by Peter Straub
Tommy Flanagan began spinning out an ethereal solo on “Star Dust.”
I told Tom about April Ransom’s interest in the Horatio Street bridge and William Damrosch.
“Did she write up any of her findings?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I could look around her office and find her notes. I’m not even sure John really knew anything about it.”
“Don’t let him know you’re interested in the notes,” he said. “Let’s just do things quietly, for a while.”
“You’re thinking about it, aren’t you? You already have ideas about it.”
“I want to find out who killed her. I also want to find out who killed this Grant Hoffman. And I want your help.”
“You and John.”
“You’ll be helping John, too, but I’d rather you didn’t tell him about our discussions until I say it’s okay.”
I agreed to this.
“I said that I want to find out,” Tom said. “That’s what I meant. I want to know how and why April Ransom and that graduate student were killed. If we can help the police at that point, fine. If not, that’s fine, too. I’m not in the justice business.”
“You don’t care if April’s murderer is arrested?”
“I can’t predict what will happen. We might learn his identity without being able to do anything about it. That would be acceptable to me.”
“But if we find out who he is, we should be able to give our information to the police.”
“Sometimes it works out that way.” He leaned back in his chair, watching to see how I was taking this.
“What if I can’t agree to this? I just go back to John’s and forget about this conversation?”
“You go back to John’s and do whatever you like.”
“I’d never know what happened. I’d never know what you did or what you found out.”
“Probably not.”
I couldn’t stand the thought of walking away without knowing what he would do—I had to know what the two of us could discover.
“If you think I’m going to walk out now, you’re crazy,” I said.
“Ah, good,” he said, smiling. He had never doubted that I would accept his terms. “Let’s go upstairs. I’ll show you my toys.”
2
AT THE FAR LEFT of the big downstairs room, past the cabinets for the sound system and the shelves packed with compact discs, a wide staircase led up to the second floor. Tom went up the stairs one step ahead of me now, already talking. “I want us to begin at the beginning,” he said. “If nothing else comes out of this, I want to understand the first Blue Rose murders. For a long time, Lamont thought it was solved, I guess—as you did, Tim. But I think it always bothered him.” At the top of the stairs, he turned around to look at me. “Two days before his death, he told me the whole history of the Blue Rose murders. We were on the plane back from Eagle Lake, and we were going to stay at the St. Alwyn.” He laughed out loud. “A couple of nuns in the seats in front of us almost broke their necks, they were listening in so hard. Lamont said that you could call Damrosch’s suicide a sort of wrongful arrest—by then he knew that my grandfather had killed Damrosch. Lamont was doing two things at once. He was preparing me to face the truth about my grandfather.”
He stepped back to let me reach the top of the stairs.
“And the second thing Lamont was doing—”
“Was to get me interested in the Blue Rose murders. I think the two of us would have worked on that one next. And do you know what that means? If he hadn’t been killed, Lamont and I might have saved April Ransom’s life.”
His face twitched. “That’s something I’d like to be clear about.”
“Me, too,” I said. I had my own reason for wanting to learn the identity of the original Blue Rose murderer.
“Okay,” he said. Now Tom did not look languid, bored, amused, indifferent, or detached. He didn’t look lost or unhappy. I had seen all of these things in him many times, but I had never seen him in the grip of a controlled excitement. He had never let me see this steely side of him. It looked like the center of his being.
“Let’s get to work.” Tom turned around and went down the hallway to what had been the door of Lamont von Heilitz’s bedroom and went in.
The old bedroom was dark when I followed him in. My first impression was of a fire-sale chaos like the room downstairs. I saw the dim shapes of desks and cabinets and what looked like the glassy rectangles of several television sets. Books on dark shelves covered most of the walls. A thick dark curtain covered the window. In the depths of the room, Tom switched on a halogen lamp just as I finally grasped that the televisions were computer monitors.
He went methodically around the room, switching on lamps, as I took in that his office served two purposes: the mansion’s old master bedroom was a much neater version of the room downstairs. It was where Tom both lived and worked. Against one wall of books, three office workstations held computers; a fourth, larger computer stood on the long wooden desk that faced the curtained window. File cabinets topped with microdiscs in plastic boxes stood beside each workstation and flanked his desk. Next to one of the workstations was a professional copy machine. Sound equipment crowded two tall shelves on the bookcase at the wall to my left. A long red leather chesterfield like Alan Brookner’s, a plaid blanket folded over one of its arms, stood before the wall of books. A matching armchair sat at right angles to the chesterfield. Within reach of both was a glass table heaped with books and magazines, with a rank of bottles and ice bucket like the table downstairs. On the glossy white mantel of the room’s fireplace, yellow orchids leaned and yawned out of tall crystal vases. Sprays of yellow freesias burst up out of a thick blue vase on a low, black piece of equipment that must have been a subwoofer.
The lamps cast mellow pools of light that burnished the rug lapping against the bookshelves. The orchids opened their lush mouths and leaned forward.
I wondered how many people had been invited into this room. I would have bet that only Sarah Spence had been here before me.
“My father told me something I never forgot, when we were flying back from Eagle Lake. Occasionally, you have to go back to the beginning and see everything in a new way.”
Tom set his glass down on his desk and picked up a book bound in gray fabric boards. He turned it over in his hands, and then turned it over again, as if looking for the title. “And then he said, Occasionally, there are powerful reasons why you can’t or don’t want to do that.” He looked for the invisible writing again. Even the spine of the book was blank. “That’s what we’re going to do to the Blue Rose case. We’re going to go back to the beginning, the beginnings of a couple of things, and try to see everything in a new way.”
I felt a flicker, no more than that, of an absolute uneasiness.
Tom Pasmore placed the peculiar book back down on the desk and came toward me with his hands out, and I picked up the battered old satchel and gave it to him.
The moment of uneasiness had felt almost like guilt.
Tom switched on the copy machine. It began to hum. Deep in its interior, an incandescently bright light flashed once.
Tom took a wad of yellowing paper six or seven inches thick out of the satchel. The top page had long tears at top and bottom that looked like they had been made by someone trying to check the pages beneath without removing a rubber band, but there was no rubber band. Part of my mind visualized a couple of stringy, broken forty-year-old rubber bands lying limp in a leather crease at the bottom of the satchel.
He put the documents on the copy machine. “Better err on the side of caution.” He lifted off the top sheet and repaired the rips with tape. Then he squared up the stack of pages and inserted the whole thing face down in a tray. He twisted a dial. “I’ll make a copy for each of us.” He punched a button and stepped back. The incandescent light flashed again, and two clean sheets fed out into trays on the side of the machine. “Good baby,” Tom said to it, and turned to me with a wry smile and said, “D
on’t put your business on the street, as a wise man once said to me.”
3
CLEAN WHITE SHEETS pumped out of the copier. “Do you know Paul Fontaine or Michael Hogan?” I asked.
“I know a little bit about them.”
“What do you know? I’m interested.”
Keeping an eye on the machine, Tom backed away and reached for his glass. He perched on the edge of the chesterfield, still watching the pages jump out of the machine. “Fontaine is a great street detective. The man has an amazing conviction record. I’m not even counting the ones who confessed. Fontaine is supposed to be a genius in the interrogation room. And Hogan’s probably the most respected cop in Millhaven—he did great work as a homicide detective, and he was promoted to sergeant two years ago. From what I’ve seen, even the people who might be expected to be jealous are very loyal to him. He’s an impressive guy. They’re both impressive guys, but Fontaine clowns around to hide it.”
“Are there a lot of murders in Millhaven?”
“More than you’d think. It probably averages out to about one a day. In the early fifties, there might have been two homicides a week—so the Blue Rose murders caused a real sensation.” Tom stood up to inspect the progress of the old records through his machine. “Anyhow, you know what most murders are like. Either they’re drug-related, or they’re domestic. A guy comes home drunk, gets into a fight with his wife, and beats her to death. A wife gets fed up with her husband’s cheating and shoots him with his own gun.”
Tom checked the machine again. Satisfied, he sat back down on the edge of the couch. “Still, every now and then, there’s something that just smells different from the usual thing. A teacher from Milwaukee in town to see her cousins disappeared on her way to a mall and wound up naked in a field, with her hands and legs tied together. There was an internist murdered in a men’s room stall at the stadium at the start of a ball game. Paul Fontaine solved those cases—he talked to everybody under the sun, tracked down every lead, and got convictions.”
“Who were the murderers?” I asked, seeing Walter Dragonette in my mind.
“Losers,” Tom said. “Dodos. They had no connection to their victims—they just saw someone they decided they wanted to kill, and they killed them. That’s why I say Fontaine is a brilliant street detective. He nosed around until he put all the pieces together, made his arrest, and made it stick. I couldn’t have solved those cases. I need a kind of a paper trail. A lowlife who stabs a doctor in a toilet, washes the blood off his hands, buys a hot dog and goes back to his seat—that’s a guy who’s safe from me.” He looked at me a little ruefully. “My kind of investigation sometimes seems obsolete.”
Tom took the original stack of papers from the copier and put them back into the satchel. One of the copies he put on his desk, and the other he gave to me.
“Let’s leaf through these quickly tonight, just to see if anything will set off some sparks.”
I was still thinking about Paul Fontaine. “Is Fontaine from Millhaven?”
“I don’t really know where he’s from,” Tom said. “I think he came here about ten-fifteen years ago. It used to be that policemen always worked in their hometowns, but now they move around, looking for promotions and better pay. Half of our detectives are from out of town.”
Tom left the couch and went to the first workstation and turned on the computer by pressing a switch on the surge protector beneath it with his foot. Then he moved to the second and third workstations and did the same at each and finally sat down at his desk and bent over to turn on the surge protector there. “Let’s see what we can come up with for that license number of yours.”
I took my notebook out of my pocket and went over to the desk to see what he was going to do.
Tom’s fingers moved over the keys, and a series of screens flashed across the monitor. The last one was just a series of codes in a single line. Tom put a plastic disc into the B drive—this much I could follow from my own experience—and punched in numbers on the telephone attached to his modem. The screen went blank for a moment and then flashed a fresh c prompt.
After the prompt, Tom typed in a code and pushed ENTER. The screen went blank again, and LC? appeared on the screen. “What was that number?”
I showed him the paper, and he typed in the plate number under the prompt and pushed ENTER again. The number stayed on the screen. He pushed a button marked RECEIVE.
“You’re in the Motor Vehicle Department records now?”
“Actually, I got to Motor Vehicles through the computer at Armory Place. It runs on a twenty-four-hour day.”
“You got directly into the police department central computer?”
“I’m a hacker.”
“Why couldn’t you just get the Blue Rose file from the computer?”
“The computerized records only go back eight or nine years. Ah, here we go. It takes the system a little while to work through the file.”
Tom’s computer flashed READY RECEIVE, and then displayed: ELVEE HOLDINGS, CORP 503 S 4TH ST MILLHAVEN IL.
“Well, that’s who owns your Lexus. Let’s see if we can get a little farther.” Tom pushed ENTER again, rattled through a sequence of commands I couldn’t follow, and typed in another code. “Now we’ll use the police computer to access Springfield, and see what this company looks like.”
He bounced past a blur of options and menus, going through different levels of state records, until he came to a list of corporations that filled the screen. All began with the letter A. The names and addresses of the officers followed the corporate names. He scrolled rapidly down the screen, reducing the names and numbers to a blur, until he got to E. EAGAN CORP EAGAN MANAGEMENT CORP EAGLE CORP EBAN CORP. When we got to ELVA CORP, he bumped down name by name and finally reached ELVEE HOLDINGS CORP.
Beneath the name was the same address on South Fourth Street in Millhaven, the information that the company had been incorporated on 23 July 1973, and beneath that were the names of the officers.
ANDREW BELINSKI 503 s 4TH ST MILLHAVEN, P
LEON CASEMENT 503 s 4TH ST MILLHAVEN, VP
WILLIAM WRITZMANN 503 s 4TH ST MILLHAVEN, T
“Mysteriouser and mysteriouser,” Tom said. “Who is the fugitive LV? I thought one of these guys would be named Leonard Vollman, or something like that. And does it seem likely that the officers of this corporation would all live together in a little tiny house? Let’s take this one step further.”
He wrote down the names and the address on a pad and then exited back through the same steps he had used to access the state records. Then he switched from the modem to a program called NETWORK. He punched more buttons and pointed at the computer at the first workstation, which began to hum. “I can use all my machines through this one. To keep from having to use a million different floppies, I have different kinds of information stored on the hard discs of these other computers. Over there, along with a lot of other stuff, I have reverse directories for a hundred major cities. Now let’s punch up Millhaven in the reverse directory.”
“God bless macros.” He punched in a few random-looking letters, typed in the South Fourth Street address, and in a couple of seconds the machine displayed: EXPRESSPOST MAIL & FAX, along with a telephone number.
“Damn.”
“Expresspost Mail?” I said. “What’s that?”
“Probably an office where you rent numbered boxes—like private post office boxes. Considering the address, I think it’s a storefront with rows of these boxes and a counter with a fax machine.”
“Is it legal to give a place like that as your address?”
“Sure, but we’re not done yet. Let’s see if these characters ever popped up in the ordinary Millhaven telephone directory over, let’s say, the past fifteen years.”
He returned to the NETWORK slogan, punched in the same terminal code and more internal directory files. He keyed in the number 91, and a long list of names beginning with A followed with addresses and telephone numbers floated up on the m
onitors of both the first workstation and his desk computer.
“Go over to that station and make sure I don’t miss one of these names.”
I sat down before the subsidiary computer and watched the screen jump to the B listings. “We want Andrew Belinski,” Tom said, and rolled down the Bs until he came to BELLI. Then he dropped line by line through BELLIARD, BELLIBAS, BELLICK, BELLICKO, BELLIN, BELLINA, BELLINELLI, BELLING, BELLISSIMO, BELMAN.
“Did I miss it, or isn’t it there?”
“There’s no Belinski,” I said.
“Let’s try Casement.”
He scrolled rapidly to the Cs and flipped down a row of names to CASE. CASEMENT followed. CASEMENT, ARTHUR; CASEMENT, HUGH; CASEMENT, ROGER. There was no LEON.
“Well, I think I know what we’re going to find, but let’s just try the last one.”
He jumped immediately to W, and rolled electronically through the pages. One WRITZMANN was listed in the 1991 Millhaven directory, OSCAR, of 5460 Fond du Lac Drive.
“What do you know? Either they don’t exist, or they don’t have telephones. Which seems more likely to you?”
“Maybe they have unlisted numbers,” I said.
“To me, no numbers are unlisted.” He smiled at me, proud of his toys. “Maybe they’re hiding—you can get a phone under another name, which makes it impossible to find you this way. But five years ago, maybe they didn’t know they wouldn’t want anybody to be able to find them in 1991. Let’s try the listings for 1986.”
Another series of backward steps, another keystroke, and all the listed and unlisted telephone numbers in Millhaven for 1986 came up on both screens.