by Peter Straub
There were no BELINSKIS, the same three CASEMENTS, and OSCAR, but not WILLIAM, WRITZMANN.
“Let’s zip back to 1981, and see if we can find them there.”
The 1981 directory contained no BELINSKI, CASEMENT, ARTHUR and ROGER but not HUGH, and WRITZMANN, OSCAR, at 5460 Fond du Lac Drive.
“I think I get the picture, but just for the hell of it, let’s take a look at 1976.”
No BELINSKI. CASEMENT, ARTHUR, without the company of ROGER. WRITZMANN, OSCAR, already at 5460 Fond du Lac Drive.
“We struck out,” I said.
“Hardly,” Tom said. “We’ve made great strides. We have discovered the very interesting fact that the car you saw following John is the property of a company incorporated in the State of Illinois under a convenience address and three phony names. I wonder if Belinski, Casement, and Writzmann are phony people, too.”
I asked him what he meant by “phony people.”
“In order to incorporate, you need a president, a vice president, and a treasurer. Now somebody filed the papers for the Elvee Holding Corporation, or there wouldn’t be an Elvee Holding Corporation. If I had to guess right now, I’d say that the person who filed for incorporation back in 1979 was good old LV. Anyhow, filing only takes one man. The filer can make up the names of his fellow officers.”
“So one of these three people actually has to exist.”
“That’s right, but he may exist under some other name altogether. Now think, Tim. During the past few days, has John ever mentioned anyone whose name began with the letter V?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He hasn’t really talked about himself very much.”
“I don’t suppose you ever heard Alan Brookner mention anybody with the initials LV.”
“No, I haven’t.” This was a disturbing question. “You don’t think these murders could have anything to do with Alan, do you?”
“They have everything to do with him. Who are the victims? His daughter. His best graduate student. But I don’t think Alan is in danger, if that’s what you mean.”
I felt myself relaxing.
“You’re fond of him, aren’t you?”
“I think he has enough problems already,” I said.
Tom leaned forward, propped his elbows on his knees, and said, “Oh?”
“I think he might have Alzheimer’s disease. He managed to get himself together for the funeral, but I’m afraid that he’s going to fall apart again.”
“Did he teach last year?”
“I guess so, but I don’t see how he can do it again this year. The problem is that if he quits, the entire Religion Department at Arkham goes with him, and John loses his job. Even Alan is worried about that—he struggled through last year partly for John’s sake.” I threw up my hands. “I wish I could do something to help. I did make arrangements for a private duty nurse to come to Alan’s place every day, but that’s about it.”
“Can he afford that?” Tom was looking thoughtful, and I suddenly knew what he was considering. I wondered how many people he helped, quietly and anonymously.
“Alan’s pretty well set up,” I said quickly. “April saw to that.”
“Well, then, John should hardly have to worry, either.”
“John has complicated feelings about April’s money. I think it’s a question of pride.”
“That’s interesting,” Tom said.
He straightened up and looked at his monitor, still displaying Oscar Writzmann’s name and address. “Let’s run these names through Births and Deaths. It’s probably a wild goose chase, but what the hell?”
He began clicking at keys, and the screen before me went momentarily blank. Rows of codes marched across the dark gray background. John typed out Belinski, Andrew, Casement, Leon, and Writzmann, William, and the names appeared on my screen. More codes that must have been instructions to the modem replaced them. The screen went blank, and SEARCHING rose up out of the background and began pulsing on the screen.
“Now we just wait around?”
“Well, I’d like to take a look through the file,” Tom said. “But before we do that, let’s talk a little bit about the idea of place.” He swallowed a little more whiskey, stood up, and walked over to his couch and sat down. I took the chair beside the chesterfield. His eyes almost snapped with excitement, and I wondered how I could ever have thought they looked washed out. “If William Damrosch didn’t unite the Blue Rose victims, what did?”
During the brief moment in which Tom Pasmore and I waited for the other to speak, I would have sworn that we were thinking the same thing.
Finally I broke the silence. “The St. Alwyn Hotel.”
“Yes,” Tom said softly.
4
WHEN LAMONT and I got off the plane from Eagle Lake, we went to the St. Alwyn. We stayed there the last night of his life. The St. Alwyn was where the murders happened—in it, behind it, across the street.”
“What about Heinz Stenmitz? His shop was five or six blocks from the St. Alwyn. And there wasn’t any connection between Stenmitz and the hotel.”
“Maybe there was a connection we don’t know yet,” Tom said. “And think about this, too. How much time elapsed between the murder of Arlette Monaghan and James Treadwell? Five days. How much time between Treadwell and Monty Leland? Five days. How much time between Monty Leland and Heinz Stenmitz? Almost two weeks. More than twice the time that separated the first three murders. Do you make anything of that?”
“He tried to stop, but couldn’t. In the end, he couldn’t restrain himself—he had to go out and kill someone again.” I looked at Tom glinting at me and tried to imagine what he was thinking. “Or maybe someone else killed Stenmitz—maybe it was like Laing, a copycat murder, for entirely different motives.”
He smiled at me almost proudly, and despite myself, I felt gratified that I had guessed what he was thinking.
“I guess that’s possible,” Tom said, and I knew that I had not followed his thinking after all. My pride curdled. “But I think my grandfather was Blue Rose’s only imitator.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I think you were half right. It was the same man, but with a different motive.”
I confessed that I was lost.
Tom leaned forward, eyes still snapping with excitement. “Here we have a vindictive, ruthless man who does everything according to plan. What’s his motive for the first three murders? A grudge against the St. Alwyn?”
I nodded.
“Once every five days for fifteen days, he kills someone in the immediate vicinity of the St. Alwyn, once actually inside the St. Alwyn. Then he stops. By this time, how many people do you suppose are staying in the St. Alwyn? It must be like a ghost town.”
“Sure, but …” I shut up and let him say what he had to.
“And then he kills Stenmitz. And who was Heinz Stenmitz? Pigtown’s friendly neighborhood sex criminal. The other three victims could have been anybody—they were pawns. But when somebody goes out of his way to kill a molester of little boys, an active chickenhawk, I think that is not a random murder.”
He leaned back, finished. His eyes were still blazing.
“So what you need,” I said, “is a vindictive, ruthless man who has a grudge against the St. Alwyn—and—”
“And—”
“And a son.”
“And a son,” Tom said. “You’ve got it. The kind of man we’re talking about couldn’t stand anybody violating his own child. If he found out about it, he’d have to kill the man who did it. The reason nobody ever thought of this before is that it looked as though that was exactly the reason that Stenmitz had been killed.” He laughed. “Of course it was the reason he was killed! It just wasn’t Damrosch who killed him!”
We looked at each other for a moment, and then I laughed, too.
“I think we know a lot about Blue Rose,” Tom said, still smiling at his own vehemence. “He didn’t stop because my grandfather had just guaranteed his immunity from arrest
by killing William Damrosch. We’ve been assuming that all along, but, now that I have Blue Rose in a kind of focus, I think he stopped because he was finished—he was finished even before he murdered Heinz Stenmitz. He accomplished what he set out to do—he paid back the St. Alwyn for whatever it did to him. If he thought the St. Alwyn had still owed him something, he would have gone on leaving a fresh corpse draped around the place every five days until he was satisfied.”
“So what set him off all over again two weeks ago?”
“Maybe he started brooding about his old grudge and decided to make life miserable for the son of his old employer.”
“And maybe he won’t stop until he kills John.”
“John is certainly the center of these new murders,” Tom said. “Which puts you pretty close to that center, if you haven’t noticed.”
“You mean Blue Rose might decide to make me his next victim?”
“Hasn’t it occurred to you that you might be in some danger?”
It sounds stupid, but it had not occurred to me, and Tom must have seen the doubt and consternation I felt.
“Tim, if you want to go back to your life, there’s no reason not to. Forget everything we talked about earlier. You can tell John that you have to meet a deadline, fly home to New York, and go back to your real work.”
“Somehow,” I said, trying to express what I had never put into words until this moment, “my work seems related to everything we’ve been talking about. Every now and then I get the feeling that some answer, some key, is all around me, and that all I have to do is open my eyes.” Tom was looking at me very intently, not betraying anything. “Besides, I want to learn Blue Rose’s name. I’m not going to run out now. I don’t want to go back to New York and get a phone call from you a week from now telling me John was found knifed to death outside the Idle Hour.”
“As long as you remember that this isn’t a book.”
“It isn’t Little Women, anyhow,” I said.
“Okay.” He looked across the room at the monitor on his desk, where SEARCHING still pulsed on and off. “Tell me about Ralph Ransom.”
5
AFTER I DESCRIBED MY CONVERSATION with John’s father at the funeral, Tom said, “I didn’t know your father used to work at the St. Alwyn.”
“Eight years,” I said. “He ran the elevator. He was fired not too long after the murders ended. His drinking got worse after my sister was killed. About a year later, he straightened himself out and got a job on the assembly line at the Glax Corporation.”
“Your sister?” Tom said. “You had a sister who was killed? I didn’t know about that.” He looked at me hard, and I saw consciousness come into his face. “You mean that she was murdered.”
I nodded, too moved by the speed and accuracy of his intelligence to speak.
“Did this happen near your house?” He meant: did it happen near the hotel?
I told him where April was murdered.
“When?”
I thought he already knew, but I told him the date and then said that I had been running across the street to help her when I was hit by the car. Tom knew all about that, but he had known nothing else.
“Tim,” he said, and blinked. I wondered what was going through his mind. Something had amazed him. He began again. “That was five days before Arlette Monaghan’s murder.” He sat there looking at me with his mouth open.
I felt as if my mouth, too, was hanging open. I had always been secretly convinced that Blue Rose was my sister’s murderer, but until this moment I had never thought about the sequence of the dates.
“That’s why you’re in Millhaven,” he said. Then he stared blindly at the table and said it to himself: “That’s why he’s in Millhaven.” He turned almost wonderingly to me again. “You didn’t come back here for John’s sake, you wanted to find out who killed your sister.”
“I came back to do both,” I said.
“And you saw him,” Tom said. “By God, you actually saw Blue Rose.”
“For about a second. I never saw his face—just a shape.”
“You devil. You dog. You—you’re a deep one.” He was shaking his head. “I’m going to have to keep my eye on you. You’ve been sitting on this information since you were seven years old, and you don’t come up with it until now.” He put a hand on top of his head, as if it might otherwise fly off. “All this time, there was another Blue Rose murder that no one knew about. He didn’t get to write his slogan, because you came along and got run over. So he waited five days and did it all over again.” He was looking at me with undiminished wonder. “And afterward no one would ever connect your sister with Blue Rose because she didn’t tie in with Damrosch in any way. You didn’t even put it in your book.”
He took his hand off the top of his head and examined me. “What else have you got locked up there inside yourself?”
“I think that’s it,” I said.
“What was your sister’s name?”
“April,” I said.
He was staring at me again. “No wonder you had to come. No wonder you won’t leave.”
“I’ll leave when I learn who he was.”
“It must be like—like all the rest of your childhood was haunted by some kind of monster. For you, there was a real bogeyman.”
“The Minotaur,” I said.
“Yes.” Tom’s eyes were glowing with intelligence, sympathy, and some other quantity, something like appreciation. Then the computer made a clicking sound, and both of us looked at the screen. Lines of information were appearing on the gray background. We stood up and went to the desk.
BELINSKI, ANDREW THEODORE 146 TURNER ST VALLEY HILL BIRTH: 6/1/1940 DEATH: 6/8/1940.
CONCLUSION BELINSKI SEARCH.
CASEMENT, LEON CONCLUSION CASEMENT SEARCH.
“We must have been talking when the Belinski information came through. This Andrew Belinski was never an officer of Elvee Holding, though—he was a week old when he died, which is the only reason his death date got into the computer. When they’re that close, they usually punch them in. And there’s nothing on the computer for Leon Casement. We should be getting Writzmann through in about ten minutes.”
We turned away from the machine. I went back to the chair and poured Poland water from a bottle on the coffee table into a glass and added ice from the bucket. Tom was walking backward and forward in front of the table with his hands in his pockets, sneaking little looks at me now and then.
Finally he stopped pacing. “Your father probably knew him.”
That was right, I realized—my father had probably known the Minotaur.
“Ralph Ransom couldn’t think of anyone else he fired around that time? I think we ought to start with that angle, until we come up with something else. He or one of his managers fired this guy—the Minotaur. And in revenge, the Minotaur set out to ruin the hotel. If you start asking about that, and there was some other motive, it will probably come up.”
“You’re asking people to remember a long way back.”
“I know.” He went to the second workstation and sat on the chair in front of the computer. “What was that day manager’s name again?”
“Bandolier,” I said. “Bob Bandolier.”
“Let’s see if he’s still in the book.” Tom called up the directory on the other machine and scrolled down the list of names beginning with B. “No Bandolier. Maybe he’s in a nursing home, or maybe he moved out of town. Just for the fun of it, let’s look for good old Glenroy.”
The blur of names rolled endlessly up the screen for a minute. “This takes too long. I’ll access it directly.” He made the screen go blank except for the directory code and punched in BREAKSTONE, GLENROY and ENTER.
The machine ticked, and the name, address, and telephone number appeared on the screen. BREAKSTONE, GLENROY 670 LIVERMORE AVE 542-5500.
He winked at me. “Actually, I knew he was still living at the St. Alwyn. I just wanted to show off. Didn’t John’s father say that Breakstone knew everybo
dy at the hotel? Maybe you can get him to talk to you.” He wrote down the saxophone player’s telephone number on a piece of paper, and I walked over to get it from him.
“Hold on, let’s find out where this wonderful manager was living when the murders were committed.”
I stood behind him while he ordered up the Millhaven directory for 1950 and then jumped to the B listings. He found the address in five seconds.
BANDOLIER, ROBERT 17 s SEVENTH ST LIVERMORE 2-4581.
“Old Bob had a short commute, didn’t he? He lived about a block away from the hotel.”
“He lived right behind us,” I said.
“Maybe we can work out how long he was there.” Tom called up the directory for 1960. BANDOLIER, ROBERT was still living on South Seventh Street. “Good stable guy.” He called up the 1970 directory and found him still there, same address but with a new telephone number. In 1971, still there, but with yet another new telephone number. “Something funny happened here,” Tom said. “Why do you change your phone number? Crank calls? Avoiding someone?”
By 1975, he was out of the book. Tom worked backward through 1974, and 1973, and found him again in 1972. “So he moved out of town or into a nursing home or, if our luck just left us, died sometime in 1972.” He wrote the address down on the same slip of paper and handed it to me. “Maybe you could go to the house and talk to whoever lives there now. It might be worth asking some of his old neighbors, too. Somebody’ll know what happened to him.”
He stood up and took a look at the other computers, which were still SEARCHING. Then he went to the table and picked up his drink. “Here’s to research.” I raised my glass of water.
The computer clicked, and information began appearing on the two monitors.
“Well, what do you know?” Tom went back to his desk. “Births and Deaths is talking to us.” He leaned forward and began writing something on his pad.
I got up and looked over his shoulder.
WRITZMANN, WILLIAM LEON 346 N 34TH STREET MILLHAVEN BIRTH: 4/16/48.
“We just found a real person,” Tom said. “If this is the mystery man following John in the Elvee company car, I’d be surprised if he doesn’t turn up again.”