by Peter Straub
“A man like Billy has to be regular,” Glenroy said. “You have to be able to find him.”
A police car came up from the bottom of Widow Street and parked in front of the old redbrick apartment building on the other side of the pawnshop. One of the uniforms in the car got out and walked up the block to the grocery store. It was Sonny Berenger, the cop who looked like a moving blue tree. The door of the Home Plate swung open, and a barrel of a man in a white shirt and gray trousers stepped outside and leaned against the front of the bar. Sonny walked past without looking at him.
“Is that him?”
“No, that’s a guy named Frankie Waldo. He’s in the wholesale meat business. Idaho Meat. Except for a couple of years, Idaho used to supply all the meat used in this hotel, back when we had room service. But Billy’s late, see, and Frankie wants to talk to him. He’s wondering where he is.”
Frankie Waldo stared at the entrance of the St. Alwyn until Sonny came back out of the grocery store with two containers of coffee. Before Sonny reached him, Waldo went back into the bar. Sonny returned to his car. A van and a pickup truck went by and turned onto Livermore. The patrol car left the curb and rolled up the street.
“Here he comes,” Glenroy said. “Now look out for Frankie.”
I saw the top and brim of a dark gray hat tilted back on the head of a man who was crossing the sidewalk in front of the hotel’s entrance. Frankie Waldo popped out of the bar again and held the door open. Billy Ritz stepped down off the curb and began moving across Widow Street. He was wearing a loose wide-shouldered gray suit, and he walked without hurrying, almost indolently.
Ritz went up to Waldo and said something that made the other man seem almost to melt with relief. Waldo clapped Ritz on the back, and Ritz marched through the open door like a crown prince. Waldo was after him before the door swung shut.
“See, Billy spread some goodwill.” Glenroy moved back from the window. “Anyhow, this is about as close as you want to get to Billy Ritz.”
“Maybe he told him the St. Alwyn is going to start delivering room service again.”
“I wish they would.” We moved away from the window, and Glenroy Breakstone gave me a look that said I had already taken up enough of his time.
I began to go toward the door, and a stray thought came to me. “I guess it was the Idaho Meat Company that sold meat to the hotel at the time of the Blue Rose murders?”
He smiled. “Well, it was supposed to be. But you know who really did it.”
I asked him what he meant.
“Remember I said the managers worked a few angles? Lambert got a cut on the laundry work, and Bad Bob worked out a deal on the meat. Ralph Ransom never found out about it. Bob got phony bills printed up, and they were all marked paid by the time they crossed Ralph’s desk.”
“How did you find out about it?”
“Nando told me, one night when he was loaded. Him and Eggs used to unload the truck every morning, right at the start of their shift. But you knew that already, right?”
“How could I?”
“Didn’t you say that the St. Alwyn connected all the Blue Rose victims?”
Then I saw what he was talking about. “The local butcher who took over the meat contract was Heinz Stenmitz?”
“Sure it was. How else could he be connected to the hotel?”
“Nobody ever said anything about it to the police.”
“No reason to.”
I thanked Glenroy and took a step toward his door, but he did not move. “You never asked me what I thought about the way James died. That’s the reason I let you come up here in the first place.”
“I thought you let me come up because I knew who wrote ‘Lush Life.’ ”
“Everybody ought to know who wrote ‘Lush Life,’ “he said. “Are you interested, or not? I can’t tell you who was fired right around then, and I can’t tell you where to find Bob Bandolier, but I can tell you what I know about James. If you have the time.”
“Please,” I said. “I should have asked.”
He took a step toward me. “Damn right. Listen to me. James was killed in his room, right? In his bed, right? Do you know what he was wearing?”
I shook my head, cursing myself for not having read the police reports more carefully.
“Nothing at all. You know what that means?” He did not give me time to answer. “It means he got up out of bed to open his door. He knew whoever was out there. James might have been young, but he wasn’t a fool about anything but one thing. Pussy. James did want to fuck just about anything good-looking that came his way. There used to be some pretty maids in this hotel, and James got tight with one of them, a girl named Georgia McKee, during the time we were playing at the Black and Tan.”
“When was that?”
“September 1950. Two months before he got killed. He dropped her, just like he dropped every other girl he used to run with. He started seeing a girl who worked at the club. Georgia used to come around and make trouble, until they barred her from the club. She wanted James back.” He was making sure that I understood what he was saying. “I always thought that Georgia McKee went into James’s room and killed him and made it look like the same person who did that whore did him, too. He opened the door. Or she let herself in with her key. Either way. James wouldn’t make any fuss, if he thought she was coming back to go to bed with him.”
“You never told the police?”
“I told Bill Damrosch, but by that time, Georgia McKee was out of here.”
“What happened to her?”
“Right after James got killed, she quit the hotel and moved to Tennessee. I guess she had people there. Tell you the truth, I hope she got knifed in a bar.”
After that, the two of us stood facing each other for a couple of seconds.
“James should have had more life,” Glenroy finally said. “He had something to offer.”
14
IT WAS STILL TOO EARLY to call Tom Pasmore, so I asked the desk clerk if he had a Millhaven directory. He went into his office and came back with a fat book. “How’s Glenroy doing today?”
“Fine,” I said. “Isn’t he always?”
“No, but he’s always Glenroy,” the clerk said.
I nodded, and leafed through the book to the S’s. David Sunchana was listed at an address on North Bayberry Lane, which sounded like it belonged in Elm Hill. I wrote down the number on the paper Tom had given me, and then, on an afterthought, looked up Oscar Writzmann on Fond du Lac Drive. Maybe he would be able to tell me something about the mysterious William Writzmann.
From the pay phone in the St. Alwyn’s lobby, I dialled the Sunchanas’ number and let it ring a long time before I hung up. They must have been the only people in Elm Hill who didn’t have an answering machine.
I went outside and began walking back toward Bob Bandolier’s old house. He must have known something, I thought—maybe he had seen Georgia McKee coming out of James Treadwell’s room and blackmailed her instead of turning her over to the police.
I turned into South Seventh, looking down, and walked past the Millhauser place before I saw Frank Belknap waving at me from his front lawn. He motioned for me to stay where I was and began walking quickly down the block. When he got closer, he looked back at his front porch and then motioned me backward, toward Livermore. “Told Hannah I was going out for a walk,” he said. “Went up and down the street four times, waiting for you to come back.”
He jerked his head toward the avenue, and we walked far enough so he could be sure his wife wouldn’t see him talking to me.
“What is it?” I asked.
He was still fighting with himself. “I met that soldier, the one who threw the Dumkys out of the house next door. He came back the day after to check on the place. Hannah was out shopping. I went out to talk to the fella when I saw him leaving, and he was worse than rude, mister. Tell you the truth, he scared me. He wasn’t big, but he looked dangerous—that fella would have killed me in a minute, and I knew it.”
“What happened? Did he threaten you?”
“Well, he did.” Belknap frowned at me. “I think that fella had just got back from Vietnam, and I don’t think there was anything he wouldn’t have done. I respect our soldiers, I want you to know, and I think what we did to those boys was a damn shame. But this fella, he was something special.”
“What did he say to you?”
“He said I had to forget I ever saw him. If I ever let on anything about him or his doings, he’d burn my house down. And he meant it. He looked like he’d burned down a few houses in his time, like you saw them on the news, with their Zippos.” Frank moved closer to me, and I could smell his stale breath. “See, he said there’d never be any trouble as long as I acted like he didn’t exist.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see.”
“You get the picture?”
“He’s the man Hannah sees at night,” I said.
He nodded wildly, as if his head were on a ball bearing. “I keep telling her she’s making it all up. Maybe it’s not him—that was all the way back in ’73, when he warned me off. But I tell you one thing, if it is him, I don’t know what he’s doing in there, but he sure as hell isn’t crying.”
“Thanks for telling me,” I said.
He looked at me doubtfully, wondering if he had made a mistake. “I was thinking you might know who he is.”
“He was in uniform when you met him?”
“Sure. I kind of had the feeling he didn’t have civilian clothes yet.”
“What kind of uniform was it?”
“He had on a jacket with brass buttons, but all the stuff, the insignia was torn off.”
That was no help. “And then there was no sign of him until Hannah saw him in the house at night.”
“I was hoping he died. Maybe it’s someone else she sees in there?”
I said that I didn’t know, and he walked slowly back to his house. He looked back at me a couple of times, still wondering if he’d done the right thing.
15
IGOT INTO THE WHITE PONTIAC and drove back onto Livermore and through the shadow of the valley.
I left the freeway at the Elm Hill turnoff and drove randomly through a succession of quiet streets, looking for Bayberry Lane. In Elm Hill, they liked two-story imitation colonials and raised ranch houses with elaborate swing sets in the long backyards and ornate metal nameplates on posts next to the driveway—THE HARRISONS, THE BERNHARDTS, THE REYNOLDS. Almost all of the mailboxes were half the size of garbage cans and decorated with painted ducks in flight, red barns by millponds, or leaping salmon.
At the center of Elm Hill, I drove into the parking lot of a semicircle of gray colonial shops. You could tie your car to a hitching rail, if you had a rope. Across the street was the hill where the elms had grown. Now it had a historical marker and two intersecting paths with granite benches. I bought a map at the Booky, Booky Bookshoppe and took it across the street to one of the benches. Bayberry Lane began just behind the shopping center at Town Hall, curved around a pond and wandered for about half a mile until it intersected Plum Barrow Way, which banged straight north back to the freeway.
The first half-dozen houses closest to squat Town Hall, modest, rundown wooden boxes with added porches, were the oldest buildings I had seen in Elm Hill, dating from the twenties and thirties. Once Bayberry Lane got past the pond, I was back among the white and gray colonials. I kept checking the addresses as the numbers went up. Finally I came to a long straight line of oak trees that had once marked the boundary of a farm.
On the other side of the oak border stood a two-story, slightly ramshackle farmhouse with a screen porch, utterly out of character with the rest of the neighborhood. Two gray propane tanks clung to the side of the house, and a rutted driveway went straight from the road to a leaning clapboard garage with a hinged door. The fading number on the plain mailbox matched the number on my piece of paper. The Sunchanas had bought the original farmhouse on this land and then watched an optimistic re-creation of Riverwood grow up around them. I drove up the ruts until I was in front of the garage, turned off the engine, and got out of the car.
I walked along the screen porch and tried the door, which opened. I stepped onto the long narrow porch. Sunbleached wicker chairs stood beneath a window in the middle of the porch. I knocked on the front door. There was no answer. I knew there wouldn’t be. After all, I was just getting away from the Ransoms. I turned around and saw a man staring at me from beside the straight row of oaks across the street.
The mesh of the screen door turned him into a standing arrangement of black dots. I felt an instant of absolute threat, and without thinking about it at all, moved sideways and crouched next to one of the wicker chairs. The man had not moved, but he was gone.
I stood up, slowly. My nerves shrieked. The man had vanished into the column of oaks. I went back out the screen door and walked toward Bayberry Lane, looking for movement in the row of great trees. It could have been a neighbor, I thought, wondering what I was doing on the Sunchanas’ porch.
But I knew it wasn’t any neighbor.
There was no movement in the row of oak trees. I walked across the street on a diagonal, so that I could see between the trees. About six feet of grass separated them. There wasn’t another human being in sight. The row of oaks ended at the street behind Bayberry, which must have been the property line of the old farm. Out of sight in the tangled lanes of eastern Elm Hill, a car started up and accelerated away. I turned toward the noise, but all I saw were swing sets and the backs of houses. My heart was still pounding.
I went back across the street and waited in the Pontiac for half an hour, but the Sunchanas did not come home. Finally, I wrote my name and John’s phone number at the bottom of a note saying that I wanted to talk with them about Bob Bandolier, tore the page from my notebook, and went back up onto the screened porch. I turned the knob of their front door, and the door opened. A residue of the sense of danger I had just experienced went through me, as if the empty house held a threat. “Hello, anybody home?” I called out, leaning into the room, but I didn’t expect an answer. I put the note on the polished floorboards in front of the brown oval rug on the living room floor, closed the door, and went back to the car.
16
TWO EXITS EAST OF THE STADIUM, I took Teutonia Avenue and slanted north, deep into Millhaven’s wide residential midsection. I wasn’t quite sure of the location of Fond du Lac Drive, but I thought it intersected Teutonia, and I drove along a strip of little shops and fast-food restaurants, watching the street signs. When I came to the traffic light at Fond du Lac Drive, I made a quick guess and turned right.
Fond du Lac Drive was a wide six-lane street that began at the lake before crossing central Millhaven on a diagonal axis. This far west, no trees stood along the white sidewalks, and the sun baked the rows of 1930s apartment buildings and single-family houses that stood on both sides of the street. As I had been doing since leaving Elm Hill, I looked in my rearview mirror every couple of seconds.
One of three identical poured concrete houses, 5460 had black shutters and a flat roof. All three had been painted the same pale yellow. The owners of the houses on either side of it had tried to soften the stark exteriors by planting borders of flowers along their walks and around their houses, but Oscar Writzmann’s house looked like a jail with shutters.
Before I knocked on the door, I checked up and down the empty block.
“Who’s there?” said a voice on the other side of the door.
I gave my name.
The door opened part of the way. Through the screen I saw a tall, heavyset bald man in his seventies taking a good look at me. Whatever he saw didn’t threaten him, because he pulled the door open the rest of the way and came up to the screen. He had a big chest and a thick neck, like an old athlete, and was wearing khaki shorts and a tired blue sweatshirt. “You looking for me?”
“If you’re Oscar Writzmann, I am,” I said.
He opened the screen door and stepped for
ward far enough to fill the frame. His shoulder held the door open. He looked down at me, curious about what I was up to. “Here I am. What do you want?”
“Mr. Writzmann, I was hoping that you could help me locate one of the officers of a corporation based in Millhaven.”
He rotated his chin sideways, looking skeptical and amused at once. “You sure you want Oscar Writzmann? This Oscar Writzmann?”
“Have you ever heard of a company called Elvee Holdings?” He thought for a second. “Nope.”
“Have you ever heard of an Andrew Belinski or a Leon Casement?”
Writzmann shook his head.
“The other officer was named Writzmann, and since you’re the only Writzmann listed in the book, you’re sort of my last shot.”
“What is this all about?” He leaned forward, not yet hostile but no longer friendly. “Who are you, anyhow?”
I told him my name again. “I’m trying to help an old friend of mine, and we want to acquire more information about this company, Elvee Holdings.”
He was scowling at me.
“It looks like the only genuine officer of Elvee Holdings is a man named William Writzmann. We can’t go to the offices, because—”
He came out through the open door, stepped down, and jabbed me hard in the chest. “Does Oscar sound like William to you?”
“I thought you might be his father,” I said.
“I don’t care what you thought.” He poked me in the chest again and stepped forward, crowding me backward. “I don’t need tricky bastards like you coming around bothering me, and I want you to get off my property before I knock your block off.”
He meant it. He was getting angrier by the second.
“I was just hoping you could help me find William Writzmann. That’s all.” I held my hands up to show I didn’t want to fight him.
His face hardened, and he stepped toward me. I jumped back, and an enormous fist filled my vision, and the air in front of my face moved. Then he stood a yard from me, his fists ready and his face burning with rage.