by Peter Straub
“Billy Ritz was an informer?”
“Like I told you—the man was in the middle. He was a contact.”
“Whose informer was he?”
“Better not to know.” Glenroy tilted up the telescope. “Show’s over.”
We went back into the living room. Glenroy switched on a lamp near his table and sat down. “How did you wind up out there in the rain?”
“Paul Fontaine took me out to see Bob Bandolier’s grave, and he got called here on the way back. He wasn’t in a very good mood.”
“He was saying—okay, maybe he did it, but he’s dead. Right? So leave it alone.”
“Right,” I said. “I think I’m beginning to see why.”
Glenroy hitched himself up in the chair. “Then you better watch who you talk to. On the real side.”
The record ended, and Glenroy jumped up and flipped it over. He put the needle down on the second side. “Night and Day” breathed out into the room. Glenroy stood next to his shelves, looking down at the floor and listening to the music. “Nobody like Ben. Nobody.”
I thought he was about to take the tension out of the air by telling me some anecdote about Ben Webster, but he clamped his arms around his chest and swayed in time to the music for a few seconds. “Suppose some doctor got killed out at the stadium,” he said. “I’m not saying this happened, I just supposing. Suppose he got killed bad—cut up in a toilet.”
He looked up at me, and I nodded.
“Suppose I’m a guy who likes to go to ball games now and then. Suppose I was there that day. Maybe I might happen to see a guy I know. He’s got some kind of name like … Buster. Buster ain’t worth much. When he ain’t breaking into someone’s house, he’s generally drunk on his ass. Now suppose one time when I’m coming back from the food stand, I happen to see this no-good Buster all curled up under the steps to the next level in a puddle of Miller High Life. And if this ever happened, which it didn’t, the only reason I knew this was a human being and not a blanket was that I knew it was Buster. Because the way this didn’t happen was, he was jammed so far up under the steps you had to look for him to see him.”
I nodded.
“Then just suppose a detective gets word that Buster was out at the game that day, and Buster once did four years at Joliet for killing a guy in a bar, and when the detective goes to his room, he finds the doctor’s wallet in a drawer. What do you suppose happens next?”
“I suppose Buster confesses and gets a life sentence.”
“Sounds about right to me,” Glenroy said. “For a made-up story, that is.”
I asked Glenroy if he knew the number of a cab company. He took a business card from the top of the dresser and carried it to me. When I reached for the card, he held onto it for a second. “You understand, I never said all that, and you never heard it.”
“I don’t even think I was here,” I said, and he let go of the card.
A dispatcher said that a cab would pick me up in front of the hotel in five minutes. Glenroy tossed me my wet shirt and told me to keep the sweatshirt.
24
LASZLO NAGY, from my point of view a mass of dark curls erupting from the bottom of a brown tweed cap, began talking as soon as I got into his cab. Some guy got killed right there across the street, did I know that? Makes you think of that crazy guy Walter Dragonette, didn’t it? What makes a guy do things like that, anyhow? You have to be God to know the answer to that one, right? Laszlo Nagy had arrived from Hungary eight years ago, and such terrible things never happened in Hungary. Other terrible things happened instead. Do I see this terrible rain? Do I know how long it will last, this terrible rain? It will last six hours exactly. And what will come next? A fog will come next. The fog will be equally terrible as the rain, because no driver will be able to see what is in front of him. We will have fog two days. Many accidents will take place. And why? Because Americans do not drive well in the fog.
I grunted in all the appropriate places, thinking about what I knew and what it meant. William Writzmann was the son of Oscar Writzmann—now I understood Oscar’s remark to John and me about going back to Pigtown, where we belonged. As Billy Ritz, Writzmann had carried on an interesting criminal career under the protection of a murderous Millhaven policeman until the day after John and I had come crashing in on his father. Writzmann had been the front man for Elvee Holdings; Elvee’s two fictitious directors had been named after Fee Bandolier’s father and an old head of homicide named Andy Belin. Tom Pasmore had been right all along. And Fee Bandolier was a policeman in Millhaven.
I had no idea of what to do next.
Laszlo drew up in front of John’s house. When I paid him, he told me that American money should be in different sizes and colors, like bills in England and France—and Hungary. He was still talking about the beauty of European money when I closed the door.
I ran up the walk and let myself into the dark house with the extra key. In the kitchen, I rubbed the rain off my face with a paper towel, and then I went upstairs to do some work until John came home.
PART
ELEVEN
JANE WRIGHT
AND JUDY ROLLIN
1
AFTER I HAD SHOWERED, dressed in clean, dry clothes, and worked for an hour or so, I sat on the bed and called Tom Pasmore. No woman named Jane Wright had been killed in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in May or any other month of 1977, but there were lots of other Allentowns in the United States, and he was gradually working through them. He told me he was going to look into Tangent’s history as soon as he found the right Allentown. Tom had a lot to say about Fee Bandolier. He also had a few ideas of how to proceed, all of which sounded dangerous to me. When we finished, I felt hungry again and decided to go downstairs to see if there was anything in the refrigerator except vodka.
As I was going toward the stairs, I heard a car splashing to a stop at the front of the house and went to the window at the front of the hallway. A dark green cab stood near the curb. Sheets of water washed down the street, and rain bounced crazily off the roof of the cab. Through the streaming water I could read the words MONARCH CAB CO. and a local telephone number on the front door. John Ransom was leaning over the front seat, wrangling with the driver. I ran back to the guest room and dialed the number on the cab door.
“This is Miles Darrow, the accountant for Mr. John Ransom. I understand that my client has used the services of your cab company within the past few hours. He has a problem saving his receipts, and I wonder if you could tell me where your driver picked him up, where he was going, and what the average fare would be to Ely Place on the east side from that location. No reason letting the IRS get it all.”
“Gee, you’re a good accountant,” said the woman I was speaking to. “I took the call from Mr. Ransom myself. Pickup was at his house and destination was the Dusty Roads Sunoco Service Station on Claremont Road in Purdum, then to return back to Ely Place. The average fare, that’s kind of hard to say, but it would have to be about sixty-seventy dollars, except more on a day like this. And waiting time would add some more, but I don’t know about that.”
“Dusty Rhoades?” I asked.
She spelled the name for me. “Not like the baseball player,” she said. “It’s more like a kind of a cute kind of a name.”
That was about right. Purdum was an affluent town about twenty miles up the shoreline. There was a well-known boarding school in Purdum; a famous polo player, if you knew about things like that, owned a stable and a riding school there. In Purdum, every traffic accident involved at least two Mercedes. I thanked her for her help, hung up, and listened to John moving through the living room. I went to the head of the stairs. The television began to babble. A heavy body hit the couch.
I started down the stairs, telling myself that John would have stowed Alan’s gun somewhere in his room.
He didn’t say anything until he had given me a long, disapproving look from the couch. Streaks of moisture still dampened his scalp, and widening dark spots covered the s
houlders of the dark green linen jacket. On the television screen, a beautifully dressed, handsome black family sat around a dining room table in what looked like a million-dollar house. John took a big mouthful from a glass filled with clear liquid and a lot of ice cubes, still giving me the full weight of his disapproval. Maybe it was disappointment. Then he looked back at the black family. The soundtrack told us that they were hugely enjoyable. “I didn’t know you were home,” he said, stressing the pronoun.
“I had a busy day,” I said.
He shrugged, still watching the television.
I walked behind the couch and leaned against the mantel. The bronze plaque with April’s name on it still lay on the pink-and-gray marble. “I’ll tell you what I did, if you tell me what you did.”
He gave me a look of pure annoyance and turned theatrically back to the set. “Actually, I thought I’d get home long before you came back. I had a little errand to get out of the way, but it look longer than I thought.” Loud, sustained laughter came from the television. The father of the black family was strutting around the table in an exaggerated cakewalk. “I had to go to my office at Arkham to go over the curriculum for next year. What took so long was that I had to hand in Alan’s reading list, too.”
“I suppose you called a taxi service,” I said.
“Yeah, and I waited an extra twenty minutes for the driver to find the place. You shouldn’t be able to drive a cab until you know the city. And the suburbs, too.”
The Monarch driver hadn’t known how to find Claremont Road. Maybe he hadn’t even known how to find Purdum.
“So what did you do?” he asked.
“I discovered some interesting information. Elvee Holdings has owned Bob Bandolier’s house since 1979.”
“What?” John finally looked up at me. “Elvee has a connection to Bandolier?”
“I was coming back here to tell you when Paul Fontaine jumped out of an unmarked car, frisked me, and yelled at me because a cop in Elm Hill bugged him about Bandolier.”
John smiled when I said I had been frisked. “Did you assume the position?”
“I didn’t have much choice. When he was done yelling, he pushed me into his car and drove like a madman to the expressway, down the expressway, and finally got off at the stadium exit. He was taking me to Bob Bandolier.”
John stretched his arm along the top of the couch and leaned toward me.
“Bandolier is buried in Pine Knoll Cemetery. He’s been dead since 1972. You know how much Elvee paid for his house? A thousand dollars. What must have happened was that he left the house to his son, who sold it to the company he set up as soon as he came home from Vietnam.”
“Writzmann,” John said. “I get it. This is great.”
“Before we could get back to the east side, just about the time it started to rain, Fontaine answered a call and took me down to Sixth and Livermore. And there, lying in front of the Idle Hour beneath the slogan Blue Rose, was William Writzmann. Oscar Writzmann’s son.”
For once, John looked stupefied. He even forgot about his drink.
“Also known as Billy Ritz. He was a small-time coke dealer down around the St. Alwyn. He also had connections to some police officer in Millhaven. I think that policeman is Fee Bandolier, grown up. I think he murders people for pleasure and has been doing it for a long time.”
“And he can cover up these murders because he’s a cop?”
“That’s right.”
“So we have to find out who he is. We have to nail him.”
I began saying what I had to say. “John, there’s a way to look at things that makes everything I just told you irrelevant. William Writzmann and Bob Bandolier and the Green Woman would have nothing to do with the way your wife died.”
“You just lost me.”
“The reason none of that would matter is that you killed April.”
He started to say something, but stopped himself. He shook his head and tried to smile. I had just announced that the earth was flat, and if you went too far in any one direction you fell off. “You’re kidding me, I hope. But I have to tell you, it isn’t funny.”
“Just suppose these things are true. You knew Barnett offered her a big new job in San Francisco. Alan knew about it, too, even though he was too mixed up to really remember anything about it.”
“Well, exactly,” John said. “This is still supposed to be a joke, right?”
“If April was offered that kind of job, would you want her to take it? I think you would have been happier if she’d quit her job altogether. April’s success always made you uneasy—you wanted her to stay the way she was when you first met her. Probably she did say that she was going to quit after a couple of years.”
“I told you that. She wasn’t like the rest of those people at Barnett—it was a big joke to April.”
“She wasn’t like them because she was so much better than they were. In the meantime, let’s admit that you saw your own job disappearing. Alan only got through last year because you were holding his hand.”
“That’s not true,” John said. “You saw him at the funeral.”
“What he did that day was an astonishing act of love for his daughter, and I’ll never forget it. But he knows he can’t teach again. In fact, he told me he was worried about letting you down.”
“There are other jobs,” John said. “And what does this make-believe have to do with April, anyhow?”
“You were Alan Brookner’s right-hand man, but how much have you published? Can you get a professorship in another department?”
His body stiffened. “If you think I’m going to listen to you trash my career, you’re wrong.” He put his drink on the table and swiveled his entire body toward me.
“Listen to me for a minute. This is how the police will put things together. You resented and downplayed April’s success, but you needed her. If someone like April can make eight hundred thousand dollars for her father, how much could she make for herself? A couple of million? Plenty of money to retire on.”
John made himself laugh. “So I killed her for her money.”
“Here’s the next step. The person I went to see downtown was Byron Dorian.”
John rocked back on the couch. Something was happening to his face that wasn’t just a flush.
“Suppose April and Dorian saw each other a couple of times a week. They were interested in a lot of the same things. Suppose they had an affair. Maybe Dorian was thinking about going to California with her.” John’s face darkened another shade, and he clamped his mouth shut. “I’m pretty sure she was going to bring Alan along with her. I bet she had a couple of brochures squirreled away up in her office. That means the police have them now.”
John licked his lips. “Did that pretentious little turd put you on this track? Did he say he slept with April?”
“He didn’t have to. He’s in love with her. They used to go to this secluded little spot in Flory Park. What do you suppose they did there?”
John opened his mouth and breathed in and out, so shocked he couldn’t speak. Years ago, I thought, April had taken him there, too. John’s face softened and lost all its definition. “Are you almost done?”
“You couldn’t stand it,” I said. “You couldn’t keep her, and you couldn’t lose her, either. So you worked out a plan. You got her to take you somewhere in her car. You got her to park in a secluded place. As soon as she started talking, you beat her unconscious. Maybe you stabbed her after you beat her. Probably you thought you killed her. There must have been a lot of blood in the car. Then you drove to the St. Alwyn and carried her in through the back door and up the service steps to room 218. They don’t have room service, the maids don’t work at night, and almost everybody who lives there is about seventy years old. There’s no one in those halls after midnight. You still have master keys. You knew the room would be empty. You put her on the bed and stabbed her again, and then you wrote BLUE ROSE on the wall.”
He was watching me with assumed indifferen
ce—I was explaining that the earth was flat all over again.
“Then you took the car to Alan’s house and stashed it in his garage. You knew he’d never see it—Alan never even left his house. You cleaned up all the obvious bloodstains. As far as you knew, you could keep it there forever, and no one would ever find it. But then you got me here, in order to muddy the water by making sure everybody thought about the old Blue Rose murders. I started spending time with Alan, so the garage wasn’t safe anymore. You had to move the Mercedes. What you did was find a friendly garage out of town, put it in for a general service and a good cleaning, and just left it there for a week.”
“Are we still talking about a hypothesis?”
“You tell me, John. I’d like to know the truth.”
“I suppose I killed Grant Hoffman. I suppose I went to the hospital and killed April.”
“You wouldn’t be able to let her come out of her coma, would you?”
“And Grant?” He was still trying to look calm, but red-and-white blotches covered his face.
“You were setting up a pattern. You wanted me and the cops to think that Blue Rose was back to work. You picked a guy who would have remained unidentified forever if he hadn’t been wearing your father-in-law’s old sport jacket. Even when we saw the body, you still pretended he was a vagrant.”
John was rhythmically clenching and unclenching his jaws.
“It wouldn’t be hard for me to think you just got me out here to use me.”
“You just turned into a liability—if you talk to anybody, you could convince them that all of this bullshit is real. Go upstairs and start packing, Tim. You’re gone.”
He started to get up, and I said, “What would happen if the police went to Purdum, John? Did you take her car to Purdum?”
“Damn you,” he said, and rushed at me.
He was on me before I could stop him. The odors of sweat and alcohol poured out of him. I punched him in the stomach, and he grunted and wrenched me away from the fireplace. His arms locked around my middle. It felt like he was trying to crush me to death. I hit the side of his head two or three times, and then I got my hands under his chin and tried to pry him off of me. We struggled back and forth, rocking between the fireplace and the couch. I shoved up on his meaty chin, and he released his arms and staggered back. I hit him once more in the belly. John clutched his stomach and stepped backward, glaring at me.