2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I shook my head.

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

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

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

"Eliza Morgan," I said.

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

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

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

"Who are you angry with?"

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

"She wasn't supposed to die."

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

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

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

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

"He tried to hit you?"

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

"Isn't William in the phone book?"

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

"Who may or may not be real."

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

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

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

"The same car?"

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

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

"Elvee Holdings bought the bar in 1980."

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

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

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

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

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

"More to him than to you?"

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

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

He frowned into the empty glass. "Nope."

"Or what she managed to get done?"

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

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

"I understand," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So was everybody else."

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

"What was that?"

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