by Peter Straub
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.
8
ONCE WE WERE OUTSIDE and on the sidewalk, I waited for John Ransom to move toward his car. He turned left toward Berlin Avenue and kept walking without pausing at any of the cars parked along the curb. I hurried to catch up with him.
“I hope you don’t mind walking. It’s humid, but this is about the only exercise I get. And the hospital isn’t really very far.”
“I walk all over New York. It’s fine with me.”
“If it’s all right with you, we could even walk to Tom Pasmore’s house after we leave the hospital. He still lives on Eastern Shore Road?”
I nodded. “Across the street from where he grew up.”
Ransom gave me a curious look, and I explained that Tom had moved long ago into the old von Heilitz house.
“So he’s still right there on Eastern Shore Road. Lucky guy. I wish I could have taken over my family’s old house. But my parents moved to Arizona when my father sold his properties in town.”
We turned north to walk down Berlin Avenue, and traffic noises, the sound of horns and the hiss of tires on asphalt, took shape in the air. Summer school students from the college moved up the block in twos and threes, heading toward afternoon classes. Ransom gave me a wry glance. “He did all right on the deal, of course, but I wish he’d held onto those properties. The St. Alwyn alone went for about eight hundred thousand, and today it would be worth something like three million. We get a lot more conventions in town than we used to, and a decent hotel has a lot of potential.”
“Your father owned the St. Alwyn?”
“And the rest of that block.” He shook his head slowly and smiled when he saw my expression. “I guess I assumed you knew that. It adds a little irony to the situation. The place was run much better when my father owned it, let me tell you. It was as good as any hotel anywhere. But I don’t think the fact that my father owned the place twenty years ago has anything to do with April winding up in room 218, do you?”
“Probably not.” Not unless his father’s ownership of the hotel had something to do with the first Blue Rose murders, I thought, and dismissed the idea.
“I still wish the old man had held out until the city turned around,” said Ransom. “An academic salary doesn’t go very far. Especially an Arkham College salary.”
“April must have more than compensated for that,” I said.
He shook his head. “April’s money is hers, not mine. I never wanted to have the feeling that I could just dip into the money she made on her own.”
Ransom smiled at some memory, and the sunlight softened the unhappiness in his face.
“I have an old Pontiac I bought secondhand for when I have to drive somewhere. April’s car is a Mercedes 500SL. She worked hard—spent all night in her office sometimes. It was her money, all right.”
“Is there a lot of it?”
He gave me a grim look. “If she dies, I’ll be a well-off widower. But the money didn’t have anything to do with who she really was.”
“It could look like a motive to people who don’t understand your marriage.”
“Like the wonderful Millhaven police department?” He laughed—a short, ugly bark. “That’s just another reason for us to learn Blue Rose’s name. As if we needed one.”
9
WE CAME AROUND THE BEND past the third-floor patients’ lounge, and a short, aggressive-looking policeman in his twenties lounged out of one of the doorways. His name tag read MANGELOTTI. He checked his watch, then gave Ransom what he thought was a hard look. I got a hard look, too.
“Did she say anything, officer?” Ransom asked.
“Who’s this?” The little policeman moved in front of me, as if to keep me from entering the room. The top of his uniform hat came up to my chin.
“I’m just a friend,” I said.
Ransom had already stepped into the room, and the policeman turned his head to follow him. Then he tilted his head and gave me another glare. Both of us heard a woman inside the hospital room say that Mrs. Ransom had not spoken yet.
The cop backed away and turned around and went into the room to make sure he didn’t miss anything. I followed him into the sunny white room. Sprays of flowers in vases covered every flat surface—vases filled with lilies and roses and peonies crowded the long windowsill. The odor of the lilies filled the room. John Ransom and an efficient-looking woman in a white uniform stood on the far side of the bed. The curtains around the bed had been pushed back and were bunched against the wall on both sides of the patient’s head. April Ransom lay in a complex tangle of wires, tubes, and cords that stretched from the bed to a bank of machines and monitors. A clear bag on a pole dripped glucose into her veins. Thin white tubes had been fed into her nose, and electrodes were fastened to her neck and the sides of her head with white stars of tape. The sheet over her body covered a catheter and other tubes. Her head lay flat on the bed, and her eyes were closed. The left side of her face was a single enormous blue-purple bruise, and another long blue bruise covered her right jaw. Wedges of hair had been shaved back from her forehead, making it look even broader and whiter. Fine lines lay across it, and two nearly invisible lines bracketed her wide mouth. Her lips had no color. She looked as if several layers of skin had been peeled from the sections of her face le
ft unbruised. She had only the smallest resemblance to the woman in the newspaper photograph.
“You brought company today,” said the nurse.
John Ransom spoke our names, Eliza Morgan, Tim Underhill, and we nodded at each other across the bed. The policeman walked to the back of the room and sat down beneath the row of windows. “Tim is going to stay with me for a while, Eliza,” John said.
“It’ll be nice for you to have some company,” said the nurse. She looked at me from the other side of the bed, letting me adjust to the sight of April Ransom.
Ransom said, “You’ve heard me speak about Tim Underhill, April. He’s here to visit you, too. Are you feeling any better today?” He moved a section of the sheet aside and closed his hand around hers. I saw a flash of white bandage pads and even whiter tape around her upper arm. “Pretty soon you’ll be strong enough to come home again.”
He looked up at me. “She looked a lot worse last Wednesday, when they finally let me see her. I really thought she was going to die that day, but she pulled through, didn’t she, Eliza?”
“She sure did,” the nurse said. “Been fighting ever since.”
Ransom leaned over the bed and began speaking to his wife in a steady, comforting voice. I moved away from the bed. The policeman seated beneath the row of bright windows straightened up in his chair and looked at me brightly and aggressively. His left hand wandered toward the bulge of the notebook in his shirt pocket.
“The patients’ lounge is usually empty around this time,” the nurse said, and smiled at me.
I walked down the curving hallway to the entrance of a large room lined with green couches and chairs, some of them arranged around plain polished wooden tables. Two overweight women in T-shirts that adhered to their bodies smoked and played cards in a litter of splayed magazines and paper bags at a table in the far corner. They had pulled one of the curtains across the nearest window. An elderly woman in a gray suit occupied a chair eight feet from them with her back to an uncovered window, reading a Barbara Pym novel as if her life depended on it. I moved toward the windows in the left-hand corner of the room, and the old woman glanced up from her book and stabbed me with a look fiercer than anything Officer Mangelotti could have produced.
I heard footsteps behind me and turned around to see April Ransom’s private duty nurse carrying a pouchy black handbag into the lounge. The old woman glared at her, too. Eliza Morgan plopped her bag onto one of the tables near the entrance and motioned me toward her. She fished around in the big handbag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and looked at me apologetically. “This is the only place in this whole wing of the hospital where smoking is allowed,” she said in a voice not far above a whisper. She lit the cigarette with a match, tossed the match into a blackened copper ashtray, blew out a white feather of smoke, and sat down. “I know it’s a filthy habit, but I’m cutting way down. I have one an hour during my shift here, and one after dinner, and that’s it. Well, that’s almost the truth. Right at the start of my shift, I sit in here and smoke three or four of the darned things; otherwise I’d never make it through the first hour.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice again. “If Mrs. Rollins gave you a dirty look when you came in, it’s because she was afraid you were going to start polluting the place. I distress her no end, because she doesn’t think nurses should smoke at all—probably they shouldn’t!”
I smiled at her—she was a nice-looking woman a few years older than I was. Her short black hair looked clean and silky, and her brisk friendliness stopped far short of being intrusive.
“I suppose you’ve been here ever since Mrs. Ransom was put into the hospital,” I said.
She nodded, exhaling another vigorous plume of smoke. “Mr. Ransom hired me as soon as he heard.”
She put her hand on her bag. “You’re staying with him?”
I nodded.
“Just get him to talk—he’s an interesting man, but he doesn’t know half of what’s going on inside him. It’d be terrible if he started to fall apart.”
“Tell me,” I said. “Does his wife have a chance? Do you think she’ll come out of her coma?”
She leaned across the table. “You just be there to help him, if you’re a friend of his.” She made sure that I had heard this and then straightened her back and snubbed out the cigarette, having said all she intended to say.
“I guess that’s an answer,” I said, and we both stood up.
“Who ever said there were answers?”
Then she came toward me, and her dark eyes looked huge in her small, competent face. She put the flat of her hand on my chest. “I shouldn’t be saying any of this, but if Mrs. Ransom dies, you should go through his medicine chest and hide any prescription tranquilizers. And you shouldn’t let him drink too much. He’s had a good marriage for a long time, and if he loses it, he’s going to become someone he wouldn’t even recognize now.”
She gave my chest a single, admonitory pat, dropped her hand, and turned around again without saying another word. I followed her back into April Ransom’s room. John was leaning over the side of the bed, saying things too soft to be overheard. April looked like a white husk.
It was past five, and Tom Pasmore was probably out of bed. I asked Eliza where to find a pay telephone, and she sent me around the nurses’ station and down a hallway to another bank of elevators. A row of six telephones hung opposite the elevators, none of them in use. Swinging doors opened to wide corridors on both sides. Green, red, and blue arrows streaked up and down the floor in lines, indicating the way to various departments.
Tom Pasmore answered after five or six rings. Yes, it would be fine if we came around seven-thirty. I could tell that he was disappointed—on the few occasions Tom welcomed company, he liked it to arrive late and stay until dawn. He seemed intrigued that we would be on foot.
“Does Ransom walk everywhere? Would he walk downtown, say, from Ely Place?”
“He drove me to his house from the airport,” I said.
“In his or his wife’s car?”
“His. His wife has a Mercedes, I guess.”
“Is it parked in front of their house?”
“I didn’t notice. Why?”
He laughed. “He has two cars and he’s marching you all over the east side.”
“I walk everywhere, too. I don’t mind.”
“Well, I’ll have some cold towels and iced lemonade ready for you when you trudge up the driveway at the break of dawn. In the meantime, see if you can find out what happened to his wife’s car.”
I promised to try. Then I hung up and turned around to find myself facing a huge broad-shouldered guy with a gray ponytail and beard, the gold dot of an earring in one ear, and a four-button double-breasted Armani suit. He sneered at me as he moved toward the phone. I sneered back. I felt like Philip Marlowe.
10
AT SEVEN JOHN RANSOM AND I walked out of the hospital and went down the hedge-lined path to Berlin Avenue. He moved quickly but heedlessly, as if he were all by himself in an empty landscape. The air could have been squeezed like a sponge, and the temperature had cooled off to something like eighty-five. There was still at least an hour and a half of sunlight. Ransom hesitated when we reached the sidewalk. For a second I thought he might wade out into the crowded avenue—I didn’t think he could see anything but the room he had just left. Instead of stepping off the curb, he let his head drop so that his chin pressed into the layer of fat beneath it. He wiped his face with his hands. “Okay,” he said, more to himself than to me. Then he looked at me. “Well, now you’ve seen her. What do you think?”
“You must be doing her some good, coming every day,” I said.
“I hope so.” Ransom shoved his hands into his pockets. For a moment he looked like a balding, overweight version of the Brooks-Lowood student he had been. “I think she’s lost some weight in the past few days. And that big bruise seems to have stopped fading. Wouldn’t you think that’s a bad sign, when a bruise won’t fade?”
; I asked him what her doctor had said.
“As usual, nothing at all.”
“Well, Eliza Morgan will do everything possible for April,” I said. “At least you know she’s getting good care.”
He looked at me sharply. “She sneaks away to smoke cigarettes in the lounge, did you notice? I don’t think nurses should smoke, and I don’t think April should be left alone.”
“Isn’t that cop always there?”
Ransom shrugged and began walking back down the way we had come. “He spends most of his time staring out of the window.” His hands were still stuffed into his trousers pockets, and he hunched over a little as he walked. He looked over at me and shook his head.
I said, “It can’t be easy to see April like that.”
He sighed—sighed up from his heels. “Tim, she’s dying right in front of me.”
We both stopped walking. Ransom covered his face with his hands for a moment. A few people walking past us stared at the unusual sight of a grown man in a handsome gray suit crying in public. When he lowered his hands, moisture shone on his red face. “Now I’m a public embarrassment.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face.
“Do you still want to see Tom Pasmore? Would you rather just go home?”