7

"They'll believe it in a hurry after one more murder," I said. "The third one was the exception I mentioned before— the doctor," said Ransom.

"I thought you were talking about your wife."

He frowned at me. "Well, in the book, the third one was the doctor. Big house on the east side."

"There won't be one on the east side," I said.

"Look at what's happening," Ransom said. "It'll be at the same address. Where the doctor died."

"The doctor didn't die. That was one of the things I changed when I wrote the book. Whoever tried to kill Buzz Laing, Dr. Laing, cut his throat and wrote blue rose on his bedroom wall, but ran away without noticing that he wasn't dead yet. Laing came to in time and managed to stop the bleeding and get himself to a hospital."

"What do you mean, 'whoever tried to kill him'? It was Blue Rose."

I shook my head.

"Are you sure about this?"

"As sure as I can be without evidence," I said. "In fact, I think the same person who cut Buzz Laing's throat also killed Damrosch and set it up to look like suicide."

Ransom opened his mouth and then closed it again. "Killed Damrosch?"

I smiled at him—Ransom looked a little punchy. "Some information about the Blue Rose case turned up a couple of years ago when I was working on a book about Tom Pasmore and Lamont von Heilitz." He started to say something, and I held up my hand. "You probably remember hearing about von Heilitz, and I guess you went to school with Tom."

"I was a year behind him at Brooks-Lowood. What in the world could he have to do with the Blue Rose murders?"

"He didn't have anything to do with them, but he knows who tried to kill Buzz Laing. And who murdered William Damrosch."

"Who is this?" Ransom seemed furious with excitement. "Is he still alive?"

"No, he's not. And I think it would be better for Tom to tell you the story. It's really his story, for one thing."

"Will he be willing to tell it to me?"

"I called him before I left New York. He'll tell you what he thinks happened to Buzz Laing and Detective Damrosch."

"Okay." Ransom nodded. He considered this. "When do I get to talk to him?"

"He'd probably be willing to see us tonight, if you like."

"Could I hire him?"

Almost every resident of Millhaven over the age of thirty would probably have known that Tom Pasmore had worked for a time as a private investigator. Twenty years ago, even the Bangkok papers had run the story of how an independent investigator, a self-styled "amateur of crime" living in the obscure city of Millhaven, Illinois, had brilliantly reinterpreted all the evidence and records in the case of Whitney Walsh, the president of TransWorld Insurance, who had been shot to death near the ninth hole of his country club in Harrison, New York. A groundskeeper with a longstanding grudge against Walsh had been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Working on his own and without ever leaving Millhaven, Tom Pasmore had succeeded in identifying and locating the essential piece of evidence necessary to arrest and convict the real murderer, a former employee. The innocent man had been freed, and after he had told his story to a number of newspapers and national magazines, it was learned that Tom Pasmore had done essentially the same thing in perhaps a dozen cases: he had used public information and trial records to get innocent men out of jail and guilty ones in. The Walsh case had merely been the most prominent. There followed, in the same newspapers and magazines, a number of lurid stories about "The Real-Life Sherlock Holmes," each containing the titillating information that the wizard habitually refused payment for his investigations, that he had a fortune of something between ten and twenty million dollars, that he lived alone in a house he seldom left, that he dressed with an odd, old-fashioned formality. These revelations came to a climax with the information that Tom Pasmore was the natural son of Lamont von Heilitz, the man who had been the inspiration for the radio character Lamont Cranston—"The Shadow." By the time all of this had emerged, Tom ceased to give interviews. As far as anyone knew, he also ceased to work—scorched into retirement by unwelcome publicity. The press never unearthed another incident in which Tom Pasmore of Millhaven, Illinois, intervened from afar to free an innocent man and jail a guilty one for murder. Yet from my contact with him, I thought it was almost certain that he continued his work anonymously, and that he had created the illusion of retirement to maintain in absolute darkness the secret the press had not discovered, that he had long been the lover of a woman married into one of Millhaven's wealthiest families.

Tom would never consent to being hired by John Ransom, and I told him so.

"Why not, if he's willing to come over?"

"In the first place, he was never for hire. And ever since the Walsh case, he's wanted people to think that he doesn't even work. And secondly, Tom is not willing to 'come over.' If you want to see him, we'll have to go to his house."

"But I went to school with him!"

"Were you friends?"

"Pasmore didn't have friends. He didn't want any." This suggested another thought, and he turned his head from the study of his interlaced hands to revolve his suspicious face toward mine. "Since he's so insistent on keeping out of sight, why is he willing to talk to me now?"

"He'd rather explain to you himself what happened to Buzz Laing and Detective Damrosch. You'll see why."

Ransom shrugged and looked at his watch. "I'm usually back at the hospital by now. Maybe Pasmore could join us for dinner?"

"We have to go to his house," I said.

He thought about it for a while. "So maybe we could have an audience with His Holiness between visiting April and going for dinner? Or is there something else about the sacred schedule of Thomas Pasmore that you haven't told me yet?"

"Well, his day generally starts pretty late," I said. "But if you point me toward the telephone, I'll give him some advance warning."

Ransom waved his hand toward the front of the room, and I remembered passing a high telephone table in the entrance hall. I stood up and left the room. Through the arch, I saw Ransom get up and walk toward the paintings. He stood in front of the Vuillard with his hands in his pockets, frowning at the lonely figures beneath the tree. Tom Pasmore would still be asleep, I knew, but he kept his answering machine switched on to take messages during the day. Tom's dry, light voice told me to leave a message, and I said that Ransom and I would like to see him around seven—I'd call him from the hospital to see if that was all right.

Ransom spun around as I came back into the room. "Well, did Sherlock agree to meet before midnight?"

"I left a message on his machine. When we're ready to leave the hospital, I'll try him again. It'll probably be all right."

"I suppose I ought to be grateful he's willing to see me at all, right?" He looked angrily at me, then down at his watch. He jammed his hands into his trousers pockets and glared at me, waiting for the answer to a rhetorical question.

"He'll probably be grateful to see you, too," I said.

He jerked a hand from his pocket and ran it over his thinning hair. "Okay, okay," he said. "I'm sorry." He motioned me back toward the entrance hall and the front door.