by Peter Straub
“You notice something?”
“No,” I said.
“Tell me about McCandless,” he said.
“Some Millhaven policeman has been using a false identity.” Hogan’s face hardened with anger, and I took a few steps away. “I know you think it was Fontaine, I thought it was Fontaine, but not anymore.”
“Why is that?”
“That piece of paper I found in the Green Woman was about a woman named Jane Wright. She was killed in May 1977, if those papers are what I think they are. The name of the town was partially destroyed, but it looked like Allentown. So I looked through all the Allentown newspapers for that month, but nobody of that name turned up.”
“You think that proves anything?”
“I found a Jane Wright who had been murdered in a town called Allerton, Ohio, in that same month. When Paul Fontaine was a detective in Allentown.”
“Ah,” Hogan said.
“So it has to be someone else. Someone who used Billy Ritz as an informant and who came to Millhaven in 1979. And there are only three men who have those things in common. You, Monroe, and McCandless.”
“Well, obviously, it isn’t me,” he said, “or you’d already be dead. But why did you rule out Monroe? And how on earth did you find out about Billy Ritz?”
“I kept my ears open. I talked to a lot of people, and some of them knew things.”
“Either you’re a born cop or a born pain in the ass,” Hogan said. “What about Monroe?”
Since I’d already said that I had come inside the theater only fifteen minutes before he did, I couldn’t tell him the truth. “I stood outside in the alley and watched the door for a long time before I came in. Monroe showed up about twelve, twelve-thirty, something like that, looked at the chain, and left. So it’s not him.”
Hogan nodded, swinging the big flashlight, and started walking away from the furnace toward the dressing room side of the basement. “McCandless comes as kind of a shock.”
“But when you first heard me, you thought I was someone you knew. Someone on the force.”
“Monroe told a lot of people about that crazy phone call. I didn’t know any of this stuff you just told me about the place in Ohio. Allerton?”
I nodded.
“I’ll fax a picture of McCandless to the Allerton police, and that’ll be that. It doesn’t matter if he shows up here tonight or not. I’ll take care of him. Let’s go upstairs so you can get your shoes, and I’ll take you to Ransom’s, or wherever you’re staying.”
“I’m staying at the St. Alwyn,” I said, hoping that Tom could hear me, wherever he was. “I’ll walk there.”
“Even better,” Hogan said.
I walked away from him faster than he expected, uncertain why I had not trusted him completely. Why should it be better for me to be staying at a hotel than at John’s? I moved toward the stairs, hearing Tom Pasmore telling me to remember what I knew about Fee Bandolier. It seemed that I knew a thousand things about Fee, none of them useful. Hogan came after me, moving slowly. I put my hand on the penlight in my pocket.
I got to the bottom of the stairs and said, “Would you just stay where you are for a second?”
At the worst, I thought, I’d just look like a fool.
“What?” Hogan stopped moving. He had been reaching toward the button that fastened his suit jacket, and he dropped his hand when he saw me turning to face him.
I slapped the light switch down with my left hand, and with the other turned the bright beam of the penlight on his face. He blinked.
“Lenny Valentine,” I said.
Hogan’s face went rigid with shock. Behind him, I saw Tom Pasmore move fast and silently out of the dressing room. I switched off my light and scrambled away from the stairs in the darkness. I had the impression that Tom was still moving.
“We’re not going to go through this all over again, are we?” Hogan said. He hadn’t moved an inch.
From somewhere near the pillar, Tom’s light shot out and outlined his head. Hogan turned to face the light and said, “Would you mind explaining what you think you’re doing, Underhill?” He could not have seen any more than the bright dazzle of the flashlight, but he did not raise his hands.
I reached into my jacket, pulled out the revolver, thumbed the safety, and aimed it at his head.
Hogan smiled. “What was that name you said?” He tilted his head, still smiling at Tom, and raised his right hand to unbutton the jacket of his suit. I remembered seeing him make the same gesture just before I had surprised him by turning off the light. He would have shot me as soon as I got to the top of the stairs. I realized that I was holding my penlight along the barrel of the revolver, aiming it at Hogan like another gun as if I had been planning my next act all along, and when Hogan’s hand reached his jacket button, I switched it on. Tom instantly extinguished his own light.
“Lenny Valentine,” I said.
Hogan had already turned to face into my light, and he was not smiling anymore. A shadow moved into his eyes, and he opened his mouth to say something. The thought of hearing his next words sent a wave of pure revulsion through me. Almost involuntarily, I pulled the trigger and sent a bullet down the bright, hot beam of light.
There was a red flash and a loud, flat crack that the cement walls amplified into an explosion. A black hole appeared just beneath Hogan’s hairline, and the light illuminated a bright spatter from the back of his head. Hogan rocked back out of the beam and disappeared. His body hit the floor, and the stench of blood and cordite filled the air. A twist of white spun in the beam of light and disappeared.
“You took a while to make up your mind,” Tom said, shining his light on me. My stiff, outstretched arms were still aiming the revolver at the place where Hogan had been. I let them drop.
I could not remember what I’d seen in Hogan’s face.
Tom shone his light downward. Hogan lay sprawled on the cement with most of his weight on his shoulder and hip, his legs bent and his arms flopped on either side. Blood flowed steadily out of the back of his head and pooled beneath his cheek.
I turned away and wobbled toward the wall. I groped around on the cinderblocks until I found the switch. Then I turned on the lights and looked back at him. A narrow line of red trickled out of the hole at his hairline and slanted across his forehead.
Tom came forward, holstering his automatic, and knelt beside Hogan’s body. He rolled him onto his back, and Hogan’s right arm landed softly in the growing pool of blood. The odor lodged in my stomach like a rotten oyster. Tom thrust his hands into one of the pockets of the gray suit coat. “What are you doing” I asked.
“Looking for a key.” He moved to the other side of the body and slid his hand into the other pocket. “Well, well.” He brought out a small silver key and held it up.
“What’s that for?”
“The papers,” he said. “And now …” He put his hand into the inner pocket of his own jacket and came out with a black marker pen. He uncapped the pen and looked up at me as if daring me to stop him. “I’m no policeman,” he said. “I’m not interested in justice, but justice is probably what this is.” He duck-walked a step away from the body, brushed a layer of dust off the cement, and wrote BLUE ROSE in big slanting letters. He spun himself around and looked at me again. “This time, it really was the detective,” he said. “Give me that gun.”
I came toward him and handed him the .38. Tom wiped it carefully with his handkerchief and bent over to place it in Hogan’s right hand. Then he wrapped the fingers around the handle and poked the index finger through the trigger guard. After that, he raised the front of the suit jacket and pulled Hogan’s own .38 out of its holster. He stood up and came toward me, holding out Hogan’s gun. “We’ll get rid of this later.”
I slid the revolver into the little wallet clipped to my belt without taking my eyes off Hogan’s body.
“We’d better get out of here,” Tom said.
I didn’t answer him. I stepped forward and looked
down at the face, the open eyes, the slack, empty face.
“You did the right thing,” Tom said.
“I have to make sure,” I said. “You know what I mean? I have to be sure.”
I knelt beside the body and gathered the material at the waist of the black T-shirt. I pulled the fabric up toward Hogan’s neck, but could not see enough. I yanked up the entire shirt until it was bunched under his arms and leaned over to stare at the dead man’s chest. It was pale and hairless. Half a dozen circular scars the size of dimes shone in the white skin.
A wave of pure relief went through me like honey, like gold, and the reek of blood suddenly smelled like laughter.
“Good-bye, Fee,” I said, and yanked the shirt back down.
“What was that about, anyhow?” Tom asked behind me.
“The body squad,” I said. “Old habit.”
I stood up.
Tom looked at me curiously, but did not ask. I switched off the light, and we went up the stairs in the dark.
Less than three minutes later, we were outside in the alley, and five minutes after that, we were back in the Jaguar, driving east.
20
HOGAN REACTED to the name.”
“He sure did,” I said.
“And the business about his chest?”
“Bachelor had little round scars on his chest.”
“Ah, I forgot. The punji stick scars. One of those books I have mentioned them.”
“They weren’t punji stick scars. Fee had them, too.”
“Ah,” Tom said. “Yes. Poor Fee.”
I thought: Sail on, Fee, sail away, Fee Bandolier.
21
IN THE DARK OF THE NIGHT, we threw Michael Hogan’s revolver into the Millhaven River from the Horatio Street bridge. It was invisible even before it smacked into the water, and then it disappeared from history.
22
THE LAST THING I REMEMBERED was the pistol smacking down into the water. I walked out of the garage, having spent all the time between Horatio Street and Eastern Shore Drive with Michael Hogan in the basement of the Beldame Oriental, and went across the top of the driveway in the dark of the night. The moon had long ago gone down, and there were no stars. The world is half night, and the other half is night, too. I saw his face in the sharp, particular beam of the penlight; I saw the black little hole, smaller than a dime, smaller than a penny, appear like a beauty spot beneath his thinning hair.
He had grown to the age of five a block away from me. Our fathers had worked in the same hotel. Sometimes I must have seen him as I wandered through the neighborhood—a little boy sitting on the front steps beside a bed of carefully tended roses.
Tom came up beside me and opened the kitchen door. We went inside, and he flicked a switch, shedding soft light over the old sinks and the white wainscoting and the plain, scarred wooden counter. “It’s a little past three,” Tom said. “Do you want to go to bed right away?”
“I don’t really know,” I said. “What happens now?” I meant: Whom do we tell? How do we tell?
“What happens now is that I have a drink,” Tom said. “Do you feel like going straight upstairs?”
Frederick Delius and the stuffed alligator, the Florida Suite. “I don’t think I could go to sleep,” I said.
“Keep me company, then.” He dumped ice cubes in a glass, covered them with malt whiskey, and sipped from the glass, watching me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “But we can’t just let him lie there, can we? For the church people to find?”
“I don’t think the church people ever go into the basement. The only thing they use down there is the organ, and they raise that from the stage.”
I poured water into a glass and drank half of it in one long swallow.
“I have some ideas,” Tom said.
“You want people to know, don’t you?” I swallowed most of the rest of the water and refilled the glass. My hands and arms seemed to be functioning by themselves.
“I want everybody to know,” Tom said. “Don’t worry, they won’t be able to bury it this time.” He took another sip. “But before we start shouting from the rooftops, I want to get those papers. We need them.”
“Where are they? Hogan’s apartment?”
“Come on upstairs with me,” Tom said. “I want to look at a photograph with you.”
“What photograph?”
He did not answer. I trailed along behind him as he went into the vast, cluttered downstairs room, walked past the couch and the coffee table, and went up the stairs to the second floor, turning on lights as he went.
Inside his office, he walked around the room, switching on the lamps. He sat down at his desk, and I fell into his chesterfield. Then I undipped the holster and placed it on the glass table before me. Tom had pulled out the top drawer of his desk to remove a familiar-looking manila envelope.
“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is how Hubbel identified Paul Fontaine. Hogan was in that picture, standing right next to Fontaine. So how could Hubbel make a mistake like that?”
“He had lousy eyesight,” I said.
“That bad?”
“He had to put his eyes right up to what he was looking at. His nose practically touched the paper.”
“So he actually examined the photograph very carefully.” Tom was facing me, leaning forward with the envelope in his hands.
“It looked to me like he did.”
“Let’s see if we can solve this one.” He opened the flap and drew the newspaper photograph out of the envelope. Tom set the envelope on his desk and carried the photograph and his drink to the couch and sat beside me. He leaned forward and placed the photograph between us on the table. “How did he identify Fontaine?”
“He pointed at him.”
“Right at Fontaine?”
“Right at him,” I said. “Dead bang at Paul Fontaine.”
“Show me.”
I leaned over and looked at the picture of Walter Dragonette’s front lawn crowded with uniformed and plainclothes policemen. “Well,” I said, “it was right in front of him, for one thing.”
“Move it.”
I slid the photograph before me. “Then he pointed at Fontaine.”
“Point at him.”
I reached out and planted my finger on Paul Fontaine’s face, just as Edward Hubbel had done in Tangent, Ohio. My finger, like Edward Hubbel’s, covered his entire face.
“Yes,” Tom said. “I wondered about that.”
“About what?”
“Look at what you’re doing,” Tom said. “If you put your finger there, who are you pointing at?”
“You know who I’m pointing at,” I said.
Tom leaned, lifted my hand off the photograph, and slid it across the table so that it was directly in front of him. He placed his finger over Fontaine’s face exactly as I had. The tip of his finger aimed directly at the next man in the picture, Michael Hogan. “Whose face am I pointing at?” Tom asked.
I stared down at the photograph. He wasn’t pointing at Fontaine, he was obliterating him.
“I bet it wasn’t Ross McCandless who canceled the trip to Tangent,” Tom said. “What do you think?”
“I think—I think I’m an idiot,” I said. “Maybe a moron. Whichever one is dumber.”
“I would have thought he meant Fontaine, too. Because, like you, I would have expected him to identify Fontaine.”
“Yes, but …”
“Tim, there isn’t any blame.”
“Fontaine must have looked into Elvee Holdings. John and I led Hogan straight to him, and all he wanted to do was get my help.”
“Hogan would have killed Fontaine whether you and John were there or not, and he would have blamed it on random violence. All you did was confirm that another shooter was present that night.”
“Hogan.”
“Sure. You just gave them a nice convenient eyewitness.” He took another swallow of his drink, seeing that he had succeeded in banishing most
of my guilt. “And even if you hadn’t seen some indistinct figure, wasn’t McCandless intent on making you say that you had? It made everything easier for him.”
“I guess that’s right,” I said, “but I still think I’m going to retire to Florida.”
He smiled at me. “I’m going to bed, too—I want us to get those papers as soon as possible tomorrow morning. This morning, I mean.”
“Are you going to tell me where they are?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t have the faintest idea,” I said.
“What’s the last place left? It’s right in front of us.”
“I don’t appreciate this,” I said.
“It starts with E,” he said, smiling.
“Erewhon,” I said, and Tom kept smiling. Then I remembered what we had learned when we first began looking into Elvee. “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”
“That’s right,” Tom said.
“And it was only a couple of blocks from the Beldame Oriental, so he probably moved them around five or six yesterday evening, right after he got off shift.”
“Say it.”
“Expresspost,” I said. “The mail drop on South Fourth Street.”
“See?” Tom said. “I told you you knew.”
Shortly afterward, I went upstairs to Frederick Delius and the alligator, undressed, and crawled into bed to get four hours of restless, dream-ridden sleep. I woke up to the smell of toast and the knowledge that the most difficult day I was to have in Millhaven had just begun.
PART
SEVENTEEN
JOHN RANSOM
1
BY EIGHT-THIRTY the sun was already high over the rooftops of South Fourth Street, and we stepped out of the car’s briskly conditioned air into ninety-degree heat that almost instantly plastered my shirt to my sides. Tom Pasmore was wearing one of his Lamont von Heilitz specials, a blue three-piece windowpane check suit that made him look as if he had just arrived from Buckingham Palace. I had on more or less what I’d worn on the airplane, jeans and a black double-breasted jacket over a white button-down shirt, and I looked like the guy who held the horses.