by Peter Straub
11
BOB BANDOLIER?” John said. “That asshole, Bob Bandolier?”
“Exactly,” I said. “That asshole, Bob Bandolier.”
“I met him a couple of times when I was a little boy. The guy was completely phony. You know how when you’re a kid you can sometimes see things really clearly? I was in my father’s office, and a guy with a waxy little mustache and slicked-down hair comes in. Meet the most important man in this hotel, my father says to me. I just do my job, young man, he says to me—and I can see that he does think he’s the most important man in the hotel. He thinks my father’s a fool.”
“All killers can’t be as congenial as Walter Dragonette.”
“That guy,” John said again. “Anyhow, you were brilliant, coming up with that sister.”
“I was telling them the truth. He murdered my sister first.”
“And you never told me?”
“John, it just never—”
He muttered something and moved away from me to lean against the door, indications that he was about to descend into the same wrathful silence of the journey out to the suburbs.
“Why should you be upset?” I asked. “I came here from New York to help you with a problem—”
“No. You came here to help yourself. You can’t concentrate on the problems of another person for longer than five seconds, unless you have some personal interest in the matter. What you’re doing has nothing to do with me. It’s all about that book you’re writing.”
I waited until my impatience with him died down. “I suppose I should have told you about my sister when you first called. I wasn’t hiding it from you, John. Even I couldn’t really be sure that the man who had killed her had done the other murders.”
“And now you know.”
“Now I know,” I said, and felt a return of that enormous relief, the satisfaction of being able to put down a weight I had carried for four decades.
“So you’re done, and you might as well go back home.” He flicked his eyes in my direction before looking expressionlessly out the car window again.
“I want to know who killed your wife. And I think it might be safer if I stay with you for a while.”
He shrugged. “What are you going to do, be my bodyguard? I don’t think anybody is going to try to take me to the Green Woman and tie me up in a chair. I can protect myself from Bob Bandolier. I know what he looks like, remember?”
“I’d like to see what else I can turn up,” I said.
“I guess you’re pretty much free to do whatever you want.”
“Then I’d like to use your car this evening.”
“For what? A date with that gray-haired crumpet?”
“I ought to talk to Glenroy Breakstone again.”
“You sure don’t mind wasting your time,” he said, and that was how we left it for the rest of the drive back to Ely Place. John pulled the Colt out from under the seat and took it into the house with him.
12
IMADE A RIGHT TURN at the next corner, went past Alan’s house, and saw him walking up the path to his front door beside Eliza Morgan. It was getting a little cooler by now, and she must have taken him for a walk around the block. He was waving one arm in big circles, describing something, and I could hear the boom of his voice without being able to distinguish the words. They never noticed the Pontiac going down the street behind them. I turned right again at the next corner and went back to Berlin Avenue to go back downtown to the east-west expressway.
Before I saw Glenroy I wanted to fulfill an obligation I had remembered in the midst of the quarrel with John.
At the time I had spoken to Byron Dorian, my motive for suggesting a meeting had been no more than my sense that he needed to talk; now I actively wanted to talk to him. The scale of what April Ransom had been trying to do in The Bridge Project had given me a jolt. She was discovering her subject, watching it unfold, as she rode out farther and farther on her instincts. She was really writing, and that the conditions of her life meant that she had to do this virtually in secret, like a Millhaven Emily Dickinson, made the effort all the more moving. I wanted to honor that effort—to honor the woman sitting at the table with her papers and her fountain pen.
Alan Brookner had been so frustrated by his inability to read April’s manuscript that he had tried to flush thirty or forty pages down the toilet, but what was left was enough to justify a trip to Varney Street.
13
IHAD BEEN RELYING on my memory to get me there, but once I turned off the expressway, I realized that I had only a general idea of its location, which was past Pine Knoll Cemetery, south of the stadium. I drove past the empty stadium and then the cemetery gates, checking the names on the street signs. One Saturday a year or two after my sister’s death, my father had taken me out to Varney Street to buy a metal detector he had seen advertised in the Ledger—he was between jobs, still drinking heavily, and he thought that if he swept a metal detector over the east side beaches, he could find a fortune. Rich people didn’t bother picking up the quarters and half dollars that dropped out of their pockets. It was all lying there to be picked up by a clever entrepreneur like Al Underhill. He had steered his car to Varney Street unhesitatingly—we had gone past Pine Knoll, made a turn, perhaps another. I remembered a block of shops with signs in a foreign language and overweight women dressed in black.
Varney Street itself I remembered as one of the few Millhaven neighborhoods a step down from Pigtown, a stretch of shabby houses with flat wooden fronts and narrow attached garages. My father had left me in the car, entered one of the houses, and come out twenty minutes later, gloating over the worthless machine.
I turned a corner at random, drove three blocks while checking the street signs, and found myself in the same neighborhood of little shops I had first seen with my father. Now all the signs were in English. Spools of thread in pyramids and scissors suspended on lengths of string filled the dusty window of a shop called Lulu’s Notions. The only people in sight were on a bench in the laundromat beside it. I pulled into an empty place behind a pickup truck, put a quarter in the meter, and went into the laundromat. A young woman in cutoff shorts and a Banana Republic T-shirt went up to the plate-glass window and pointed through houses at the next street down.
I went to the back of the laundromat, took the paper on which I had written Dorian’s phone number and address from my wallet, and dialed the number.
“You’re who?” he asked.
I told him my name again. “We spoke on the phone once when you called the Ransom house. I’m the person who told you that she had died.”
“Oh. I remember talking to you.”
“You said I might come to your place to talk about April Ransom.”
“I don’t know … I’m working, well, I’m sort of trying to work …”
“I’m just around the corner, at the laundromat.”
“Well, I guess you could come over. It’s the third house from the corner, the one with the red door.”
The dark-haired, pale young man I had seen at April’s funeral cracked open the vermillion door in the little brown house and leaned out, gave me a quick, nervous glance, and then looked up and down the block. He was dressed in a black T-shirt and faded black jeans. He pulled himself back inside. “You’re a friend of John Ransom’s, aren’t you? I saw you with him at the funeral.”
“I saw you there, too.”
He licked his lips. He had fine blue eyes and a handsome mouth. “Look, you didn’t come here to make trouble or anything, did you? I’m not sure I understand what you’re doing.”
“I want to talk about April Ransom,” I said. “I’m a writer, and I’ve been reading her manuscript, The Bridge Project.’ It was going to be a wonderful book.”
“I guess you might as well come in.” He backed away.
What had been the front room was a studio with drop cloths on the floor, tubes of paint and a lot of brushes in cans strewn over a paint-spattered table, and a low daybed. At i
ts head, large, unframed canvases were stacked back to front against the wall, showing the big staples that fastened the fabric to the stretchers; others hung in an uneven row along the opposite wall. An opening on the far side of the room led into a dark kitchen. Tan drop cloths covered the two windows at the front of the house, and a smaller cloth that looked like a towel had been nailed up over the kitchen window. A bare light bulb burned on a cord in the middle of the room. Directly beneath it, a long canvas stood on an easel.
“Where did you find her manuscript? Did John have it?”
“It was at her father’s house. She used to work on it there.”
Dorian moved to the table and began wiping a brush with a limp cloth. “That makes sense. You want some coffee?”
“That would be nice.”
He went into the kitchen to pour water into an old-fashioned metal percolator, and I walked around the room, looking at his paintings.
Nothing like the nudes in the Ransoms’ bedroom, they resembled a collaboration between Francis Bacon and panels from a modernist graphic novel. In all of the paintings, dark forms and figures, sometimes slashed with white or brilliant red, moved forward out of a darker background. Then a detail jumped out at me from the paintings, and I grunted with surprise. A small, pale blue rose appeared in each of the paintings: in the buttonhole of the suit worn by a screaming man, floating in the air above a bloody corpse and a kneeling man, on the cover of a notebook lying on a desk beside a slumped body, in the mirror of a crowded bar where a man in a raincoat turned a distorted face toward the viewer. The paintings seemed like responses to April’s manuscript, or visual parallels to it.
“Sugar?” Dorian called from the kitchen. “Milk?”
I realized that I had not eaten all day, and asked for both.
He came out of the kitchen and gave me a cup filled to the top with sweet white coffee. He turned to look at the paintings with me and raised his cup to his lips. When he lowered the cup, he said, “I’ve spent so much time with this work, I hardly know what it looks like anymore. What do you think?”
“They’re very good,” I said. “When did you change your style?”
“In art school, this was at Yale, I was interested in abstraction, even though no one else was, and I started getting into that flat, outlined, Japanese-y Nabi kind of work right around the time I graduated. To me, it was a natural outgrowth of what I was doing, but everybody hated it.” He smiled at me. “I knew I wouldn’t have a chance in New York, so I came back here to Millhaven, where you can live a lot cheaper.”
“John said that a gallery owner gave your name to April.”
He looked away abruptly, as if this was an embarrassing subject. “Yeah, Carol Judd, she has a little gallery downtown. Carol knew my work because I took my slides in when I first got back. Carol always liked me, and we used to talk about my having a show there sometime.” He smiled again, but not at me, and the smile faded back into his usual earnestness when I asked another question.
“So that was how you first met April Ransom?”
He nodded, and his eyes drifted over the row of paintings. “Uh huh. She understood what I was after.” He paused for a second. “There was a kind of appreciation between us right from the start. We talked about what she wanted, and she decided that instead of buying any of the work I’d already done, she would commission two big paintings. So that’s how I got to know her.”
He took his eyes off the paintings, set his cup on the table covered with paints and brushes, and swung around a sway-backed chair in front of the easel so that it faced the bed. Two tapestry cushions were wedged into the tilted back support. When I sat down, the cushions met my back in all the right places.
Dorian sat on the camp bed. Looking at his paintings had comforted him, and he seemed more relaxed.
“You must have spent a lot of time talking with her,” I said.
“It was wonderful. Sometimes, if John was out of town or teaching late, she’d invite me to her house so I could just sit in front of all those paintings she had.”
“Didn’t she want you to meet John?”
He pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, as if he were working out a problem. “Well, I did meet John, of course. I went there for dinner twice, and the first time was all right, John was polite and the conversation was fine, but the second time I went, he barely spoke to me. It seemed like their paintings were just possessions for him—like sports cars, or something.”
I had the nasty feeling that, for John, having Byron Dorian around the house would have been something like an insult. He was young and almost absurdly good-looking while appearing to be entirely without vanity—John would have accepted him more easily if his looks had been undermined by obvious self-regard.
Then something else occurred to me, something I should have understood as soon as I saw the paintings on the walls.
“You’re the one who got April interested in the Blue Rose case,” I said. “You were the person who first told her about William Damrosch.”
He actually blushed.
“That’s what all these paintings are about—Damrosch.”
His eyes flew to the paintings again. This time, they could not comfort him. He looked too anguished to speak.
“The boy in the Vuillard painting reminded you of Damrosch, and you told her about him,” I said. “That doesn’t make you responsible for her death.”
This sentence, intended to be helpful, had the opposite effect.
Like a girl, Dorian pushed his knees together, propped his elbow on them, and twisted sideways with his chin in his hand. An almost visible cloud of pain surrounded him.
“I’m fascinated by Damrosch, too,” I said. “It’s hard not to be. When I was in Vietnam, I wrote two novels in my head, and the second, The Divided Man, was all about Damrosch.”
Dorian shot me a blue-eyed glance without altering his posture. “I must have looked at that boy in the Vuillard three or four times before I really saw him—it’s so subtle. At first, you just take him for granted, and then the way he’s looking out at you takes over the whole painting.”
He paused to struggle with his feelings. “That’s how we started talking about Bill Damrosch and everything. She was excited about the idea of the bridge, that he was found under a bridge. That sort of ignited her.”
I asked him how he had first become interested in Damrosch’s story.
“Oh, I heard about him from my father. Lots and lots of times. They were partners for a long time. My dad didn’t get on very well with his first wife, so he spent a lot of time with Bill Damrosch. I guess you could say he loved him—he used to say he tried everything he could think of to stop Bill from drinking, but he couldn’t, so he started drinking with him.” He gave me a frank look. “My father was an alcoholic, but after Bill died, he straightened himself out. In the sixties, when he was getting close to retirement age, he met my mother in a grocery store. Even she says she picked him up. She was twenty-five years younger, but they got married, and a year later I happened along, not exactly according to plan, I gather.”
It made sense, if Dorian took after his father—as long as he didn’t get fat, women would be trying to pick him up for the next three decades.
“Your father must have been disturbed about the outcome of the Blue Rose case.”
He gave me a fierce look. “What outcome? You mean the junk in the papers? That drove him crazy. He almost quit the force, but he loved the work too much.” He had calmed down, and now I was getting the frank, level look again. This time there was a touch of censure in it. “He hated your book, by the way. He said you got everything wrong.”
“I guess I did.”
“What you did was irresponsible. My father knew that Bill Damrosch never killed anybody. He was set up.”
“I know that now,” I said.
Dorian hooked one foot around his other ankle and started looking stricken again. “I should never have mentioned Damrosch to her. That’s how everything started.�
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“The only people who knew what she was doing with her spare time were one or two brokers at Barnett and the police.”
“I told her she should write to the police department.”
“It should have worked.” I told him what Paul Fontaine had done for me.
Outrage and scorn darkened his face. “Then they’re as fucked up as my father said they were. That doesn’t make any sense. They should have let her see those records.” He glared at the paint-spattered floor for a couple of seconds. “My dad told me he didn’t like what happened to the force after he retired—all the new people, like Fontaine. He didn’t like the way they worked. He didn’t trust their methods. Except for Mike Hogan. My dad thought Mike Hogan was a real cop, and he had a lot of respect for him.” Dorian looked suspiciously back up at me.
“So your father was still alive when Fontaine and Hogan joined the force.” He was describing any veteran’s natural resentment of a brilliant new arrival.
“He’s still alive, period. My father is eighty-five, and he’s as strong as an ox.”
“If it’s any consolation, Paul Fontaine told me that he liked my book because it was so ridiculous.”
“I’ll tell him that.” He flashed me a nice white smile. “No, on second thought, maybe I won’t.”
“Do you think I could talk to your father?”
“I guess.” Dorian rubbed his face and looked at me grudgingly for a moment before reaching down behind the end of the day bed to pick up a spiral notebook with a ballpoint pen clipped into its metal rings. He flipped to an empty page and wrote something down. Then he ripped out the page and walked across the floor to hand it to me.
He had printed the name George Dubbin above an address and telephone number.
“George Dubbin?”
“That’s his name.” Dorian sat down on the bed again. “My name used to be Bryan Dubbin. I thought I could never be a famous painter with a name like that. Francesco Clemente and Bryan Dubbin? As soon as I graduated from UI-Millhaven, I changed it to something that sounded better to me. You don’t have to tell me that I was being silly. But it could have been worse—the other name I was considering was Beaumont Darcy. I guess my head was in a pretty decadent place back then.”
