know who that is?"

It was a tenor saxophone player leading a small group, and at first I thought he was playing an old record of his own, one I didn't know. The tune was "I Found a New Baby." Then the saxophone started to solo.

"Same answer as before. Ike Quebec. On Blue Note, with Buck Clayton and Keg Johnson, in 1945."

"I should of thought of a harder question." He lowered his hand and proceeded across the bright rug to the same low table where we had been sitting before. Beside the Krazy Kat mirror and the wooden box sat a round white ashtray crowded with mashed butts, a nearly full pack of Luckies and a black lighter, a bottle of Johnny Walker Black, and a highball glass containing an inch of whiskey. Breakstone dropped into a chair and looked at me sourly. I took the other chair without being invited.

"You messed me up," he said. "Ever since you were here, I been thinking about James. I gotta start getting my shit together to go to France, and I can't do anything but remember that boy. He never had his chance. We ought to be sitting up here together right now, talking about what tunes we'll play and the assholes we'll have to play 'em with, but we can't, and that's not right."

"It still affects you so much, after forty years?"

"You don't understand." He picked up his glass and swallowed half of the whiskey. "What he was starting, nobody could finish but him."

I thought of April Ransom and her manuscript.

He was glaring at me with his red eyes. "All of that music he would have made, nobody else can make that. I should have been standing right next to him, listening to the things he would have done. That boy was like my son, you understand? I play with lots of piano players, and some of them are great, but no piano player except James ever grew up right under my wing, you know?" He finished the whiskey in his glass and thumped the glass down on the table. His eyes moved to the wooden box, then back to me. "James played so pretty—but you never heard him, you don't know."

"I wish I had," I said.

"'James was like Hank Jones or Tommy, and nobody heard him except me."

"He was like you, you mean."

The red eyes gave me a deep, deep look. Then he nodded. "I wish I could go to Nice with him. I wish I could see through his eyes again."

He poured another inch of whiskey into his glass, and I looked around the room. Subtle signs of disorder were everywhere—the telescope tilted wildly upward, records and compact discs were spread on the floor in front of the shelves, record sleeves covered the octagonal table. Gray smears of ash dirtied the wrinkled Navaho rugs.

The record came to an end, and he glanced up at the turntable. "If you want to hear something, put it on. I'll be right back."

Glenroy slid the box toward him, and I said, "You can do what you like. It's your place."

He shrugged and swung back the top of the box. Two two-gram bottles, one about half full and the other empty, lay in a rounded groove along one side. A short white straw lay beside them. In the middle of the box was a baggie filled with marijuana buds resting on a layer of loose, crumbled shreds. He had lots of different kinds of rolling paper. Glenroy flipped back the lid of the mirror, took out a vial, unscrewed the top, and used the spoon to dump two fat white piles of powder on the mirror. He pushed them into rough lines with the long spoon attached to the screw top. Then he worked an end of the straw into one of his nostrils and sucked up one of the lines. He did the same thing with the other nostril.

"You get high?"

"Not anymore," I said.

He screwed the cap back on the bottle and put it into the groove in the box. "I been trying to get in touch with Billy, but I can't find him in any of his places. I want to get some for the plane over, you know."

Glenroy wiped his finger over the white smears on the glass, rubbed his gums, and closed the box and the mirror. He gave me the first halfway friendly look of the night and looked at the box again. "Billy better show up before tomorrow, man." He leaned back in his chair, wiping his finger under his nose.

"Does Tom do coke?" I asked.

He grinned derisively at me. "Tom won't hardly do anything at all anymore. That cat hardly even drinks. He acts like he juices all day and all night, but you watch him. He takes one tiny little sip, and that's it. That's that. He's funny, man. He looks like he's half asleep, you know what he's doing? The man is working."

"I noticed that the other night," I said. "He nursed one drink all night long."

"He's a sneaky mother." Breakstone stood up and went to the turntable. He removed the Ike Quebec record, grabbed its plastic inner sleeve from a shelf, and slid it into the sleeve. "Duke, I want some Duke." He moved along the shelves, running his hand over the tops of the albums, and pulled out an Ellington record. With the same rough delicacy, he set the record on the turntable. Then he turned down the volume knob on the amplifier. "I don't suppose you came over here just to listen to my records."

"No, I didn't," I said. "I came here to tell you how James Treadwell was killed."

"You found that bitch!" His whole face brightened. He took his chair again, picked the burning cigarette out of the ashtray, and squinted at me through the smoke as he inhaled. "Tell me about it."

"If Bob Bandolier came to James's room late at night, would James have let him in?"

Nodding, he said, "Sure."

"And if Bandolier wanted to get in without knocking, he could just have let himself in."

His eyes widened. "What are you trying to tell me?"

"Glenroy, Bandolier murdered James Treadwell. And the woman, and Monty Leland, and Stenmitz. His wife was dying because he beat her into a coma, and he got angry because Ransom fired him when he had to take extra time to care for her. He killed all of them to ruin the hotel's business."

"You're saying Bob killed all these people, and then afterward, he just came back here like nothing happened?"

"Exactly." I told him what I had learned from Theresa Sunchana, and I watched him take it all in.

When I was done, he said, "Roses?"

"Roses."

"I don't know if I can believe this." Breakstone shook his head slowly, smiling. "I saw Bob Bandolier every day, almost every day, when I was here at home. He was a miserable bastard, but outside of that, he was normal, if you know what I mean."

"Did you know he had a wife and a son?"

"First I ever heard of it."

For a time we said nothing. Glenroy stared at me, shaking his head now and then. Once or twice he opened his mouth and closed it without saying anything. "Bob Bandolier," he said, but not to me. Finally, he said, "This lady heard him going out every night someone was killed?"

"Every night."

"You know, he could have done it. I know he didn't give a damn about anybody but himself." He frowned at me for a little time.

Glenroy was changing an idea he had held firmly for forty years. "He was the kind of man who'd beat a woman, that's right." He gave me a sharp look. "I tell you, what I think, Bob would sort of like his woman helpless. She wouldn't walk around, messing things up. That kind of guy, he could go for that."

He was silent for another couple of seconds, and then he stood up, walked away a couple of steps, turned around and sat back down again. "There isn't any way to prove all this, is there?"

"No, I don't think it can be proved. But he was Blue Rose."

"Goddamn." He smiled at me. "I'm starting to believe it. James probably didn't even know Bob was fired. I didn't know for maybe a week, when I asked one of the maids where he was. You know, they didn't even uncover his meat scam—he was back in time to switch back to Idaho."

"Speaking of the meat business," I said, and asked him if he'd heard about Frankie Waldo.

"We better not talk about that. I guess Frankie got too far out of line."

"It sounds like a mob killing."

"Yeah, maybe it's supposed to look that way." He hesitated, then decided not to say any more.

"You mean it had something to do with Billy Ritz?"

"Frankie just got out of line, that's all. That day we saw him, he was one worried man."

"And Billy reassured him that everything was going to be okay."

"Looked that way, didn't it? But we weren't supposed to see that. If you don't get in Billy's way, everything's cool. Someday, they'll nail somebody for Waldo's murder."

"Paul Fontaine has a great arrest record."

"He sure does. Maybe pretty soon he'll get whoever killed your friend's wife." There was an odd smile on his face.

"I have an idea about that," I said.

Glenroy refused to say any more. He was casting glances at his box again, and I left a few minutes later.

18

The clerk asked me if Glenroy was feeling any better, and when I said that I thought he was, he said, "Will he let the maids in there tomorrow?"

"I doubt it," I said, and went back to the pay phone. I could hear him sighing to himself while I dialed.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled up in front of Tom Pasmore's house on Eastern Shore Drive. Tom had still been in bed when he answered, but he said he'd be up by the time I got there.

On the telephone, I'd asked Tom if he would like to know the name of the Blue Rose murderer.

"That's worth a good breakfast," he told me. My stomach growled just as Tom opened the door, and he said, "If you can't control yourself better than that, get in the kitchen." He looked resplendent in a white silk robe that came down to a pair of black slippers. Under the robe, he was wearing a pink shirt and a crimson necktie. His eyes were clear and lively. The smell of food hit me as soon as I reached the table, and saliva filled my mouth. I walked into the kitchen. In separate pans on two gas rings on the range, diced ham, bits of tomatoes, and a lot of whitish cheese lay across irregular circles of egg. Two plates had been set out on the counter, and four brown pieces of toast jutted up out of a toaster. I smelled coffee.

Tom rushed in behind me and immediately picked up a spatula and experimentally slid it under each of the omelettes. "You butter the toast, if you want some, and I'll take care of these. They'll be ready in a minute."

I took out the hot slices of toast, put two on each plate, and smeared butter over them. I heard one of the omelettes slapping into its pan and looked sideways to see him fold over the edges of the second one and toss it neatly into the air and field it with the pan. "When you live alone, you learn to amuse yourself," he said, and slid them onto the plates.

I had finished a quarter of my omelette and an entire piece of toast before I could speak. "This is wonderful," I said. "Do you always flip them like that?"

"No. I'm a show-off."

"You're in a good mood."

"You're going to give me the name, aren't you? And I have something to give you."

"Something besides this omelette?"

"That's right."

Tom took the plates into the kitchen and brought out a glass cylinder of strong filtered coffee and two cups. I leaned back into the sturdy, comfortable chair. Tom's coffee was another sort of substance from Byron Dorian's, stronger, smoother, and less bitter.

"Tell me everything. This is a great moment."

I started with the man who had followed me back to John's from his house and finished with Glenroy Breakstone's final remark. I talked steadily for nearly half an hour, and all Tom did was to smile occasionally. Every now and then he raised his eyebrows. Once or twice he closed his eyes, as if to see exactly what I was describing. He read the fragment from the taproom and handed it back without comment.

When I had finally finished, he said, "Most of Glenroy's clothes come from festivals or jazz parties, have you noticed that?"

I nodded. This was what he had to say?

"Because he almost always wears black, those outfits always look pretty good on him. But their real function is to declare his identity. Since the only people he sees at all regularly, at least while he's at home, are the desk clerk, his dealer, and me, the person to whom he's announcing that he is Glenroy Breakstone, the famous tenor player, is mostly Glenroy Breakstone." He smiled at me. "Your case is a little different."

"My case?" I looked at the clothes I had on. They mainly announced that I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about what I wore.

"I'm not talking about your clothes. I mean, the child who appears to you from time to time—from what you call the imaginative space."

"That's work."

"Of course. But a lot of children are scattered through your whole story. It's as though you're fitting everything that happens to you into a novel. And the main element of this novel isn't Bob Bandolier or April Ransom, but this nameless boy."

So far Tom had said nothing at all about Bob Bandolier, and all of this seemed like an unnecessary indirection. I had mentioned the boy, maybe vaingloriously, to give Tom some insight into the way I worked, and now I had begun feeling a bit impatient with him, as if he were ignoring some splendid gift I had laid before him.

"Do you know what movie was playing at your old neighborhood theater during the last two weeks of October in 1950?"

"I don't have any idea."

"A film noir called From Dangerous Depths. I looked back at old issues of the paper. Isn't it interesting to think that everyone we're talking about might have seen that movie over those two weeks?"

"If they went to the movies, they all did," I said.

He smiled at me again. "Well, it's a minor point, but I'm intrigued that even when you're doing my job for me, going around and investigating, you're still doing yours—even when you're in the basement of the Green Woman."

"Well, in a way they're the same job."

"In a sense," Tom said. "We just look through different frames. Different windows."

"Tom, are you trying to let me down gently? Don't you think Bob Bandolier was the Blue Rose killer?"

"I'm sure he was. I don't have doubt about that. This is a great moment. You know who killed your sister, and I know the real name of Blue Rose. Those people who knew him, the Sunchanas, are finally going to tell the police what they've been sitting on for forty years, and we'll see what happens. But your real mission is over."

"You sound like John," I said.

"Are you going to go back to New York now?"

"I'm not done yet."

"You want to find Fee Bandolier, don't you?"

"I want to find Bob." I thought about it. "Well, I'd like to know about Fee, too."

"What was the name of that town?"

I was sure he remembered it, but I told him anyhow. "Azure, Ohio. The aunt was named Judy Leatherwood."

"Do you suppose Mrs. Leatherwood is still alive? It would be interesting to know if Fee went off to college, or if he, what, killed himself driving a stolen car while he was drunk. After all, when he was five years old, he all but saw his father beat his mother to death. And at some level, he would have known that his father went out and killed other people." He interrogated me with a look. "Do you agree?"

"Children always pick up on what's going on. They might not admit it, or acknowledge it, but they understand."

"All of which amounts to substantial disturbance. And there's one other terrible thing that happened to him."

I must have looked blank.

"The reason his father murdered Heinz Stenmitz," Tom said. "Didn't that woman you liked so much say that Bob sent him to the movies? Fee went alone to see From Dangerous Depths, and who should the boy meet but his father's partner in a business arrangement?"

I had managed to forget this completely.

"Do you want to see what I found?" His eyes sparkled. "I think it'll interest you."

"You found where Writzmann lives?"

He shook his head.

"You found out something about Belinski or Casement?"

"Let me show you upstairs."

Tom bounded up the stairs and led me into his office. He threw his robe on the couch, waved me to a chair, and went around the room, turning on the lights and the computers. Suspenders went up the front of the pink shirt like dark blue stripes. "I'm going to hook into one of the data bases we used the last time." He put himself in front of the desk computer and began punching in codes. "There's a question we didn't ask, because we thought we already knew the answer." He turned sideways on the chair and looked at me with a kind of playful expectancy. "Do you know what it was?"

"I have no idea," I admitted.

"Bob Bandolier owned a property at Seventeen South Seventh Street, right?"

"You know he did."

"Well, the city has records of all leaseholders and property owners, and I thought I'd better make sure that address was still listed under his name. Just watch, and see what turned up."

He had linked his computer to the mainframe at Armory Place and through it to the Registrar of Deeds. The modem burped. "I just keyed in the address," Tom said. "This won't take long."

I looked at the blank gray screen. Tom leaned forward with his hands on his knees, smiling to himself. Then I knew. "Oh, it can't be," I said.

Tom put his finger to his lips. "Shhh."

"If I'm right…" I said.

"Wait." RECEIVE flashed in the upper left corner of the screen. "Here we go," Tom said, and leaned back. A column of information sped down the screen.

17 SOUTH SEVENTH STREET

PURCHASED 04/12/1979 ELVEE HOLDINGS CORP 314 SOUTH FOURTH STREET MILLHAVEN IL

PURCHASE PRICE $1,000

PURCHASED 05/01/1943 ROBERT BANDOLIER 14B SOUTH WINNETKA STREET MILLHAVEN IL

PURCHASE PRICE $3,800

"Good old Elvee Holdings," Tom said, virtually hugging himself in gleeful self-congratulation and smiling like a new father.

"My God," I said. "A real connection."

"That's right. A real connection between the two Blue Rose cases. What if Bob Bandolier is the man who's been following you?"

"Why would he do that?"

"If he tried to kill the Sunchanas after seeing you in Elm Hill, he didn't want them to tell you something."

I nodded.

"What is it?"

"They knew that he killed his wife. They told me about the roses."

"The Belknaps could have told you about the roses. And a doctor signed Anna Bandolier's death certificate. She's been dead so long that no one could prove that she had been beaten. But the Sunchanas knew about the existence of Fielding Bandolier."

"But anyone who asked the Sunchanas the right questions would find out what he had done."

"And find out that he had a son. I think the person who followed you was Fee."

I stopped breathing. Fee Bandolier had tried to kill the Sunchanas. Then I realized what a long leap Tom had made. "Why do you even think that Fee came back to Millhaven? He's had forty years to get as far away as he can."

Tom asked me if I remembered the price Elvee had paid for the house on South Seventh.

I looked at the screen of the monitor, but the letters and numbers were too small to read from across the room. "I think it was something like ten thousand dollars."

"Take a look."

I walked up beside him and looked at the screen.

"A thousand?"

"You saw ten thousand because you expected to see something like that. Elvee bought the house for next to nothing. I think that means that Elvee Holdings is Fee Bandolier. And Fee protects himself here, too, by putting up a smoke screen of fake directors and a convenience address."

"Why would Bob give him his house? He sent him away when he was five. As far as we know, he never saw him again." Tom held up his hands. He didn't know. Then another of Tom's conclusions fell into place for me. "You think Fee Bandolier was the man in uniform, the soldier who threatened Frank Belknap."

"That's right. I think he came back to take possession of the house."

"He's a scary guy."

"I think Fee Bandolier is a very scary guy," Tom said.

19

"I want to see if we can talk to Judy Leatherwood," he said. "Go down the hall to the bedroom and pick up the telephone next to the bed when I tell you. In the meantime, I'll try to get her number from Information."

He pulled a telephone book out of a drawer and started looking for dialing codes in Ohio. I went into the hall, pushed open the door to a darkened room, and went inside and turned on the light. A telephone stood on an end table at the side of a double bed.

"Success," Tom called out. "Pick up now."

I put the receiver to my ear and heard the musical plunk, plunk, plunk of the dialing. The Leatherwood telephone rang three times before a woman picked it up and said, "Hello?" in a quavery voice.

"Am I speaking to Mrs. Judith Leatherwood?" Tom asked.

"Well, yes, you are," said the quavery voice. She was faintly alarmed by the official-sounding voice coming from Tom's mouth.

"Mrs. Leatherwood, this is Henry Bell from the Mid-States Insurance Company. I'm in the Millhaven office, and I promise you I'm not trying to sell you insurance. We have a five-thousand-dollar death benefit to pay out, and I am trying to locate the beneficiary. Our field agents have discovered that this beneficiary was last known to be living with you and your husband."

"Someone left money to my son?"

"The name of the recipient, at least as it's listed on the policy here in front of me, is Fielding Bandolier. Did you adopt Mr. Bandolier?"

"Oh, no. We didn't adopt him. Fee was my sister's boy."

"Could you tell me Fielding Bandolier's present location, ma'am?"

"Oh, I know what happened," she said. "It must be, Bob died. Bob Bandolier, Fee's dad. Is he the one who left that money to Fee?"

"Robert Bandolier was our policy holder, that's right, ma'am. He was the beneficiary's father?"

"Well, yes, he was. How did Bob die? Are you allowed to tell me that?"

"I'm afraid it was a heart attack. Were you close?"

She uttered a shocked little laugh. "Oh my, no. We were never close to Bob Bandolier. We hardly ever saw him, after the wedding."

"You said that Fielding Bandolier no longer resides at your address?"

"Oh, no," she said. "There's nobody here but senior citizens. Only about five or six of us have our own telephones. The rest of them wouldn't know what to do with a telephone."

"I see. Do you have a current address for the beneficiary?"

"No, I don't."

"How long did he reside with you, ma'am?"

"Less than a year. After I got pregnant with my Jimmy, Fee went to live with my brother Hank. Hank and his wife, my sister-in-law, Wilda? They had a real nice home in Tangent, that's about a hundred miles east of here. They were real nice people, and Fee lived with them until he graduated high school."

"Could I trouble you for your brother's telephone number?"

"Hank and Wilda passed away two years ago." She did not speak for about fifteen seconds. "It was a terrible thing. I still don't like to think about it."

"They did not die of natural causes?" I heard a suppressed excitement in his voice.

"They were on that Pan Am flight—103, the one that blew up right in the air? Over Lockerbie, in Scotland? I guess they have a nice memorial over there, with my brother's name and Wilda's on a kind of a plaque? I'd go over there to see it, but I don't get around too good these days, with the walker and everything." There was another long pause. "It was a terrible, terrible thing."

"I'm sorry for your loss." What probably sounded like sympathy to her sounded like disappointment to me. "You said that your nephew graduated from high school in Tangent?"

"Oh, yes. Hank always said Fee was a good student. Hank was the vice-principal of the high school, you know."

"If your nephew went on to college, we might get his address from the alumni records."

"That was a big disappointment to Hank. Fee went down and joined up in the army right after he graduated. He didn't even tell anyone until the day before he was supposed to be inducted."

"What year would that have been?"

"Nineteen sixty-one. So we all thought he must have gone to Vietnam. But of course we couldn't know."

"He didn't tell your brother where he was assigned to duty?"

"He didn't tell him anything. But that wasn't all! My brother wrote to him where he said he was going, for basic training? At Fort Sill? But his letters all came back. They said they didn't have any soldier named Fielding Bandolier. It was like running up against a stone wall."

"Was your nephew a troubled boy, ma'am?"

"I don't like to say. Do you have to know about things like that?"

"There's a particular feature of Mr. Bandolier's policy that might come into play. It allowed him to make smaller payments.What the provision states is that payment of the death benefit is no longer in effect should the beneficiary, I'm reading this right off the form here, be incarcerated in any penal institution, on parole, or in a mental institution of any kind at the time of the death of the policy holder. As I say, this provision seldom comes into force, as you can imagine, but we do have to have assurance on this point before we are allowed to issue payment."

"Well, I wouldn't know anything about that."

"Did your brother have any feeling for what sort of work our beneficiary was interested in taking up? It might help us locate him."

"Hank told me once that Fee said he was interested in police work." She paused. "But after he disappeared like that, Hank sort of wondered if—you know, if he really knew Fee. He wondered if Fee was truthful with him."

"During the year he lived with you, did you notice any signs of disturbance?"

"Mr. Bell, is Fee in some sort of trouble? Is that why you're asking these questions?"

"I'm trying to give him five thousand dollars." Tom gave her a good, hearty insurance man laugh, the laugh of a member of the Million Dollar Round Table. "That may be trouble to some, I don't know."

"Could I ask you a question, Mr. Bell?"

"Of course."

"If Fee is somewhere like you say, or if you flat can't find him, does that insurance money go to the family? Does that ever happen?"

"I'll have to tell you the simple truth. It happens all the time."

"Because I'm the only family left, you see. Me and my son."

"In that case, anything you can tell me could be even more useful. You said that Fee went to Tangent, Ohio, when you found you were pregnant?"

"With my Jimmy, that's right."

"Was that because you did not feel that you could cope with two children?"

"Well, no." Pause. "That was why I asked about, you know. I could have brought up two children, but Fee was like a boy who—like a boy a normal person couldn't understand. He was such a little boy, but he was so private. He'd just sit staring into space for so long! And he'd wake you up screaming at night! But never talk about it! So closed-mouthed! But that's not the worst."

"Go on," Tom said.

"Well, if what you say is right, my Jimmy could use that money to help get a downpayment."

"I understand."

"It's not for me. But that money can come to the family if Fee is like you say. Incarcerated."

"We'll be going over the policy to make that determination, ma'am."

"Well, I know that Fee took a knife from my knife drawer once and went outside with it, and that same day, I mean that night, one of our neighbors found their old dog dead. That dog was cut. I found the knife under Fee's little bed, all covered with dirt. I didn't think he killed that dog, of course—he was just a little boy! I didn't even connect it with my knife. But a while later, a dog and a cat were killed about a block away from our house. I asked Fee right out if he was the one who did those things, and he said no. I was so relieved! But then he said, 'There isn't any knife missing from the drawer, is there, Mama?' He called us Mama and Papa. And I just, I don't know, felt a chill. It was like he knew that I counted those knives."

The quavery voice stopped talking. Tom said nothing.

"I just never felt right about Fee after that. Maybe I was wrong, but I couldn't stand the thought of bringing a baby into the house if he was still living with us. So I called Hank and Wilda."

"Did you tell them anything about your doubts?"

"I couldn't. I felt terrible, having all these bad thoughts about my sister's boy. What I said to Hank was, Fee wasn't screaming at night anymore, which was the truth, but I still thought he might upset the baby. And then I went and talked to Fee. He cried, but not for very long, and I told him he had to be a good boy in Tangent. He had to be a normal boy, or Hank would have to put him in the orphan home. It sounds just awful, but I wanted to help him."

"He did well in Tangent, didn't he?"

"Just fine. He behaved himself. But when we drove over to Tangent, Thanksgivings and such, Fee never looked at me. Not once."

"I see."

"So I wondered," she said.

"I understand," Tom said.

"No, sir, I don't think you do. You said you're in Millhaven?"

"At the Millhaven office, yes."

"That Walter Dragonette was on the front page right here in Azure. And when I first heard about him, I just started to shake. I couldn't eat a bite at dinner. Couldn't sleep at all that night— I had to go down to the lounge and watch the television. And there was his picture on the news, and he was so much younger, and I could go back up to my room."

Tom did not say anything.

"I'd do the same thing I did back then," she said. "With a new baby in the house."

"We'll be in touch, ma'am, if we cannot locate the beneficiary."

She hung up without saying good-bye.

20

Tom had tilted himself back in his desk chair and was staring at the ceiling, his hands laced together behind his head, his legs straight out before him and crossed at the ankle. He looked like a bored market trader waiting for something to show up on his Quotron. I leaned forward and poured water from a crystal jug on the table into a clean glass. On second thought, he looked too pleased with himself to be bored.

"Extraordinary place names they have in Ohio," he said. "Azure. Tangent. Cincinnati. They're positively Nabokovian. Parma. Wonderful names."

"Is there a point to this, or are you just enjoying yourself?" He closed his eyes. "Everything about this moment is extraordinary. Fee Bandolier is extraordinary. That woman, Judy Leatherwood, is extraordinary. She knew exactly what her nephew was. She didn't want to admit it, but she knew. Because he was her sister's child, she tried to protect him. She told him he had to act like a normal child. And the incredible child could do it."

"Aren't you making a lot of assumptions?"

"Assumptions are what I have to work with. I might as well enjoy them. Do you know what is really extraordinary?"

"I have the feeling you're going to tell me."

He smiled without opening his eyes. "This city. Our mayor and chief of police get up on their feet at April Ransom's funeral and tell us that we are a haven of law and order, while, against odds of about a million to one, we have among us two very dedicated, utterly ruthless serial killers, one of them of the disorganized type and only recently apprehended, and the other of the organized type and still at large." He opened his eyes and brought his hands forward and clasped them in his lap. "That really is extraordinary."

"You think Fee killed April Ransom and Grant Hoffman."

"I think he probably killed a lot of people."

"You're going too fast," I said. "I don't see how you can pretend to know that."

"Do you remember telling me why Walter Dragonette thought he had to kill his mother?"

"She found his notebook. He made lists of details like 'red hair.' "

"And this is pretty common with people like that, isn't it? They want to be able to remember what they've done."

"That's right," I said.

There was an anticipatory smile on his face. "You wouldn't want anyone else to find your list, would you?"

"Of course not."

"And if you kept detailed notes and descriptions, you'd have to put them in a safe place, wouldn't you?"

"As safe as possible."

Still smiling, Tom waited for me to catch up with him.

"Someplace like the basement of the Green Woman, you mean?"

His smile widened. "You saw the impressions of two boxes. Suppose he wrote narratives of every murder he committed. How many of these narratives would it take to fill two boxes? Fifty? A hundred?"

I took the folded paper from my shirt pocket. "Can you get into the Allentown police records? We have to find out if this woman, Jane Wright, was murdered there. We even have an approximate date: May 'seventy-seven."

"What I can do is scan the Allentown newspapers for her name." He stood up and put his hands in the small of his back and stretched backward. This was probably Tom's morning exercise program. "It'll take a couple of hours. Do you want to wait around to see what turns up?"

I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly seven. "John's probably going out of his mind again." As soon as I said this, I gave an enormous yawn. "Sorry," I said. "I guess I'm tired."

Tom put a hand on my shoulder. "Go back to John's and get some rest."

21

Paul Fontaine stepped out of a dark blue sedan parked in front of the Ransom house as I walked down the block from the spot where I'd left the Pontiac. I stopped moving.

"Get over here, Underhill." He looked almost incandescent with rage.

Fontaine unbuttoned the jacket of his baggy suit and stepped back from the sedan. I smiled at him, but he wasn't having any smiles today. As soon as I got within a couple of feet of him, he jumped behind me and jammed his hands into the small of my back. I fell toward his car and caught myself on my arms. "Stay there," he said. He patted my back, my chest, my waist, and ran his hands down my legs.

I told him I wasn't carrying a gun.

"Don't move, and don't talk unless I ask you a question." Across the street, a little white face appeared at a downstairs window. It was the elderly woman who had brought coffee to the reporters the day after April Ransom was killed in Shady Mount. She was getting a good show.

"I've been sitting here for half an hour," Fontaine said. "Where the hell were you? Where's Ransom?"

"I was driving around," I said. "John must have gone out somewhere."

"You've been doing a lot of driving around lately, haven't you?" He made a disgusted sound. "You can stand up."

I pushed myself off the car and faced him. His rage had quieted down, but he still looked furious. "Didn't I talk to you this morning? Did you think I was trying to amuse you?"

"Of course not," I said.

"Then what do you think you're doing?"

"All I did was talk to some people."

His face turned an ugly red. "We got a call from the Elm Hill police this afternoon. Damn you, instead of paying attention to me, you and your pal went out there and made everybody crazy. Listen to me—you have no role in what is going on in Millhaven. You get that? The last thing we need right now is bullshit about some—some—" He was too angry to continue. He jabbed his index finger at me. "Get in the car." His eyes were blazing.

I moved to open the back door of the sedan, and he growled, "Not there, dummy. Go around and get in the front."

He opened his door and kept blazing at me as I walked around the front of the car and got in the front seat. He got behind the wheel, slammed his door, and wrenched the ignition key to the side. We streaked off down the street, and he tore through the stop sign on Berlin Avenue and turned left in a blare of horns. "Are we going to Armory Place?"

He told me to shut up. The police radio crackled and spat, but he ignored it. Fontaine simmered in silence all the way downtown, and when he hit the on-ramp to the east-west expressway, he thumped the accelerator. We hurtled out into the westbound traffic. Fontaine careened through the other cars, ignoring the cacophony, and got us into the fast lane without actually hitting another car. I managed not to put my arms in front of my face. He kept his foot down until we reached seventy-five. When a red Toyota refused to get out of his way, he flashed his lights and held down the horn until it swerved into the next lane, and then he roared past it.

I asked where we were going.

His glare was as solid as a blow. "I'm taking you to Bob Bandolier. Do me a favor and keep your mouth shut until we get there."

Fontaine blew the cars in front of us into smoke. When the stadium floated into view, he flicked the turn indicator and changed lanes at the same time. Brakes squealed behind us. Fontaine kept moving in an implacable diagonal line until he got across the expressway. He was still doing seventy when we squirted onto the off-ramp. Holding down the horn, he blasted through a red light. The tires whined and the car heeled over to the left as he dodged through the traffic and turned south. We roared past the stadium and slowed down only when we reached Pine Knoll.

Fontaine turned in through the gates and rolled up to the guardhouse. He cut off the engine. "Okay, get out."

"Where am I going to meet him, in the afterlife?" I asked, but he left the car and stood in the slanting sun until I got out and walked toward him, and then he began moving quickly up a gravel path toward the area where my parents and my sister were buried. By now, I was regretting my crack about the afterlife. The sprinklers were quiet, and the groundskeeper had gone home. We were the only people in the cemetery. Fontaine moved steadily and without looking back toward the stone wall at the far left.

He left the path about thirty feet before the row of graves I had visited earlier and led me up along a row of graves with small white headstones, some decorated with bright, wilting roses and lilies. He stopped at a bare white marker. I came up beside him and read what was carved into the stone. ROBERT C. BANDOLIER 21 SEPTEMBER 1919—22 MARCH 1972.

"You have anything to say?"

"A Virgo. That figures."

I thought he was going to hit me. Fontaine unclenched his fists. His saggy face twitched. He didn't look anything like a comedian. He stared at the ground, then looked back up at me. "Bob Bandolier has been dead for twenty years. He did not ignite the propane tanks at the house in Elm Hill."

"No," I said.

"Nobody is interested in this man." Fontaine's voice was flat and emphatic. "You can't prove he was the Blue Rose killer, and neither can anyone else. The case came to an end in 1950. That's that. Even if we wanted to open it up again, which would be absurd, the conclusion would be exactly the same. And, if you keep wandering around, stirring things up, I'll have you shipped back to New York on the next available flight. Or I'll arrest you myself and charge you with disturbing the peace. Is that clear?"

"Can I ask you a couple of questions?"

"Is that clear! Do you understand me?"

"Yes. Now can I ask you a few things?"

"If you have to." Fontaine visibly settled himself and stared off toward the row of hemlocks, far in the distance.

"Did you hear the substance of what the Sunchanas had to say about Bob Bandolier?"

"Unfortunately."

"Didn't you think there was some chance they might be right?"

He grimaced as if he had a headache. "Next question."

"How did you know how to find this grave?"

He turned his head and squinted at me. His chest rose and fell. "That's a hell of a question. It's none of your business. Are you through?"

"Do the Elm Hill police think that the explosion at the Sunchana house was accidental?"

"That's none of your business, either."

I couldn't ask him any of the questions I really wanted answered. What seemed a safer, more neutral question suddenly occurred to me, and, thoughtlessly, I asked it. "Do you know if Bandolier's middle initial stood for Casement?" As soon as I said it, I realized that I had announced a knowledge of Elvee Holdings.

He stared up at the sky. It was just beginning to get dark, and heavy gray clouds were sailing toward us from over the hemlocks, their edges turned pink and gold by the declining sun. Fontaine sighed. "Casement was Bandolier's middle name. It was on his death certificate. He died of a longstanding brain tumor. Is that it, or do you have some more meaningless questions?"

I shook my head, and he shoved his hands in his pockets and stamped back toward the car.

Might as well go for broke, I thought, and called out, "Does the name Belinski mean anything to you? Andrew Belinski?"

He stopped walking to turn around and glower at me. "As a matter of fact, not that it's any business of yours, that was what we called the head of the homicide unit when I came to Millhaven. He was one of the finest men I ever met. He took on most of the people I work with now."

"That's what you called him?"

Fontaine kicked at the gravel, already sorry he had answered the question. "His name was Belin, but his mother was Polish, and people just called him Belinski. It started off as a joke, I guess, and it stuck. Are you coming with me, or do you want to walk back to the east side?"

I followed him toward the car, looking aimlessly at the headstones and thinking about what he had told me. Then a name jumped out at me from a chipped headstone, and I looked at it again to make sure I had seen it correctly, HEINZ FRIEDRICH STINMITZ , 1892-1950. That was all. The stone had not merely been chipped; chunks had been knocked off, and parts of the curved top were vaguely serrated, as if someone had attacked it with a hammer. I stared at the battered stone for a moment, feeling numb and tired, and then walked back to the car. Fontaine was revving the engine, sending belches of black smoke out of the exhaust pipe.

22

As soon as I got back into the car, I realized that Fee Bandolier had to be a Millhaven policeman—he had appropriated a name only a cop would know.

By the time Fontaine rolled up the looping ramp to the expressway, the heavy clouds I had seen coming in from the west had blotted out the sky. The temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees. Fontaine got to the end of the ramp and moved slowly forward until a truck hummed past, then nudged the sedan into the space behind it. He checked his rearview mirror before changing into the second lane. I rolled up my window against the sudden cold and looked over at him. He was pretending I wasn't there. I leaned back against the seat, and we drove peacefully back toward the middle of town.

A raindrop the size of an egg struck my side of the windshield; a few seconds later, another noisily landed in the center of the windshield. Fontaine sighed. The radio spooled out crackling nonsense. Two more fat raindrops plopped onto the windshield.

"Are you going to go back to New York soon, Underhill?"

The question surprised me. "In a little while, probably."

"We all make mistakes."

After a little silence, Fontaine said, "I don't know why you'd want to hang around here now." The big raindrops were landing on the windshield at the rate of one per second, and we could hear them striking the roof of the car like hailstones.

"Have you ever had doubts about this police department?"

He looked at me sharply, suspiciously. "What?"

The clouds opened up, and a cascade of water slammed against the windshield. Fontaine snapped on the wipers, and peered forward into the blur until they began to work. He pulled out the knob for the headlights, and the dashboard controls lit up. "I probably didn't phrase that very well," I said.

"I have plenty of doubts about you, which is something you ought to know about." He scowled into the streaming windshield until the blade swept it clean again. "You don't understand cops very well."

"I know you're a good detective," I said. "You have a great reputation."

"Leave me out of this, whatever it is."

"Have you ever heard of—"

"Stop," he said. "Just stop."

About thirty seconds later, the intensity of the rain slackened off to a steady drumming against the windshield and the top of the car. It slanted down from the clouds in visible gray diagonals. Sprays of water flew away from the wheels of the cars around us. Fontaine loosened his hands on the wheel. We were going no more than thirty-five miles an hour. "Okay," he said. "For the sake of my great reputation, tell me what you were going to ask me."

"I wondered if you ever heard of the Elvee Holdings Corporation."

For the first time, I saw genuine curiosity in his glance. "You know, I'm wondering about something myself. Is everyone in New York like you, or are you some kind of special case?"

"We're all full of meaningless little queries," I said.

The police radio, which had been sputtering and hissing at intervals, uttered a long, incomprehensible message. Fontaine snatched up the receiver and said, "I'm on the expressway at about Twentieth Street, be there in ten minutes."

He replaced the receiver. "I can't take you back to Ransom's. Something came up." He checked the mirror, looked over his shoulder, and rocketed into the left lane.

Fontaine unrolled his window, letting in a spray of rain, pulled a red light from under his seat, and clapped it on the top of the car. He flicked a switch, and the siren began whooping. From then on, neither of us spoke. Fontaine had to concentrate on controlling the sedan as he muscled it around every car that dared to get in front of him. At the next exit, he swung off the expressway and went zooming up Fifteenth Street Avenue the same way he had terrorized the expressway on our way to Pine Knoll. At intersections, Fontaine twirled the car through the traffic that stopped to let him go by.

Fifteenth Street Avenue brought us into the valley, and factory walls rose up around us. Fontaine turned south on Geothals and rocketed along until we swerved onto Livermore. The streetlights were on in my old neighborhood. The pouring sky looked black.

A long way ahead of us, blinking red-and-blue lights filled the inside lane on the other side of the street. Yellow sawhorses and yellow tape gleamed in the lights. Men in caps and blue rain capes moved through the confusion. As we got closer to the scene, I saw where we were going. I should have known. It had happened again, just as Tom had predicted.

Fontaine didn't even bother to look as we went past the Idle Hour. He went down the end of the block, his siren still whooping, made a tight turn onto the northbound lanes of Livermore, and pulled up behind an ambulance. He was out of the car before it stopped ticking. Curls of steam rose up off the sedan's hood.

I got out of the car, hunched myself against the rain, and followed him toward the Idle Hour.

Four or five uniformed officers were standing just inside the barricades, and two others sat smoking in the patrol car that blocked off the avenue'sinside lane. The rain had kept away the usual crowd. Fontaine darted through a gap in the barricades and began questioning a policeman trying to stand in the shelter of the tavern's overhang. Unlike the others, he was not wearing a rain cape, and his uniform jacket was sodden. The policeman took a notebook from his pocket and bent over the pages to keep them dry as he read to Fontaine. Directly beside him at the level of his shoulders, a red marker spelling the words blue rose burned out from the dirty white planks. I stepped forward and leaned over one of the yellow barricades.

A sheet of loose black plastic lay over a body on the sidewalk. Rainwater puddled and splashed in the hollows in the plastic, and runnels of rainwater sluiced down from the body onto the wet pavement. From the bottom end of the black sheet protruded two stout legs in soaked dark trousers. Feet in basketweave loafers splayed out at ten to two. The cops standing behind the barricade paid no attention to me. Steady rain beat down on my head and shoulders, and my shirt glued itself to my skin.

Fontaine nodded to the rain-drenched young policeman who had found the body and pointed at the words on the side of the tavern. He said something I couldn't hear, and the young policeman said, "Yes, sir."

Fontaine crouched down beside the body and pulled back the plastic sheet. The man who had followed John Ransom down Berlin Avenue in a blue Lexus stared unseeing up at the overhang of the Idle Hour. Rain spattered down onto his chest and ran into the slashes in a ragged, blood-soaked shirt. Ridges of white skin surrounded long red wounds. The gray ponytail lay like a pointed brush at the side of his neck. I wiped rain off my face. Dark blood had stiffened on his open suit jacket.

Fontaine took a pair of white rubber gloves from his pocket, pulled them on, and leaned over the body to slide his hand under the bloody lapel. The fabric lifted away from the shirt. Fontaine drew out the slim black wallet I had seen before. He flipped it open. The little badge was still pinned to a flap on the right side. Fontaine lifted the flap. "The deceased is a gentleman named William Writzmann. Some of us know him better under another name." He stood up. "Is Hogan here yet?" The young officer held out a plastic evidence bag, and Fontaine dropped the wallet into it.

One of the men near me said that Hogan was on his way.

Fontaine noticed me behind the barricade and came frowning toward me. "Mr. Underhill, it's time for you to leave us."

"Is that Billy Ritz?" I asked. As much rain was falling on the detective as on me, but he still did not look really wet.

Fontaine blinked and turned away.

"He was the man who followed John. The one I told you about at the hospital." The policemen standing near me edged away and put their hands under their capes.

Fontaine turned around and gave me a gloomy look. "Go home before you get pneumonia." He went back to the body, but the young policeman was already pulling the plastic sheet over Writzmann's wet, empty face.

The two closest policemen looked at me with faces nearly as empty as Writzmann's. I nodded to them and walked along the barricades past the front of the tavern. Two blocks away, another dark blue sedan wearing a flashing red bubble like a party hat was moving down South Sixth Street toward the tavern. Rain streaked through the beams of its headlights. I went across Sixth and looked up at the side of the St. Alwyn. A brass circle at the tip of a telescope angled toward the Idle Hour from the corner window of the top floor. I waited for a break in the line of cars moving north in the single open lane and jogged toward the St. Alwyn's entrance.

23

The night clerk watched me leave a trail of damp footprints on the rug. My shoes squished, and water dripped down inside my collar.

"See all that excitement outside?" He was a dry old man with deep furrows around his mouth, and his black suit had fit him when he was forty or fifty pounds heavier. "What they got there, a stiff?"

"He looked dead to me," I said.

He hitched up his shoulder and twitched away, disappointed with my attitude.

When Glenroy Breakstone picked up, I said, "This is Tim Underhill. I'm down in the lobby."

"Come up, if that's what you're here for." No jazz trivia this time.

Glenroy was playing Art Tatum's record with Ben Webster so softly it was just a cushion of sound. He took one look at me and went into his bathroom to get a towel. The only light burning was the lamp next to his records and sound equipment. The windows on Widow Street showed steady rain falling through the diffuse glow thrown up by the streetlights.

Glenroy came back with a worn white towel. "Dry yourself off, and I'll find you a dry shirt."

I unbuttoned the shirt and peeled it off my body. While I rubbed myself dry, Glenroy returned to hand me a black long-sleeved sweatshirt like the one he was wearing. His said TALINN JAZZFEST across the front; when I unfolded the one he gave me, it said BRADLEY'S above a logo of a toothy man strumming a long keyboard. "I never even worked that place," he said. "A bartender there likes my music, so he mailed it to me. He thought I was about your size, I guess."

The sweatshirt felt luxuriously soft and warm. "You moved the telescope into your bedroom."

"I went into the bedroom when I heard the sirens. After I got a look across the street, I fetched my telescope."

"What did you see?"

"They were just pulling that blanket thing over the dead guy"

"Did you see who it was?"

"I need a new dealer, if that's what you mean. You mind coming into the bedroom? I want to see what happens."

I followed Glenroy into his neat, square bedroom. None of the lights had been turned on, and glass over the framed prints and posters reflected our silhouettes. I stood next to him and looked down across Livermore Avenue.

The big cops in rain capes still stood in front of the barricades. A long line of cars crawled by. The plastic sheet had been folded down to Billy Ritz's waist, and a stout, gray-haired man with a black bag squatted in front of the body, next to Paul Fontaine. Billy looked like a ripped mattress. The gray-haired man said something, and Fontaine pulled the sheet back up over the pale face. He stood up and gestured at the ambulance. Two attendants jumped out and rolled a gurney toward the body. The gray-haired man picked up his bag and held out his hand for a black rod that bloomed into an umbrella in front of him. "What do you think happened to him?" I asked.

Glenroy shook his head. "I know what they'll say, anyhow —they'll call it a drug murder."

I looked at him doubtfully, and he gave a short, sharp nod. "That's the story. They'll find some shit in his pockets, because Billy always had some shit in his pockets. And that'll take care of that. They won't have to deal with any of the other stuff Billy was into."

"Did you see the words on the wall over there?"

"Yeah. So what?"

"Billy Ritz is the third Blue Rose victim. He was killed—" I stopped myself, because I suddenly realized where Billy Ritz had been killed. "His body was found exactly where Monty Iceland was killed in 1950."

"Nobody cares about those Blue Rose murders," Glenroy said. He stepped back and put his eye to the end of the telescope. "Nobody is gonna care about Billy Ritz, either, any more than they cared about Monty Leland. Is that Hogan, that one over there now?"

I leaned toward the window and looked down. It was Michael Hogan, all right, rounding the corner in front of the tavern: the charge of his personality leapt across the great distance between us like an electrical spark.

Ignoring the rain, Hogan began threading through the police outside the Idle Hour. As soon as they took in his presence, the other men parted for him as they would have for Arden Vass. Instantly in charge, he got to the body and asked one of the policemen to fold back the sheet. Ritz's face was a white blotch on the wet sidewalk. The ambulance attendants waited beside their gurney, hugging themselves against the chill. Hogan stared down at the body for a couple of seconds and commanded the sheet to be raised again with an abrupt, angry-looking gesture of his hand. Fontaine slumped forward to talk to him. The attendants lowered the gurney and began maneuvering the body onto it. Glenroy left the telescope. "Want a look?" I adjusted the angle to my height and put my eye to the brass circle. It was like looking through a microscope. Startlingly near, Hogan and Fontaine were facing each other in the circle of my vision. I could almost read their lips. Fontaine looked depressed, and Hogan was virtually luminous with anger. With the rain glistening on his face, he looked more than ever like a romantic hero from forties movies, and I wondered what he made of the end of Billy Ritz. Hogan spun away to speak to the officer who had found the body. The other policemen edged away from him. I moved the telescope to Fontaine, who was watching the attendants wheel the gurney down the sidewalk.

"That writing is red," Glenroy said. I was still looking at Fontaine, and as Glenroy spoke, the detective turned his head to look at the slogan on the wall. I couldn't see his face. "Right," I said.

"Wasn't it black, the other time? Behind the hotel?"

"I think so," I said.

Fontaine might have been comparing the two slogans, too: he turned around and stared fixedly across the street, toward the passage where three people had been killed. Rain streamed off the tip of his nose.

"It's funny, you mentioning Monty Leland," Glenroy said.

I straightened up from the telescope, and Fontaine shrank to a damp little figure on the sidewalk, facing in a different direction from all of the other damp little figures. "Why is it funny?"

"He was kind of in the same business as Billy. You know much about Monty Leland?"

"He was one of Bill Damrosch's informers."

"That's right. He wasn't much else, but he was that."

"Billy Ritz was an informer?"

"Like I told you—the man was in the middle. He was a contact."

"Whose informer was he?"

"Better not to know." Glenroy tilted up the telescope. "Show's over."

We went back into the living room. Glenroy switched on a lamp near his table and sat down. "How did you wind up out there in the rain?"

"Paul Fontaine took me out to see Bob Bandolier's grave, and he got called here on the way back. He wasn't in a very good mood."

"He was saying—okay, maybe he did it, but he's dead. Right? So leave it alone."

"Right," I said. "I think I'm beginning to see why."

Glenroy hitched himself up in the chair. "Then you better watch who you talk to. On the real side."

The record ended, and Glenroy jumped up and flipped it over. He put the needle down on the second side. "Night and Day" breathed out into the room. Glenroy stood next to his shelves., looking down at the floor and listening to the music. "Nobody like Ben. Nobody."

I thought he was about to take the tension out of the air by telling me some anecdote about Ben Webster, but he clamped his arms around his chest and swayed in time to the music for a few seconds. "Suppose some doctor got killed out at the stadium," he said. "I'm not saying this happened, I just supposing. Suppose he got killed bad—cut up in a toilet."

He looked up at me, and I nodded.

"Suppose I'm a guy who likes to go to ball games now and then. Suppose I was there that day. Maybe I might happen to see a guy I know. He's got some kind of name like… Buster. Buster ain't worth much. When he ain't breaking into someone's house, he's generally drunk on his ass. Now suppose one time when I'm coming back from the food stand, I happen to see this no-good Buster all curled up under the steps to the next level in a puddle of Miller High Life. And if this ever happened, which it didn't, the only reason I knew this was a human being and not a blanket was that I knew it was Buster. Because the way this didn 't happen was, he was jammed so far up under the steps you had to look for him to see him." I nodded.

"Then just suppose a detective gets word that Buster was out at the game that day, and Buster once did four years at Joliet for killing a guy in a bar, and when the detective goes to his room, he finds the doctor's wallet in a drawer. What do you suppose happens next?"

"I suppose Buster confesses and gets a life sentence."

"Sounds about right to me," Glenroy said. "For a made-up story, that is."

I asked Glenroy if he knew the number of a cab company. He took a business card from the top of the dresser and carried it to me. When I reached for the card, he held onto it for a second. "You understand, I never said all that, and you never heard it."

"I don't even think I was here," I said, and he let go of the card.

A dispatcher said that a cab would pick me up in front of the hotel in five minutes. Glenroy tossed me my wet shirt and told me to keep the sweatshirt.

24

Laszlo Nagy, from my point of view a mass of dark curls erupting from the bottom of a brown tweed cap, began talking as soon as I got into his cab. Some guy got killed right there across the street, did I know that? Makes you think of that crazy guy Walter Dragonette, didn't it? What makes a guy do things like that, anyhow? You have to be God to know the answer to that one, right? Laszlo Nagy had arrived from Hungary eight years ago, and such terrible things never happened in Hungary. Other terrible things happened instead. Do I see this terrible rain? Do I know how long it will last, this terrible rain? It will last six hours exactly. And what will come next? A fog will come next. The fog will be equally terrible as the rain, because no driver will be able to see what is in front of him. We will have fog two days. Many accidents will take place. And why? Because Americans do not drive well in the fog.

I grunted in all the appropriate places, thinking about what I knew and what it meant. William Writzmann was the son of Oscar Writzmann—now I understood Oscar's remark to John and me about going back to Pigtown, where we belonged. As Billy Ritz, Writzmann had carried on an interesting criminal career under the protection of a murderous Millhaven policeman until the day after John and I had come crashing in on his father. Writzmann had been the front man for Elvee Holdings; Elvee's two fictitious directors had been named after Fee Bandolier's father and an old head of homicide named Andy Belin. Tom Pasmore had been right all along. And Fee Bandolier was a policeman in Millhaven.

I had no idea of what to do next.

Laszlo drew up in front of John's house. When I paid him, he told me that American money should be in different sizes and colors, like bills in England and France—and Hungary. He was still talking about the beauty of European money when I closed the door.

I ran up the walk and let myself into the dark house with the extra key. In the kitchen, I rubbed the rain off my face with a paper towel, and then I went upstairs to do some work until John came home.

PART ELEVEN

JANE WRIGHT AND JUDY ROLLIN

1

After I had showered, dressed in clean, dry clothes, and worked for an hour or so, I sat on the bed and called Tom Pasmore. No woman named Jane Wright had been killed in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in May or any other month of 1977, but there were lots of other Allentowns in the United States, and he was gradually working through them. He told me he was going to look into Tangent's history as soon as he found the right Allentown. Tom had a lot to say about Fee Bandolier. He also had a few ideas of how to proceed, all of which sounded dangerous to me. When we finished, I felt hungry again and decided to go downstairs to see if there was anything in the refrigerator except vodka.

As I was going toward the stairs, I heard a car splashing to a stop at the front of the house and went to the window at the front of the hallway. A dark green cab stood near the curb. Sheets of water washed down the street, and rain bounced crazily off the roof of the cab. Through the streaming water I could read the words MONARCH CAB CO. and a local telephone number on the front door. John Ransom was leaning over the front seat, wrangling with the driver. I ran back to the guest room and dialed the number on the cab door.

"This is Miles Darrow, the accountant for Mr. John Ransom. I understand that my client has used the services of your cab company within the past few hours. He has a problem saving his receipts, and I wonder if you could tell me where your driver picked him up, where he was going, and what the average fare would be to Ely Place on the east side from that location. No reason letting the IRS get it all."

"Gee, you're a good accountant," said the woman I was speaking to. "I took the call from Mr. Ransom myself. Pickup was at his house and destination was the Dusty Roads Sunoco Service Station on Claremont Road in Purdum, then to return back to Ely Place. The average fare, that's kind of hard to say, but it would have to be about sixty-seventy dollars, except more on a day like this. And waiting time would add some more, but I don't know about that."

"Dusty Rhoades?" I asked.

She spelled the name for me. "Not like the baseball player," she said. "It's more like a kind of a cute kind of a name."

That was about right. Purdum was an affluent town about twenty miles up the shoreline. There was a well-known boarding school in Purdum; a famous polo player, if you knew about things like that, owned a stable and a riding school there. In Purdum, every traffic accident involved at least two Mercedes. I thanked her for her help, hung up, and listened to John moving through the living room. I went to the head of the stairs. The television began to babble. A heavy body hit the couch.

I started down the stairs, telling myself that John would have stowed Alan's gun somewhere in his room.

He didn't say anything until he had given me a long, disapproving look from the couch. Streaks of moisture still dampened his scalp, and widening dark spots covered the shoulders of the dark green linen jacket. On the television screen, a beautifully dressed, handsome black family sat around a dining room table in what looked like a million-dollar house. John took a big mouthful from a glass filled with clear liquid and a lot of ice cubes, still giving me the full weight of his disapproval. Maybe it was disappointment. Then he looked back at the black family. The soundtrack told us that they were hugely enjoyable. "I didn't know you were home," he said, stressing the pronoun.

"I had a busy day," I said.

He shrugged, still watching the television.

I walked behind the couch and leaned against the mantel. The bronze plaque with April's name on it still lay on the pink-and-gray marble. "I'll tell you what I did, if you tell me what you did."

He gave me a look of pure annoyance and turned theatrically back to the set. "Actually, I thought I'd get home long before you came back. I had a little errand to get out of the way, but it look longer than I thought." Loud, sustained laughter came from the television. The father of the black family was strutting around the table in an exaggerated cakewalk. "I had to go to my office at Arkham to go over the curriculum for next year. What took so long was that I had to hand in Alan's reading list, too."

"I suppose you called a taxi service," I said.

"Yeah, and I waited an extra twenty minutes for the driver to find the place. You shouldn't be able to drive a cab until you know the city. And the suburbs, too."

The Monarch driver hadn't known how to find Claremont Road. Maybe he hadn't even known how to find Purdum. "So what did you do?" he asked.

"I discovered some interesting information. Elvee Holdings has owned Bob Bandolier's house since 1979."

"What?" John finally looked up at me. "Elvee has a connection to Bandolier?"

"I was coming back here to tell you when Paul Fontaine jumped out of an unmarked car, frisked me, and yelled at me because a cop in Elm Hill bugged him about Bandolier."

John smiled when I said I had been frisked. "Did you assume the position?"

"I didn't have much choice. When he was done yelling, he pushed me into his car and drove like a madman to the expressway, down the expressway, and finally got off at the stadium exit. He was taking me to Bob Bandolier."

John stretched his arm along the top of the couch and leaned toward me.

"Bandolier is buried in Pine Knoll Cemetery. He's been dead since 1972. You know how much Elvee paid for his house? A thousand dollars. What must have happened was that he left the house to his son, who sold it to the company he set up as soon as he came home from Vietnam."

"Writzmann," John said. "I get it. This is great."

"Before we could get back to the east side, just about the time it started to rain, Fontaine answered a call and took me down to Sixth and Livermore. And there, lying in front of the Idle Hour beneath the slogan Blue Rose, was William Writzmann. Oscar Writzmann's son."

For once, John looked stupefied. He even forgot about his drink.

"Also known as Billy Ritz. He was a small-time coke dealer down around the St. Alwyn. He also had connections to some police officer in Millhaven. I think that policeman is Fee Bandolier, grown up. I think he murders people for pleasure and has been doing it for a long time."

"And he can cover up these murders because he's a cop?"

"That's right."

"So we have to find out who he is. We have to nail him."

I began saying what I had to say. "John, there's a way to look at things that makes everything I just told you irrelevant. William Writzmann and Bob Bandolier and the Green Woman would have nothing to do with the way your wife died."

"You just lost me."

"The reason none of that would matter is that you killed April."

He started to say something, but stopped himself. He shook his head and tried to smile. I had just announced that the earth was flat, and if you went too far in any one direction you fell off. "You're kidding me, I hope. But I have to tell you, it isn't funny."

"Just suppose these things are true. You knew Barnett offered her a big new job in San Francisco. Alan knew about it, too, even though he was too mixed up to really remember anything about it."

"Well, exactly," John said. "This is still supposed to be a joke, right?"

"If April was offered that kind of job, would you want her to take it? I think you would have been happier if she'd quit her job altogether. April's success always made you uneasy—you wanted her to stay the way she was when you first met her. Probably she did say that she was going to quit after a couple of years."

"I told you that. She wasn't like the rest of those people at Barnett—it was a big joke to April."

"She wasn't like them because she was so much better than they were. In the meantime, let's admit that you saw your own job disappearing. Alan only got through last year because you were holding his hand."

"That's not true," John said. "You saw him at the funeral."

"What he did that day was an astonishing act of love for his daughter, and I'll never forget it. But he knows he can't teach again. In fact, he told me he was worried about letting you down."

"There are other jobs," John said. "And what does this make-believe have to do with April, anyhow?"

"You were Alan Brookner's right-hand man, but how much have you published? Can you get a professorship in another department?"

His body stiffened. "If you think I'm going to listen to you trash my career, you're wrong." He put his drink on the table and swiveled his entire body toward me.

"Listen to me for a minute. This is how the police will put things together. You resented and downplayed April's success, but you needed her. If someone like April can make eight hundred thousand dollars for her father, how much could she make for herself? A couple of million? Plenty of money to retire on."

John made himself laugh. "So I killed her for her money."

"Here's the next step. The person I went to see downtown was Byron Dorian."

John rocked back on the couch. Something was happening to his face that wasn't just a flush.

"Suppose April and Dorian saw each other a couple of times a week. They were interested in a lot of the same things. Suppose they had an affair. Maybe Dorian was thinking about going to California with her." John's face darkened another shade, and he clamped his mouth shut. "I'm pretty sure she was going to bring Alan along with her. I bet she had a couple of brochures squirreled away up in her office. That means the police have them now."

John licked his lips. "Did that pretentious little turd put you on this track? Did he say he slept with April?"

"He didn't have to. He's in love with her. They used to go to this secluded little spot in Flory Park. What do you suppose they did there?"

John opened his mouth and breathed in and out, so shocked he couldn't speak. Years ago, I thought, April had taken him there, too. John's face softened and lost all its definition. "Are you almost done?"

"You couldn't stand it," I said. "You couldn't keep her, and you couldn't lose her, either. So you worked out a plan. You got her to take you somewhere in her car. You got her to park in a secluded place. As soon as she started talking, you beat her unconscious. Maybe you stabbed her after you beat her. Probably you thought you killed her. There must have been a lot of blood in the car. Then you drove to the St. Alwyn and carried her in through the back door and up the service steps to room 218. They don't have room service, the maids don't work at night, and almost everybody who lives there is about seventy years old. There's no one in those halls after midnight. You still have master keys. You knew the room would be empty. You put her on the bed and stabbed her again, and then you wrote BLUE ROSE on the wall."

He was watching me with assumed indifference—I was explaining that the earth was flat all over again.

"Then you took the car to Alan's house and stashed it in his garage. You knew he'd never see it—Alan never even left his house. You cleaned up all the obvious bloodstains. As far as you knew, you could keep it there forever, and no one would ever find it. But then you got me here, in order to muddy the water by making sure everybody thought about the old Blue Rose murders. I started spending time with Alan, so the garage wasn't safe anymore. You had to move the Mercedes. What you did was find a friendly garage out of town, put it in for a general service and a good cleaning, and just left it there for a week."

"Are we still talking about a hypothesis?"

"You tell me, John. I'd like to know the truth."

"I suppose I killed Grant Hoffman. I suppose I went to the hospital and killed April."

"You wouldn't be able to let her come out of her coma, would you?"

"And Grant?" He was still trying to look calm, but red-and-white blotches covered his face.

"You were setting up a pattern. You wanted me and the cops to think that Blue Rose was back to work. You picked a guy who would have remained unidentified forever if he hadn't been wearing your father-in-law's old sport jacket. Even when we saw the body, you still pretended he was a vagrant."

John was rhythmically clenching and unclenching his jaws.

"It wouldn't be hard for me to think you just got me out here to use me."

"You just turned into a liability—if you talk to anybody, you could convince them that all of this bullshit is real. Go upstairs and start packing, Tim. You're gone."

He started to get up, and I said, "What would happen if the police went to Purdum, John? Did you take her car to Purdum?"

"Damn you," he said, and rushed at me.

He was on me before I could stop him. The odors of sweat and alcohol poured out of him. I punched him in the stomach, and he grunted and wrenched me away from the fireplace. His arms locked around my middle. It felt like he was trying to crush me to death. I hit the side of his head two or three times, and then I got my hands under his chin and tried to pry him off of me. We struggled back and forth, rocking between the fireplace and the couch. I shoved up on his meaty chin, and he released his arms and staggered back. I hit him once more in the belly.

John clutched his stomach and stepped backward, glaring at me.

"You killed her," I managed to say.

He lunged toward me, and I put my hands on his shoulders and tried to push him aside. John rode in under me, clamped his right arm around my waist, and pulled me into his shoulder. His head was a boulder in my side. I grabbed the brass plaque off the mantel and pounded it into his neck. Ransom pushed me backward with all of his weight. My feet vanished beneath me, and I landed on the marble apron of the fireplace so hard I saw actual stars. Ransom reached wildly up toward my head and got a hand on my face and pulled himself up onto my chest. Both hands closed around my neck. I bashed the plaque into the side of his head. Because of the way I was holding the award, I couldn't use the edge, only the flat surface. I hit him with the plaque again. A creaky squawk came from my throat, and I merely tapped the plaque against the side of his head. My muscles felt like water. I used the last of my strength to bash the metal plaque against his head again.

John's hands loosened on my throat. All the tension went out of his body. He was a huge slack weight pressing down on me. His chest heaved. Strangled, wheezing noises came from his mouth. After a couple of seconds, I realized that he wasn't dying right on top of me. He was weeping. I crawled out from under him and lay panting on the carpet. I unwrapped my fingers from the plaque. John curled up like a fetus and continued to cry, his arms tented over his head.

After a little while, I got upright and slid along the marble apron and leaned against the edge of the fireplace. We'd been fighting for no more than a minute or two. Someone had been slamming a baseball bat into my arms, my back, my legs, my chest, and my head. I still felt Ransom's hands around my neck.

John lowered his arms and lay curled up with his chest on the marble apron and his hips and legs on the carpet. An ugly wound bled down into his hair. He reached into his trouser pocket for a dark blue handkerchief and put it up against the cut. "You're a real bastard."

"Tell me what happened," I said. "Try to get in the truth this time."

He looked at the handkerchief. "I'm bleeding." He placed the handkerchief back over the wound.

"You can put a bandage on it later."

"How did you know about Purdum?"

"I was sneaky," I said. "Where is her car now, John?"

He tried to push himself up and groaned. He lay back down again. "It's out there in a storage garage. In Purdum. April and I could have retired there. It's a beautiful place."

People like Dick Mueller moved to Riverwood. People like Ross Barnett retired to estates in Purdum.

John sat up, holding the handkerchief to the side of his head, and slid on his bottom until his back hit the other side of the fireplace. We sat there like andirons. He wiped his free hand down over his face and snorted back mucus. Then he looked at me, red-eyed. "I'm sorry I went for you like that, but you pushed my buttons, and I snapped. Did I hurt you?"

"Was that what happened with April? You snapped?"

"Yeah." He nodded very carefully, wincing. I got another darting look from the red eyes. "I wasn't going to tell you about any of this, because it makes me look so bad. But I didn't invite you here to use you—you have to know that."

"Then tell me what happened."

He sighed. "You got a lot of it right. Barnett spoke to April confidentially about going into business in San Francisco. I wasn't crazy about that. I wanted her to keep to the agreement we made—that she'd quit after she proved she could do a good job at Barnett. But then she had to prove she was the best broker and analyst in the whole damn Midwest. It got so I never saw her except on weekends, and not always then. But I didn't want her to go to California. She could open her own office here, if that was what she wanted. Everything would have been all right, if it hadn't been for that fourth-rate, womanizing twerp." He glared at me. "Dorian had an affair with Carol Judd, the dealer who put him onto April, did you know that?"

"I guessed," I said.

"The guy is slime. He goes after older women. I will never, never know what April saw in him. He was cute, I guess."

"How did you find out about it?"

John inspected the handkerchief again. I couldn't see the wound, but the handkerchief was bright with blood. "Could we move? I have to take care of this gash."

I got up, all my joints aching, and held out a hand for him. John grabbed my hand and levered himself up. He steadied himself on the mantel for a moment and then began moving across the living room toward the stairs.

2

Leaning over to let the blood drip into the sink, John dipped a washcloth into the stream of cold water and dabbed at the inch-long abrasion on the side of his head, where his hair began to get thin. It didn't look so bad now that it was clean. He had placed a square white bandage on the edge of the sink. I was sitting on the tub, looking up at him and holding a wad of folded tissues.

"April told me she was working late at the office. Just to see if she was telling me the truth, I called her line every half hour for three hours. Every half hour, on the button. Maybe six times. She was never there. Around eleven-thirty, I went up to her office here and looked in the file where she kept her charge slips and credit card records. Okay."

He held out his hand, and I passed him the tissues. He clamped them down on the gash to dry it and then tossed them into the wastebasket and snatched up the bandage square. He centered it over the wound, pushed wisps of hair out of the way, and flattened it down on his scalp. "That'll do. I guess I won't need any stitches." He turned his head to see the bandage from different angles. "Now all I have is one hell of a headache."

He opened his medicine chest, shook two aspirin tablets onto his palm, and swallowed them with a gulp of water from a surprisingly humble red plastic cup.

"You know what I found? Charges from Hatchett and Hatch. She bought clothes for that little turd."

"How do you know they weren't yours?" He sneered at me in the mirror. "I haven't bought anything there in years. All my suits and jackets are made for me. I even get my shirts made to order at Paul Stuart, in New York. And I order my shoes from Wilkes Bashford in San Francisco." He lifted a foot so that I could admire a dark brown pigskin cap-toe. "About all I buy in Millhaven is socks and underwear." He patted the bandage and stepped away from the sink. "Could we go downstairs so I could get a drink? I'm going to need one."

I followed him into the kitchen, and he gave me a chastened look as he opened the freezer. Now that his father was gone, the three-hundred-dollar bottle was back in the vodka library. "I'm not going to run away or anything, Tim, you don't have to act like my shadow,"

"What did you do when she finally came home?" He poured about three inches of hyacinth vodka into a glass. He tasted it before answering me. "I should never put ice cubes in this stuff. It's too refined to dilute—such a delicate flavor. Would you like a sip?"

"A sip wouldn't help me. Did you confront her directly?"

He took another taste and nodded. "I had the charge slips right in front of me—I was sitting out there in the living room, and she came in about a quarter past twelve. God, I almost died." He looked up at the ceiling and let out a nearly soundless sigh. "She looked so beautiful. She didn't see me for a second. And as soon as she noticed me, she changed. All the life went out of her. She might have just seen her jailer. Right up until that moment, I was still thinking that there could be another explanation for everything. The clothes could have been for her father—he used to like that store. But the second I saw her mood change like that, I knew."

"Did you lose your temper?"

He shook his head. "I felt like someone had just shoved a knife in my back. 'Who is it?' I said. 'Your little pet, Byron?' She said she didn't know what I was talking about. So I told her I knew that she hadn't been at her office all night, and she gave me some kind of story about not answering the phone, about being in the copy room, in another office… so I said, April, what are these charge slips? and she kept giving me lies, and I kept saying Dorian, Dorian, Dorian, and finally she plunked herself down in a chair and said, okay, I've been seeing Byron. What's it to you? God, it was like she was killing me. Anyhow, she got less defensive as we went along, and she said she was sorry I had to find out like this, she didn't like being underhanded, and she was almost glad I'd found out, so we could talk about ending our marriage."

"Did she mention the job in San Francisco?"

"No, she saved that for the car. I want to go into the other room, Tim. I'm a little bit dizzy, okay?"

In the living room, he noticed the bronze plaque on me floor and bent down to pick it up. He showed it to me. "Is this what you were clobbering me with?" I said that it was, and he shook his head over the irony of it all. "Damn thing even looks like a murder weapon," he said, and put it back on me mantel.

"Whose idea was it to go for a ride?"

John looked slightly peevish for a second, but no more than that. "I'm not used to being grilled. This is still a very touchy subject."

He went to the couch. The cushions exhaled when he sat down. He drank and held the liquid in his mouth for a moment as he looked around the room. "We didn't break anything. Isn't that amazing? The only reason I know I was in a fight is that I feel like shit."

I sat down on the chair and waited.

"Okay. I got everything I thought about that weasel, Dorian, out of my system, and finally I started telling her what I should have said at the beginning—I said I loved her and I wanted to stay married. I said that we had to give ourselves another chance. I said she was the most important person in my life. Hell, I said she was my life."

Tears spilled out of his eyes. "And that was true. Maybe I wasn't much of a husband, but April was my whole life." He got his handkerchief halfway to his face before noticing its condition. He checked his trousers for bloodstains and dropped the handkerchief in a clean ashtray. "Tim, do you happen to have… ?" I fished mine out of my pocket and tossed it to him. It was two days old, but still clean, mostly. John pressed it to his eyes, wiped his cheeks, and threw it back to me.

"Anyhow, she said she couldn't sit still any longer, she had to go out for a drive or something. I even asked if I could come along. If you want to talk to me, you'd better, hadn't you? she said. So we drove around, I don't even remember where. We kept saying the same things over and over—she wouldn't listen to me. Finally, we ended up somewhere around Bismarck Boulevard, on the west side."

John pushed out air between his lips. "She pulled over on Forty-sixth, Forty-fifth, I don't remember. There was a bar down at the end of the block. The Turf Lounge, I think it was." He looked at me, and his mouth twitched. His glance shot away again, and he made a wild inventory of the things in the room. "Tim, you remember how I kept looking for a car following us, after we dropped off my parents? I think someone was following April and me that night. I wasn't too straight, you know, I was reallyscrewed up. But I still pick up on things, I haven't lost all the old radar. But sometimes I get that feeling, and no one's there, you know? Doesn't that happen to you?" I nodded.

"Anyhow, there wasn't anybody else on the street. All the lights were out, except in the bar. I was begging for my life. I told her about this place I found in Purdum, good price, fifteen acres, a pond, a beautiful house. We could have had our own art gallery there. I got done telling her about it, and she said, Ross might want me to go to San Francisco. I'd head my own office, she said. Forget that stuffed shirt Ross, I said, what do you want? I've been thinking of taking it, she said. I said, Without discussing it with me first? And she said—I didn't see any point in bringing you into it. Bringing me into it. She was giving me broker talk! I couldn't help myself, Tim." He sat forward and stared at me. His mouth worked while he figured out a way to say it. "I couldn't help myself. Literally." His face reddened. "I just— smacked her. I reached up and belted her in the face. Twice." His eyes got swimmy, bleary with tears. "I, I felt so shocked— I felt so dirty. April was crying. I couldn't take it."

His voice crumbled, and he closed his eyes and reached a big pink hand out toward me. For an odd second I thought he wanted me to grasp it. Then I realized what he wanted and passed him my handkerchief again. He held it over his eyes and bent forward and wept.

"Oh, God," he said at last, sitting up. His voice was soft and cottony. "April just sat there with tears all over her face." His chest was jerking, and he mopped his eyes until he could speak again. "She didn't say anything. I couldn't sit in that car anymore. I got out and walked away. I'm pretty sure I heard a car starting up, but I wasn't paying attention to things like that. I didn't think I was going up to the bar, but when I got to the door, I went inside. I never even noticed if anyone else was in the place. I put down about four drinks, boom boom boom boom, one right after the other. I have no idea how long I was in there. Then this sumo wrestler type of guy was standing in front of me, telling me that they were closing and I had to pay up. I guess he was the bartender, but I couldn't even remember seeing him before. He said—get this—"