The Throat

"We're checking on Elvee right now, and I suppose we'll come up with the same information," he said. "Did you understand the significance of the name Andrew Belinski?"

"Not at the time."

"And you say you got all this information by using a computer at the university library?"

"That's right," I said.

He didn't believe me—he must have known that I wouldn't be able to get motor vehicle records through a university computer—but he wasn't going to press the point. "Someday, you'll have to show me how you did that."

"I guess I got lucky," I said. "Did John tell you that I have a long-standing interest in the old Blue Rose murders? That's why he called me."

"Go on," he said.

For something like ten minutes, I told him about meeting the Belknaps, hearing about Bob Bandolier, visiting the Sunchanas, and for the first time learning of the existence of Fielding Bandolier. The computer told me that Elvee owned Bob Bandolier's old house. A vanity press book by a retired colonel gave me an idea about a soldier, supposedly killed in action, who had an old grudge against John Ransom. I talked about Judy Leatherwood and Edward Hubbel.

"You saw no need to come to the police with all this information."

"I did go to the police," I said. "I went to Fontaine. He was the detective in charge of April's case. Once I mentioned the Sunchanas, Fontaine ordered me to stay away from the old Blue Rose murders, and then he suggested that I get out of town. When I didn't, he took me himself to Bob Bandolier's grave, in order to prove that Bandolier couldn't have had anything to do with the new deaths. He was the one who told me about Andy Belin's nickname, by the way, but he denied knowing anything about Elvee."

McCandless nodded. "Ransom said he called you to arrange a meeting near the St. Alwyn."

"He found out that I had gone to his old hometown in Ohio. When I came back, somebody tried to run me off the highway in the fog. Fontaine wanted me dead, but he didn't know what I had learned from Hubbel."

McCandless hitched his chair an inch closer to the bed. "Then this woman on South Seventh Street called you." We were getting to the red meat now, and I had the feeling that something was going on that I did not quite understand. McCandless seemed to grow heavier and denser with concentration, as if he were now willing me to put things in a way that would match a prearranged pattern. The only pattern I could see grew out of what I had already told him, and I alluded again to the agreement Hannah Belknap had made with me.

He nodded. That was explanatory, but unimportant.

A cart rattled past the door, and someone down the hall began shouting.

"What did you have in mind when you decided to go to the Bandolier house?"

"I wanted to surprise Fontaine. John and I thought we could knock him out or overpower him and find the boxes of notes." I looked down the bed at Sonny, but Sonny was still made of stone.

"What was the point of bringing that old man along with you?"

"Alan can be extremely insistent. He didn't give us much choice."

"Apparently, a lot of people heard Professor Brookner threaten to kill the man who murdered his daughter. I guess he was insistent then, too."

I remembered the funeral—John must have told them about Alan's outburst. "I ordered him to stay in the car, but he wanted to be close to the action, and he followed us on the other side of the street."

"You had already been inside the house."

I nodded. "Looking for his records—those boxes he moved out of the Green Woman. You found them, didn't you?"

"No," McCandless said.

I felt my stomach sinking toward the mattress.

"How'd you happen to get in, that first time?"

"The back door wasn't locked," I said.

"Really," McCandless said. "He left the place open. Like the Green Woman, right? You went up there, you found the lock broken."

"Right," I said. "So I went in and had a look around."

"That's probably a real common activity in New York, breaking and entering. Out here, we sort of frown on it." The man down the hall started shouting again, but the dead eyes never left mine. "Anyhow, let's say you and your buddy got in there. There's an interesting little present down in the basement, but no boxes full of good stuff. On the other hand, you picked up something, didn't you? A piece of paper."

I'd been carrying that paper around in my jacket pocket ever since Tom gave it back to me. I had forgotten all about it, and someone at the hospital had turned it over to the police. "Tampering with evidence carries a little weight, too." John had told him all about getting into the house and the tavern, and they were keeping him at Armory Place until McCandless decided what to do with me. The decision had to do with the way I answered his questions—unless I helped him push reality into the shape he wanted, he'd be happy to mess up my life with as many criminal charges as he could think up.

"I might even be tempted to think that you and your pal brought along the old man because you knew he'd shoot Fontaine as soon as he had the chance."

"We told him to stay in the car," I said, wearily. "We didn't want him anywhere near us. This is crazy. John didn't let him have the gun, he took it. We didn't even have a real plan." The pain dialed itself up a couple of notches. It was a long time until my next injection. "Look, if you saw the paper, you understood what it was, right? You saw that it was about a woman in Allentown. Fontaine worked in Allentown."

"Yeah." McCandless sighed. "But we don't have anything that proves he killed anybody there. And this conversation isn't really about Paul Fontaine anymore. It's about you."

He abruptly stood up and walked over to the window. He rubbed his face, looking out at the street. Sunlight blazed on the building across the street. McCandless tugged at his belt and turned slowly around. "I have to think about this city. At this point, things could go a couple of different ways. There's going to be a lot of changes in the department. You got a guy in Ohio who says Fontaine was somebody else. What I got is a dead detective and the tail end of a riot. What I don't need is a lot of publicity about another serial killer in Millhaven, especially one on the force. Because then, what we get is even more trouble than we already have." He sighed again. "Am I making sense to you?"

"Too much," I said.

"Everything in the world is politics." He walked back to the chair, planted his hands on its back, and leaned forward. "Let's talk about what happened when Fontaine got shot."

He looked up as the door swung open. The blond doctor I had met last night took two steps into the room, froze, and turned right around and walked out again.

"When we're done," McCandless said, "all this is settled for good. After this, there are going to be no surprises. On the night of the riot, you went down to that house with the intention of overpowering and capturing a man you had reason to believe had killed two people. You intended to turn him over to the police."

"Exactly," I said.

"Did you hear gunfire in the neighborhood?"

"Not then. No, I'm wrong. I heard shots from the area of the riot."

"What happened when you got to the house?"

"John and I were going around to the back door, but I took him along the side of the house again to go up onto the porch. When John and I got near the porch steps, Alan saw the front door open and started yelling."

"The patrol car was about a block away at that point."

"That's right," I said. "Alan saw Fontaine and started screaming, 'Is that him?' Fontaine said something like, 'Damn you, Underhill, you're not going to get away.' I don't think the men in the car had seen us yet."

McCandless nodded.

"John ran up to Alan and tried to get him to calm down, but Alan yanked the gun away from him and started shooting. The next thing I knew, I was lying down in a pool of blood."

"How many shots did you hear?"

"There must have been two," I said.

He waited a significant beat. "I asked, how many did you hear?"

I thought back. "Well, I saw Alan fire twice," I said. "But I think I might have heard more than two shots."

"Brookner fired twice," McCandless said. "Officer Berenger fired a warning shot into the air. The couple who live across the street from where you were say they heard at least five shots, and so does the woman next door. Her husband slept through the whole thing, so he didn't hear anything. Berenger's partner thinks he heard five shots, fired very close together."

"It's like the grassy knoll," I said.

"You were facing Ransom and Brookner. What did you see? There had been some trouble in that area during the rioting."

I remembered what I had seen. "I had an impression that there was a person between the houses behind Alan and Ransom."

"Good for you, Mr. Underhill. Did you see this person?"

"I thought I saw movement. It was dark. Then everything went crazy."

"Have you ever heard of someone named Nicholas Ventura?"

A second too late, I said, "No."

"No, I don't suppose so," McCandless said. He must have known that I was lying. "Ventura was an up-and-coming young sleazeball who ran into some trouble on Livermore Avenue during the rioting. Somebody took a knife away from him and almost broke off his arm." McCandless almost smiled at me and then came around the chair and sat down, facing me. "Some party called 911 from the St. Alwyn Hotel almost immediately afterward, but I don't imagine that it was the same party that kicked the shit out of Ventura, do you?"

"No," I said.

"In fact, what happened to Ventura was riot-related, wouldn't you say?"

I nodded.

"Probably you heard about the death of a man named Frankie Waldo."

"I heard something about it," I said. "If you want to know what I think—"

"So far, you don't think anything about it," McCandless said. "Unofficially, I can tell you that Waldo was tied into Billy Ritz's drug business. And Ritz was killed in retribution for his murder."

"Do you think you can really do this?" I asked.

"I didn't hear you."

"Ritz was payback for Waldo."

"Like I told you, everything is politics." He stood up. "By the way, Officer Berenger found some old photographs in the basement of that house. I think some good might come out of this, despite what you idiots tried to do."

"You're not too unhappy that Fontaine is dead, are you?"

McCandless moved away from the chair. Sonny stepped back and looked down toward his feet. He was deaf and blind. "You know what makes me happy?" McCandless asked me. "I can protect him one hell of a lot better the way things are."

"You didn't have much trouble believing that he was really Franklin Bachelor. All you have is what I told you about Edward Hubbel. I don't get it."

McCandless gave me a long, utterly unreadable look. Then he glanced down the bed at Sonny, who snapped his head up like a soldier on parade. "Tell him."

"Detective Monroe made a search of Detective Fontaine's apartment this morning." Sonny directed his words to the bright window. "He located Major Bachelor's discharge papers in his desk."

If I hadn't known how much it would hurt, I would have laughed out loud. "I wonder if he also came across some boxes of notes."

"There never were any boxes of notes," McCandless said.

"Not now, I bet," I said. "Congratulations."

McCandless let it roll right off him. Maybe they hadn't destroyed the notes, after all. Maybe Fontaine had flushed them down the toilet, page by page, before we had shown up at his old house.

"You'll be protected from journalists as long as you are here," McCandless said. He sounded like he was reading me my Miranda rights. "The hospital will screen all your calls, and I'm stationing an officer at the door to secure your privacy. In about an hour, Officer Berenger will bring you your statement, based on your responses to my questions. Is that correct, Sonny?"

"Yes, sir," Sonny said.

"And you might think about booking your ticket home for the day of your release. You'll be taken to the airport in a patrol car, so after you arrange the ticket, give the officer your flight information."

"All in the interest of my security," I said.

"Take care of yourself," McCandless said. "You look lousy, if you want to know the truth."

"Glad to help you out," I said. They were already moving toward the door.

I opened the magazine and tried to revive my interest in menopause. Some of the symptoms had an ironic familiarity— heavy bleeding, increased pain, depression. The columnist had nothing to say about sudden flare-ups of anger against authority figures who looked like retired circus performers. I understood some of what McCandless had been after, but his insistence on there having been more than three gunshots puzzled me. Whatever I had said had satisfied him, but I couldn't figure out why. Then I started worrying about Alan. I reached across my chest to get the telephone and call County Hospital, but the operator almost apologetically told me that I was restricted by police order to incoming calls. I picked up Modern Bride and discovered that today's young woman got married in pretty much the same kind of thing as yesterday's. I was just getting into Longevity and 'Exercises for the Recently Bereaved' when a short, pudgy young policeman stuck his head in the door and said, "I'll be right out here, okay?" We recognized each other at the same moment. It was Officer Mangelotti, minus the white head bandage he'd been wearing when I last saw him. "Nobody said I had to talk to you, though," he said, and gave me what he thought was a truly evil scowl. His folding chair squeaked when he sat down.

4

Geoffrey Bough conned his way past the receptionist and turned up outside my door about an hour after Ross McCandless left. I was playing with the cold oatmeal the kitchen had sent up, coaxing it into a mound and then mushing it flat. The first indication I had of the reporter's arrival was the sound of Mangelotti saying, "No. No way. Get out of here." I thought he was ordering John Ransom away from my room, and I shoved away the oatmeal and called out, "Come on, Mangelotti, let him in."

"No way," Mangelotti said.

"You heard him," said a voice I knew. Bough squeezed his skinny chest past Mangelotti and leaned into the room. "Hi, Tim," he said, as if we were old friends. Maybe we were, by now—I realized that I was glad to see him.

"Hello, Geoffrey," I said.

"Tell this officer to give me five minutes, will you?"

Mangelotti planted his hand on Bough's chest and pushed him part of the way into the hall. Geoffrey gesticulated at me over the cop's head, but Mangelotti gave him another push, and the reporter disappeared.

I heard him protesting all the way down the hallway to the elevator. Mangelotti was so angry with me that he closed the door when he came back.

The next time the door opened, I was beginning to wish that I had eaten the oatmeal. Sonny Berenger came in with a single sheet of paper on a clipboard. "Your statement's ready," he said, and handed it to me. He pulled a ballpoint out of his pocket. "Sign it anywhere on the bottom."

Most of the sentences in the statement began with "I" and contained fewer than six words. There was at least one typing mistake in every sentence, and the grammar was casual. It was a bare-bones account of what had happened outside Bob Bandolier's old house. The last two sentences were: "Professor Brookner fired two shots, striking me. I heard the shooting to continue." McCandless had probably made him rewrite it three times, taking new details out each time.

"I have to make some changes in this before I sign it," I said.

"What do you mean, changes?" Berenger asked.

I began writing in "with one of them" after "striking me," and Berenger leaned over the clipboard to see what I was doing. He wanted to grab the pen out of my hand, but he relaxed when he saw what I was doing. I crossed out the "to" in the last sentence, and then wrote my name under the statement.

He took back the clipboard and the pen, puzzled but relieved.

"Just editing," I said. "I can't help myself."

"The lieutenant's a big believer in editing."

"I got that part."

Sonny stepped back from the bed and glanced toward the door to make sure it was closed. "Thanks for not saying that you told me about the photographs."

"Will Monroe let John go home after you get back with that statement?"

"Probably. Ransom's just sitting at his desk, trading Vietnam stories." He still did not want to go, towering near the bed with his clipboard like Officer Friendly in a high school auditorium.

For the first time, he looked openly at the pad of gauze taped to my shoulder. I saw him decide not to say anything about it, and then he took a step backward toward the door. "Should I tell Ransom you'd like to see him?"

"I'd like to see anybody except Mangelotti," I said. After Sonny left, a black-haired, energetic young doctor bounced in to tape fresh gauze over the bloody hole. "You're going to have to run around your backhand for a month or so, but otherwise, you'll be fine." He pressed the last of the tape into place and straightened up. Curiosity was fairly boiling out of him. "The police seem to feel you'll be safer in here."

"I think it's the other way around," I said.

After that, I read Modern Maturity. Cover to cover, every word of it, including the advertisements. I had to change my running shoes and do something about my IRA account. For lunch, I had a piece of chicken so pale that it nearly disappeared into the plate. I ate every scrap, even the gristly little bits that clung to the bones.

When John turned up several hours later, Mangelotti refused to let him in until he got permission from the department. Permission took a long time to get, and while they were at the desk, I got out of bed and hauled my glucose pole across the room to the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. I had a little more color than the chicken, and I needed a shave. As revenge for the magazines, I peed into the sink. By the time Mangelotti learned he would not be suspended for letting John into my room, I had hobbled back to bed, feeling as though I had just climbed one of the minor Alps.

John came in carrying a beat-up white canvas bag, closed the door, and leaned back against it, shaking his head from side to side in frustration. "Can you believe that guy is still on the force? What's he doing here anyhow?"

"Defending me from the press."

John snickered and pushed himself off the door. I looked greedily at the canvas bag. ARKHAM COLLEGE was printed on its side in big red letters.

"Funny thing, you look like a guy who just got shot. I stopped off at the house and picked up some books. Nobody was willing to tell me how long you'd be in here, so I got a lot of them." He set the bag next to me and began piling books on the table. The Nag Hammadi Library, Sue Grafton, Ross Macdonald, Donald Westlake, John Irving, A. S. Byatt, Martin Amis. "Some of these belonged to April. And I thought you'd be interested in seeing this." He took a thick, green-jacketed book out of the bag and held it up so that I could see the cover. The Concept of the Sacred, Alan Brookner. "Probably his best book."

I took it from him. As battered as an old suitcase, smudged, soft with use, it looked as if it had been read a hundred times. "I'm really grateful," I said.

"Keep it." He reared back in the chair and shook out his arms. "What a night."

I asked what happened to him after I'd been taken away.

"They jammed Alan and me into a police car and hauled us off to Armory Place. Then they locked us up in a little room and asked the same questions over and over." After a couple of hours, they had driven him home and let him get some sleep, and then picked him up again and started the questioning all over again. Eventually, McCandless had taken a statement and then let him go. He had not been charged with anything.

He took hold of my wrist. "You didn't say anything about the car, did you? Or about that other stuff?" He meant Byron Dorian.

"No. I stuck to Elvee and Franklin Bachelor and the Blue Rose business."

"Ah." He leaned back in the chair and looked up, giving thanks. "I didn't know what shape you were in. Good. I had a few worried moments there."

"What about Alan? I heard he was at County Hospital."

John groaned. "Alan fell apart. For a long time, he kept quoting one of those damned gnostic verses. Then he started on baby talk. I don't know what he did when they interrogated him, but Monroe finally told me that he was under sedation at County. I guess they have to charge him with reckless use of a weapon, or reckless endangerment, or something like that, but Monroe told me that he would probably never have to go to trial or anything. I mean, he won't end up in jail. But God, you should see him."

"You visited him?"

"I feel like he's taken over my life. I went to County and there's Alan, lying in a bed and saying things like I live in a little white house. Is my daddy home yet? My brother made pee-pee off the bridge.' Literally. He's about four years old. To tell you the truth, I don't think he's ever going to be anything else."

"Oh, my God," I said.

"So then his lawyer gets ahold of me and tells me that since he appointed April the trustee of his estate a couple of years ago, now I'm his trustee by default, unless I elect to turn the job over to him. Fat chance. He's about eighty years old, a lawyer straight out of Dickens. So I have to deal with the bank, I have to sign a million papers, I have to see his case through the court, I have to sell his house."

"Sell his house?"

"He can't live there anymore, he's gone. I have to find a home that'll take him, which is a good trick, given his condition."

I pictured Alan babbling about a little white house and felt a wave of pity and sorrow that nearly made me dizzy. "What's happening out in the world? Is it on the news?"

"Are we on the news, do you mean? I put on the radio when I got home, and all I heard about us was that Detective Paul Fontaine had been killed in an incident that took place in the Livermore Avenue area. I'll tell you one thing—Armory Place is keeping a very tight lid on things."

"I guessed," I said.

"Tim, I have to get moving. All this business about Alan— you know." He stood up and looked benignly down. "I'm glad you're on the mend. Man, I couldn't tell what happened to you last night."

"Alan hit me in the shoulder." Of course, John knew that, but I felt that it deserved a little more attention.

"You nearly flipped over. I'm not kidding. Your feet flew straight out in front of you. Wham, you're down."

My hand moved automatically to the gauze pad. "You know what's funny about all this? Nobody seems to doubt that Fontaine killed April and Grant Hoffman. They don't have the notes, or they claim they don't, and they don't have any evidence. All they have is what we gave them, and they knew him for better than ten years. His own department, people who thought he was God yesterday morning, did a 360-degree turn twelve hours later."

"Of course they did." John smiled and shook his head, looking at me as if I'd flunked an easy test. "McCandless and Hogan found out that they never really knew the guy at all. They might not be showing it to us, but they're feeling betrayed and angry. Just when they have to convince this entire city that their cops are hot shit after all, their best detective turns out to be very, very dirty."

John came forward, buttoning his suit, his eyes alight with a private understanding. "And Monroe searched his apartment, right? He found the discharge papers, but who knows what else he found? Just the fact they're not telling us that they came up with knives or bloodstains on his shoes means that they did."

When he saw I took the point that they would have been much tougher on us if they had not, he glanced toward the door and then lowered his voice. "What I think is, I bet Monroe found those notes we were looking for, took them straight to McCandless, and after McCandless read them, he put them through a shredder. Case closed."

"So they'll never officially clear April's murder?"

"McCandless told me he'd get me for breaking and entering if he ever heard that I was talking to the press." He shrugged. "Why is that fat little shit sitting outside your door? He's useless at saving lives, but he's good enough to keep Geoffrey Bough out of your room."

"You can live with that?" I asked, but the answer had been present since he had walked into the room.

"I know who murdered my wife, and the son of a bitch is dead. Can I live with that? You bet I can." John looked at his watch. "Hey, I'm already late for a meeting at the bank. You're okay? Need anything else?"

I asked him to arrange airline tickets for the day after tomorrow and to give the flight information to McCandless.

5

Alan Brookner's book made two or three hours zoom by in happy concentration, even though I probably understood about one-fourth of what I was reading. The book was as dense and elegant as an Elliot Carter string quartet, and about as easy to grasp on first exposure. After a bright-faced little nurse rolled in the magic tray and injected me, the book began speaking with perfect clarity, but that may have been illusory.

I heard the door close and looked up to see Michael Hogan coming toward me. His long face seemed about as expressive as Ross McCandless's rusty iron mask, but as he got closer I saw that the effect was due to exhaustion not disdain. "I thought I'd check up on you before I went home," he said. "Mind if I sit down?"

"No, please do," I said, and he slipped into the chair sideways, almost languidly. A stench of smoke and gunpowder floated toward me from his wrinkled pinstripe suit. I looked at Hogan's weary, distinguished face, still distinguished in spite of the marks of deep exhaustion, and realized that the odor was nothing more than the same smell of ashes that I had caught at the Sunchanas' burned-out house. Along with Fontaine, Hogan had spent a lot of the night near burning buildings, and he had not been home since then.

"You look better than I do," he said. "How are things going? In much pain?"

"Ask me again in about an hour and a half."

He managed to smile through the tangle of emotions visible in his weary face.

"I guess the riot is over," I said, but he sent the riot into oblivion with a wave of his hand and an impatient, bitter glance that touched me like an electric shock.

Hogan sighed and slumped into the chair. "What you and Ransom were trying to do was incredibly stupid, you know."

"We didn't know who to trust. We didn't think anybody would believe us unless we caught him in his old house and made him talk."

"How did you think you were going to get him to talk?"

He was avoiding the use of the name—the process John had predicted was already beginning.

"Once we had him tied up"—this was the image I'd had of the conclusion of our attack on Fontaine—"I was going to tell him that I knew who he really was. I could prove it. There wouldn't be any way out for him—he'd have to know he was trapped."

"The proof would be this man Hubbel?"

"That's right. Hubbel identified him immediately."

"Imagine that," Hogan said, meaning that it was still almost too much to imagine. "Well, we'll be sending someone out there tomorrow, but don't expect to be reading much about Franklin Bachelor in the New York Times. Or the Ledger, for that matter." The look in his eyes got even smokier. "When we got in touch with the army, they stonewalled for most of the day, and finally some character in the CIA passed down the word that Major Bachelor's file is not only closed, it can't be opened for fifty years. Officially, the man is dead. And anything printed about him that isn't already a matter of public record must be approved first by the CIA. So there you are."

"There we all are," I said. "But thanks for telling me."

"Oh, I'm not done yet. I understand you met Ross McCandless."

I nodded. "I understand what he wants."

"He doesn't tend to leave much doubt about that. But probably he didn't tell you a couple of things you ought to know."

I waited, fearing that he was going to say something about Tom Pasmore.

"The old man's gun is at ballistics. They move slow, over there. The report won't come back for about a week. But the bullet that killed our detective couldn't have come from the same gun as the one that hit you."

"You're going too far," I said. "I was there. I saw Alan fire, twice. What's the point of this, anyhow?" And then I saw the point—if Allen had not killed Fontaine, then our whole story disappeared into a fiction about the riot.

"It's the truth. You saw Brookner fire twice because his first shot went wild. The second one hit you—if the first one had hit you, you'd never have seen him fire the second one."

"So the first one hit Fontaine."

"Do you know what happened to him? His whole chest blew apart. If you'd been hit by the same kind of round, you wouldn't have anything left on your right side below the collarbone. You wouldn't even be alive."

"So who shot him?" As soon as I had spoken, I knew.

"You told McCandless that you saw a man between the houses across the street."

Well, I had—I thought I had, anyhow. Even if I hadn't, McCandless would have suggested that I probably had. I'd conveniently given him exactly what he wanted.

"We still have a police department in this town," Hogan said. "We'll get him, sooner or later."

I saw a loose end and seized it. "McCandless mentioned someone named Ventura, I think. Nicholas Ventura."

"That's the other thing I wanted you to know. Ventura was operated on, put into a cast, and given a bed at County. Not long after the riot started, he disappeared. Nobody's seen him since. Somehow, I don't think anybody ever will."

"How could he disappear?" I asked.

"County's a disorganized place. Maybe he walked out."

"That's not what you think."

"I don't think Ventura could have stood up by himself, much less walked away from the hospital." The flat rage in his eyes seemed connected to the stink of ashes that floated out from his clothing, as if his body produced the smell. "Anyhow, that's what I had to say. I'll leave you alone now."

He pushed himself to his feet and looked grimly down at me. "It's been real."

"A little too real," I said, and he nodded and walked out of the room. The stench of his rage and frustration stayed behind, like a layer of ashes on my skin, the sheets, the book I had forgotten I was holding.

6

"I warned you that something like this might happen," Tom Pasmore said to me the next morning, after I had described my conversation with Hogan. "But I didn't think it would be so complete." That ashy layer of frustration still covered me so absolutely that I came close to being grateful for the distraction of the steady thudding into which my pain had retreated. Tom's uncharacteristically discreet charcoal suit seemed like another form of it, unrelieved by any of the flashes of color, the pink tie or yellow vest or blooming red pocket cloth, with which he would normally have brightened his general aspect. Tom's general aspect seemed as wan as mine.

Both of us held copies of the morning's Ledger, which was dominated by photographs of burned-out buildings and articles about volunteers engaged in the monumental cleanup necessary before rebuilding could begin. At the top of the third page, ordered like the pictures of Walter Dragonette's victims, lay a row of photographs of the eight people killed during the rioting. They were all male, and seven were African-Americans. The white man was Detective Paul Fontaine. Beneath the square of his photograph, a short paragraph referred to his many commendations, the many successes in solving difficult homicide cases that had given him the nickname "Fantastic," and his personal affability and humor. His death, like most of the others, had been due to random gunfire.

On the second page of the next section, a column-length article headed FOURTY-YEAR-OLD CASE SOLVED reported that recent investigations led by Lieutenant Ross McCandless had brought to light the identity of the Blue Rose killer, who had murdered four people in Millhaven in October of 1950, as Robert C. Bandolier, at the time the day manager of the St. Alwyn Hotel. "It is a great satisfaction to exonerate Detective William Damrosch, who has had an undeserved stain on his reputation for all this time," said McCandless. "Evidence located in Mr. Bandolier's old residence definitely ties him to the four killings. Forty years later, we can finally say that justice has been done for William Damrosch, who was a fine and dedicated officer, in the tradition of Millhaven's Homicide Division."

And that was it. Nothing about Fielding Bandolier or Franklin Bachelor, nothing about Grant Hoffman or April Ransom. "It's complete, all right," I said.

Tom dropped his copy of the newspaper to the floor, raised one foot to prop his ankle on a knee, and leaned forward with his elbow on the other knee. Chin in hand, his eyes bright with inward curiosity, he suggested an almost comic awareness of his own depression. "The thing is, if I knew what was coming, why do I feel so bad about it?"

"They're just protecting themselves," I said.

He knew that—it didn't interest him. "I think you feel left out," I said.

"This certainly isn't what I had in mind," he said. "I don't blame you in any way, but I sort of pictured that it would be you and me instead of you and John. And Alan should have been nowhere in sight."

"Naturally," I said. "But if you hadn't been insistent on keeping yourself out—"

"I wouldn't have been kept out, I know." He jiggled his foot. "John put me off. He tried to buy one of my paintings, and then he tried to buy me."

I agreed that John could be off-putting. "But if you ever spent half an hour with his parents, you'd know why. And underneath it all, he's a pretty good guy. He just wasn't quite what I expected, but people change."

"I don't," Tom said, sounding disconsolate about it. "I guess that's part of my problem. I've always got two or three things on the fire, but this was the most exciting one in years. We really did something tremendous, and now it's all over."

"Almost," I said. "Don't you still have the two or three other things to take up the slack?"

"Sure, but they're not like this one. In your terms, they're just short stories. This was a whole novel. And now, nobody will ever read it but you and me and John."

"Don't forget Ross McCandless," I said.

"Ross McCandless always reminded me of the head of the secret police in a totalitarian state." Realizing that he could pass on a fresh bit of gossip, he brightened. "Have you heard that Vass is probably on the way out?"

I shook my head. "Because of Fontaine?"

"Fontaine's probably the real reason, but the mayor will imply that he's resigning because of the combination of Walter Dragonette, the riot, and the boy who was shot in City Hall."

"Is this public yet?"

"No, but a lot of people—the kind of people who really know, I mean—have been talking about it as though it's a foregone conclusion."

I wondered whom he meant, and then remembered that Sarah Spence spent her life among the kind of people who really know. "How about Merlin?"

"Merlin's a gassy liquid—he takes the shape of whatever container he puts himself into. I think we'll be seeing a lot of the elder statesman act for a while. What he'll probably do is find a good black chief in some other part of the country, sing lullabies to him until he loses his mind, and then announce the appointment of a new chief. Right up until that moment, he'll be behind Vass a thousand percent."

"Everything is politics," I said.

"Especially everything that shouldn't be." He gloomily regarded the stack of books on my table without seeming to take in the individual titles. "I should have protected you better."

"Protected me?"

He looked away. "Oh, by the way, I brought some of those computer reconstructions of the last photograph, if there's any point in looking at them anymore." He reached into his jacket pocket, brought out three folded sheets of paper, and then met my eyes with a flash of embarrassment at what he saw there.

"That was you—you followed me back to John's that night."

"Do you want to look at these, or not?"

I took the papers without releasing him. "It was you."

The red dots appeared in his cheeks. "I couldn't just let you walk nine blocks in the middle of the night, could I? After everything I'd just said to you?"

"And was that you I saw out in Elm Hill?"

"No. That was Fontaine. Or Billy Ritz. Which proves that I should have stuck to you like a burr." He smiled, at last. "You weren't supposed to see me."

"It was more like I felt you," I said, troubled by the evil I had sensed dogging me that night, and the memory of the Minotaur's knowledge of a hidden shame. From where had I dredged that up, if not out of myself? Cloudy with doubt, I flattened the pages and looked at each of the computer images in turn.

They were of buildings that had never existed, buildings with recessed ground floors beneath soaring blank upper reaches like pyramids, oblongs, ocean liners. Empty sidewalks devoid of cracks led up to boxy windows and glassed-in guardhouses. They looked like an eccentric billionaire's vision of a modern art museum. I spread the papers out between us. "This is it?" I asked. "The other ones were even worse. You know what they say—garbage in, garbage out. There just wasn't enough information for it to work with. But I guess we know what it really is, anyhow, don't we?"

"Stenmitz's shop had a kind of triangular sign over the window. That must be what suggested all this—" I pointed at the rearing structures of the upper floors.

"I guess." Tom swept the pages together in a gesture of disappointment and disgust. "It would have been nice if…"

"If I recognized some other building?"

"I don't want it to be over yet," Tom said. "But boy, is it over. You want to keep these? Bring a souvenir home with you?"

I didn't say that I already had a souvenir—I wanted to keep the computer's hallucinations. I'd fasten them to the refrigerator, beneath the picture of Ted Bundy's mother.

7

Tom came back the next day with the news that Arden Vass had offered to resign as soon as a suitable replacement could be found. He had expected the mayor to refuse his offer, but Merlin Waterford had immediately announced that he was accepting the resignation of his old friend, albeit with the greatest sorrow, and the Committee for a Just Millhaven would be given a voice in the selection of the new chief. The officer who had killed the teenage boy was under suspension, pending a hearing. Tom stayed for an hour, and when he left, we promised to stay in touch.

John Ransom came in half an hour before the end of visiting hours and told me that he had decided what he wanted to do— buy a farmhouse in the Dordogne where he could work on his book and rent an apartment in Paris for weekends and vacations in the city. "I need a city," he said. "I want a lot of quiet for my work, but I'm no country mouse. Once I'm set up, I want you to come over, spend some time with me. Will you do that?"

"Sure," I said. "It'd be nice. This visit turned out to be a little hectic."

"Hectic? It was a nightmare. I was out of my mind most of the time." John had stayed on his feet during his visit, and he jammed his hands in his pockets and executed a hesitant half-turn, clocking toward the sunny window and then back to me again. "I'll see you tomorrow when you come around to get your things. Ah, I just have to say how much I appreciate everything you did here, Tim. You were great. You were fantastic. I'll never forget it."

"It was quite a ride," I said.

"I want to give you a present. I've been giving this a lot of thought, and while nothing could really repay you for everything you did, I want to give you that painting you liked so much. The Vuillard. Please take it. I want you to have it."

I looked up at him, too stunned to speak.

"I can't look at the thing anymore, anyhow. There's too much of April in it. And I don't want to sell it. So do me a favor and take it, will you?"

"If you really want to give it to me," I said.

"It's yours. I'll take care of the paperwork and have some good art handlers pack it up and ship it to you. Thanks." He fidgeted for a while, having run out of things to say, and then he was gone.

8

Four hours before my flight was scheduled to take off, John called to say that he was in a meeting with his lawyers and couldn't get out. Would I mind letting myself in with the extra key and then pushing it through the mail slot after I locked up again? He'd get the painting off to me as soon as he had the time and be in touch soon to let me know how his plans were developing. "And good luck with the book," he said. "I know how important it is to you."

Five minutes later, Tom Pasmore called. "I tried to wangle a ride out to the airport with you, but Hogan turned me down. I'll call you in a day or two to see how you're doing."

"Tom," I said, suddenly filled with an idea, "why don't you move to New York? You'd love it, you'd make hundreds of interesting friends, and there'd never be any shortage of problems to work on."

"What?" he said in a voice filled with mock outrage. "And abandon my roots?"

Officer Mangelotti stood beside me like a guard dog as I signed myself out of the hospital, drove me to Ely Place, and trudged around the house while I struggled with the problem of one-armed packing. The curved blue splint covering my right arm from fingers to shoulder made it impossible for me to carry downstairs both the hanging bag and the carryon, and Mangelotti stood glumly in the living room and watched me go back up and down the stairs. When I came down the second time, he said, "These are real paintings, like oil paintings, right?"

"Right," I said.

"I wouldn't put this crap in a doghouse." He watched me pick up both bags with my left hand and then followed me out through the door, waited while I locked up, and let me put the bags in the trunk by myself. "You don't move too fast," he said.

I looked at my watch as he turned onto Berlin Avenue—it was still an hour and a half before my flight. "I want to make a stop before we get to the airport," I said. "It won't take long."

"The sergeant didn't say anything about a stop."

"You don't have to tell him about it."

"You sure get royal treatment," he said. "Where's this stop you want me to make?"

"County Hospital."

"At least it's on the way to the lousy airport," Mangelotti said.

9

A nurse in a permanent state of rage took me at quick-march tempo down a corridor lined with ancient men and women in wheelchairs. Some of them were mumbling to themselves and plucking at their thin cotton robes. They were the lively ones. The air smelled of urine and disinfectant, and a gleaming skin of water had seeped halfway out into the corridor, occasionally swelling into puddles that reached the opposite wall. The nurse flew over the puddles without explaining, apologizing, or looking down. They had been there a long time.

Unasked, Mangelotti had refused to leave the car and told me that I had fifteen minutes, tops. It had taken about seven minutes to get someone to tell me where Alan was being kept and another five of jogging along behind the nurse through miles of corridors to get this far. She rounded another corner, squeezed past a gurney on which an unconscious old woman lay covered to the neck by a stained white sheet, and came to a halt by the entrance to a dim open ward that looked like a homeless shelter for the aged. Rows of beds no more than three feet apart stood in ranks along each wall. Dirty windows at the far end admitted a tired substance more like fog than light.

In a robot voice, the nurse said, "Bed twenty-three." She dismissed me with her eyes and about-faced to disappear back around the corner.

The old men in the beds were as identical as clones, so institutionalized as to be without any individuality—white hair on white pillows, wrinkled, sagging faces, dull eyes and open mouths. Then the details of an arched, beaky nose, a crusty bald head, a protruding tongue, began to emerge. The mumbles of the few old men not asleep or permanently stupefied sounded like mistakes. I saw the numeral 16 on the bed in front of me and moved down the row to 23.

Flyaway white hair surrounded a shrunken face and a working mouth. I would have walked right past him if I hadn't looked first at the number. Alan's thrusting eyebrows had flourished at the expense of the rest of his body. I supposed he had always possessed those branchy, tangled eyebrows, but everything else about him had kept me from noticing them. Even his extraordinary voice had shrunk, and whatever he was saying vanished into a barely audible whisper. "Alan," I said, "this is Tim. Can you hear me?"

His mouth went slack, and for a second I saw something like awareness in his eyes. Then his lips began moving again. I bent down to hear what he was saying.

"… standing on the corner and my brother had a toothpick in his mouth because he thought it made him look tough. All it did was make him look like a fool, and I told him so. I said, you know why those fools hang around in front of Armistead's with toothpicks in their mouths? So people will think they just ate a big dinner there. I guess everybody can recognize a fool except one of its own kind. And my aunt came out and said, You're making your brother cry, when are you ever going to learn to control that mouth of yours?"

I straightened up and rested my left hand on his shoulder. "Alan, talk to me. It's Tim Underhill. I want to say good-bye to you."

He turned his head very slightly in my direction. "Do you remember me?" I asked.

Recognition flared in his eyes. "You old son of a gun. Aren't you dead? I shot the hell out of you."

I knelt beside him, the sheer weight of my relief pushing me close to tears. "Alan, you only hit me in the shoulder."

"He's dead." Alan's voice recovered a tiny portion of its original strength. Absolute triumph widened his eyes. "I got him."

"You can't stay in this dump," I said. "We have to get you out of here."

"Listen, kiddo." A smile stretched the loose mouth, and the shrunken face and enormous eyebrows summoned me nearer. "All I have to do is get out of this bed. There's a place I once showed my brother, over by the river. If I can watch my big motormouth, uh…" He blinked. Fluid wobbled in the red wells of his eyelids. "Curse of my life. Talk first, think later." Alan closed his eyes and sank into the pillow.

I said, "Alan?" Tears leaked from his closed eyelids and slipped into the gauze of his whiskers. After a second, I realized that he had fallen asleep.

When I let myself back into the car, Mangelotti glowered at me. "I guess you don't have a watch."

I said, "If you bitch one more time, I'll ram your teeth down your throat with this cast."

PART FIFTEEN

LENNY VALENTINE

1

When I got back to New York, I did my best to settle back into my abnormal normal life, but settling was exactly what I couldn't do. Everything had been taken away while I was gone and replaced with other objects that only appeared to resemble them—the chairs and couches, my bed and writing table, even the rugs and bookshelves, were half an inch narrower or shorter, the wrong width or height, and subtly shifted in a way that turned my loft into a jigsaw puzzle solved by forcing pieces into places where other pieces belonged. Part of this sense of dislocation was the result of having to type with only the index finger of my left hand, which refused to work in the old way without the assistance of its partner, but all the rest of it, most of it, was simply me. I had returned from Millhaven so disarranged that I no longer fit my accustomed place in the puzzle.

Wonderfully, my friends distracted me from this sense of disarrangement by fussing over my injury and demanding to hear the story of how I had managed to get myself shot in the shoulder by a distinguished professor of religion. The story was a long story, and it took a long time to tell. They wouldn't settle for summations, they wanted details and vivid recreation. Maggie Lah was particularly interested in what had happened on the morning I got lost in the fog and told me that it was simple, really. "You walked into your book. You saw your character, and he was yourself. That's why you told the man in the ambulance that your name was Fee Bandolier. Because what else is the point of this book you're writing?"

"You're too smart," I said, flinching a little at her perception.

"You better write this book, get it out of your system," she answered, and that was perceptive, too.

When Vinh brought plates of delicious Vietnamese food up from Saigon's kitchen—an internal takeout—Maggie insisted that he go back downstairs for soup. "This is a person who requires a great deal of soup," she said, and Vinh must have agreed, because he went right back down and came back with enough soup to feed us all for a week, most of it parceled out into containers that he put into my refrigerator.

Michael Poole wanted to know about the Franklin Bachelor period of Fee Bandolier's life and if I thought I understood what had happened when John Ransom reached Bachelor's encampment. "Didn't he say that he got there two days before the other man? What did he do there, for two whole days?"

"Eat soup," Maggie said.

These friends clustered around me like a family, which is what they are, at various times and for various periods, separately and together, for two or three days, and then, because they knew I needed it, began giving me more time by myself.

Using one finger, turned at an unfamiliar angle to the keyboard, I started typing what I had written in John's house into the computer. What would normally have taken me about a week dragged out to two weeks. The hooks and ratchets in my back heated up and rolled over, and every half hour or so I had to stand up and back into the wall to press them back into place. My doctor gave me a lot of pills that contained some codeine, but after I discovered that the codeine slowed me down even further and gave me a headache, I stopped using them. I typed on for another couple of days, trying to ignore both the pain in my back and the sensation of a larger disorder.

Byron Dorian's painting arrived via UPS, and five days later April's Vuillard turned up, wrapped in foot-thick bubble wrap within a wooden case. The men who delivered it even hung it for me—all part of the service. I put the paintings on the long blank wall that faced my desk, so that I could look up and see them while I worked.

Tom Pasmore called, saying that he was still "fooling around," whatever that meant. John Ransom called with the news that he had found a place for Alan in Golden Manor, a nursing home with lake views from most of the rooms. "The place looks like a luxury hotel and costs a fortune, but Alan can certainly afford it," John said. "I hope I can afford it, or something like it, when I'm his age."

"How is he doing?" I asked.

"Oh, physically, he's improved a lot. He's up and around, he doesn't look so small anymore, and he's eating well. I meant that in both senses. The food at the place is better than it is in most restaurants around here."

"And mentally?"

"Mentally, he goes in and out. Sometimes, it's like talking to the old Alan, and other times, he just disconnects and talks to himself. To tell you the truth, though, I think that's happening less and less." Without transition, he asked if I had received the painting. I said I had and thanked him for it.

"You know it cost about a thousand bucks to get it packed and shipped by those guys?"

Around eight o'clock one night, three in the morning for him, Glenroy Breakstone called me from France and announced that he wanted to talk about Ike Quebec. He talked about Ike Quebec for forty minutes. Whatever Glenroy was using these days, they had a lot of it in France. When he had finished, he said, "You're on my list now, Tim. You'll be hearing from me."

"I hope I will," I said, telling him nothing but the truth.

The next morning, I finished typing out everything I had written in Millhaven. To celebrate, I went straight to bed and slept for an hour—I'd hardly been able to sleep at night ever since I'd returned. I went downstairs and ate lunch at Saigon. After I got back up to my loft, I started writing new scenes, new dialogue again. And that's when my troubles really began.

2

Sleeplessness must have been part of the trouble. In the same way that the fingers of my left hand had mysteriously lost the ability to type, my body had lost its capacity to sleep. During my first nights back in New York, I came awake about four in the morning and spent the rest of the night lying in bed with my eyes closed, waiting until long past dawn for the gradual mental slippage, the loosening of rationality, which signals the beginning of unconsciousness. To make up for the lost sleep, I took hour-long naps after lunch. Then I began waking at three in the morning, with the same results. I tried reading and wound up reading until morning. By the end of the first week, I was going to bed at eleven and waking up at two in the morning. After another four or five nights, I never went to sleep at all. I took off my clothes and brushed my teeth, got into bed, and instantly felt as though I'd just gulped down a double espresso.

I couldn't blame the cast or the pains in my back and shoulder. These were uncomfortable, awkward, and irritating, but they were not the problem. My body had forgotten how to sleep at night. I went back to my doctor, who gave me sleeping pills. For two nights, I took the pills before going to bed, with the alarming result that I'd come out of a lengthy daze at six in the morning, standing by the window or sitting on the couch, with no memory of what had happened since I had stretched out on my bed. Instead of sleep, I'd had amnesia. I threw the pills away, took two-hour naps in the middle of the day, and waited it out. By the time I began writing fresh material, I had stopped going to bed—I took a shower around midnight, changed clothes, and alternately worked, read, and walked around my loft. Sometimes I turned off the lights and wrote in the dark. I took a lot of aspirin and vitamin C. Sometimes I wandered into the kitchen and gazed at the surreal buildings that Tom's computer had invented. Then I went back to my desk and lost myself in my made-up world.

Despite my fatigue, my work went leaping ahead of me like some animal, tiger or gazelle, that I was trying to capture. I was scarcely conscious of writing—the experience was more like being written. I saw everything, smelled everything, touched everything. During those hours, I ceased to exist. Like a medium, I just wrote it down. By the time I began to awaken to my various aches, it was seven or eight in the morning. I tottered to my bed, lay down, and rested while my mind kept pursuing the leaping tiger. After fifteen minutes of exhausted nonsleep, I got up and went back to the machine.

Sometimes I noticed that I had spent an entire night writing Fee Bandolier instead of Charlie Carpenter.

All of this should have been joyous, and most of the time it was. But even when I was most absorbed in my work, during those periods when I had no personal existence, some dormant part of me flailed about in an emotional extremity. After I stopped typing, my fingers trembled—even the fingers trapped in the cast were quivering. I had entered the childhood of Fielding Bandolier, and dread and terror were his familiars. But not all of the trouble came from what I was writing.

During my two-hour naps, I dreamed of being back on the body squad and plunging my hands into dead and dismembered bodies. I encountered the skinny young VC on Striker Tiger and froze, blank and mindless, while he raised his ancient rifle and sent a bullet into my brain. I stepped on a mine and turned into red mist, like Bobby Swett. I walked across a clearing so crowded with dead men that I had to step over their bodies, looked down to see purple-and-silver entrails spilling out of my gut, and fell down in acknowledgment of my own death. Paul Fontaine sat up on his gurney with his gun in his hand and said, Bell, and blew my chest apart with a bullet.

For twenty years, the afternoons had been the hours when I did the bulk of my work. After I forgot how to sleep at night, after I began walking into hell every time I took a nap, those hours turned to stone. What I wrote came out forced and spiritless. I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't write. So I tucked my notebook into my pocket and went out on long walks.

I trudged through Soho. I passed unseeing through Washington Square. I hovered distracted in the Three Lives bookstore and came back to myself in Books & Co., miles away. Now and then, some grudging little incident found its way into the notebook, but most of the time I was in Millhaven. People I had never seen before turned into John Ransom and Tom Pasmore. The lightless eyes and rusty face of Ross McCandless slanted toward me from the window of a passing bus. Block after block, I walked along Livermore Avenue, finally saw the sign outside the White Horse Tavern, and realized that I was on Hudson Street.

Around seven o'clock on what turned out to be the last of these miserable journeys, I walked past a liquor store, stopped moving, and went back and bought a bottle of vodka. If what I needed was unconsciousness, I knew how to get it. I carried the bottle home in the white plastic carrier bag, set it on the kitchen shelf and stared at it. Sweating, I paced around the loft for a long time. Then I went back into the kitchen, twisted the cap off the bottle, and poured the vodka into the sink.

As soon as the last of it disappeared into the drain, I went downstairs for dinner and told everybody I was feeling much better today, thank you, just a little trouble sleeping. I forced myself to eat at least half of the food on my plate, and drank three bottles of mineral water. Maggie Lah came out of the kitchen, took a long look at me, and sat down across the table. "You're in trouble," she said. "What's going on?"

I said I wasn't too sure.

"Sometimes I hear you walking around in the middle of the night. You can't sleep?"

"That's about it."

"You could try going to one of those veterans' meetings. They might help you."

"Veterans of Millhaven don't have meetings," I said, and told her not to worry about me.

She said something about therapy, stood up, kissed the top of my head, and left me alone again.

When I got back into my loft, I double-checked my locks, something I'd been doing four and five times a night since my return, took a shower, put on clean clothes, and went to my desk and turned on the computer. When I saw that my hands were still shaking, Maggie's words came back to me. They sounded no more acceptable now than they had the first time. Years before, I'd gone twice to a veterans' group, but the people there had been in another war altogether. As for therapy, I'd rather go directly to the padded rooms and the electroshock table. I tried to get back into the world of my work and found that I could not even remember the last words I'd written. I called up the chapter, pushed HOME HOME and the button with the arrow that pointed down, which instantly delivered me to the point where I had stopped work that morning. Then the nightly miracle took place once again, and I fell down into the throat of my novel.

3

Something astounding, no other word will do, happened to me the next day. Its cause was an ordinary moment, banal in every outward way; but what it called up was another moment, not at all ordinary, from the archaic story ringed with warnings about looking back I had imagined concealed behind Orpheus and Lot's wife, and this glimpse did turn me into something like a pillar of salt, at least for a while.

My own cries had jerked me up out of the usual daymares, napmares mingling Vietnam and Millhaven. My shirt was stuck to my skin, and the cushion I used as a pillow was slick with sweat. I ripped off the shirt and groaned my way into the bathroom to splash cold water over my face. In a fresh shirt, I went up to my desk, sat down before the computer and searched for that capacity for surrender which gave me access to my book. I hated the whole idea of going outside again. As it had on every other afternoon for the past two weeks, the door into the book refused to open. I gave up, left the machine, and paced around my loft in a state suspended between life and death. My loft seemed like a cage built for some other prisoner altogether. It came to me that my strange afternoon treks around Manhattan might be an essential part of the night's work—that they might be what allowed my imagination to fill itself up again. It also came to me that this was magical thinking. But worthless as it was, it was the best idea I had, and I let myself out of the cage and went out onto Grand Street.

Warm summer light shone on the windows of art galleries and clothing stores, and women from New Jersey and Connecticut strolled like travelers from a more affluent planet among the locals. Today, most of the locals seemed to be young men in pressed jeans and rugby shirts. They were Wall Street trainees, embryo versions of Dick Mueller, who had taken over artists' lofts when the rents in Soho had pushed the artists into Hoboken and Brooklyn. I tried to picture Dick Mueller hovering over the arugula at Dean & DeLuca, but failed. Neither could I see Dick bragging to his friends about the Cindy Sherman photograph he had picked up for a good price at Metro Gallery. My mood began to improve.

I stopped in front of my local video shop, thinking about renting Babette's Feast for the twentieth time. I could catch up on all the Pedro Almodovar films I hadn't seen, or have a private Joan Crawford retrospective, beginning with Strait-Jacket. Along with all the usual Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise posters in the window was one for a line of film noir released on video for the first time. Now we're talking, I thought, and moved up to inspect the poster. Alongside a reproduction of the box for Pickup on South Street was that for From Dangerous Depths, the movie that Tom said had been playing in our neighborhood at the time of the Blue Rose murders. I peered at the picture on the box, looking for details. From Dangerous Depths starred Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino and had been directed by Robert Siodmak. I told myself that I would rent it someday and moved on.

At the Spring Street Bookstore, I bought John Ashbery's Flow Chart and took a quick, unforeseen spin into desperation while I signed the credit slip. I saw myself pouring the vodka into the drain the previous night. I wanted it back, I wanted a big cold glass of liquid narcotic in my hand. As soon as I got out of the bookstore, I went into a cafe and took a table at the opposite end of the room from the bar to order whatever kind of mineral water they had. The waiter brought me an eight-ounce bottle of Pellegrino, and I made myself drink it slowly while I opened the Ashbery book and read the first few pages. The desperation began to recede. I finished the water and devoured another hundred lines of Flow Chart. Then I left some bills on the table and walked back out into the sunlight.

What happened next might have been the culmination of all these events. It might have been the result of getting only two hours of sleep every day or of the wretched dreams that jumped out at me during those hours. But I don't think it was any of those things. I think it happened because it had been waiting to happen. A long gray Mercedes pulled into a parking space across the street, and a huge bearded blond man got out and locked bis door. He looked like Thor dressed in artist uniform, black shirt and black trousers. His hair fell in one long wave to just above his collar, and his beard foamed and bristled. Although I'd never met him, I recognized him as a painter named Allen Stone who had become famous in the period between Andy Warhol and Julian Schnabel. He'd just had a retrospective, negatively reviewed almost everywhere, at the Whitney. Allen Stone turned away from his car and glanced at me with cold, pale blue eyes.

I saw. That was all that happened, but it was enough. I saw. On a mental screen that obliterated the street before me, Heinz Stenmitz's great blond head loomed over me. He was grinning like a wolf, pressing one hand against the back of my neck as I knelt in semidarkness, crowded between his vast legs, my arm across his lap, my fingers held tight around the great veiny red thing straining up at me out of his trousers. This, the center and foreground of the scene, pulsed in my hand. "Put it in your mouth, Timmy," he said, almost pleading, and urged my head toward the other head, my mouth toward the other little mouth. I shuddered, recoiled, and the vision blew apart. Allen Stone had turned away from whatever he saw in my face and was moving past the front of his car toward a set of double black doors set into an ornate building at the level of the sidewalk.

Heat blazed in my face. My scalp tried to peel itself away from my skull. My stomach flipped inside-out, and I stepped forward and deposited a pink mixture of Italian water and partially digested Vietnamese food into the gutter. Too shocked to be embarrassed, I stood looking down at the mess. When my insides contracted again, I drooled out another heap of the pink lava. I wobbled back on the sidewalk and saw two of the well-dressed suburban women, their faces stiff with disgust, standing stock-still about six feet away from me. They jerked their eyes away and hurried across the street.

I wiped my mouth and moved toward the corner, separating myself from the spatter in the gutter. My legs seemed disconnected and much too long. Fee Bandolier, I said to myself.

When I got back to Grand Street, I fell into a chair and began to cry, as if I had needed the safety of my own surroundings to experience the enormity of whatever I felt—shock and grief. Anger, too. A glance on the street had just unlocked a moment, a series of moments, I had stuffed into a chest forty years ago. I had wrapped chain after chain around the chest. Then I had dropped the chest down into a psychic well. It had been bubbling and simmering ever since. Among all the feelings that rushed up from within was astonishment—this had happened to me, to me, and I had deliberately, destructively forgotten all about it.

Memory after memory came flooding back. Partial, fragmentary, patchy as clouds, they brought my own life back to me— they were the missing sections of the puzzle that allowed everything else to find its proper place. I had met Stenmitz in the theater. Slowly, patiently, saying certain things and not saying others, playing on my fear and his adult authority, he had forced me to do what he wanted. I did not know how many days I had met him to kneel down before him and take him in my mouth, but it had gone on for a time that the child-me had experienced as a wretched eternity—four times? Five times? Each occasion had been a separate death.

Around ten, I reeled out to a restaurant where I wouldn't see anyone I knew, reeled through some kind of dinner, then reeled back to my loft. I realized that I had done exactly what I wished: instead of therapy, I had gone straight to electric shocks. At midnight, I took the usual second shower—not, this time, to get ready for work, but to make myself feel clean. About an hour later, I went to bed and almost immediately dropped into the first good eight-hour sleep in two weeks. When I came awake the next morning, I understood what Paul Fontaine had been trying to tell me on Bob Bandolier's front lawn.

4

I spent most of the next day at my desk, feeling as though I were shifting a pile of gravel with a pair of tweezers—real sentences, not instruction-manual sentences, came out, but no more of them than filled two pages. Around four, I turned off the machine and walked away, figuring that it would take me at least a few weeks to adjust to what I had just learned about myself. Too restless to read a book or sit through a movie, I met the old urge to get on my feet and walk somewhere, but two weeks of wandering in an aimless daze were enough. I needed somewhere to go.

Eventually I picked up the telephone book and started looking for veterans' organizations. My sixth call turned up information about a veterans' group that met at six o'clock every night in the basement of a church in the East Thirties—Murray Hill. They took drop-ins. Without being what I wanted, it was what I was looking for, a long walk to an actual destination. I left Grand Street at five-fifteen and turned up at the low, fenced-in brick church ten minutes early. A sign with inset white letters told me to use the vestry door.

5

When I came down into the basement, two skinny guys with thinning hair and untrimmed beards and dressed in parts of different uniforms were arranging a dozen folding chairs in a circle. An overweight, heavily mustached priest in a cassock striped with cigarette ash stood in front of a battered table drinking coffee from a paper cup. All three of them glanced at my splint. An old upright piano stood in one corner, and Bible illustrations hung on the cinder-block walls alongside colored maps of the Holy Land. Irregular brown stains discolored the concrete floor. I felt as though I had walked back into the basement of Holy Sepulchre.

The two skinny vets nodded at me and continued setting up the chairs. The priest came up and grabbed my hand. "Welcome. I'm Father Joe Morgan, but everybody usually calls me Father Joe. It's your first time here, isn't it? Your name is?"

I told him my name.

"And you were in Nam, of course, like Fred and Harry over there—like me, too. Before I went to the seminary, that was. Ran a riverboat in the Delta." I agreed that I had been in Nam, and he poured me a coffee from the metal urn. "That's how we started out, of course, guys like us getting together to see if we could help each other out. These days, you never know who could turn up—we get fellows who were in Grenada, Panama, boys from Desert Storm."

Fred or Harry sent me a sharp, dismissive look, but it didn't refer to me.

"Anyhow, make yourself at home. This is all about sharing, about support and understanding, so if you feel like letting it all hang out, feel free. No holds barred. Right, Harry?"

"Not many," Harry said.

By six, another seven men had come down into the basement, three of them wearing old uniform parts like Harry and Fred, the others in suits or sport jackets. Most of them seemed to know each other. We all seemed to be about the same age. As soon as we took our chairs, five or six men lit cigarettes, including the priest.

"Tonight we have two new faces," he said, exhaling an enormous cloud of gray smoke, "and I'd like us to go around the circle, giving our names and units. After that, anybody who has something to say, jump right in."

Bob, Frank, Lester, Harry, Tim, Jack, Grover, Pee Wee, Juan, Buddy, Bo. A crazy quilt of battalions and divisions. The jumpy little man called Buddy said, "Well, like some of you guys know from when I was here a couple of weeks ago, I was a truck driver in Cam Ranh Bay."

I immediately tuned out. This was what I remembered from the veterans' meeting I'd attended four or five years before, a description of a war I never saw, a war that hardly sounded like war. Buddy had been fired from his messenger job, and his girlfriend had told him that if he started acting crazy again, she'd leave him.

"So what do you do when you act crazy?" someone asked. "What does that mean, crazy?"

"It gets like I can't talk. I just lay up in bed and watch TV all day long, but I don't really see it, you know? I'm like blind and deaf. I'm like in a hole in the ground."

"When I get crazy, I run," said Lester. "I just take off, man, no idea what I'm doin', I get so scared I can't stop, like there's something back there comin' after me."

Jack, a man in a dark blue suit, said, "When I get scared, I take my rifle and go up on the roof. It's not loaded, but I aim it at people. I think about what it would be like if I started shooting."

We all looked at Jack, and he shrugged. "It helps."

Father Joe talked to Jack for a while, and I tuned out again. I wondered how soon I could leave. Juan told a long story about a friend who had shot himself in the chest after coming back from a long patrol. Father Joe talked for a long time, and Buddy started to twitch. He wanted us to tell him what to do about his girlfriend.

"Tim, you haven't said anything yet." I looked up to see Father Joe looking at me with glistening eyes. Whatever he had said to Juan had moved him. "Is there anything you'd like to share with the group?"

I was going to shake my head and pass, but a scene rose up before me, and I said, "When I first got to Nam, I was on this graves registration squad at Camp White Star. One of the men I worked with was called Scoot." I described Scoot kneeling beside Captain Havens' body bag, saying He nearly got in and out before I could pay my respects, and told them what he had done to the body.

For a moment no one spoke, and then Bo, one of the men in clothing assembled from old uniforms, said, "There's this thing, this place I can't stop thinking about. I didn't even see what the hell happened there, but it got stuck in my head."

"Let it out," said the priest.

"We were in Darlac Province, way out in the boonies, way north." Bo leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. "This is gonna sound a little funny." Before Father Joe could tell him to let it out again, he tilted his head and glanced sideways in the circle at me. "But what, Tim? what Tim said reminded me. I mean, I never saw any American do that kind of junk, and I hate it when people talk like that's all we ever did. You want to make me crazy, all you gotta do is tell me about so-called atrocities we did over there, right? Because personally, I never saw one. Not one. What I did see, what I saw plenty of times, was Americans doing some good for the people over there. I'm talking about food and medicine, plus helping kids."

Every man in the circle uttered some form of assent—we had all seen that, too.

"Anyhow, this one time, it was like we walked into this ghost town. The truth is, we got lost, we had this lieutenant fresh out of training, and he just got lost, plain and simple. He had us moving around in a big circle, which he was the only one who didn't understand what we were doing. The rest of us, we said, fuck it, he thinks he's a leader, let him lead. We get back to base, let him explain. So we're out there three-four days, and the lieutenant is just beginning to get the picture. And then we start smelling this fire."

"Like an old fire, you know? Not like a forest fire, like a burning building. Whenever the wind comes in from the north, we smell ashes and dead meat. And pretty soon, the smell is so strong we know we're almost on top of it, whatever it is. Now the lieutenant has a mission, he can maybe save his ass if he brings back something good—hell, it doesn't even have to be good, it just has to be something he can bring back, like he was looking for it all along. So we hump along through the jungle for about another half hour, and the stench gets worse and worse. It smells like a burned-down slaughterhouse. And besides that, there's no noise around us, no birds, no monkeys, none of that screeching we heard every other single day. The jungle is deserted, man, that fucker's empty, except for us."

"So in about half an hour we come up to this place, and we all freeze—it isn't a hamlet, it isn't a ville, it's out in the jungle, right? But it looks like some kind of town or something, except most of it's burned down, and the rest of it is still burning. You could tell from the charred stakes that there used to be a big stockade fence around it—some of it's still sticking up. But we can see this goddamn grid, with little tiny lots and everything, where these people had their huts all lined up on these narrow streets. All this was straw, I guess, and it's gone—there's nothing left but holes in the ground, and some flooring here and there. And the bodies."

"Lots of bodies, lots and lots of bodies. Someone pulled a lot of them into a big pile and tried to burn them, but all that happened was they split open. These were all women and children, and a couple old men. Yards—the first Yards I ever saw, and they're all dead. It looked like that Jonestown, that Jim Jones thing, except these bodies had bullet holes. The stink was incredible, it made your eyes water. It looked like someone had all these people stand in a big ring and then just blasted them to pieces. We didn't say a word. You can't talk about what you don't understand."

"At the far end of this place, there's part of a mud wall and a lot of blood on the ground. I saw a busted-up M-16 lying next to a big iron cookpot hung up over a burned-out fire. Somebody had did a job on that M-16. They busted the stock right off, and the barrel was all bent out of true. I looked into the cookpot and wished I hadn't even thought of it. Through the froth on top, I could see bones floating down in this kind of jelly, this soupy jelly. Long bones, like leg bones. And a rib cage."

"And then I saw what I really didn't want to see. Next to the pot was a baby. Cut in half—just sliced in half, right across the belly. There was maybe a foot of ground between the top half and the bottom half, where his guts were. It was a boy. Maybe a year old. And he wasn't any ordinary Yard baby, because he had blue eyes. And his nose was different—straight, like ours."

Bo knotted his hands together and stared at them. "It was like we were killing our own, you know? Like we were killing our own. I couldn't take it anymore. I said to myself, This is too weird, all I'm doing from now on is concentrating on getting out of this place. I said, I'm through with seeing things. This right here is it. I said, From now on, all I'm doing is following orders—man, I'm already done."

Father Joe waited a second, nodding like a sage. "Do you feel better about this incident, now that you've told the group about it?"

"I don't know." Bo retreated into himself. "Maybe."

Jack hesitantly raised his hand a couple of inches off his lap. "I don't want to keep going up on my roof. Could we talk about that some more?"

"You never heard of willpower?" Lester asked.

The meeting broke up a little while later, and Bo disappeared almost instantly. I helped Harry and Frank stack the chairs while Father Joe told me how much I'd gotten out of the meeting. "These feelings are hard to let go of. Lots of times I've seen men experience things they couldn't even grasp until a couple of days went by." He put a hand on my shoulder. "You might not believe this, Tim, but something happened to you while Bo was sharing with us. He reached you. Come back soon, will you, and let the others help you get through it?"

I said I'd think about it.

6

When I opened the door to my loft, the red light on the answering machine flashed like a beacon in the darkness, but I ignored it and went into the kitchen, turning on lights along the way. I couldn't even imagine wanting to talk to anyone. I wondered if I would ever know the truth about anything at all, if the actual shape of my life, of other lives too, would ever remain constant. What had really happened in Bachelor's encampment? What had John met there and what had he done? I made myself a cup of herbal tea, carried it back into the main part of the loft, and sat down in front of the paintings that had been shipped from Millhaven. I had looked at them during the long nights of work, been pleased and delighted by them, but until this moment I had never really seen them—seen them together.

The Vuillard was a much greater painting than Byron Dorian's, but by whose standards? John Ransom's? April's? By mine, at least at this moment, they had so much in common that they spoke in the same voice. For all their differences, each seemed crammed with possibility, with utterance, like Glenroy Breakstone's saxophone or like the human throat—overflowing with expression. It occurred to me that for me, both paintings concerned the same man. The isolated boy who stared out of Vuillard's deceptively comfortable world would grow into the man turned toward Byron Dorian's despairing little bar. Bill Damrosch in childhood, Bill Damrosch near the end of his life—the painted figures seemed to have leapt onto the wall from the pages of my manuscript, as if where Fee Bandolier went, Damrosch trailed after. Heinz Stenmitz meant that I was part of that procession, too.

The red light blinked at my elbow, and I finished the tea, set down the cup, and pushed the playback button.

"It's Tom," said his voice. "Are you home? Are you going to answer? Well, why aren't you home? I wanted to talk to you about something kind of interesting that turned up yesterday. Maybe I'm crazy. But do you remember talking about Lenny Valentine? Turns out he's not fictional, he's real after all. Do we care? Does it matter? Call me back. If you don't, I'll try you again. This is a threat."

I rewound the tape, looking across the room at the paintings, trying to remember where I had heard or read the name Lenny Valentine—it had the oddly unreal "period" atmosphere of an old paperback with a tawdry cover. Then I remembered that Tom had used Lenny Valentine as one of the possible sources for the name Elvee Holdings. How could this hypothetical character be "real after all"? I didn't think I wanted to know, but I picked up the receiver and dialed.

7

I waited through his message, and said, "Hi, it's Tim. What are you trying to say? There is no Lenny—"

Tom picked up and started talking. "Oh, good. You got my message. You can deal with it or not, that's up to you, but I think this time I'm going to have to do something, for once in my life."

"Slow down," I said, slightly alarmed and even more puzzled than before. Tom's words had flown past so, quickly that I could now barely retain them. "We have to decide about what?"

"Let me tell you what I've been doing lately," Tom said. For a week or so, he had busied himself with the two or three other cases he had mentioned to me in the hospital, but without shedding the depression I had seen there. "I was just going through the motions. Two of them turned out all right, but I can't take much credit for that. Anyhow, I decided to take another look through all those Allentowns, and any other town with a name that seemed possible, to see if I could find anything I missed the first time."

"And you found Lenny Valentine?"

"Well, first I found Jane Wright," he said. "Remember Jane? Twenty-six, divorced, murdered in May 1977?"

"Oh, no," I said.

"Exactly. Jane Wright lived in Allerton, Ohio, a town of about fifteen thousand people on the Ohio River. Nice little place, I'm sure. From 1973 to 1979, they had a few random murders— well, twelve actually, two a year, bodies in fields, that kind of thing—and about half of them went unsolved, but I gather from the local paper that most people assumed that the killer, if there was one single killer, was some kind of businessman whose work took him through town every now and then. And then they stopped."

"Jane Wright," I said. "In Allerton, Ohio. I don't get it."

"Try this. The name of the homicide detective in charge of the case was Leonard Valentine."

"It can't be," I said. "This is impossible. We had this all worked out. Paul Fontaine was in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in May of 'seventy-seven."

"Precisely. He was in Pennsylvania."

"That old man I talked to, Hubbel, pointed right at Fontaine's picture."

"Maybe his eyesight isn't too good."

"His eyesight is terrible," I said, remembering him pushing his beak into the photograph.

Tom said nothing for a moment, and I groaned. "You know what this means? Paul Fontaine is the only detective in Millhaven, as far as we know, who could not have killed Jane Wright. So what was he doing at that house?"

"I suppose he was beginning a private little investigation of his own," Tom said. "Could it be a coincidence that a woman named Jane Wright is killed in a town with the right sort of name in the right month of the right year? And that the detective in charge of the case has the initials LV, as in Elvee? Is there any way you can see that as coincidental?"

"No," I said.

"Me, neither," Tom said. "But I don't understand this LV business anymore. Would someone call himself Lenny Valentine because it starts with the same letters as Lang Vo? That just doesn't sound right."

"Tom," I said, remembering the idea I'd had that morning, "could you check on the ownership of a certain building for me?"

"Right now, you mean?"

I said yes, right now.

"Sure, I guess," he said. "What building is it?"

I told him, and without asking any questions, he switched on his computer and worked his way into the civic records. "Okay," he said. "Coming up." Then it must have come up, because I could hear him grunt with astonishment. "You know this already, right? You know who owns that building."

"Elvee Holdings," I said. "But it was just a guess until I heard you grunt."

"Now tell me what it means."

"I guess it means I have to come back," I said, and fell silent with the weight of all that meant. "I'll get the noon flight tomorrow. I'll call you as soon as I get there."

"As soon as you get here, you'll see me at the gate. And you have your pick of the Florida Suite, the Dude Ranch, or the Henry the Eighth Chamber."

"The what?"

"Those are the names of the guest rooms. Lamont's parents were a little bit eccentric. Anyhow, I'll air them out, and you can choose between them."

"Fontaine wasn't Fee," I said, finally stating what both of us knew. "He wasn't Franklin Bachelor."

"I'm partial to the Henry the Eighth Chamber myself," Tom said. "I'd suggest you stay away from the Dude Ranch, though. Splinters."

"So who is he?"

"Lenny Valentine. I just wish I knew why."

"And how do we find out who Lenny Valentine is?" Then an idea came to me. "I bet we can use that building."

"Ah," Tom said. "Suddenly, I'm not depressed anymore. Suddenly, the sun came up."

PART SIXTEEN

FROM DANGEROUS DEPTHS

1

And so, again because of an unsolved murder, I flew back to Millhaven, carried the same two bags out again into the bright, science-fictional spaces of its airport, and again met the embrace of an old friend with my own. A twinge, no more, blossomed and faded in my shoulder. I had removed the blue cast shortly after putting down the telephone the night before. Tom snatched my hanging bag and stepped back to grin at me. He looked revived, younger, and more vital than when he had visited me in the hospital. Everything about him seemed fresh, and the freshness was more than an aura of soap, shampoo, and clear blue eyes: it was the result of an awakened excitement, a readiness to join the fray.

Tom asked about my shoulder and said, "This might be crazy—it's so little evidence, to bring you all the way back here."

We were walking through the long gray tube, lined with windows on the runway side, that led from the gate into the center of the terminal.

"I don't care how little it is." I felt the truth of it as soon as I had spoken—the size of the evidence didn't matter when the evidence was right. If we could apply pressure in the right place, a dead woman in a small town in Ohio would let us pry open the door to the past. Tom and I had worked out a way to do that on the telephone last night. "I liked Paul Fontaine, and even though I had what looked like proof, I never—"

"I could never quite believe it, either," Tom said. "It all fit together so neatly, but it still felt wrong."

"But this old queen in Tangent, Hubbel, pointed right at him. He couldn't see very well, but he wasn't blind."

"So he made a mistake," Tom said. "Or we're making one. We'll find out, soon enough."

The glass doors opened before us, and we walked outside. Across the curving access road, hard bright sunlight fell onto the miles of pale concrete of the short-term parking lot. I stepped down off the curb, and Tom said, "No, I parked up this way."

He gestured toward the far end of the passenger loading zone, where a shiny blue Jaguar Vanden Plas sat in the shade of the terminal just below a NO PARKING sign. "I didn't know you had a car," I said.

"It mainly lives in my garage." He opened the trunk and put my bags inside, then lowered the lid again. The trunk made a sound like the closing of a bank vault. "Something came over me, I guess. I saw it in a showroom window, and I had to have it. That was ten years ago. Guess how many miles it has on it."

"Fifty thousand," I said, thinking I was being conservative. In ten years, you could put fifty thousand miles on your car just by driving once a week to the grocery store.

"Eight," he said. "I don't get out much."

The interior of the car looked like the cockpit of a private jet. When Tom turned the key, the car made the noise of an enormous, extremely self-satisfied cat being stroked in a pool of sunlight. "Lots of times, when I can't stand being in the house anymore, when I'm stuck or when there's something I know I'm not seeing, I go out into the garage and take the car apart. I don't just clean the spark plugs, I clean the engine." We rolled down the access road and slipped without pausing into the light traffic on the expressway. "I guess it isn't transport, it's a hobby, like fly fishing." He smiled at the picture he had just evoked, Tom Pasmore in one of his dandy's suits sitting on the floor of his garage in the middle of the night, polishing up the exhaust manifold. Probably his garage floor sparkled; I thought the entire garage probably resembled an operating theater.

He brought me out of this reverie with a question. "If we're not wasting our time and Fontaine was innocent, who else could it be? Who is Fee Bandolier?"

This was what I had been considering during the flight. "He has to be one of the men who used Billy Ritz as an informant. According to Glenroy, that means he's either Hogan, Monroe, or McCandless."

"Do you have a favorite?"

I shook my head. "I think we can rule out McCandless on grounds of age."

Tom asked me how old I thought McCandless was, and I said about fifty-seven or fifty-eight, maybe sixty.

"Guess again. He's no older than fifty. He just looks that way."

"Good Lord," I said, realizing that the intimidating figure who had questioned me in the hospital was about my own age. He instantly became my favorite candidate.

"How about you?" I asked. "Who do you think he could be?"

"Well, I managed to get into the city's personnel files, and I went through most of the police department, looking for their hiring dates."

"And?"

"And Ross McCandless, Joseph Monroe, and Michael Hogan were all hired from other police departments within a few months of each other in 1979. So was Paul Fontaine. Andy Belin hired all four of them."

"I don't suppose one of them came from Allerton?"

"None of them came from anywhere in Ohio—McCandless claims to be from Massachusetts, Monroe says he's from California, and Hogan's file says he's from Delaware."

"Well, at least we each have the same list," I said.

"Now all we have to do is figure out what to do with it," Tom said, and for the rest of the drive to Eastern Shore Road we talked about that—what to do with the people on our list.

2

His garage looked a lot more like the service bays in the gas stations on Houston Street than an operating room. I think it might have been even messier than the service bays. For some reason, I found this reassuring. We got the bags out of the Jaguar's trunk, walked through the piles of rags and boxes of tools, and after Tom swung down the door of the old garage, went into the house through the kitchen door. I felt a surge of pleasure— it was good to be in Tom Pasmore's house again.

He led me upstairs and past his office to a narrow, nearly vertical staircase which had once led up to the servants' rooms on the third floor. An only slightly worn gray-and-blue carpet with a floral pattern covered the stairs and extended into the third-floor hallway. Over each of the three doors hung an elaborately hand-painted sign announcing the name of the room. Dude Ranch Bunkhouse, Henry VIII Chamber, Florida Suite.

"I bet you thought I was kidding," Tom said. "Lamont's parents really were a little strange, I think. Now Dude Ranch has saddles and Wanted posters and bleached skulls, Henry has a suit of armor and an enclosed bed that's probably too small for you, and Florida has violent wallpaper, rattan chairs, and a stuffed alligator. But it's big."

"I'll take it," I said. "Delius once wrote something called 'Florida Suite.' "

He opened the door to a set of rooms with dormer windows and white wallpaper printed with the flat patterns of enormous fronds—it reminded me of Saigon's dining room. Yellow cushions brightened the rattan furniture, and the eight-foot alligator grinned toward a closet, as if waiting for dinner to walk out.

"Funny you should remember that," Tom said. "There's a picture of Delius in the bedroom. Do you need help hanging up your things? No? Then I'll meet you in my office, one floor down, whenever you're ready."

I took my bags into the bedroom and heard him walk out of the suite. Over a glass-topped bamboo table with conch shells hung a photograph of Delius that made him look like the physics master in a prewar English public school. Frederick Delius and an alligator, that seemed about right. I washed my hands and face, wincing a little when I moved my right arm the wrong way, dried myself off, and went downstairs to give Tom the last part of the plan we had been working out in the car.

3

"Dick Mueller was the first person to mention April's project to you, wasn't he? So he hints that he came across something in the manuscript."

"Something worth a lot of money."

"And then he arranges our meeting. And our boy gets rattled."

"We hope," I said. We were seated on the chesterfield in Tom's office, with the three surreal computer dreams spread out on the table before us. Now that we knew the identity of the building in the defaced photograph, the computer's lunatic suggestions made a kind of sense—the pyramids and ocean liners were exaggerations of the marquee, and the glass guardhouses had grown out of the ticket booth. Bob Bandolier had intended to murder Heinz Stenmitz in the most fitting place possible, in front of the Beldame Oriental. The presence of either other people or Stenmitz himself had caused a change in Bandolier's plans, but the old theater had retained its importance to his son.

"It has to be where he's keeping his notes," I went on. "It's the last place left."

Tom nodded. "Do you think you can really convince him that you're Dick Mueller? Can you do that voice?"

"Not yet, but I'm going to take lessons," I said. "Do you have a phone book in this room?"

Tom got up and pulled the directory off a shelf beside his desk. "Lessons in how to speak Millhaven?" He handed me the book.

"Just wait," I said, and looked up Byron Dorian's number.

4

Dorian sounded unsurprised to hear from me: what did surprise him, mildly, was that I was back in Millhaven. He told me that he was working on getting a show in a Chicago gallery and that he had done another Blue Rose painting. He asked me how my writing was going. I spoke a couple of meaningless sentences about how the writing was going, and then I did succeed in surprising him.

"You want to learn how to talk with a Millhaven accent?"

"I'll have to explain later, but it's important that the people I talk to think I'm who I say I am."

"This is wild," Dorian said. "You're even from here."

"But I don't have the accent anymore. I know you can do it. I heard you do your father's voice. That's the accent I want."

"Oh, boy. I guess I can try. What do you want to say?"

"How about 'The police will be very interested'?"

"The p'leece'll be very innarestud," he said immediately.

" 'This could be important for your career.' "

"This cud be importint f'yore c'reer. What's this about, anyhow?"

" 'Hello.' "

"H'lo. Does this have anything to do with April?"

"No, it doesn't. I don't want to go off on a tangent.' "

"Are you saying that really, or do you want me to say it in Millhaven?"

"Say it in Millhaven."

"I doan wanna go off onna tangunt. The whole thing is to put your voice up into your head and keep things flat. When you want emphasis, you just sort of stretch the word out. You know how you say Millhaven?"

"Muhhaven," I said.

"Close. It's really M'avun. Just listen to the guys on the news sometime—they all say M'avun. It's almost maven, but not quite."

"M'avun," I said. "H'lo. This cud be importint f'yore c'reer."

"That was good. Anything else?"

I tried to think what else I would need. "Movie theater. Beldame Oriental. This manuscript has some interesting information."

"Movee theeadur. Beldayme Orientul. This manyewscrip has got sum innaresteen infermashun. Oh, and if you want to say a time, you know? Like five o'clock? You just say five clock, unless it's twelve—you always say twelve o'clock, I don't know why."

"I wanna meet yoo at five clock to talk about sum innaresteen infermashun."

"Tock, not talk—tock about. And ta, not to. Ta tock. Otherwise, you're sounding pretty good."

"Tock," I said.

"Now you're tockin'," he said. "Good luck, whatever this is."

I hung up and looked over at Tom. "Do you realize," he asked, "that you're probably trying to learn to talk in exactly the same way you did when you were a little boy?"

"I'm tryna lurn ta tock like Dick Mueller," I said.

5

While Tom paced around the room, I called each of them in turn—McCandless, Monroe, and Hogan—saying that I was Dick Mueller, a good friend and colleague of April Ransom's. I put my voice up into my head and kept it flat as Kansas. H'lo. I jus happena to cum across this innaresteen manyewscrip April musta hid beheyn the books in my office, because that's where I founnit. Iss fulla innaresteen infurmashun, ya know? Very innaresteen infurmashun, speshally if yur a p'leeceman in M'a-ven. In fact, this cud be importint f'yore c'reer.

McCandless said, "If what you found is so important, Mr. Mueller, why don't you bring it in?"

Hogan said, "The April Ransom case is over. Thanks for calling, but you might as well just throw the manuscript away."

Monroe said, "What is this, some kind of threat? What kind of information are you talking about?"

I doan wanna go off onna tangent, but I think iss importunt for you ta tock ta me.

McCandless: "If you want to talk about something, come down here to Armory Place."

Hogan: "I have the impression that we are talking. Why don't you just say what you have to say?"

Monroe: "Maybe you could be a little more specific, Mr. Mueller."

I wanna meet you inside the ol movie theeadur, the Beldame Orientul, five clock tomorrow morneen.

McCandless: "I don't think we have any more to say to each other, Mr. Mueller. Good-bye."

Hogan: "If you want to see me, Mr. Mueller, you can come to Armory Place. Good-bye."

Monroe: "Sure. I love it. Give my best wishes to your doctor, will you?" He hung up without bothering to say good-bye.

I put down the receiver, and Tom stopped pacing.

6

"How much time do you think we have?" I asked.

"At least until dark."

"How are we going to get in?"

"Who do you think inherited the Lamont von Heilitz collection of picklocks and master keys? Give me enough time, and I can get in anywhere. But it won't take five minutes to get into the Beldame Oriental."

"How can you be so sure?"

Tom let his mouth drop open, raised his shoulders, spread his hands, and gazed goggle-eyed around the room. "Oh. You went down and looked at it." He came back to the couch and sat beside me. "The entry doors on Livermore Avenue open with a simple key that works a deadbolt. The same key opens the doors on the far side of the ticket booth." He pulled an ordinary brass Medeco key from his jacket pocket and set it on the table. "There's an exit to the alley behind the theater—double doors with a push-bar that opens them from the inside. On the outside, a chain with a padlock runs between the two bracket handles. So that's easy, too." From the same pocket, he removed a Yale key of the same size and color and placed it beside the first. "We could also go in through the basement windows on the alley, but I imagine you've had enough B&E to last you a while."

"So do you want to go in through the front or the back?"

"The alley. No one will see us," Tom said. "But it has one drawback. Once we're inside, we can't replace the chain. On the other hand, one of us could go in, and the other one could reattach the chain and wait."

"In front?"

"No. On the other side of the alley there's a wooden fence that juts out from the back of a restaurant. They line up the garbage cans inside the fence. The top half of the fence is louvered—there are spaces between the slats."

"You want us to wait out there until we see someone let himself into the theater?"

"No, I want you inside, and me behind the fence. When I see someone go in, I come around to the front. Those old movie theaters have two entrances to the basement, one in front, near the manager's office, and the other in back, close to the doors. In the center of the basement there's a big brick pillar, and behind that is the boiler. On the far side are old dressing rooms from the days when they used to have live shows between the movies. If I come down in front, he'll hear me, but he won't know you are already there. I could drive him right back to the pillar, where you'd be hiding, and you could surprise him."

"Have you already been inside the theater?"

"No," he said. "I saw the plans. They're on file at City Hall, and this morning I went down there to check them out."

"What am I supposed to do when I 'surprise' him?"

"That's up to you, I guess," Tom said. "All you have to do is hold him still long enough for me to get to you."

"You know what I think you really want to do? I think you want to stick a gun in his back while he's unlocking the chain, march him downstairs, and make him take us to the notes."

"And then what do I want to do?"

"Kill him. You have a gun, don't you?"

He nodded. "Yes, I have a gun. Two, in fact."

"I'm not carrying a gun," I said.

"Why not?"

"I don't want to kill anyone again, ever."

"You could carry it without using it."

"Okay," I said. "I'll carry the other gun if you come inside the theater with me. But I'm not going to use it unless I absolutely have to, and I'm only going to wound him."

"Fine," he said, though he looked unhappy. "I'll go in with you. But are you absolutely clear about your reasons? It's almost as if you want to protect him. Do you have any doubts?"

"If one of those three turns up at the theater tonight, how could I?"

"That's just what I was wondering," Tom said. "Whoever turns up is going to be Fielding Bandolier-Franklin Bachelor. Alias Lenny Valentine. Alias whatever his name is now."

I said that I knew that.

He went to his desk and opened the top drawer. The computer hid his hands, but I heard two heavy metal objects thunk against the wood. "You get a Smith & Wesson .38, okay? A Police Special."

"Fine," I said. "What do you have, a machine gun?"

"A Glock," he said. "Nine millimeter. Never been fired." He came around the desk with the guns in his hands. The smaller one was cupped in a clip-on brown holster like a wallet. The .38 looked almost friendly, next to the Glock.

"Someone I once helped out thought I might need them sometime."

They had never been sold. They were unregistered—they had come out of the air. "I thought you helped innocent people," I said.

"Oh, he was innocent—he just had a lot of colorful friends." Tom pushed himself up. "I'm going to make the coffee and put it in a thermos. There's food in the fridge, when you get hungry. We'll leave here about eight-thirty, so you have about three hours to kill. Do you want to take a nap? You might be grateful for it, later."

"What are you going to do?"

"I'll be around. There are a few projects I'm working on."

"You have somebody watching the theater, don't you? That's why we're not already on the way there."

He smiled. "Well, I do have two boys posted down there. They'll call me if they see anything—I don't think our man will show up until after midnight, but there's no sense in being stupid."

I carried the revolver upstairs and lay down on the bed with my head propped against the pillows. Three floors below, the garage door squeaked up on its metal track. After a couple of minutes, I heard a steady tapping of metal against metal float up from inside the garage. I aimed the revolver at the dormer window, the alligator, the tip of Delius's pointed nose. Fee Bandolier aroused so much sorrow and horror in me, such a mixture of sorrow and horror, that shooting him would be like killing a mythical creature. I lowered my arm and fell asleep with my fingers around the grip.

7

By eight-fifteen we were back in the Jaguar, heading south toward Livermore Avenue. My stomach was full, my mind was clear, and because Tom's .38 hung on its clip from my belt, I felt like I was pretending to be a cop. A fat red thermos full of coffee stood between us. Tom seemed to have nothing on his mind but driving his pampered car. He was wearing black slacks and a black T-shirt under a black linen sports jacket, and he looked like Allen Stone without the beard and the paranoia. In more or less the same clothes, black jeans, one of Tom's black T-shirts, and a black zippered jacket, I looked like a middle-aged burglar. About twenty minutes later, we were moving past the St. Alwyn, and five blocks farther south, the Jaguar slowly cruised past the front of what once had been the Beldame Oriental. On the far side of the street, a black teenager in a Raiders sweatshirt and a backward baseball cap squatted on his haunches and leaned against the yellow brick wall of a supermarket. When Tom glanced at him through the Jaguar's open window, the teenager shook his head sharply and bounced to his feet. He flipped a wave toward the Jaguar and started walking north on Livermore, rolling from side to side and tilting his head back as if listening to some private music.

"Well, no one's gone in through the front yet, anyhow,"

Tom said.

"Who's that?" I indicated the swaggering boy.

"That's Clayton. When we get to the alley, you'll see Wiggins. He's very reliable, too."

"How did you happen to meet them?"

"They came to visit me one day after seeing a story in the Ledger. I think they were about fourteen, and I believe they took the bus." Tom smiled to himself and turned off to the right. Directly ahead of us on the left was a white building with a sign that read MONARCH PARKING. "They wanted to know if the story in the paper was true, and if it was, they wanted to work for me." Tom turned into the garage and drove up to the STOP HERE sign. "So I tried them out on a few little things, and they always did exactly what I asked. If I said, stand on the corner of Illinois Avenue and Third Street and tell me how many times a certain white car goes past you, they'd stand there all day, counting white cars."

We got out of the Jaguar, and a uniformed attendant trotted toward us on the curved drive sloping down to the lower floor. He saw the Jaguar and his face went smooth with lust. "Could be any time between two and six in the morning," Tom said. The attendant said that was fine, he'd be there all night, and took the keys, barely able to look away from the car. He went into his booth and returned with a ticket.

Tom and I walked out of the garage into the beginning of twilight. Grains of darkness bloomed in the midst of the fading light. Tom turned away from Livermore, crossed the street, and led me into the alley at the end of the block. Ten feet wide, the alley was already half in night. A tall boy leaning against a dumpster up at the far end straightened up when we moved in out of the light. "Wiggins?" Tom asked. "Nope," said Wiggins, his voice soft but carrying, "but check that chain." He gave Tom a mock salute and sauntered off.

Tom moved ahead of me as the boy slipped out of the alley by the other end. Thirty feet along, opposite a high brown half-louvered fence, stood the long flat windowless back of the Beldame Oriental. Whorls of spray paint covered the gray cement blocks and surrounded the two wide black doors. I came up beside Tom. The thick length of chain that should have joined the two doors hung from the left bracket, and the padlock dangled from the right. Tom frowned at me, thinking.

"Is he in there?" I whispered.

"I think I should have sent Clayton and Wiggins down here right after you did your Dick Mueller act. I thought he'd wait until the end of his shift."

"To do what?"

"Move the papers, of course." At what must have been my expression of absolute dismay, he said, "It's just a guess. He'll come back, anyhow."

He pulled at the right bracket, and both doors moved forward a quarter of an inch and then clanked to a stop. "Ah, there's another lock," Tom said. "I forgot that one." Until Tom spoke, I had not seen the round, slightly indented shape of the lock beneath the bracket.

From the inside of his jacket he pulled a long dark length of fabric, held it by one end, and let its own weight unroll it. Keys of different sizes and long, variously shaped metal rods fit into slots and pockets all along the heavy, ribbed fabric. "Lamont's famous kit," he said. He bent forward to look at the lock and then took a silver key from one of the pockets in the cloth. He moved up to the door, poised the key, and nudged it squarely into the slot. He nodded. When he turned the key, we heard the bolt sliding back into its housing. Tom put the key into his jacket pocket, rolled up the length of fabric, and slid the fabric into a pouch on the inside of his jacket. I vaguely saw the shape of the Glock's handle protruding from a soft, glovelike holster just in front of his right hip.

"Try the penlight," he said, and both of us pulled from our pockets the narrow, tubular flashlights he had produced just before we left the house. I turned around and pushed up the switch. A six-inch circle of bright light appeared on the brown wall opposite. I moved the light sideways, and the circle swept along the buildings across the alley, widening as it moved toward the other end. "Good, aren't they?" he said. "Lot of power, for a little thing."

"Why would he come back, if he already moved his notes?"

"Dick Mueller. He'll imagine that Mueller will try to outfox him by showing up early, and so he'll show up even earlier."

"Where would he put the notes?"

"I'm thinking about that," Tom said, and grasped the bracket and opened the right half of the double doors. "Shall we?"

I looked over his shoulder. In ten minutes the street lamps would switch on. "Okay," I said, and moved past him into the pure darkness of the theater.

As Tom closed the door behind us, I switched on the penlight and ran it over the dusty cement wall to our right and found the single black door in front of us that opened into the main body of the theater. To my left, wide concrete steps led down into the basement. "Over here," Tom said. I swung the light toward the door he had just closed and zigzagged it around until I found the interior indentation, painted over with black, that matched the one on the outside. "Good, hold it there," Tom said, and relocked the door. I trained the yellow circle of light on him as he unfolded the cloth, inserted the key, and packed the kit away into his jacket again.

"You know, those notes might still be here. Fee might have come over here from Armory Place right after we called and unlocked the chain to make it easier to get in tonight."

He switched on his light and played it over the door. He held the beam on the doorknob and switched off the penlight as soon as he took the handle. I also turned off mine, and Tom opened the door.

8

After the door closed behind us, Tom placed the tips of his fingers in the small of my back and urged me forward into a dimensionless void. I remembered a long stretch of empty floor between the first row of seats and the back exit; in any case, I knew that all I was stepping toward so cautiously was the aisle; but it was like being blind, and I put my hands out in front of me. "What?" I said, whispering for no rational reason. Tom nudged me forward again, and I took another two cautious steps and waited. "Turn around," Tom whispered back to me. I heard his feet moving quietly on the bare cement of the theater's floor and turned around, less out of obedience than fear that he was going to disappear. I heard the knob turning in the exit door. If he goes out, I thought, so do I. The door swung open an inch or two, and I realized what he was doing—a distinct line of grayish light shone along the edge of the door. He opened the door another few inches, and a column of gray light shone in the darkness. A shaft of the rough surface of the cement floor, painted black and lightly traced with dust, opened like an eye in front of the shining column. We would be able to see anyone who came into the theater.

He gently shut the door. Absolute blackness closed in on us again. Two soft footsteps came toward me, and his hand whispered against cloth as it slid into his pocket. There was a sharp click! and a round beam of yellow light, startlingly well defined and so physical it seemed solid, cut through the darkness and picked out the last two seats in the first row. "Tom," I began, but before I got any further, he had snapped off the penlight, leaving me with the shadow image of the raised seats. The floor moved under my feet like the deck of a boat. Over the shadow-flash image of the chairs, the hot beam of light hung in my eyes like the ghost of a flashbulb, increasing the darkness.

"I know," Tom said. "I just wanted to get a general idea."

"Let's just stand here for a couple of minutes," I said, and pressed the burning circle in my back against the wall. The floor immediately stopped swaying. Through the jacket, the cool roughness of the wall seeped toward my skin. I remembered the walls of the Beldame Oriental. Red, printed with a raised pattern of random, irregular swirls, they were stony, as abrasive as coral, sometimes sweaty with a chill layer of condensation. I bent my knees to concentrate the pressure on the hooks and ratchets, flattened my palms against the rough stipple of the cement, and waited for details to swim up out of the blank dark wall in front of me. Tom's soft, slow breathing at my side seemed indistinguishable from my own.

A sense of space and dimension began to shape the darkness. I began to be aware that I stood near one corner of a large tilted box that grew smaller as it rose toward the far end. After a time, I could make out before me the raised edge of the stage as a slight shimmer, like rays of heat coming up off a highway. This disappeared as Tom Pasmore moved in front of me and then returned when he moved quietly away up the side of the theater. I heard his footsteps dampen but not disappear as he left the cement apron extending from the first row of seats to the stage and stepped onto the carpeting. The shimmer solidified into the long swelling shape of the stage, and the seats gradually became visible as a dark, solid triangle fanning up and out from a point a few feet from where I stood. Tom's face was a faint, pale blotch up the aisle.

At the far end of the theater was another aisle, I remembered, and the wide space of a central passage, probably mandated by the fire department, divided the rows of seats in half.

I could now just about make out the curved backs of the nearest individual seats, and I had a dim sense of the width of the aisle. Beneath the pale smudge of his face, Tom was a black shape melting in and out of the darkness surrounding him. I followed him up the aisle toward the front of the theater. When we reached the last row, Tom stopped moving and turned around. A metallic glint like a slipperiness in the air marked the panel in the lobby door. Looking down, we could see a great soft darkness over the stage that must have been the curtains.

The gleam of the metal plate disappeared as he put his hand over it, and the door yielded before him in another widening column of shining gray light.

The lobby was filled with hazy illumination from the oval windows set into thick doors opposite leading out to the old ticket booth and the glass doors on Livermore Avenue.

Two chest-high pieces of wooden furniture stood in the place of the old candy counter. Even in the partial light, the lobby seemed smaller than I had remembered and cleaner than I had expected. At its far end, another set of doors with metal hand plates led into the aisle at the other side of the theater. I went up to the furniture where the candy counter had been, bent down to look at a round carving in what I thought was the back of a shelf unit, and saw ornate letters in the midst of the filigree. I took out my penlight and shone it on the letters, inri. I pointed the light at what looked like a lectern and saw the same pattern. I was standing in front of a portable altar and pulpit.

Tom said, "Some congregation must use this place as a church on Sundays."

Tom went toward a door in the wall next to the pulpit. He tried the knob, which jittered but would not otherwise move, unrolled the burglar kit, peered at the keyhole, and worked another key into the slot. When the lock clicked and the door opened, Tom packed away the kit and peered inside. He took out his light, switched it on, and with me behind him went into a stuffy, windowless room about half the size of Tom's kitchen.

"Manager's office," he said. The penlights picked out a bare desk, a small number of green plastic chairs, and a wheeled rack crowded with shiny blue choir robes. Four cardboard boxes stood lined up in front of the desk. "Do you suppose?" Tom asked, running his light along the boxes.

I went through the chairs and knelt in front of the two boxes at the center of the desk. The open flaps had been simply laid shut, and I opened those of the first box to see two stacks of thick blue books. "Hymnals," I said.

I played my own light along the other boxes while Tom started moving things around behind me. None of the boxes showed anything but ordinary wear, no rips or holes made by busy rats. All four would hold hymnals. I checked them anyhow and found—hymnals. I stood up again and turned around. The rack stuffed with choir robes angled out into the room. Tom's head protruded above the rack, and the circle of light before him shone on a plywood door almost exactly the color of his hair. "Fee always liked basements, didn't he?" Tom said. "Let's take a look."

9

I walked around the rack as Tom opened the door, and trained my penlight just ahead of his. A flight of wooden stairs with a handrail began at the door and led down to a cement floor. I followed Tom down the stairs, playing my light over the big space to our right. Two startled mice scrambled toward the far wall. We descended another three or four steps, and the mice darted into an almost invisible crevice between two cement blocks in the wall on the other side of the basement. Tom's light flashed over an old iron furnace, a yard-square column of bricks, heating pipes, electrical conduits, rusting water pipes, and drooping spiderwebs. "Cheerful place," he said.

We reached the bottom of the steps. Tom went straight ahead toward the furnace and the front of the theater, and I walked off to the side, looking for something I had glimpsed while I watched the mice scramble toward the wall. Tom's light wandered toward the center of the basement; mine skimmed over yards of dusty cement. I moved forward in a straight line. Then my beam landed squarely on a wooden carton.

I walked up to it, set down the thermos, and pushed at the edge of the flat top. It moved easily to the side and exposed a section of something square and white. I slid the top all the way off the carton and held the light on what I thought would be reams of paper arranged into neat stacks. A lunatic message gleamed back into the light. Black letters on a white ground spelled out BUYTERVIO. Above that, in another row of letters, was MNUFGJKA. Two other nonsense words filled the top two rows of the carton. "Buytervio?" I said to myself, and finally realized that the carton contained the letters once used to spell out the movie titles on the marquee.

"Come over here."

Tom's voice came from a penumbra of light behind the furnace. I picked up the thermos and followed the beam of my own light across the dirty floor to the side of the furnace and then shone it on Tom. "He was here," he said. "Take a look."

I misheard him to say He's here, and, thinking that Fee's corpse lay on the ground beside the gun with which he had killed himself, experienced an involuntary surge of rage, sorrow, grief, and pain, all mingled with something that felt like regret or disappointment. My light swept over a pair of cardboard boxes. Did I want him to live, in spite of everything he had done? Or did I simply want to be in at the end, like Tom Pasmore? Raging at both Fee and myself, I aimed my light at Tom's chest and said, "I can't find him."

"I said, he was here." Tom took my hand and aimed the beam of light on the boxes I had overlooked in my search for the corpse.

Their flaps lay open, and one box was tipped onto its side, exposing an empty interior. Ragged holes of various sizes had been chewed into two sides of the box still upright. Tom had tried to prepare me, but as much as a body, the empty boxes were the end of our quest. I said, "We lost him."

"Not yet," Tom said.

"But if he moved the notes to some other safe house, all he has to do now is kill Dick Mueller." I placed my hand on my forehead, seeing horrible things. "Oh, God. It might already be too late."

"Mueller's safe," came Tom's voice from the darkness beside me. "I called his house last night. His answering machine said that he was on vacation with his family for the next two weeks. He didn't say where."

"But what if Fee called him? He'd know…" It didn't matter, I saw.

"He still has to come back," Tom said. "He knows somebody's trying to blackmail him."

That was right. He had to come back. "But where did he put those notes?"

"Well, I have an idea about that." I remembered Tom saying something like this earlier and waited for him to explain. "It's an obvious last resort," Tom said. "In fact, it's been in front of our face all along. It was even in front of his face, but he didn't see it either, until today."

"Well, what is it?"

"I can't believe you won't see it for yourself," Tom said. "So far, you've seen everything else, haven't you? If you still don't know by the time we're done here, I'll tell you."

"Smug asshole," I said. We separated again to probe the rest of the theater's basement.

On a hydraulic platform beneath the stage, I found an organ—not the "mighty Wurlitzer" that would have appeared in a billow of curtains before the start of features in the thirties, but a tough, bluesy little Hammond B-3.

The old dressing rooms on the basement's left side were nothing but barren concrete holes with plywood counters to suggest the twelve-foot mirrors and rings of light bulbs that had once stood along their far walls.

"Well, now we know where everything is," Tom said. Back in the office, Tom led me past the glimmering robes and pushed the rack back into place. We went back out into the lobby, and he relocked the door. I started toward the entrance we had used on our way out, but Tom said, "Other side."

His instincts were better than mine. From the far side of the theater, we would be invisible to anyone entering through the back door, while he—Fee—would be outlined in the column of gray light the instant he came inside. I walked past the altar and pulpit to the padded doors on the far side of the lobby and let us back into the darkness.

10

We moved blindly down the far aisle, touching the backs of the seats for guidance, moving through total blackness, a huge coffin, where every step brought us up against what looked like a solid, unyielding black wall that retreated as we moved forward.

Tom touched my shoulder. We had not yet reached the wide separation between rows in the middle of the theater, but could have been anywhere from the third row to the twentieth. The black wall still stood before me, ready to step back if I stepped forward. I groped for the worn plush of the chair beside me, pushed down the seat, and slid into it. I heard Tom moving into the seat directly in front of me and sensed him turning around. I put out my right hand and felt his arm on the back of the seat. I made out the faint shape of his head and upper body. "All right?" he asked.

"I usually like to sit closer to the screen," I said.

"We're probably in for a long wait."

"What do you want to do when he comes in?"

"If he comes through the exit door, we do what we have to do until he settles down. If he checks the place out with a flashlight, we get out of our seats and crouch down here in the aisle. Or we flatten out under the seats. I don't think he's going to be very thorough, because he'll be confident about being the first one here. The point is to get him comfortable. Once he sits down to wait it out, we split up and come toward him from opposite ends. Silently, if possible. When we get close, scream your head off. I'll do the same. He won't know where the hell we are, he won't know how many of us there are, and we should have a good chance to take him."

"What happens after that?"

"Are you thinking about disarming him and taking him to Armory Place? Do you think he'll confess? Or that we'd ever walk out of Armory Place? You know what would happen."

I said nothing.

"Tim, I don't even believe in the death penalty. But right now, the only alternative is to get out of here and go back home. In a couple of years, maybe ten years, he'll make a mistake and get caught. Is that good enough?"

"No," I said.

"I've spent about fifteen years working to get innocent men off death row—saving lives. That's what I believe in. But this isn't like anything else I know—it's as if we discovered that Ted Bundy was a detective with so many fallbacks and paper trails that he could never be brought to justice in the normal way."

"I thought you said you weren't interested in justice."

"Do you want to know how I really see this? I don't think I could say this to anyone else. There aren't many people who would understand it."

"Of course I want to know," I said. By now I could dimly make out Tom's face. Absolute seriousness shone out of him, along with something else that made me brace myself for whatever he would say.

"We're going to set him free," he said. As a euphemism for execution, the phrase was ludicrous.

"Thanks for sharing that," I said.

"Remember your own experience. Remember what happened to your sister."

I saw my sister sailing before me into a realm of utter mystery and felt Tom's psychic assurance, his depth of understanding, strike me like a tide.

"Who is he now? Is that worth saving? That person is a being who has to kill over and over again to satisfy a rage so deep that nothing could ever touch it. But who is he, really?"

"Fee Bandolier," I said.

"Right. Somewhere, in some part of himself he can't reach, he is a small boy named Fielding Bandolier. That boy passed through hell. You've been obsessed with Fee Bandolier even before you really knew he existed. You almost made him up out of your own history. You've even seen him. Do you know why?"

"Because I identify with him," I said.

"You see him because you love him," Tom said. "You love the child he was, and that child is still present enough to make himself visible to you, and he makes himself visible to your imagination because you love him."

I remembered the child who came forward out of swirling dark, on his open palm the word that cannot be read or spoken. He was the child of the night, William Damrosch, Fee Bandolier, and myself, all of whom had passed through the filthy hands of Heinz Stenmitz.

"Do you remember telling me about your old nurse, Hattie Bascombe, who said that the world is half night? What she didn't say was that the other half is night, too."

Too moved to speak, I nodded.

"Now let's get to the important stuff," Tom said.

"What?"

"Give me that thermos you've been carrying around. I don't want to be asleep when he finally gets here."

I handed him the thermos, and he poured some of the coffee into its top and drank. When he had finished, he passed the thermos back to me. I didn't think I would ever sleep again.

11

He's psychic, I thought. It was as if Tom Pasmore had seen into my mind. I felt intense gratitude and another, darker emotion combining resentment and fear. Tom had probed into private matters. My early memories, those that had refused to come on command in front of my old house or my family's graves, came flooding into me. One of these, of course, was Heinz Stenmitz. Another, equally powerful, was my sister's last day of life and my brief journey across the border into the territory from which she had never returned. I had never spoken of these moments to Tom—I had just learned of one, and of the other I never spoke, never, not to anyone. Every particle of my consciousness fled from it. That moment could not be held in the mind, because it held terror and ecstasy so great they threatened to tear the body apart. Yet some portion of the self retained and remembered. While knowing nothing of this, Tom Pasmore still knew all about it. My resentment vanished when I realized that he had read a version of it in one of the books I had written with my collaborator; he was smart and perceptive enough to have worked out the rest by himself. He had not probed: he had just told me what he knew. I sat in the dark behind Tom, realizing that what had sounded like sentimental froth made me chime with agreement— I wanted to release Fee Bandolier. I wanted to set him free.

12

I sat in the dark behind Tom Pasmore, wide awake and loose in time. Forty years collapsed into a single endless moment in which I was a child watching a movie called From Dangerous Depths while a huge blond man who smelled like blood ran his hand over my chest and spoke the unspeakable, I was a soldier in an underground room staring at an altar to the Minotaur, a greenhorn pearl diver unbuttoning the shirt of a mutilated dead man named Andrew T. Majors, a shred of infinite being speeding toward an annihilating ecstasy, a wounded animal in St. Mary's Hospital, a man with a notebook walking through a city park. I turned around to look six rows back and saw myself kneeling before Heinz Stenmitz, doing what he wanted me to do, what I thought I had to do to stay alive. You survived, I said silently, you survived everything. His pain and terror were mine, because I had survived them. Because I had survived them, they had educated me; because they were a taste always in my mouth, they had helped to keep me sane in Vietnam. What was unbearable was what had to be borne. Without the consciousness of the unbearable, you put your feet where Fee had placed his, or ended up as unaware as Ralph Ransom. I thought of John, whose life had once seemed so golden to me, peering into the depths of Holy Sepulchre, and of the closed-off place where his readiness for experience had taken him.

I thought for a long time of what had happened to John Ransom.

13

I don't know how long Tom and I sat waiting in the dark theater. After I started thinking about John, I got restless. I stood up to stretch and pace the aisle. Tom never left his seat. He sat without moving for long periods, as if we were at an opera. (Even when I am at the opera, I have trouble sitting still.) After two or three hours in the dark, I could make out most of the stage and the great hanging weight of the curtain, without being able to see individual folds. When I looked back, I could see the shape of the double doors into the lobby. All of the seats more than four or five rows ahead of me congealed into a single object. I got back into my seat and leaned back, thinking about Fee and John and Franklin Bachelor, and after half an hour had to get up and swing my arms and walk down toward the stage and the curtains again. When I got back into my seat and settled down, I heard a noise from the other side of the theater—a creak. "Tom," I said.

"Old buildings make noise," he said.

Half an hour later, the back door rattled. "What about that?" I asked.

"Uh huh," he said.

The door rattled again. Both of us were sitting up straight, leaning forward. The door rattled a third time, and then nothing happened for a long time. Tom leaned back. "I think some kid saw that the chain was unhooked," he said.

We sat in the dark for another long period. I looked at my watch, but the hands were invisible. I crossed my legs and closed my eyes and was instantly in Saigon, the restaurant not the city, trying to tell Vinh about John Ransom. He was working on the accounts, and he wasn't interested in John Ransom. "Write a letter to Maggie," he said. "She knows more than you think." I came awake with a jerk and felt under the seat for the thermos. "Me, too," Tom said.

The ceiling ticked. A footstep sounded in the lobby. The ceiling ticked again. Tom sat like a statue. Write a letter to Maggie? I thought, and realized to whom I could write a letter about John Ransom. She was probably a person who shared certain of Maggie's gifts. Time wore on. I yawned. At least an hour passed, second by slow second. Then the alley door rattled again.

"Wait for it," Tom said.

There was an unendurable silence for a few seconds, and then a key slotted into the keyhole. The sound was as clear as if I stood on the other side of the door. When the door swung open, Tom eased out of his seat and crouched beside it. I did the same. Someone walked into the space between the alley door and the theater exit. The exit door cracked open an inch, and gray light filtered through the crack. It opened wider, and a man stepped into the column of gray light and became a silhouette. He turned to look behind him, exposing his profile in the column of gray light. It was Monroe, and he had a gun in his hand.

14

Monroe stepped forward and let the exit door close behind him. The dark shape of his body moved a few steps alongside the stage. He stopped moving to let his eyes adjust. Tom and I crouched behind the seats, waiting for him either to take a seat or to check to see if his caller had already arrived. Monroe remained standing in the far aisle, listening, hard. Monroe was good—he stood next to the stage for so long that my legs began to cramp. The hot circle below my shoulder blade started to throb. Monroe relaxed and pulled a police baton from his belt. A beam of light flew from the end of the baton and darted from the middle of the front seats to the rear doors on his side, then to the wall six or seven feet down from John and me.

Monroe walked up the aisle, training the light along the rows of seats. He reached the wide central passage that divided the front seats from the rear and paused, working out if he'd be wasting his time by going farther. Tom noiselessly lowered himself to the floor. I sank to my knees and kept my eyes on Monroe. The detective moved across the divide between the seats and went up another two rows. Then he scanned the light in long sweeps across the seats in front of him. If he walked up another five rows, he'd have to see us, and I held my breath and waited for the cramp in my legs to subside.

Monroe turned around. The beam of light flitted across the wall beside us, traveled over the folds of the curtains, and struck the exit door. Monroe started to move back down the far aisle. I watched him reach the side of the stage, turn around to stab his light in a long pass back over the seats, and then push through the door. I sat down and stretched out my legs. Tom looked up at me and put his finger to his mouth. The alley door opened. "He's getting away," I whispered. Tom shushed me.

The back door opened and closed in a flurry of footsteps. The exit door swung in. Monroe and a man in a blue running suit came back into the theater. Monroe said, "Well, I don't think anyone got in."

"But they unlocked the chain," said the other man.

"Why do you think I called you?"

"It's funny," said the other man. "I mean, they take the chain off, and then they lock the door! Only but two other people got the keys."

"Church people?"

"My deacon has one. And the owner's got one, that's for sure. But he never shows his face—I never even met the man. Did you look at my office?"

"Do you keep any money in there?"

"Money?" The other man chuckled. "Holy Spirit is just a little storefront church, you know. But I keep the hymnals, choir robes, that kind of thing, in my office."

"Let's have a look, Reverend," Monroe said, and they set off up the aisle, the flashlight trained straight ahead of them. I lowered myself to the carpet and heard them pass by on the other end of the long row of seats and open the doors to the lobby.

As soon as they had left the theater, Tom slid into his row and I into mine, scooting along the cool concrete floor. The murmur of voices from the lobby ceased when the two men went into the office. I flattened out on the dusty concrete, my face an inch from a patch of fossilized gum. I could see the bushy outline of Tom's head and the pale blot of his left hand through the seat supports. The lobby doors swung in again.

"It doesn't make sense at all to me, officer," said the reverend. "But tomorrow, I'm getting the locks changed, and I'm buying a new padlock for that chain."

I stopped breathing and tried to disappear into the floor. My cheek flattened out against the wad of gum. It felt like dead skin. The two men came down the far aisle. My heart accelerated as they approached my row. Their slow footsteps neared me, passed me, continued down the aisle.

"How did you come to check us in the first place, officer?"

"Some lunatic called me this afternoon, asking me to meet him here this morning."

"In here?" They stopped moving.

"So I thought I ought to come down here, take a look at the place."

"The Lord thanks you for your diligence, officer."

The footsteps resumed.

"I'm putting that chain back on the door and getting new locks tomorrow. The Lord doesn't favor fools."

"Sometimes I wonder about that," Monroe said.

Their shoes clicked against the concrete beside the stage. The exit door swished open, closed. The door into the alley clanked open. I got to my feet. Tom stood up in front of me. From the alley came the sound of the chain rattling through the brackets. I exhaled and began brushing invisible dust off my clothes.

"That was interesting," Tom said. "Monroe turns out to be a good cop. Do you suppose all three of them will come down?"

"I hope the two don't show up together."

"Which one do you think is Fee?"

I saw Ross McCandless's seamy face and empty eyes leaning toward my hospital bed. "No hunches," I said.

"I have one." Tom stretched out his arms and arched his back. He swatted his jacket and brushed off his knees. Then he walked back to the end of the aisle and sat down in his old seat.

"Which one?"

"You," he said, and laughed.

15

"What is Fee going to think when he comes back and finds the chain back in place?"

"Oh, that's going to be helpful."

Tom turned around and placed his arm on the back of his seat. "He'll think the reverend came here after someone reported an attempted break-in, checked the place out, and locked it up again. When he works that out, he'll be even more confident that he got here first. So he won't be paying as much attention—he'll be careless."

We settled back down to wait.

16

I drifted into a strained half-sleep. My eyes were open, and I did not dream, but I began hearing voices speaking just above the level of audibility. Someone described seeing a blue-eyed baby cut in half beside a dead fire. A man said that it would catch up with me in a day or two. I could see everything, another said, I saw my dead friend and his team leader standing beneath a giant tree. They told me to go on, go on, go on.

Dark patterns unfolded and moved in the air before me, shifting as the voices rose and fell.

Someone spoke about a rattling chain. The rattle of the chain was important. Couldn't I hear that the chain was rattling?

The voices whisked backward into the psychic vault from which they had come, the darkness stood still, and I sat upright, hearing the chain clanking over the brackets on the alley doors. A great deal of time had passed, an hour at least, perhaps two, while I drifted along the border between sleep and wakefulness. My mouth felt dry and my eyes could not focus.

"Were you asleep?" Tom asked.

"Will you be quiet?" I said.

The tail of the chain struck one of the brackets as it passed through, making a tinny clink!

"Here we go," Tom said.

We moved out of our seats and listened to the key sliding into the lock. The alley door opened and shut, and a man moved two steps past the alley door. Harsh light flew around the frame, and then shrank to a yellow glimmer visible only at a point about waist-high on the frame. It disappeared as the footsteps ticked away into silence.

Tom and I looked at each other.

"Should we wait for him to come back up?"

"Aren't you curious about what he's doing down there?"

I looked at him.

"I'd like to know what it is."

"He'd hear us on the stairs."

"Not if we use the office stairs—the wooden ones. They're so old they're soft. Remember, he's convinced no one else is here." Tom stood up and began moving quickly and soundlessly up the aisle.

I almost ran into him at the door. He was sitting on the armrest of the last seat, bending over. "What are you doing?"

"Taking off my shoes."

I knelt to unlace my Reeboks.

17

We moved out into the lobby and padded past the church equipment to the office door. I whispered something about his being able to hear us unlocking it.

"I can take care of that." Tom took out the length of ribbed cloth and, after finding the key that fit the office door, pulled out a short length of soft black cloth, about an eighth of an inch wide. With it came a small, narrow metal rod that looked like a toothpick. "You can only use these once, and sooner or later it fouls up the lock, but do we care?"

He knelt in front of the door, wet the tip of the cloth in his mouth, and patiently worked a small portion into the keyhole. He prodded it into place with the metal toothpick, then nudged the key in beside it. Most of the rest of the cloth moved into the slot along with the lock. When he turned the key, the last of the cloth disappeared. The lock made no sound at all.

Tom motioned for me to squat beside him. He leaned toward me to whisper. "We're going to have to pick up the rack and set it down again. I'll go through the door first. Count to a hundred, and listen to what's going on down there. If nothing happens, come down. Don't worry about where I am."

"You want me to sneak up on him?"

"Play it by ear."

"What if he sees me?"

"Eventually, he has to see you," Tom said. "Don't tell him that you made the call, and don't let him see your gun. Give him some stuff about Elvee—say you couldn't stay away, say you were going to call him as soon as you found Fontaine's notes."

"And what are you going to do?"

"Depends on what he does. Just remember what you know about him."

What I knew about him?

Without giving me time to ask what he meant, Tom stood up and slid the door toward us and went inside. In utter darkness, we moved side by side toward the rack. My outstretched hands touched smooth fabric, and I felt my way up the robe to the top of the rack. Tom and I worked our way to opposite ends, and he whispered, "Now," so softly that the command nearly vaporized before it reached me. I lifted the pole on my side, and the entire heavy rack went two inches off the floor. The rack moved with me when I stepped sideways, and then continued to move. I took another sideways step. Tom and I gingerly lowered the rack, and its wheels noiselessly met the floor.

I heard his feet whisper around the rack and groped toward the wall and the basement door. Suddenly, what we were doing seemed as absurd as the attempt John Ransom and I had made to capture Paul Fontaine. It was impossible to go downstairs without making noise. I rubbed sweat off my forehead. A few cautious steps took me to the wall, and I reached out for Tom, imagining him easing open the plywood door. My hand touched nothing but empty air. I moved sideways, still reaching out. I took another step. My hand brushed the edge of the door, and I nearly banged it against the wall. I lowered myself back down into a squat, still trying to find Tom. He wasn't there. I leaned forward and poked my head over the top of the staircase. In the very faint illumination provided by a flashlight at the other end of the basement, a dark shape glided away from the bottom of the stairs and disappeared.

I pushed myself slowly upright, moving with exaggerated care to keep my knees from popping, and started counting to one hundred.

18

I wanted to keep going until I got to two hundred, maybe two thousand, but I made myself walk through the opening and set my right foot down on the first step. Tom had been right—the wood was so soft it was almost furry. I felt the grain through my sock. I grabbed the rail and went down the next two steps without making any noise at all. I padded down another three steps, then another two, and my head finally passed beneath the level of the floor.

Someone was sweeping the beam of a flashlight over the floor behind the furnace. I saw the circle of light leap to the right of the big furnace and then travel slowly along the floor until it disappeared behind it. A few seconds later, it reappeared to the left of the furnace and moved another five or six feet toward the wall of the dressing rooms. Then it skittered over the floor, looping and circling on the cement until it steadied again a few feet further from the furnace and began making another long steady sweep across the floor. Fee was standing behind the furnace and facing in my direction, looking for something. I thought I knew what it was.

I moved slowly down the last five steps. He would not be able to see me even if he moved around the furnace—all he could see was what fell into the beam of his flashlight. I came down onto the cement and began walking carefully toward the place where I remembered seeing the brick pillar. The man with the flashlight backed up and swung the light wildly over the floor between the furnace and the dressing rooms. I stopped moving, and the elongated circle of light swooped over the furnace, throwing the pipes and conduits above it into stark black silhouette, streaked across the wall near the stairs, and came to rest on the floor to the left of the furnace. The man backed up again, and I took a few more quiet steps toward the invisible pillar.

Judging from the direction he'd been moving, Tom must have been hidden in the rear of the basement, probably behind the crate of marquee letters. He would wait until I identified the man with the flashlight before he made his move. Maybe he would wait until Fee said something incriminating. I hoped he wouldn't wait until Fee started shooting.

Another quiet step, then another, took me to the spot where I had seen the pillar. I felt the air in front of me, but not the pillar. I took a third step forward. The beam of light was making big sideways sweeps over the territory to the right of the furnace as Fee began a more systematic search. I moved sideways without bothering to check the air with my hands and bumped right into the pillar. It didn't make any more noise than an auto wreck. The light stopped moving. I pressed up against the side of the pillar, drenched in sweat.

"Who's there?" The voice sounded much calmer than I was.

I felt around for the back of the pillar and stepped behind it, hoping that Tom Pasmore would come forward out of the darkness.

"Who are you?"

I put my hand on the little holster clipped to my belt. The man with the flashlight moved to the left side of the furnace— the beam of light flared across the basement and flattened on the back wall. His footsteps clicked against the cement. Then he stopped moving and turned off his light.

"I'm a police officer," he said. "I am armed and prepared to shoot. I want to know who you are and what you're doing here."

This wasn't right—he wasn't acting guilty. Fee would have switched off his flashlight the instant he realized that someone else was in the basement. He wasn't even protecting himself by moving away.

"Say something."

In my panic, I couldn't remember the voices of either of the two men who could have been Fee Bandolier. Rough chunks of mortar pushed into my side. Wishing that I was anywhere else but in this basement, I grasped a thick chunk of mortar, broke it off the pillar, and tossed it toward the stairs. The mortar hit the concrete and shattered.

"Oh, come on," the man said. "That only works in the movies."

He took another step, but I could not tell where.

"Let me tell you what's going on," he said. "You came here to meet a man who knew all about you—he called a bunch of detectives, me, Monroe, and I don't know who else. Either he called you, too, or you heard people talking about it." He was moving noiselessly around as he talked, his voice seeming to come from first one side of the furnace, then, in what seemed an impossibly short time, the other. He sounded perfectly calm.

"You know me—you can take a shot at me, but you won't hit me. And then I'll take you down."

There was a long silence, and then he spoke again, from somewhere off to the right. "What troubles me about this is, you're not acting like a cop. Who the hell are you?"

I wasn't acting like a cop, and he wasn't acting like Fee Bandolier.

The pillar was still between us. It was a good, sturdy pillar. Not a bullet in the world could go through it. And if he didn't shoot, we were in the basement for the same reason.

"Sergeant Hogan?" I said.

Sudden light flooded over me from somewhere behind my right shoulder, and my shadow loomed against the wall like a giant. My stomach plummeted toward my knees, but no gunshot resounded, neither from the man with the light nor from Tom. I wanted to duck around the pillar, but I made myself turn into the glare.

"I thought we got rid of you, Underhill." He sounded angry and amused at the same time. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?"

"You surprised me," I said.

"It's mutual." He turned the light off me. I put my hand back on the holster as the beam swept across the floor toward the source of his voice. The circle of the beam diminished as it sped toward him and then flattened out against his chest and jumped up to illuminate Michael Hogan's handsome, weathered face. He blinked under the light, and then turned the flashlight back on me, aiming the beam at my chest, so that I could see. "What are you doing here?"

"The same as you," I said. "I wanted to see if I could find the papers that used to be in those boxes. When I saw that they were gone, I was looking for anything that might have fallen out."

He sighed, and the beam dropped to the floor. "How did you know where the papers would be?"

"Just before Paul Fontaine died, he said 'Bell.' It took me a couple of weeks to understand that he was trying to say Beldame Oriental."

"You're the lunatic who made the calls?"

"I didn't know anything about that until you told me," I said. "What did he say?"

"How did you get in here?"

"John Ransom's father owned a hotel. He has lots of skeleton keys."

"Then how did you manage to reattach the chain from the inside?"

"I came in the front," I said. "About fifteen minutes before you showed up. I didn't think I'd see anyone else in here."

"You were down here when I came in?"

"That's right."

"I guess I'm lucky you didn't shoot me."

"With what?"

"Well, you picked a hell of a night to go exploring."

"I guess you're not Fielding Bandolier, are you?"

The light jumped into my face again, blinding me. I held up my hand to block it. "Did Ransom come down here with you? Is he somewhere in the theater?"

A jolt of terror went through me like cold electricity. I kept my hand up over my face. "I'm alone. I don't think John cares anymore."

"Okay." The light dropped to my waist, and I lowered my hand. "I'm sick of the subject of Fielding Bandolier. I don't want to hear anything more about him, from you or anyone else."

"So you knew about the theater because of the telephone call?"

"Knew what?" He waited, and when I did not answer, he said, "The caller asked me to meet him here. I thought that was unusual, to put it mildly, so I checked up on the ownership. I gather you've heard of Elvee Holdings."

"Didn't you get confirmation from Hubbel, the head of Bachelor's old draft board?"

"We never talked to Hubbel. McCandless said he was going to organize that, and then he called it off."

"McCandless," I said.

Hogan said nothing. I heard his feet move as he turned around. The oval of light swung away from me and traveled across the floor toward the stairs. "I don't know why we're standing here in the dark," he said. "There's a switch on the wall next to the stairs. Go over there and turn on the lights, will you?"

"I don't think that's a very good idea."

"Do it."

He moved the beam to just in front of me and lit my way to the bottom of the stairs. I walked along the moving oval on the floor, wondering where Tom had hidden himself. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, Hogan aimed the light at the switch.

"What if someone else shows up?"

"Who would that be?"

I took a breath. "Ross McCandless. He's a murderer. And if someone called a bunch of detectives, trying to lure the right one here, then—even if he already moved his papers—he has to come back to kill the person who called him."

"Turn on the lights," Hogan said.

19

I reached for the switch and flipped it up.

Bare light bulbs dangling over the bottom of the stairs, near the furnace, somewhere near the crate of letters, and far at the front of the basement, threw out enough light to stab into my eyes. The entire basement came into being around us, larger and dirtier than I had expected. It was brightly lit around the hanging bulbs, shadowy in the corners, but entirely visible. Matted spiderwebs hung from the cords of the light bulbs. Tom Pasmore was nowhere in sight.

In a gray suit and a black T-shirt, Michael Hogan stood about twelve feet away, looking at me dryly. A long black flashlight tilted like a club in his right hand. He moved his thumb and switched it off. "Now that we can see, let's check out the place where he put the boxes." Hogan wheeled around and strode past the pillar and the furnace.

I walked across the basement and came around the side of the furnace. Hogan was standing near the boxes, staring down at the cement floor. Then he noticed my feet. "What did you do with your shoes?"

"Left them upstairs."

"Humph. Junior G-man."

The empty boxes lay on the dusty floor. Hogan scanned the area between the furnace and the wall to our right, then the long stretch of floor between the furnace and the dressing rooms. There were no crumpled pieces of paper. I looked back at the dressing rooms. The door of the first, the one farthest from us, hung slightly ajar.

"You notice something?"

"No," I said.

"Tell me about McCandless," he said.

"Some Millhaven policeman has been using a false identity."

Hogan's face hardened with anger, and I took a few steps away.

"I know you think it was Fontaine, I thought it was Fontaine, but not anymore."

"Why is that?"

"That piece of paper I found in the Green Woman was about a woman named Jane Wright. She was killed in May 1977, if those papers are what I think they are. The name of the town was partially destroyed, but it looked like Allentown. So I looked through all the Allentown newspapers for that month, but nobody of that name turned up."

"You think that proves anything?"

"I found a Jane Wright who had been murdered in a town called Allerton, Ohio, in that same month. When Paul Fontaine was a detective in Allentown."

"Ah," Hogan said.

"So it has to be someone else. Someone who used Billy Ritz as an informant and who came to Millhaven in 1979. And there are only three men who have those things in common. You, Monroe, and McCandless."

"Well, obviously, it isn't me," he said, "or you'd already be dead. But why did you rule out Monroe? And how on earth did you find out about Billy Ritz?"

"I kept my ears open. I talked to a lot of people, and some of them knew things."

"Either you're a born cop or a born pain in the ass," Hogan said. "What about Monroe?"

Since I'd already said that I had come inside the theater only fifteen minutes before he did, I couldn't tell him the truth. "I stood outside in the alley and watched the door for a long time before I came in. Monroe showed up about twelve, twelve-thirty, something like that, looked at the chain, and left. So it's not him." Hogan nodded, swinging the big flashlight, and started walking away from the furnace toward the dressing room side of the basement. "McCandless comes as kind of a shock."

"But when you first heard me, you thought I was someone you knew. Someone on the force."

"Monroe told a lot of people about that crazy phone call. I didn't know any of this stuff you just told me about the place in Ohio. Allerton?"

I nodded.

"I'll fax a picture of McCandless to the Allerton police, and that'll be that. It doesn't matter if he shows up here tonight or not. I'll take care of him. Let's go upstairs so you can get your shoes, and I'll take you to Ransom's, or wherever you're staying."

"I'm staying at the St. Alwyn," I said, hoping that Tom could hear me, wherever he was. "I'll walk there."

"Even better," Hogan said.

I walked away from him faster than he expected, uncertain why I had not trusted him completely. Why should it be better for me to be staying at a hotel than at John's? I moved toward the stairs, hearing Tom Pasmore telling me to remember what I knew about Fee Bandolier. It seemed that I knew a thousand things about Fee, none of them useful. Hogan came after me, moving slowly. I put my hand on the penlight in my pocket.

I got to the bottom of the stairs and said, "Would you just stay where you are for a second?"

At the worst, I thought, I'd just look like a fool.

"What?" Hogan stopped moving. He had been reaching toward the button that fastened his suit jacket, and he dropped his hand when he saw me turning to face him.

I slapped the light switch down with my left hand, and with the other turned the bright beam of the penlight on his face. He blinked.

"Lenny Valentine," I said.

Hogan's face went rigid with shock. Behind him, I saw Tom Pasmore move fast and silently out of the dressing room. I switched off my light and scrambled away from the stairs in the darkness. I had the impression that Tom was still moving.

"We're not going to go through this all over again, are we?" Hogan said. He hadn't moved an inch.

From somewhere near the pillar, Tom's light shot out and outlined his head. Hogan turned to face the light and said, "Would you mind explaining what you think you're doing, Underhill?" He could not have seen any more than the bright dazzle of the flashlight, but he did not raise his hands.

I reached into my jacket, pulled out the revolver, thumbed the safety, and aimed it at his head.

Hogan smiled. "What was that name you said?" He tilted his head, still smiling at Tom, and raised his right hand to unbutton the jacket of his suit. I remembered seeing him make the same gesture just before I had surprised him by turning off the light. He would have shot me as soon as I got to the top of the stairs. I realized that I was holding my penlight along the barrel of the revolver, aiming it at Hogan like another gun as if I had been planning my next act all along, and when Hogan's hand reached his jacket button, I switched it on. Tom instantly extinguished his own light.

"Lenny Valentine," I said.

Hogan had already turned to face into my light, and he was not smiling anymore. A shadow moved into his eyes, and he opened his mouth to say something. The thought of hearing his next words sent a wave of pure revulsion through me. Almost involuntarily, I pulled the trigger and sent a bullet down the bright, hot beam of light.

There was a red flash and a loud, flat crack that the cement walls amplified into an explosion. A black hole appeared just beneath Hogan's hairline, and the light illuminated a bright spatter from the back of his head. Hogan rocked back out of the beam and disappeared. His body hit the floor, and the stench of blood and cordite filled the air. A twist of white spun in the beam of light and disappeared.

"You took a while to make up your mind," Tom said, shining his light on me. My stiff, outstretched arms were still aiming the revolver at the place where Hogan had been. I let them drop. I could not remember what I'd seen in Hogan's face. Tom shone his light downward. Hogan lay sprawled on the cement with most of his weight on his shoulder and hip, his legs bent and his arms flopped on either side. Blood flowed steadily out of the back of his head and pooled beneath his cheek.

I turned away and wobbled toward the wall. I groped around on the cinderblocks until I found the switch. Then I turned on the lights and looked back at him. A narrow line of red trickled out of the hole at his hairline and slanted across his forehead.

Tom came forward, holstering his automatic, and knelt beside Hogan's body. He rolled him onto his back, and Hogan's right arm landed softly in the growing pool of blood. The odor lodged in my stomach like a rotten oyster. Tom thrust his hands into one of the pockets of the gray suit coat

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Looking for a key." He moved to the other side of the body and slid his hand into the other pocket. "Well, well." He brought out a small silver key and held it up.

"What's that for?"

"The papers," he said. "And now…" He put his hand into the inner pocket of his own jacket and came out with a black marker pen. He uncapped the pen and looked up at me as if daring me to stop him. "I'm no policeman," he said. "I'm not interested in justice, but justice is probably what this is." He duck-walked a step away from the body, brushed a layer of dust off the cement, and wrote BLUE ROSE in big slanting letters. He spun himself around and looked at me again. "This time, it really was the detective," he said. "Give me that gun."

I came toward him and handed him the .38. Tom wiped it carefully with his handkerchief and bent over to place it in Hogan's right hand. Then he wrapped the fingers around the handle and poked the index finger through the trigger guard. After that, he raised the front of the suit jacket and pulled Hogan's own .38 out of its holster. He stood up and came toward me, holding out Hogan's gun. "We'll get rid of this later."

I slid the revolver into the little wallet clipped to my belt without taking my eyes off Hogan's body.

"We'd better get out of here," Tom said.

I didn't answer him. I stepped forward and looked down at the face, the open eyes, the slack, empty face.

"You did the right thing," Tom said.

"I have to make sure," I said. "You know what I mean? I have to be sure."

I knelt beside the body and gathered the material at the waist of the black T-shirt. I pulled the fabric up toward Hogan's neck, but could not see enough. I yanked up the entire shirt until it was bunched under his arms and leaned over to stare at the dead man's chest. It was pale and hairless. Half a dozen circular scars the size of dimes shone in the white skin.

A wave of pure relief went through me like honey, like gold, and the reek of blood suddenly smelled like laughter.

"Good-bye, Fee," I said, and yanked the shirt back down.

"What was that about, anyhow?" Tom asked behind me.

"The body squad," I said. "Old habit."

I stood up.

Tom looked at me curiously, but did not ask. I switched off the light, and we went up the stairs in the dark.

Less than three minutes later, we were outside in the alley, and five minutes after that, we were back in the Jaguar, driving east.

20

"Hogan reacted to the name."

"He sure did," I said.

"And the business about his chest?"

"Bachelor had little round scars on his chest."

"Ah, I forgot. The punji stick scars. One of those books I have mentioned them."

"They weren't punji stick scars. Fee had them, too."

"Ah," Tom said. "Yes. Poor Fee."

I thought: Sail on, Fee, sail away, Fee Bandolier.

21

In the dark of the night, we threw Michael Hogan's revolver into the Millhaven River from the Horatio Street bridge. It was invisible even before it smacked into the water, and then it disappeared from history.

22

The last thing I remembered was the pistol smacking down into the water. I walked out of the garage, having spent all the time between Horatio Street and Eastern Shore Drive with Michael Hogan in the basement of the Beldame Oriental, and went across the top of the driveway in the dark of the night. The moon had long ago gone down, and there were no stars. The world is half night, and the other half is night, too. I saw his face in the sharp, particular beam of the penlight; I saw the black little hole, smaller than a dime, smaller than a penny, appear like a beauty spot beneath his thinning hair.

He had grown to the age of five a block away from me. Our fathers had worked in the same hotel. Sometimes I must have seen him as I wandered through the neighborhood—a little boy sitting on the front steps beside a bed of carefully tended roses.

Tom came up beside me and opened the kitchen door. We went inside, and he flicked a switch, shedding soft light over the old sinks and the white wainscoting and the plain, scarred wooden counter. "It's a little past three," Tom said. "Do you want to go to bed right away?"

"I don't really know," I said. "What happens now?" I meant: Whom do we tell? How do we tell?

"What happens now is that I have a drink," Tom said. "Do you feel like going straight upstairs?"

Frederick Delius and the stuffed alligator, the Florida Suite. "I don't think I could go to sleep," I said.

"Keep me company, then." He dumped ice cubes in a glass, covered them with malt whiskey, and sipped from the glass, watching me. "Are you okay?"

"I'm okay," I said. "But we can't just let him lie there, can we? For the church people to find?"

"I don't think the church people ever go into the basement. The only thing they use down there is the organ, and they raise that from the stage."

I poured water into a glass and drank half of it in one long swallow.

"I have some ideas," Tom said.

"You want people to know, don't you?" I swallowed most of the rest of the water and refilled the glass. My hands and arms seemed to be functioning by themselves.

"I want everybody to know," Tom said. "Don't worry, they won't be able to bury it this time." He took another sip. "But before we start shouting from the rooftops, I want to get those papers. We need them."

"Where are they? Hogan's apartment?"

"Come on upstairs with me," Tom said. "I want to look at a photograph with you."

"What photograph?"

He did not answer. I trailed along behind him as he went into the vast, cluttered downstairs room, walked past the couch and the coffee table, and went up the stairs to the second floor, turning on lights as he went.

Inside his office, he walked around the room, switching on the lamps. He sat down at his desk, and I fell into his chesterfield. Then I unzipped the holster and placed it on the glass table before me. Tom had pulled out the top drawer of his desk to remove a familiar-looking manila envelope.

"What I don't understand," he said, "is how Hubbel identified Paul Fontaine. Hogan was in that picture, standing right next to Fontaine. So how could Hubbel make a mistake like that?"

"He had lousy eyesight," I said.

"That bad?"

"He had to put his eyes right up to what he was looking at. His nose practically touched the paper."

"So he actually examined the photograph very carefully." Tom was facing me, leaning forward with the envelope in his hands.

"It looked to me like he did."

"Let's see if we can solve this one." He opened the flap and drew the newspaper photograph out of the envelope. Tom set the envelope on his desk and carried the photograph and his drink to the couch and sat beside me. He leaned forward and placed the photograph between us on the table. "How did he identify Fontaine?"

"He pointed at him."

"Right at Fontaine?"

"Right at him," I said. "Dead bang at Paul Fontaine."

"Show me."

I leaned over and looked at the picture of Walter Dragonette's front lawn crowded with uniformed and plainclothes policemen. "Well," I said, "it was right in front of him, for one thing."

"Move it."

I slid the photograph before me. "Then he pointed at Fontaine."

"Point at him."

I reached out and planted my finger on Paul Fontaine's face, just as Edward Hubbel had done in Tangent, Ohio. My finger, like Edward Hubbel's, covered his entire face.

"Yes," Tom said. "I wondered about that."

"About what?"

"Look at what you're doing," Tom said. "If you put your finger there, who are you pointing at?"

"You know who I'm pointing at," I said. Tom leaned, lifted my hand off the photograph, and slid it across the table so that it was directly in front of him. He placed his finger over Fontaine's face exactly as I had. The tip of his finger aimed directly at the next man in the picture, Michael Hogan. "Whose face am I pointing at?" Tom asked.

I stared down at the photograph. He wasn't pointing at Fontaine, he was obliterating him.

"I bet it wasn't Ross McCandless who canceled the trip to Tangent," Tom said. "What do you think?"

"I think—I think I'm an idiot," I said. "Maybe a moron. Whichever one is dumber."

"I would have thought he meant Fontaine, too. Because, like you, I would have expected him to identify Fontaine."

"Yes, but…"

"Tim, there isn't any blame."

"Fontaine must have looked into Elvee Holdings. John and I led Hogan straight to him, and all he wanted to do was get my help."

"Hogan would have killed Fontaine whether you and John were there or not, and he would have blamed it on random violence. All you did was confirm that another shooter was present that night."

"Hogan."

"Sure. You just gave them a nice convenient eyewitness." He took another swallow of his drink, seeing that he had succeeded in banishing most of my guilt. "And even if you hadn't seen some indistinct figure, wasn't McCandless intent on making you say that you had? It made everything easier for him."

"I guess that's right," I said, "but I still think I'm going to retire to Florida."

He smiled at me. "I'm going to bed, too—I want us to get those papers as soon as possible tomorrow morning. This morning, I mean."

"Are you going to tell me where they are?"

"You tell me."

"I don't have the faintest idea," I said.

"What's the last place left? It's right in front of us."

"I don't appreciate this," I said.

"It starts with E," he said, smiling.

"Erewhon," I said, and Tom kept smiling. Then I remembered what we had learned when we first began looking into Elvee. "Oh," I said. "Oh."

"That's right," Tom said.

"And it was only a couple of blocks from the Beldame Oriental, so he probably moved them around five or six yesterday evening, right after he got off shift."

"Say it."

"Expresspost," I said. "The mail drop on South Fourth Street."

"See?" Tom said. "I told you you knew."

Shortly afterward, I went upstairs to Frederick Delius and the alligator, undressed, and crawled into bed to get four hours of restless, dream-ridden sleep. I woke up to the smell of toast and the knowledge that the most difficult day I was to have in Millhaven had just begun.

PART SEVENTEEN

JOHN RANSOM

1

By eight-thirty the sun was already high over the rooftops of South Fourth Street, and we stepped out of the car's briskly conditioned air into ninety-degree heat that almost instantly plastered my shirt to my sides. Tom Pasmore was wearing one of his Lamont von Heilitz specials, a blue three-piece windowpane check suit that made him look as if he had just arrived from Buckingham Palace. I had on more or less what I'd worn on the airplane, jeans and a black double-breasted jacket over a white button-down shirt, and I looked like the guy who held the horses.

Expresspost Mail and Fax was a bright white shopfront with its name painted in drastic red letters above a long window with a view of a clean white counter at which a man with rimless glasses and a red tie stood flipping through a catalogue. The bronze doors of individual mail receptacles lined the walls behind him.

We came through the door, and the man closed the catalogue and placed it on a shelf beneath the counter and looked eagerly from Tom to me and back to Tom. "Can I do something for you?" he said.

"Yes, thanks," Tom said. "I want to pick up the papers that my colleague deposited here for the Elvee Corporation yesterday evening."

A shadow of uncertainty passed over the clerk's face. "Your colleague? Mister Belin?"

"That's him," Tom said. He brought the key out of his pocket and put it on the counter in front of the clerk.

"Well, Mister Belin said he was going to do that himself." He looked over his shoulder at a rank of the locked boxes. "We can't give you a refund, or anything like that,"

"That's all right," Tom said.

"Maybe you should tell me your name, in case he comes back."

"Casement," Tom said.

"Well, I guess it'll be all right." The clerk picked up the key.

"We're grateful for your help," Tom said.

The clerk turned away and went to the wall to his right, twiddling the key in his fingers. The boxes in the bottom row were the size of the containers used to ship dogs on airplanes. When he had nearly reached the rear of the shop, the clerk knelt down and put the key into a lock.

He looked back up at Tom. "Look—since you already paid for the week, I can reserve this one for you until the time is up. That way, if you want to use it again, you won't have to pay twice."

"I'll pass that on to Mister Belin," Tom said.

The clerk began pulling stacks of paper stuffed into manila folders out of the box.

2

WE carried the long cardboard container the clerk had given us up the stairs to the office, Tom in front and me behind him. On the way back, Tom had stopped off at a stationery store and bought six reams of copy paper, four of which were now distributed across the tops of the files, with the other two slipped down beside the files at each end of the box. Halfway up the stairs, the handholds started to rip, and we had to carry the box the rest of the way by holding the bottom.

The box went on the floor beside the copy machine. Tom flipped its square black switch, and the machine hummed and flashed. I picked up one of the fat manila folders and opened it up. Papers of varying sizes and colors filled it, some of them closely filled with single-space typing that ran from edge to edge without margins, other crowded with the handwriting I had first seen in the basement of the Green Woman. I turned to one of the typed pages.

When we left the bar it was one or two in the morning, and she was too drunk to walk straight. I ought to take you in for public intoxication. You ain't a cop now, are you? No, honey, I own one of those big hotels downtown, I already told you that. Which one? The Heartbreak Hotel, I said. I already been there. I probably owe you lots of rent. I know that, honey, we'll take care of that. She giggled. Here's my car. Her black skirt rode up on her thighs when she got in. Skinny thighs, one black and blue thumbprint. We got to the GWT and she said This dump? Don't worry, there's a throne all ready for you downstairs.

I looked up at Tom, who was leafing through another file. "This is incredible," I said. "He described them in such detail. He even put in the dialogue. It's like a book."

Tom looked a little sickened by whatever he had read. He closed his file. "They seem to be more or less in order—each murder takes up about twenty pages, from what I see here. How many pages do you think we have, about a thousand?"

"Something like that," I said, looking down at the stacks.

"At least fifty murders," Tom said. Both of us looked at the stacks of papers. "I suppose he let Fontaine solve some of the most colorful ones."

"Who are you going to send copies to?"

"The FBI. Isobel Archer. The new chief, Harold Green. Someone at the Ledger. Geoffrey Bough?"

"You'll make his day," I said. "You're not going to identify yourself, are you?"

"Sure, I'm the worried citizen who found these papers in a garbage can. In fact, I think the worried citizen is about to call Ms. Archer right now."

He went to his desk and dialed a number. I sat down on the couch and listened to his half of the conversation. When I realized that I was still holding the thick file, I put it on the table as if I thought I might catch something from it.

"I'd like to speak to Isobel Archer, please. It has to do with a shooting."

"Yes, I'll hold."

"Miss Archer? I'm glad to be able to speak to you."

"My name? Fletcher Namon."

"Well, yes, it is about a shooting. I didn't know what to do about this, so I thought I'd call you."

"I don't want to get involved with the police, Miss Archer. It's about a policeman."

"Well, yes."

"Okay. Last night, this was. I saw a detective, I don't know his name, but I saw him one night on the news, I know he's some kind of detective, and he was going into the old movie theater down on Livermore."

"Late at night."

"No, I couldn't tell you what time. Anyhow, after he got inside, I heard this shot."

"No, I got out of there, fast. "

"I'm sure."

"Sure, I'm sure. It was a gunshot."

"Well, I don't know what I expect you to do. I thought that was your business. I gotta go now."

"No. Good-bye." He put down the phone and turned to me.

"What do you think?"

"I think she'll be down there with a hacksaw and blowtorch in about five minutes."

"I do, too." He took all the pages out of the folder on his lap and tapped their bottom edges against his desk. "It'll take me two or three hours to copy all this stuff. Do you want to hang around, or is there something else you feel like doing?"

"I guess I should talk to John," I said.

"Do you want me with you?"

"You're an executive," I said. "Flunkies like me do the dirty work."

3

I walked through the heat down the pretty streets toward John Ransom's house. The Sevens, Omdurman Place, Balaclava Place, Victoria Terrace; brick houses matted with ivy, stone houses with ornate entrances and leaded windows, mansard roofs and pointed gables. Sprinklers whirled, and small boys zipped past on ten-speed bicycles. It looked like a world without secrets or violence, a world in which blood had never been shed. A for sale sign had been staked into the neat lawn in front of Alan Brookner's house.

The white Pontiac stood at the curb across from John's house, in the same place I had found it on my first morning back in town. It was squeezed into a parking place just long enough to accommodate it, and I remembered, as I had last night, a noisy little patriot in shorts charging out of his flag-draped fortress to yell about abuse. I walked across sunny Ely Place and went up to John's front door and rang his bell.

He appeared at the narrow window to the left of the door and looked out at me with frowning curiosity—the way you'd look at an encyclopedia salesman who had come back after you'd already bought the books. By the time he opened the door, his expression had altered into something more welcoming.

"Tim! What are you doing back here?"

"Something came up," I said.

"More research? The book going well?"

"Very well. Can I come in for a minute?"

"Well, sure." He stepped back and let me in. "When did you get in? Just now?"

"Yesterday afternoon."

"Well, you shouldn't be staying in a hotel. Check out and come back here, stay as long as you like. I just got some information about houses for sale in Perigord, we could go over it together."

"I'm not in a hotel," I said. "I'm staying with Tom Pasmore."

"That stuck-up phony."

John had followed me into the living room. When I sat down on the couch facing the wall of paintings, he said, "Why don't you make yourself at home?"

"Thanks again for sending me the Vuillard," I said. He had not rearranged the paintings to compensate for its absence, and the place where it had been looked naked.

He was standing beside the couch, looking down at me, uncertain of my mood or intentions. "I knew you appreciated it. And like I said, I couldn't have it in my house anymore—it was too much for me."

"I'm sure it was," I said.

He gave me the encyclopedia salesman look again and then moved his face into a smile and sat down on the arm of a chair. "Did you come here just to thank me for the painting?"

"I wanted to tell you some things," I said.

"Why do I think that sounds ominous?" He hitched his knee up beside him on the fat arm of the chair and kept his smile. John was wearing a dark green polo shirt, faded jeans, and penny loafers without socks. He looked like a stockbroker on a weekend break.

"Before we get into them, I want to hear how Alan's doing."

"Before we get into these mysterious 'things'? Don't you think I'll want to talk to you afterward?"

I reminded myself that John Ransom was pretty smart, after all. "Not at all," I said. "You might want to talk to me night and day."

"Night and day." He tucked his foot in closer to his thigh.

"Let's try to keep that tone." He looked up, theatrically. "Well, Alan. Dear old Alan. I don't suppose you ever saw him when he was out at County."

"I stopped in for five minutes, on the way to the airport." He raised his eyebrows. "Did you? Well, in that case, you know how bad he was. Since then—really, since I moved him into Golden Manor—he's come a long way. They've been giving him good care, which they damn well better, considering how much the place costs."

"Does he mind being there?"

John shook his head. "I think he likes it. He knows he'll be taken care of if anything happens to him. And the women are all crazy about him."

"Do you visit him often?"

"Maybe once a week. That's about enough for both of us."

"I suppose that's right," I said.

He narrowed his eyes and bit on his lower lip. He didn't get it. "So what did you want to tell me?"

"In a day or two, this whole town is going to go crazy all over again. There'll be another big shakeup in the police department."

He snapped his fingers and then pointed at me, grinning with delight. "You bastard, you found those papers. That's it, isn't it?"

"I found the papers," I said.

"You're right! This town is going to lose its mind. How many people did Fontaine kill, anyway? Do you know?"

"It wasn't Fontaine. It's the man who killed Fontaine."

His mouth opened, and his mouth twitched in and out of a grin. He was trying to decide if I were serious.

"You can't be trying to tell me that you think Alan—"

He hadn't even been interested enough to ask about the ballistics report. "Alan didn't shoot Paul Fontaine," I said. "Alan shot me. Someone was hiding between the houses across the street. I think he must have had some kind of assault rifle. Alan, you, me—we had nothing to do with it at all. He was already there by the time we got to the house. He was with Fontaine in the ghetto. Maybe he even saw him call me here. He probably followed him to the house."

"So the guy in Ohio identified the wrong man?"

"No, he identified the right one. I just didn't understand what he was doing."

John pressed a palm to his cheek and regarded me without speaking for a couple of seconds. "I don't suppose I have to know the whole story," he finally said.

"No, it's not important now. And I never saw you today, and you never saw me. Nothing I tell you, nothing you tell me, ever leaves this house. I want you to understand that."

He nodded, a little puzzled about the notion of his telling me anything, but eager enough to grasp what he thought was the main point. "Okay. So who was it?"

"Michael Hogan," I said. "The person you knew as Franklin Bachelor changed his name to Michael Hogan. Right now, he's lying dead on the floor of the Beldame Oriental with a gun in his hand and the words BLUE ROSE written beside his body. In black marker."

John took in my words avidly, nodding slowly and appreciatively.

"Isobel Archer is going to wangle her way inside the theater and find his body. A couple of days from now, she and a few other people, including the FBI, will get photocopies of the notes he took on his killings. About half of them are handwritten, and there won't be any doubt that Hogan wrote them."

"Did you kill him?"

"Look, John," I said. "If I killed a detective in Millhaven, I should never tell anyone about it. Right? But I want you to understand that everything we say here is only between us. It'll never leave this room. So the answer is yes. I shot him."

"Wow." John was absolutely glowing at me. "That's amazing—you're fantastic. The whole story is going to come out."

"I don't think you want that," I said. John stared at me, trying to read my thoughts. He slid his leg off the arm of the chair. Whatever he saw in me he didn't like. He had stopped glowing, and now he was trying to look injured and innocent. "Why wouldn't I want everything to come out?"

"Because you murdered your wife," I said.

4

"First, you brought her to the St. Alwyn and stuck a knife in her, but you didn't quite manage to kill her. So when you heard that she was coming out of the coma, you got into her room and finished her off. And of course, you killed Grant Hoffman, too."

He slid down off the arm of the chair into the seat. He was stunned. He wanted me to know that he was stunned. "My God, Tim. You know exactly what happened. You even know why. It was you who came up with Bachelor's name. You put the whole thing together."

"You wanted me to know about Bachelor, didn't you? That's part of the reason you wanted me to come here in the first place. You had no idea he was living here—he was supposed to have come in from out of town after seeing your picture in the paper, killed Hoffman and your wife, and then slipped off into his new identity when things got too hot."

"This is so absurd, it's crazy," John said.