3

I closed the door behind me. Two or three yards away, Ralph Ransom leaned against the red-flocked wallpaper, his hands back in his pockets. He still had the quizzical expression on his face. He could not figure out my motives, and that made him uneasy. The unease translated into reflexive aggression. He pushed his shoulders off the wall and faced me.

"I thought it would be better to talk about this out here," I said. "A few years ago, I did some research that indicated that Detective Damrosch had nothing to do with the murders."

"Research?" His shoulders went down as he relaxed. "Oh, I get it. You're a history guy, a whaddayacallit. A historian."

"I write books," I said, trying to salvage as much of the truth as possible.

"The old publish or perish thing."

I smiled—in my case, this was not just a slogan.

"I don't know if I can tell you anything."

"Was there anybody you suspected, someone you thought might have been the killer?"

He shrugged. "I always thought it was a guest, some guy who came and went. That's what we had, mostly, salesmen who showed up for a couple of days, checked out, and then came back again for a few more days."

"Was that because of the prostitute?"

"Well, yeah. A couple girls used to sneak up to the rooms. You try, but you can't keep them out. That Fancy, she was one of them. I figured someone caught her stealing from him, or, you know, just got in a fight with her out in back there. And then I thought he might have known that the piano player saw it happen—his room looked right out onto the back of the hotel."

"Musicians stayed at the St. Alwyn, too?"

"Oh yeah, we used to get some jazz musicians. See, we weren't too far from downtown, our rates were good, and we had all-night room service. The musicians were good guests. To tell you the truth, I think they liked the St. Alwyn because of Glenroy Breakstone."

"He lived in the hotel?"

"Oh, sure. Glenroy was there when I bought it, and he was still there when I sold it. He's probably still there! He was one of the few who didn't move out, once all the trouble started. The reason that piano player lived in the hotel, Glenroy recommended him personally. Never any trouble with Glenroy."

"Who used to cause trouble?"

"Well, sometimes guys, you know, might have a bad day and bust up the furniture at night—anything can happen in a hotel, believe me. The ones who went crazy, they got barred. The day manager took care of that. The man kept things shipshape, as much as he could. A haughty bastard, but he didn't stand for any nonsense. Religious fellow, I think. Dependable."

"Do you remember his name?"

He laughed out loud. "You bet I do. Bob Bandolier. You wouldn't want to go around a golf course with that guy, but he was one hell of a manager."

"Maybe I could talk to him."

"Maybe. Bob stayed on when I sold the place—guy was practically married to the St. Alwyn. And I'll tell you someone else—Glenroy Breakstone. Nothing passed him by, you can bet on that. He pretty much knew everybody that worked at the hotel."

"Were he and Bob Bandolier friends?"

"Bob Bandolier didn't have friends," Ralph said, and laughed again. "And Bob would never get tight with, you know, a black guy."

"Would he talk to me?"

"You never know." He checked his watch and looked at the door to the chapel. "Hey, if you find something out, would you tell me? I'd be interested."

We went back into the enormous room. John looked up at us from beside the table.

Ralph said, "Who's supposed to fill all these chairs?"

John morosely examined the empty chairs. "People from Barnett and clients, I suppose. And the reporters will show up." He scowled down at a plastic cup. "They're hovering out there like blowflies."

There was a moment of silence. Separately, Marjorie Ransom and Alan Brookner came down the center aisle. Marjorie said a few words to Alan. He nodded uncertainly, as if he had not really heard her.

I poured coffee for them. For a moment we all wordlessly regarded the coffin.

"Nice flowers," Ralph said.

"I just said that," said Marjorie. "Didn't I, Alan?"

"Yes, yes," Alan said. "Oh John, I haven't asked you about what happened at police headquarters. How long were you interrogated?"

John closed his eyes. Marjorie whirled toward Alan, sloshing coffee over her right hand. She transferred the cup and waved her hand in the air, trying to dry it. Ralph gave her a handkerchief, but he was looking from John to Alan and back to John.

"You were interrogated?"

"No, Dad. I wasn't interrogated."

"Well, why would the police want to talk to you? They already got the guy."

"It looks as though Dragonette gave a false confession."

"What?" Marjorie said. "Everybody knows he did it."

"It doesn't work out right. He didn't have enough time to go to the hospital for the change of shift, go to the hardware store and buy what he needed, then get back home when he did. The clerk who sold him the hacksaw said they had a long conversation. Dragonette couldn't have made it to the east side and back. He just wanted to take the credit."

"Well, that man must be crazy," Marjoiiie said.

For the first time that day, Alan smiled.

"Johnny, I still don't get why the police wanted to question you," said his father.

"You know how police are. They want to go over and over the same ground. They want me to remember everybody I saw on my way into the hospital, everybody I saw on the way out, anything that might help them."

"They're not trying to—"

"Of course not. I left the hospital and walked straight home. Tim heard me come in around five past eight." John looked at me. "They'll probably want you to verify that."

I said I was glad I could help.

"Are they coming to the funeral?" Ralph asked.

"Oh, yeah," John said. "Our ever-vigilant police force will be in attendance."

"You didn't say a word about any of this. We wouldn't have known anything about it, if Alan hadn't spoken up."

"The important thing is that April is gone," John said. "That's what we should be thinking about."

"Not who killed her?" Alan boomed, turning each word into a cannonball.

"Alan, stop yelling at me," John said.

"The man who did this to my daughter is garbage!" Through some natural extra capacity, Alan's ordinary speaking voice was twice as loud as a normal person's, and when he opened it up, it sounded like a race car on a long straight road. Even now, when he was nearly rattling the windows, he was not really trying to shout. "He does not deserve to live!"

Blushing, John walked away.

Just Call Me Joyce peeked in. "Is anything wrong? My goodness, there's enough noise in here to wake the know you what."

Alan cleared his throat. "Guess I make a lot of noise when I get excited."

"The others will be here in about fifteen minutes." Joyce gave us a thoroughly insincere smile and backed out. Her father must have been hovering in the hallway. Clearly audible through the door, Joyce said, "Didn't these people ever hear of Valium?"

Even Alan grinned, minutely.

He twisted around to look for John, who was winding back toward us, hands in his pockets like his father, his eyes on the pale carpet. "John, is Grant Hoffman coming?"

I remembered Alan asking about Hoffman when he was dressed in filthy shorts and roaches scrambled through the pizza boxes in his sink.

"I have no idea," John said.

"One of our best Ph.D. candidates," Alan said to Marjorie.

"He started off with me, but we moved him over to John two years ago. He dropped out of sight—which is odd, because Grant is an excellent student."

"He was okay," John said.

"Grant usually saw me after his conferences with John, but last time, he never showed up."

"Never showed up for our conference on the sixth, either," John said. "I wasted an hour, not to mention all the time I spent going to and fro on the bus."

"He came to your house?" I asked Alan.

"Absolutely," Alan said. "About once a week. Sometimes, he gave me a hand with cleaning up the kitchen, and we'd gab about the progress of his thesis, all kinds of stuff."

"So call the guy up," Ralph said to his son.

"I've been a little busy," John said. "Anyhow, Hoffman didn't have a telephone. He lived in a single room downtown somewhere, and you had to call him through his landlady. Not that I ever called him." He looked at me. "Hoffman used to teach high school in a little town downstate. He saved up some money, and he came here to do graduate work with Alan. He was at least thirty."

"Do graduate students disappear like that?"

"Now and then they slink away."

"People like Grant Hoffman don't slink away," Alan said.

"I don't want to waste my time worrying about Grant Hoffman. There must be people who would notice if he got hit by a bus, or if he decided to change his name and move to Las Vegas."

The door opened. Just Call Me Joyce led a number of men in conservative gray and blue suits into the chapel. After a moment a few women, also dressed in dark suits but younger than the men, became visible in their midst. These new arrivals moved toward John, who took them to his parents.

I sat down in a chair on the aisle. Ralph and one of the older brokers, a man whose hair was only a slightly darker gray than his own, sidled off to the side of the big room and began talking in low voices.

The door clicked open again. I turned around on my seat and saw Paul Fontaine and Michael Hogan entering the room. Fontaine was carrying a beat-up brown satchel slightly too large to be called a briefcase. He and Hogan went to different sides of the room. That powerful and unaffected natural authority that distinguished Michael Hogan radiated out from him like an aura and caused most of the people in the room, especially the women, to glance at him. I suppose great actors also have this capacity, to automatically draw attention toward themselves. And Hogan had the blessing of looking something like an actor without at all looking theatrical—his kind of utterly male handsomeness, cast in the very lines of reliability, steadiness, honesty, and a tough intelligence, was of the sort that other men found reassuring, not threatening. As I watched Hogan moving to the far side of the room under the approving glances of April's mourners, glances he seemed not to notice, it occurred to me that he actually was the kind of person that an older generation of leading men had impersonated on screen, and I was grateful that he was in charge of April's case.

Less conspicuous, Fontaine poured coffee for himself and sat behind me. He dropped the satchel between his legs.

"The places I run into you," he said.

I did not point out that I could say the same.

"And the things I hear you say." He sighed. "If there's one thing the ordinary policeman hates, it's a mouthy civilian."

"Was I wrong?"

"Don't push your luck." He leaned forward toward me. The bags under his eyes were a little less purple. "What's your best guess as to the time your friend Ransom got home from the hospital on Wednesday morning?"

"You want to check his alibi?"

"I might as well." He smiled. "Hogan and I are representing the department at this municipal extravaganza."

Cops and cop humor.

He noticed my reaction to his joke, and said, "Oh, come on. Don't you know what's going to happen here?"

"If you want to ask me questions, you can take me downtown."

"Now, now. You know that favor you asked me to do?"

"The lost license number?"

"The other favor." He slid the scuffed leather satchel forward and snapped it open to show me a thick wad of typed and handwritten pages.

"The Blue Rose file?"

He nodded, smiling like a big-nosed cat.

I reached for the satchel, and he slid it back between his legs. "You were going to tell me what time your friend got home on Wednesday morning."

"Eight o'clock," I said. "It takes about twenty minutes to walk back from the hospital. I thought you said this was going to be hard to find."

"The whole thing was sitting on top of a file in the basement of the records office. Someone else was curious, and didn't bother putting it back."

"Don't you want to read it first?"

"I copied the whole damn thing," he said. "Get it back to me as soon as you can."

"Why are you doing this for me?"

He smiled at me in his old way, without seeming to move his face. "You wrote that stupid book, which my sergeant adores. And I shall have no other sergeants before him. And maybe there's something to this ridiculous idea after all."

"You think it's ridiculous to think that the new Blue Rose murders are connected to the old ones?"

"Of course it's ridiculous." He leaned forward over the satchel. "By the way, will you please stop trying to be helpful in front of the cameras? As far as the public is concerned, Mrs. Ransom was one of Walter's victims. The man on Livermore Avenue, too."

"He's still unidentified?"

"That's right," Fontaine said. "Why?"

"Have you ever heard of a missing student of John's named Grant Hoffman?"

"No. How long has he been missing?"

"A couple of weeks, I think. He didn't turn up for an appointment with John."

"And you think he could be our victim?"

I shrugged.

"When was the appointment he missed, do you know?"

"On the sixth, I think."

"That's the day after the body was found." Fontaine glanced over at Michael Hogan, who was talking with John's parents. Her face toward the detective, Marjorie was drinking in whatever he was saying. She looked like a girl at a dance.

"Do you happen to know how old this student was?"

"Around thirty," I said, wrenching my attention away from the effect Michael Hogan was making on John's mother. "He was a graduate student."

"After the funeral, maybe we'll—" He stopped talking and stood up. He patted my shoulder. "Get the file back to me in a day or two."

He passed down the row of empty chairs and went up to Michael Hogan. The two detectives parted from the Ransoms and walked a few feet away. Hogan looked quickly, assessingly at me for a long second in which I felt the full weight of his remarkable concentration, then at John. I still felt the impact of his attention. Rapt, Marjorie Ransom continued to stare at the older detective until Ralph tugged her gently back toward the gray-haired broker, and even then she turned her head to catch sight of him over her shoulder. I knew how she felt.

Someone standing beside me said, "Excuse me, are you Tim Underhill?"

I looked up at a stocky man of about thirty-five wearing thick black glasses and a lightweight navy blue suit. He had an expectant expression on his broad, bland face.

I nodded.

"I'm Dick Mueller—from Barnett? We talked on the phone? I wanted to tell you that I'm grateful for your advice—you sure called it. As soon as the press found out about me and, ah, you know, they went crazy. But because you warned me what was going to happen, I could work out how to get in and out of the office."

He sat down in front of me, smiling with the pleasure of the story he was about to tell me. The door clicked open again, and I turned my head to see Tom Pasmore slipping into the chapel behind a young man in jeans and a black jacket. The young man was nearly as pale as Tom, but his thick dark hair and thick black eyebrows made his large eyes blaze. He focused on the coffin as soon as he got into the big room. Tom gave me a little wave and drifted up the side of the room.

"You know what I go through to get to work?" Mueller asked.

I wanted to get rid of Dick Mueller so that I could talk to Tom Pasmore.

"I asked Ross Barnett if he wanted me to—"

I broke into the account of How I Get to My Office. "Was Mr. Barnett going to send April Ransom out to San Francisco to open another office, some kind of joint venture with another brokerage house?"

He blinked at me. His eyes were huge behind the big square lenses. "Did somebody tell you that?"

"Not exactly," I said. "It was more of a rumor."

"Well, there was some talk a while ago about moving into San Francisco." He looked worried now.

"That wasn't what you meant about the 'bridge deal'?"

"Bridge deal?" Then, in a higher tone of voice: "Bridge deal?"

"You told me to tell your secretary—"

He grinned. "Oh, you mean the bridge project. Yeah. To remind me of who you were. And you thought I meant the Golden Gate Bridge?"

"Because of April Ransom."

"Oh, yeah, no, it wasn't anything like that. I was talking about the Horatio Street bridge. In town here. April was nuts about local history."

"She was writing something about the bridge?"

He shook his head. "All I know is, she called it the bridge project. But listen, Ross"—he looked sideways and tilted his head toward the prosperous-looking gray-haired man who had been talking with Ralph Ransom—"worked out this great little plan."

Mueller told me an elaborate story about entering through a hat shop on Palmer Street, going down into the basement, and taking service stairs up to the fourth floor, where he could let himself into the Barnett copy room.

"Clever," I said. I had to say something. Mueller was the sort of person who had to impose what delighted him on anyone who would listen. I tried to picture his encounters with Walter Dragonette, Mueller bubbling away about bond issues and Walter sitting across the desk in a daze, wondering how that big schoolteacher head would look on a shelf in his refrigerator.

"You must miss April Ransom," I said.

He settled back down again. "Oh, sure. She was very important to the office. Sort of a star."

"What was she like, personally? How would you describe her?"

He pursed his lips and glanced at his boss. "April worked harder than anyone on earth. She was smart, she had an amazing memory, and she put in a lot of hours. Tremendous energy."

"Did people like her?"

He shrugged. "Ross, he certainly liked her."

"You sound like you're not saying something."

"Well, I don't know." Mueller looked at his boss again. "This is the kind of a person who's always going ninety miles an hour. If you didn't travel at her speed, too bad for you."

"Did you ever hear that she was thinking of leaving the business to have a baby?"

"Would Patton quit? Would Mike Ditka quit? To have babies?" Mueller clamped a fat hand over his mouth and looked around to see if anyone had noticed his giggle. He wore a pinky ring with a tiny diamond chip and a big college ring with raised letters. Puffy circles of raised fat surrounded both rings.

"You could call her aggressive," he said. "It's not a criticism. We're supposed to be aggressive." He tried to look aggressive as all get-out for a second and succeeded in looking a little bit sneaky.

People had been coming into the room in twos and threes while we talked, filling about three-fourths of the seats. I recognized some of John's neighbors from the local news. When Mueller stood up, I left my seat and carried the heavy satchel to the back of the room, where Tom Pasmore was drinking a cup of coffee.

"I didn't think you'd come," I said.

"I don't usually have the chance to get a look at my murderers," he said.

"You think April's murderer is here?" I looked around at the roomful of brokers and, teachers. Dick Mueller had sidled up to Ross Barnett, who was angrily shaking his head, probably denying that he'd ever had any intention of moving April anywhere at all. Because you never know what you'll be able to use, I stepped sideways and took out my notebook to write down a phrase about a broker so feeble that he used his college ring to get business from other people who had gone to the same college. A combination of letters and numbers was already written on the last page, and it took me a moment to remember what they represented. Tom Pasmore was smiling at me. I put the notebook back in my pocket.

"I'd say there's an excellent chance." He looked down at the case between my legs. "The Blue Rose files wouldn't be in that thing, would they?"

"How did you work that out?"

He bent down and picked up the case to show me the dim, worn gold of the initials stamped just below the clasp: WD.

Fontaine had given me William Damrosch's own satchel— he had probably used it as a suitcase when he went on trips, and as a briefcase in town.

"Would you mind bringing this over to my place tonight, so I can make copies?"

"You have a copy machine?" Like Lamont von Heilitz, Tom often gave the impression of resisting technological progress.

"I even have computers."

I thought he was being playful: I wasn't even sure that he used an electric typewriter.

"They're upstairs. These days, most of my information comes through the modem." The surprise on my face made him smile. He held up his right hand. "Honest. I'm a hacker. I'm tapped in all over the place."

"Can you find out someone's name through their license plate number?"

He nodded. "Sometimes." He gave me a speculative look. "Not in every state."

"I'm thinking of an Illinois plate."

"Easy."

I began to tell him about the license number on the piece of paper I thought I had given to Paul Fontaine. At the front of the room, the young man who had come into the room behind Tom turned away from April Ransom's coffin and made a wide circle around John, who turned his back on him, either by chance or intentionally. The music became much louder. Mr. Trott appeared through a white door I had not noticed earlier and closed the coffin. At the same time, everybody in the room turned around as the big doors at the back of the chapel admitted two men in their early sixties. One of them, a man about as broad as an ox cart, wore a row of medals on the chest of his police uniform, like a Russian general. The other man had a black armband on the sleeve of his dark gray suit. His hair, as silvery as Ralph Ransom's, was thicker, almost shaggy. I assumed that he must have been the minister.

Isobel Archer and her crew pushed themselves into the room, followed by a dozen other reporters. Isobel waved her staff to a point six feet from Tom Pasmore and me, and the other reporters lined up along the sides of the room, already scribbling in notebooks and talking into their tape recorders. The big silver-haired man marched up to Ross Barnett and whispered something.

"Who's that?" I asked Tom.

"You don't know Merlin Waterford? Our mayor?"

The uniformed man who had come in with him pumped John's hand and pulled him toward the first row. Bright lights flashed on and washed color from the room. The music ended. The pale young man in the black jacket bumped against a row of knees as he fought his way toward a seat. Isobel Archer held up a microphone to her face and began speaking into the camera and the floodlights. John leaned forward and covered his face with his hands.

"Ladies and gentlemen, fellow mourners for April Ransom." The mayor had moved behind the podium. The white light made his hair gleam. His teeth shone. His skin was the color of a Caribbean beach. "Some few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the dinner at which a brilliant young woman received the financial community's Association Award. I witnessed the respect she had earned from her peers and shared her well-earned pride in that wonderful honor. April Ransom's profound grasp of business essentials, her integrity, her humanity, and her deep commitment to the greater good of our community inspired us all that night. She stood before us, her friends and colleagues, as a shining example of everything I have tried to encourage and represent during the three terms in which I have been privileged to serve as the mayor of this fine city."

If you cared for that sort of thing, the mayor was a great speaker. He would pledge, in fact he would go so far as to promise, that the memory of April Ransom's character and achievements would never leave him as he worked night and day to bring good government to every citizen of Millhaven. He would dedicate whatever time was left to him to—

This went on for about fifteen minutes, after which the chief of police, Arden Vass, stumped up to the microphone, frowned, and pulled three sheets of folded paper from an inside jacket pocket. The papers crackled as he flattened them onto the podium with his fist. He was not actually frowning, I saw. That was just his normal expression. He tugged a pair of steel-rimmed glasses from a pocket below the rows of medals and rammed them onto his face.

"I can't pontificate like my friend, the mayor," he said. His hoarse, bludgeoning voice slammed each of his short sentences to the ground before picking up the next. We had a great police department. Each man—and woman—in that department was a trained professional. That was why our crime rate was one of the lowest in the nation. Our officers had recently apprehended one of the worst criminals in history. That man was currently safe in custody, awaiting a full statement of charges and eventual trial. The woman whose life we were celebrating today would understand the importance of cooperation between the community and the brave men who risked their lives to protect it. That was the Millhaven represented by April Ransom. I have nothing more to say. Thank you.

Vass pushed himself away from the podium and lumbered toward the first row of seats. For a second everybody sat frozen with uncertainty, staring at the empty podium and the bleached flowers. Then the lights snapped off.