by Peter Straub
He bent forward, lifted his glass and took another measured sip. I had never had the good luck to meet Lamont von Heilitz, but as I looked at Tom Pasmore, I had the uncanny feeling that I was seeing the old detective before me. John Ransom might have been seeing him, too, from the sudden tension in his posture.
“Who did you meet at Eagle Lake?” John asked. This was the privately owned resort in northern Wisconsin to which a select portion of Millhaven’s society families went every summer.
“In order to tell you about this,” Tom said, “I have to explain some private things about my family. I want to ask you not to repeat what I have to say.”
John promised.
“Then let me tell you a story,” Tom said.
12
YOU PROBABLY REMEMBER meeting my mother now and then, at school functions.”
“I remember your mother,” Ransom said. “She was a beautiful woman.”
“And fragile. I’m sure you remember that, too. My mother would spend whole days in her bedroom. Sometimes she’d cry for hours, and even she didn’t know why, she’d just stay up there and weep. I used to get so angry with her for not being like anyone else’s mother … Well, instead of getting angry, I should have been thinking about what could have made her be so helpless.” Tom let that sink in for a moment, then reached for his glass again. His pale lips made a round aperture for the slightly larger sip of vodka. He hated having to tell this story, I saw. He was telling it because he would have hated my telling it even more, and because he thought that John Ransom ought to know it. He set the glass down and said, “I suppose you knew something about my grandfather.”
John blinked. “Glendenning Upshaw? Of course. A powerful man.” He hesitated. “Passed away in your senior year. Suicide, I remember.”
Tom glanced at me, for we both knew the real circumstances of his grandfather’s death. Then he looked back at John. “Yes, he was powerful. He made a fortune in Millhaven, and he had some political influence. He was a terrible man in almost every way, and he had a lot of secrets. But there was one secret he had to protect above all the others, because he would have been ruined if it ever came out. He killed three people to protect this secret, and he nearly succeeded in killing a fourth. His wife learned about it in 1923, and she drowned herself in Eagle Lake—it destroyed her.”
Tom looked down at his hands in his lap. He raised his eyes to mine, briefly, and then looked at John Ransom. “My grandfather fired all his servants when my mother was about two. He never hired any more, even after his wife died. He couldn’t afford to have anyone discover that he was raping his daughter.”
“Raping?” Ransom sounded incredulous.
“Maybe he didn’t have to use force, but he forced or coerced my mother into having sex with him from the time she was about two until she was fourteen.”
“And in all that time, no one found out?”
Tom took another swallow, I think from relief that he had finally said it. “He went to great lengths to make sure that would never happen. For obvious reasons, my mother went to the doctor he had always used. In the early fifties, this doctor took on a young partner. Needless to say, the young doctor, Buzz Laing, did not get my mother as one of his patients.”
“Okay, Buzz Laing,” Ransom said. “Everybody always thought he was the fourth Blue Rose victim, but Tim told me that he was attacked by someone else. What did he do, find out about your mother?”
“Buzz took the office records home at night to build up backgrounds on his patients. One night he just grabbed the wrong file. What he saw there disturbed him, and he went back to his partner to discuss it. Years before, the older doctor had recorded all the classic signs of sexual abuse—vaginal bleeding, vaginal warts, change in personality, nightmares. Et cetera, et cetera. It was all there in the records.”
When Tom set his glass down, it was empty. Ransom pushed his own glass toward him, and Tom added ice and vodka to it.
“So the older doctor called your grandfather,” John Ransom said when Tom had taken his seat again.
“One night Buzz Laing came home and went upstairs, and a big man grabbed him from behind and almost cut his head off. He was left for dead, but he managed to stop the bleeding and call for help. The man who had tried to kill him had written BLUE ROSE on his bedroom wall, and everyone assumed that Laing was the fourth victim.”
“But what about William Damrosch? He had been Laing’s lover. That butcher, Stenmitz, had abused him. And the case ended when he killed himself.”
“If the case ended, why are you sitting here listening to ancient history?”
“But how could your grandfather know about some detective’s private life?”
“He had a close friend in the police department. A sort of a protégé—they did each other a lot of good, over the years. This character made sure he knew everything that might be useful to him, and he shared whatever he found out with my grandfather. That was one of his functions.”
“So this cop—”
“Told my grandfather about Damrosch’s history. My grandfather, good old Glendenning Upshaw, saw how he could wrap everything up into one neat little package.”
“He killed Damrosch, too?”
“I think he followed him home one night, waited three or four hours or however long he thought it would take Damrosch to get too drunk to fight back, and then just knocked on his door. Damrosch let him in, and my grandfather got his gun away from him and shot him in the head. Then he printed BLUE ROSE on a piece of paper and let himself out. Case closed.”
Tom leaned back in the chair.
“And after that, the murders stopped.”
“They stopped with the murder of Heinz Stenmitz.”
Ransom considered this. “Why do you think Blue Rose stopped killing people for forty years? Or do you even think it’s the same person who attacked my wife?”
“That’s a possibility.”
“Have you noticed that the new attacks took place on the same sites as the old ones?”
Tom nodded.
“So he’s repeating himself, isn’t he?”
“If it’s the same man,” Tom said.
“Why do you say that? What are you thinking?”
Tom Pasmore looked as if he were thinking about nothing but getting us out of his house. His head lolled against the back of the chair. I thought he wanted us to leave so that he could get to work. His day was just beginning. He surprised me by answering Ransom’s question. “Well, I always thought it might have something to do with place.”
“It has something to do with place, all right,” Ransom said. He set down his empty glass. There was a band of red across his cheekbones. “It’s his neighborhood. He kills where he lives.”
“No one knows the identity of the man on Livermore Avenue, is that right?”
“Some homeless guy who thought he was going to get a handful of change.”
Tom nodded in acknowledgment rather than agreement. “That’s a possibility, too.”
“Well, sure,” John Ransom said.
Tom nodded absentmindedly.
“I mean, who goes unidentified these days? Everybody carries credit cards, cards for automatic teller machines, driver’s licenses …”
“Yes, it makes sense, it makes sense,” Tom said. He was still staring at some indeterminate point in the middle of the room.
Ransom shifted forward on the couch. He rocked his empty glass back and forth on the table for a moment. He raised his eyes to the paintings Lamont von Heilitz had bought in Paris sixty years ago. “You’re not really retired, are you, Tom? Don’t you still do a little work here and there, without telling anybody about it?”
Tom smiled—slowly, almost luxuriantly.
“You do,” Ransom said, though that was not what I thought the strange inward smile meant.
“I don’t know if you would call it work,” Tom said. “Sometimes something catches my attention. I hear a little music.”
“Don’t you hear it now?”
Tom focused on him. “What are you asking me?”
“We’ve known each other a long time. When my wife is beaten and stabbed by a man who committed Millhaven’s most notable unsolved murders, I would think you couldn’t help but be interested.”
“I was interested enough to invite you here.”
“I’m asking you to work for me.”
“I don’t take clients,” Tom said. “Sorry.”
“I need your help.” John Ransom leaned toward Tom with his hands out, separated by a distance roughly the length of a football. “You have a wonderful gift, and I want that gift working for me.” Tom seemed hardly to be listening. “On top of everything else, I’m giving you the chance to learn the name of the Blue Rose murderer.”
Tom slumped down in his chair so that his knees jutted out and his chin rested on his chest. He brought his joined hands beneath his lower lip and regarded Ransom with a steady speculation. He seemed more comfortable, more actually present than at any other time during the evening.
“Were you considering offering me some payment for this assistance?”
“Absolutely,” John Ransom said. “If that’s what you want.”
“What sort of payment?”
Ransom looked flustered. He glanced at me as if asking for help and raised his hands. “Well, that’s difficult to answer. Ten thousand dollars?”
“Ten thousand. For identifying the man who attacked your wife. For getting the man you call Blue Rose behind bars.”
“It could be twenty thousand,” John said. “It could even be thirty.”
“I see.” Tom pushed himself back into an upright position, placed his hands on the arms of his chair, and pushed himself up. “Well, I hope that what I told you will be of some help to you. It’s been good to see you again, John.”
I stood up, too. John Ransom stayed seated on the couch, looking back and forth between Tom and me. “That’s it? Tom, we were talking about an offer. Please tell me you’ll consider it.”
“I’m afraid I’m not for hire,” Tom said. “Not even for the splendid sum of thirty thousand dollars.”
Ransom looked completely baffled. Reluctantly, he pushed himself up from the couch. “If thirty thousand isn’t enough, tell me how much you want. I want you on my team.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Tom said. He moved toward the maze of files and the front door.
Ransom stood his ground. “What does that mean?”
“I’ll check in from time to time,” Tom said.
Ransom shrugged and shoved his hands in his pockets. He and I went around opposite sides of the glass table toward Tom. For the first time I looked down at the stacks of books beside the bottles and the ice bucket and was surprised to see that, like the books on John Ransom’s table, nearly all of them were about Vietnam. But they were not novels—most of the books on the table seemed to be military histories, written by retired officers. The US Infantry in Vietnam. Small Unit Actions in Vietnam, 1965–66. History of the Green Berets.
“I wanted you to know how I felt,” Ransom was saying. “I had to give it a try.”
“It was very flattering,” Tom said. They were both working their way toward the door.
I caught up with them just as Ransom looked back over his shoulder to see the paintings on the long back wall. “And if you’re ever interested in selling some of your art, I hope you’ll speak to me first.”
“Well,” Tom said. He opened the door to scorching heat and the end of daylight. Above the roofs of the lakefront houses, the moon had already risen into a darkening sky in which a few shadowy clouds drifted in a wind too far up to do us any good.
“Thanks for your help,” said John Ransom, holding out his hand. Tom took it, and Ransom raised one shoulder and grimaced, squeezing hard to show his gratitude.
“By the way,” Tom said, and Ransom relaxed his grip. Tom pulled back his hand. “I wonder if you’ve been thinking about the possibility that the attack on your wife was actually directed at you?”
“I don’t see what you mean.” John Ransom probed me with a look, trying to see if I had made sense of this question. “You mean Blue Rose thought April might be me?”
“No.” Tom smiled and leaned against the door frame. “Of course not.” He looked across the street, then up and down, and finally at the sky. Outside, in the natural light, his skin looked like paper that had been crumpled, then smoothed out. “I just wondered if you could think of someone who might want to get at you through your wife. Someone who wanted to hurt you very badly.”
“There isn’t anyone like that,” Ransom said.
Down the block, a small car turned the corner onto Eastern Shore Road, came some twenty feet in our direction, then swung over to the side of the road and parked. The driver did not leave the car.
“I don’t think Blue Rose could know anything about April or me,” said Ransom. “That’s not how these guys work.”
“I’m sure that’s right,” Tom said. “I hope everything turns out well for you, John. Good-bye, Tim.” He gave me a little wave and waited for us to move down onto the walk. He waved again, smiling, and closed his door. It was like seeing him disappear into a fortress.
“What was that about?” Ransom asked.
“Let’s get some dinner,” I said.
13
JOHN RANSOM spent most of dinner complaining. Tom Pasmore was one of those geniuses who didn’t seem too perceptive. Tom was a drunk who acted like the pope. Sat all day in that closed-up house and pounded down the vodka. Even back in school, Pasmore had been like the Invisible Man, never played football, hardly had any friends—this pretty girl, this knockout, Sarah Spence, long long legs, great body, turned out she had a kind of a thing for old Tom Pasmore, always wondered how the hell old Tom managed that …
I didn’t tell Ransom that I thought Sarah Spence, now Sarah Youngblood, had been the driver of the car that had turned the corner and pulled discreetly up to the curb thirty feet from Tom Pasmore’s house as we were leaving. I knew that she visited Tom, and I knew that he wished to keep her visits secret, but I knew nothing else about their relationship. I had the impression that they spent a lot of time talking to each other—Sarah Spence Youngblood was the only person in the whole of Millhaven who had free access to Tom Pasmore’s house, and in those long evenings and nights after she slipped through his front door, after the bottles were opened and while the ice cubes settled in the brass bucket, I think he talked to her—I think she had become the person he most needed, maybe the only person he needed, because she was the person who knew most about him.
John Ransom and I were in Jimmy’s, an old east-side restaurant on Berlin Avenue. Jimmy’s was a nice wood-paneled place with comfortable banquettes and low lights and a long bar. It could have been a restaurant anywhere in Manhattan, where all of its tables would have been filled; because we were in Millhaven and it was nearly nine o’clock, we were nearly the only customers.
John Ransom ordered a Far Niente cabernet and made a ceremonial little fuss over tasting it.
Our food came, a sirloin for Ransom, shrimp scampi for me. He forgot Tom Pasmore and started talking about India and Mina’s ashram. “This wonderful being was beautiful, eighteen years old, very modest, and she spoke in short plain sentences. Sometimes she cooked breakfast, and she cleaned her little rooms by herself, like a servant. But everyone around her realized that she had this extraordinary power—she had great wisdom. Mina put her hands on my soul and opened me up. I’ll never stop being grateful, and I’ll never forget what I learned from her.” He chewed for a bit, swallowed, took a mouthful of wine. “By the time I was in graduate school, Mina had become well known. People began to understand that she represented one very pure version of mystic experience. Because I had studied with her, I had a certain authority. Everything unfolded from her—it was like having studied with a great scholar. And in fact, it was like that, but more profound.”
“Haven’t you ever been tempted to go back
and see her again?”
“I can’t,” he said. “She was absolutely firm about that. I had to move on.”
“How does it affect your life now?” I asked, really curious about what he would say.
“It’s helping me make it through,” he said.
He finished off the food on his plate, then looked at his watch. “Would you mind if I called the hospital? I ought to check in.”
He signaled the waiter for the check, drank the last of the wine, and stood up. He pulled a handful of change from his pocket and went toward the pay telephone in a corridor at the back of the restaurant.
The waiter brought the check on a saucer, and I turned it over and read the amount and gave the waiter a credit card. Before the waiter returned with the charge slip, Ransom came charging back toward the table. He grabbed my arm. “This is—this is unbelievable. They think she might be coming out of her coma. Where’s the check?”
“I gave him a card.”
“You can’t do that,” he said. “Don’t be crazy. I want to pay the thing and get over there.”
“Go to the hospital, John. I’ll walk back to your house and wait for you.”
“Well, how much was it?” He dug in his trousers pockets for something, then rummaged in the pockets of his suit jacket.
“I already paid. Take off.”
He gave me a look of real exasperation and fished a key from his jacket pocket and held it out without giving it to me. “That was an expensive bottle of wine. And my entree cost twice as much as yours.” He looked at the key as if he had forgotten it, then handed it to me. “I still say you can’t pay for this dinner.”
“You get the next one,” I said.
He was almost hopping in his eagerness to get to the hospital, but he saw the waiter coming toward us with the credit card slip and leaned over my shoulder to see the amount while I figured out the tip and signed. “You tip too much,” he said. “That’s on your head.”
“Will you get away?” I said, and pushed him toward the door.
14