by Peter Straub
“Are you kidding?”
He straightened his spine and began moving down the sidewalk again, past the card shop and the grocery store and the florist with its striped awning and its sidewalk display of flowers. “Whatever happened to April’s Mercedes? I don’t think I saw it when we left the house.”
Ransom frowned at me. “You hardly could have. It’s gone. I suppose it’ll turn up eventually—I’ve had other things to think about.”
“Where do you think it is?”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t care what happened to the car. It was insured. It’s just a car.”
We walked several more blocks through the heat, not talking. Now and then John Ransom pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and blotted his forehead. We were getting closer to the UI campus, and bookstores and little restaurants had replaced the grocery stores and florists. The Royal, Millhaven’s only art film house, was showing a season of thrillers from the forties and fifties—the marquee showed a complicated schedule beginning with a double feature of Double Indemnity and Kiss Me Deadly and ending, sometime in August, with Pickup on South Street and Strangers on a Train. In between they were running From Dangerous Depths, The Big Combo, The Asphalt Jungle, Chicago Deadline, DOA, The Hitchhiker, Laura, Out of the Past, Notorious. These were the movies of my youth, and I remembered the pleasure of slipping into the cool of the Beldame Oriental on a hot day, of buying popcorn and watching a doom-laden film noir in the nearly empty theater.
Suddenly I remembered the nightmare I’d had on the morning of the day John Ransom had called me—the thick hands on the big white plate. Cutting off human flesh, chewing it, spitting it out in revulsion. The heat made me feel dizzy, and the memory of the dream brought with it the gritty taste of depression. I stopped moving and looked up at the marquee.
“You okay?” Ransom said, turning around just ahead of me.
The title of one of the films seemed to float out an inch or two from the others—a trick of vision, or of the light. “Have you ever heard of a movie called From Dangerous Depths?” I asked. “I don’t know anything about it.”
Ransom walked back to join me. He looked up at the crowded marquee. “Cornball title, isn’t it?”
Ransom plunged across Berlin Avenue and walked east on a block lined with three-story frame and redbrick houses separated by thick low hedges. Some of the tiny front lawns were littered with bicycles and children’s toys, and all of them bore brown streaks like burn scars. Rock and roll drifted down from an upstairs window, tinny and lifeless.
“I remember Tom Pasmore,” Ransom said. “The guy was an absolute loner. He didn’t really have any friends. The money was his grandfather’s, wasn’t it? His father didn’t amount to much—I think he ran out on them in Tom’s senior year.”
That was the sort of detail everyone at Brooks-Lowood would have known.
“And his mother was an alcoholic,” Ransom said. “Pretty lady, though. Is she still alive?”
“She died about ten years ago.”
“And now he’s retired? He doesn’t do anything at all?”
“I suppose just looking after his money is a full-time job.”
“April could have done that for him,” Ransom said.
We crossed Waterloo Parade and walked another block in silence while Ransom thought about his wife.
After we crossed Balaclava Lane, the houses began to be slightly larger, set farther apart on larger lots. Between Berlin Avenue and Eastern Shore Drive, the value of the property increases with every block—walking eastward, we were moving toward John Ransom’s childhood neighborhood.
Ransom’s silence continued across Omdurman Road, Victoria Terrace, Salisbury Road. We reached the long street called The Sevens, where sprawling houses on vast lawns silently asserted that they were just as good as the houses one block farther east, on Eastern Shore Road. He stopped walking and wiped his forehead again. “When I was a kid, I walked all over this neighborhood. Now it seems so foreign to me. It’s as if I never lived here at all.”
“Aren’t the same people basically still here?”
“Nope—my parents’ generation died or moved to the west coast of Florida, and people my age all moved out to Riverwood. Even Brooks-Lowood moved, did you know that? Four years ago, they sold the plant and built a big Georgian campus out in Riverwood.”
He looked around, and for a moment he seemed to be considering buying one of the big showy houses. “Most people like April, people with new money, they bought places out in Riverwood. She wouldn’t hear of it. April liked being in the city—she liked being able to walk. She liked that little house of ours, and she liked it just where it is.”
He was using the past tense, I noticed, and I felt a wave of pity for all he was going through.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I get so discouraged.”
We walked up the rest of the block and turned right onto Eastern Shore Drive. Mansions of every conceivable style lined both sides of the wide road. Huge brick piles with turrets and towers, half-timbered Tudor structures, Moorish fantasies, giant stone palaces with stained-glass windows—money expressing itself unselfconsciously and unfettered by taste. Competing with one another, the people who built these enormous structures had bought grandeur by the yard.
Eventually, I pointed out Tom Pasmore’s house. It was on the west side of the drive, not the lake side, and dark green vines grew up the gray stone of its façade. As always in Lamont von Heilitz’s day, the curtains were closed against the light.
We went up the walk to the front door, and I rang the bell. We waited for what seemed a long time. John Ransom gave me the look he’d give a student who did not hand in a paper on time. I pressed the bell again. Maybe twenty seconds passed.
“Are you sure His Lordship is up?”
“Hold on,” I said. Inside the house, footsteps came toward the door.
After shooting me another critical glance, John pulled his damp handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the back of his neck and his forehead. The lock clicked. He squared his shoulders and worked his face into a pretty good imitation of a smile. The door swung open, and Tom Pasmore stood on the other side of the screen, blinking and smiling back. He was wearing a pale blue suit with a double-breasted vest still partially unbuttoned over a snowy white shirt and a dark blue silk tie. Comb marks separated his damp hair. He looked tired and a little out of focus.
11
RANSOM SAID, “HEY, BIG FELLA!” His voice was too loud. “You had us worried!”
“Tim and John, what a pleasure,” said Tom. He was fumbling with the buttons of the vest as his eyes traveled back and forth between us. “Isn’t this something?” He pushed the screen door open, and John Ransom had to step backward to move around it. Still moving around the screen door on the expanse of the front step, Ransom stuck out his right hand. Tom took it and said, “Well, just imagine.”
“It’s been a long time,” John Ransom said. “Too long.”
“Come on in,” Tom said, and dropped backward into the relative darkness of the house. I could smell traces of the soap and shampoo from his shower as I stepped into the house. Low lamps glowed here and there, on tables and on the walls. The familiar clutter filled the enormous room. I moved away from the door to let John Ransom come in.
“You’re very good to agree to—” Ransom stopped talking as he finally saw what the ground floor of Tom Pasmore’s house really looked like. He stood with his mouth open for a moment, then recovered himself. “To agree to see me. It means a lot to me, all the more since I gather from Tim that what you can tell me is, ah, rather on the personal side—”
He was still taking in the interior, which would have matched none of his expectations. Lamont von Heilitz, the previous owner of Tom’s house, had turned most of the ground floor into a single enormous room filled with file cases, stacks of books and newspapers, tables strewn with the details of whatever murder was on his mind at the moment, and couches and chairs that seemed randomly placed. Tom
Pasmore had changed the room very little. The curtains were still always drawn; old-fashioned upright lamps and green-shaded library lamps still burned here and there around the room, shedding warm illumination on the thousands of books ranged in dark wooden cases along the walls and on the dining table at the rear of the room. Tall stereo speakers stood against the walls, connected to shelves of complicated audio equipment. Compact discs leaned against one another like dominoes on half a dozen bookshelves, and hundreds of others had been stacked into tilting piles on the floor.
Tom said, “I know this place looks awfully confusing at first glance, but there is, I promise you, a comfortable place to sit down at the other end of the room.” He gestured toward the confusion. “Shall we?”
John Ransom was still taking in the profusion of filing cabinets and office furniture. Tom struck off through the maze.
“Say, I know I haven’t seen you since school,” said John Ransom, “but I’ve been reading about you in the papers, and that was an amazing job you did on Whitney Walsh’s murder. Amazing. You put it all together from here, huh?”
“Right in this house,” Tom said. He motioned for us to sit on two couches placed at right angles to a glass coffee table stacked with books. An ice bucket, three glasses, a jug of water, and various bottles stood in the middle of the table. “Everything was right there in the newspapers. Anyone could have seen it, and sooner or later someone else would have.”
“Yeah, but haven’t you done the same thing lots of times?” John Ransom sat facing a paneled wall on which hung half a dozen paintings, and I took the couch on the left side of the table. Ransom was eyeing the bottles. Tom seated himself in a matching chair across the table from me.
“Now and then, I manage to point out something other people missed.” Tom looked extremely uncomfortable. “John, I’m very sorry about what happened to your wife. What a terrible business. Have the police made any progress?”
“I wish I could say yes.”
“How is your wife doing? Do you see signs of improvement?”
“No,” Ransom said, staring at the ice bucket and the bottles.
“I’m so sorry.” Tom paused. “You must be in the mood for a drink. Can I get anything for you?”
Ransom said he would take vodka on the rocks, and Tom leaned over the table and used silver tongs to drop ice cubes into a thick low glass before filling the glass nearly to the top with vodka. I was watching him act as if there was no more on his mind than making John Ransom comfortable, and I wondered if he would make a drink for himself. I knew, as Ransom did not, that Tom had been out of bed for no more than half an hour.
During the course of telephone conversations in the middle of the night that sometimes lasted for two and three hours, I had sometimes imagined that Tom Pasmore started drinking when he got out of bed and stopped only when he managed to get back into it. He was the loneliest person I had ever met.
Tom’s mother had been a weepy drunk all during his childhood, and his father—Victor Pasmore, the man he had thought was his father—had been distant and short-tempered. Tom had known Lamont von Heilitz, his biological father, only a short time before von Heilitz was murdered as a result of the only investigation the two of them had conducted together. Tom had found his father’s body upstairs in this house. That investigation had made Tom Pasmore famous at the age of seventeen and left him with two fortunes, but it froze him into the life he still had. He lived in his father’s house, he wore his father’s clothes, he continued his father’s work. He had drifted through the local branch of the University of Illinois, where he wrote a couple of monographs—one about the death of the eighteenth-century poet-forger Thomas Chatterton, the other about the Lindbergh kidnapping—that caused a stir in academic circles. He began law school at Harvard in the year that an English graduate student there was arrested for murder after being found unconscious in a Cambridge motel bedroom with the corpse of his girlfriend. Tom talked to people, thought about things, and presented the police with evidence that led to the freeing of the student and the arrest of a famous English professor. He refused the offer from the parents of the freed student to pay his tuition through the rest of law school. When reporters began following him to his classes, he dropped out and fled back home. He could only be what he was—he was too good at it to be anything else.
I think that was when he started drinking.
Given this history, he still looked surprisingly like the young man he had been: he had all his hair, and, unlike John Ransom, he had not put on a great deal of weight. Despite the old-fashioned, dandyish elegance of his clothes, Tom Pasmore looked more like a college professor than Ransom did. The badges of his drinking, the bags under his eyes, the slight puffiness of his cheeks, and his pallor might have been the result of nothing more than a few too many late nights in a library carrel.
He paused with his hands on the vodka bottle and a new glass, regarding me with his exhausted blue eyes, and I knew that he had seen exactly what was going through my mind.
“Feel like a drink?” He knew all about my history.
John Ransom looked at me speculatively.
“Any soft drink,” I said.
“Ah,” Tom said. “We’ll have to go into the kitchen for that. Why don’t you come with me, so you can see what I’ve got in the fridge?”
I followed him to the back of the room and the kitchen door.
The kitchen too had been left as it had been in Lamont von Heilitz’s time, with high wooden cupboards, double copper sinks, wainscoting and weak, inadequate lighting. The only modern addition was a gleaming white refrigerator nearly the size of a grand piano. A long length of open cupboards had been cut away to make room for it. Tom swung open the wide door of this object—it was like opening the door of a carriage.
The bottom shelf of the otherwise nearly empty refrigerator held at least a dozen cans each of Coke and Pepsi and a six-pack of club soda in bottles. I chose club soda. Tom dropped ice into a tall glass and poured in the club soda.
“Did you ask him about his wife’s car?”
“He said he supposes that it’ll turn up.”
“What does he think happened to it?”
“It might have been stolen from in front of the St. Alwyn.”
Tom pursed his lips together. “Sounds plausible.”
“Did you know that his father owned the St. Alwyn?” I asked.
Tom raised his eyes to mine, and I saw the glimmer of something like a sparkle in them. “Did he, now?” he said, in such a way that I could not tell whether or not he had already known it. Before I was able to ask, a yelp of pain or astonishment came from the other room, accompanied by a thud and another yelp, this time clearly one of pain.
I laughed, for I suddenly knew exactly what had happened. “John finally saw your paintings,” I said.
Tom lifted his eyebrows. He gestured ironically toward the door.
When we came out of the kitchen, John Ransom was standing on the other side of the table, looking at the paintings that hung on that wall. Ransom was bending down to rub his knee, and his mouth was open.
He turned to stare at us.
“Did you hurt yourself?” Tom asked.
“You own a Maurice Denis,” John Ransom said, straightening up. “You own a Paul Ranson, for God’s sakes!”
“You’re interested in their work?”
“My God, that’s a beautiful Bonnard up there,” John said. He shook his head. “I’m just astounded. Yes, well, my wife and I own a lot of work by the Nabis, but we don’t—” But we don’t have anything as good as that, he had been going to say.
“I’m particularly fond of that one,” said Tom. “You collect the Nabis?”
“It’s so rare to see them in other people’s houses …” For a moment Ransom gaped at the paintings. The Bonnard was a small oil painting of a nude woman drying her hair in a shaft of sunlight.
“I don’t go into other people’s houses very much,” Tom said. He moved around to his chair,
sat down, regarded the bottles and the ice bucket for a moment, and then poured himself a drink of another, less expensive brand of vodka than the one he had given John Ransom. His hand was completely steady. He took a small, businesslike sip. Then he smiled at me. I sat down across from him. A small spot of color like rouge appeared in both of his cheeks.
“I wonder if you’ve ever thought about selling anything,” John said, and turned expectantly around.
“No, I’ve never thought about that,” Tom said.
“Would you mind if I asked where you found some of this work?”
“I found them exactly where you found them,” Tom said. “On the back wall of this room.”
“How could you—?”
“I inherited them when Lamont von Heilitz left me this house in his will. I suppose he bought them in Paris, sometime in the twenties.” For a second more he indulged John Ransom, who looked as if he wanted to pull out a magnifying glass and scrutinize the brush strokes on a four-foot-square Maurice Denis, and then he said, “I gathered that you were interested in talking about the Blue Rose murders.”
Ransom’s head snapped around.
“I read what the Ledger had to say about the assault on your wife. You must want to learn whatever you can about the earlier cases.”
“Yes, absolutely,” Ransom said, finally leaving the painting and walking a little tentatively back to his seat.
“Now that Lamont von Heilitz’s name has come up, it may be as well to go into it.”
Ransom slid onto the other couch. He cleared his throat, and when Tom said nothing, swallowed some of his vodka before beginning. “Did Mr. von Heilitz ever do any work on the Blue Rose murders?”
“It was a matter of timing,” Tom said. He glanced at the glass he had set on the table, but did not reach for it. “He was busy with cases all over the country. And then, it seemed to come to a neat conclusion. I think it bothered him, though. Some of the pieces didn’t seem to fit, and by the time I got to know him, he was just beginning to think about it again. And then I met someone at Eagle Lake who had been connected to the case.”