The Throat (65 page)

"And Billy
reassured him that everything was going to be okay."

"Looked that
way, didn't it? But we weren't supposed to see that. If you don't get
in Billy's way, everything's cool. Someday, they'll nail somebody for
Waldo's murder."

"Paul
Fontaine has a great arrest record."

"He sure
does. Maybe pretty soon he'll get whoever killed your friend's wife."
There was an odd smile on his face.

"I have an
idea about that," I said.

Glenroy
refused to say any more. He was casting glances at his box again, and I
left a few minutes later.

The clerk
asked me if Glenroy was feeling any better, and when I said that I
thought he was, he said, "Will he let the maids in there tomorrow?"

"I doubt it,"
I said, and went back to the pay phone. I could hear him sighing to
himself while I dialed.

Twenty
minutes later, I pulled up in front of Tom Pasmore's house on Eastern
Shore Drive. Tom had still been in bed when he answered, but he said
he'd be up by the time I got there.

On the
telephone, I'd asked Tom if he would like to know the name of the Blue
Rose murderer.

"That's worth
a good breakfast," he told me. My stomach growled just as Tom opened
the door, and he said, "If you can't control yourself better than that,
get in the kitchen." He looked resplendent in a white silk robe that
came down to a pair of black slippers. Under the robe, he was wearing a
pink shirt and a crimson necktie. His eyes were clear and lively. The
smell of food hit me as soon as I reached the table, and saliva filled
my mouth. I walked into the kitchen. In separate pans on two gas rings
on the range, diced ham, bits of tomatoes, and a lot of whitish cheese
lay across irregular circles of egg. Two plates had been set out on the
counter, and four brown pieces of toast jutted up out of a toaster. I
smelled coffee.

Tom rushed in
behind me and immediately picked up a spatula and experimentally slid
it under each of the omelettes. "You butter the toast, if you want
some, and I'll take care of these. They'll be ready in a minute."

I took out
the hot slices of toast, put two on each plate, and smeared butter over
them. I heard one of the omelettes slapping into its pan and looked
sideways to see him fold over the edges of the second one and toss it
neatly into the air and field it with the pan. "When you live alone,
you learn to amuse yourself," he said, and slid them onto the plates.

I had
finished a quarter of my omelette and an entire piece of toast before I
could speak. "This is wonderful," I said. "Do you always flip them like
that?"

"No. I'm a
show-off."

"You're in a
good mood."

"You're going
to give me the name, aren't you? And I have something to give you."

"Something
besides this omelette?"

"That's
right."

Tom took the
plates into the kitchen and brought out a glass cylinder of strong
filtered coffee and two cups. I leaned back into the sturdy,
comfortable chair. Tom's coffee was another sort of substance from
Byron Dorian's, stronger, smoother, and less bitter.

"Tell me
everything. This is a great moment."

I started
with the man who had followed me back to John's from his house and
finished with Glenroy Breakstone's final remark. I talked steadily for
nearly half an hour, and all Tom did was to smile occasionally. Every
now and then he raised his eyebrows. Once or twice he closed his eyes,
as if to see exactly what I was describing. He read the fragment from
the taproom and handed it back without comment.

When I had
finally finished, he said, "Most of Glenroy's clothes come from
festivals or jazz parties, have you noticed that?"

I nodded.
This
was what he had to say?

"Because he
almost always wears black, those outfits always look pretty good on
him. But their real function is to declare his identity. Since the only
people he sees at all regularly, at least while he's at home, are the
desk clerk, his dealer, and me, the person to whom he's announcing that
he is Glenroy Breakstone, the famous tenor player, is mostly Glenroy
Breakstone." He smiled at me. "Your case is a little different."

"My case?" I
looked at the clothes I had on. They mainly announced that I didn't
spend a lot of time thinking about what I wore.

"I'm not
talking about your clothes. I mean, the child who appears to you from
time to time—from what you call the imaginative space."

"That's work."

"Of course.
But a lot of children are scattered through your whole story. It's as
though you're fitting everything that happens to you into a novel. And
the main element of this novel isn't Bob Bandolier or April Ransom, but
this nameless boy."

So far Tom
had said nothing at all about Bob Bandolier, and all of this seemed
like an unnecessary indirection. I had mentioned the boy, maybe
vaingloriously, to give Tom some insight into the way I worked, and now
I had begun feeling a bit impatient with him, as if he were ignoring
some splendid gift I had laid before him.

"Do you know
what movie was playing at your old neighborhood theater during the last
two weeks of October in 1950?"

"I don't have
any idea."

"A film noir
called
From Dangerous Depths
.
I looked back at old issues of the paper.
Isn't it interesting to think that everyone we're
talking about might have seen that movie over those two weeks?"

"If they went
to the movies, they all did," I said.

He smiled at
me again. "Well, it's a minor point, but I'm intrigued that even when
you're doing my job for me, going around and investigating, you're
still doing yours—even when you're in the basement of the Green Woman."

"Well, in a
way they're the same job."

"In a sense,"
Tom said. "We just look through different frames. Different windows."

"Tom, are you
trying to let me down gently? Don't you think Bob Bandolier was the
Blue Rose killer?"

"I'm sure he
was. I don't have doubt about that. This is a great moment. You know
who killed your sister, and I know the real name of Blue Rose. Those
people who knew him, the Sunchanas, are finally going to tell the
police what they've been sitting on for forty years, and we'll see what
happens. But your real mission is over."

"You sound
like John," I said.

"Are you
going to go back to New York now?"

"I'm not done
yet."

"You want to
find Fee Bandolier, don't you?"

"I want to
find Bob." I thought about it. "Well, I'd like to know about Fee, too."

"What was the
name of that town?"

I was sure he
remembered it, but I told him anyhow. "Azure, Ohio. The aunt was named
Judy Leatherwood."

"Do you
suppose Mrs. Leatherwood is still alive? It would be interesting to
know if Fee went off to college, or if he, what, killed himself driving
a stolen car while he was drunk. After all, when he was five years old,
he all but saw his father beat his mother to death. And at some level,
he would have known that his father went out and killed other people."
He interrogated me with a look. "Do you agree?"

"Children
always pick up on what's going on. They might not admit it, or
acknowledge it, but they understand."

"All of which
amounts to substantial disturbance. And there's one other terrible
thing that happened to him."

I must have
looked blank.

"The reason
his father murdered Heinz Stenmitz," Tom said. "Didn't that woman you
liked so much say that Bob sent him to the movies? Fee went alone to
see
From Dangerous Depths
,
and who should the boy meet but his father's
partner in a business arrangement?"

I had managed
to forget this completely.

"Do you want
to see what I found?" His eyes sparkled. "I think it'll interest you."

"You found
where Writzmann lives?"

He shook his
head.

"You found
out something about Belinski or Casement?"

"Let me show
you upstairs."

Tom bounded
up the stairs and led me into his office. He threw his robe on the
couch, waved me to a chair, and went around the room, turning on the
lights and the computers. Suspenders went up the front of the pink
shirt like dark blue stripes. "I'm going to hook into one of the data
bases we used the last time." He put himself in front of the desk
computer and began punching in codes. "There's a question we didn't
ask, because we thought we already knew the answer." He turned sideways
on the chair and looked at me with a kind of playful expectancy. "Do
you know what it was?"

"I have no
idea," I admitted.

"Bob
Bandolier owned a property at Seventeen South Seventh Street, right?"

"You know he
did."

"Well, the
city has records of all leaseholders and property owners, and I thought
I'd better make sure that address was still listed under his name. Just
watch, and see what turned up."

He had linked
his computer to the mainframe at Armory Place and through it to the
Registrar of Deeds. The modem burped. "I just keyed in the address,"
Tom said. "This won't take long."

I looked at
the blank gray screen. Tom leaned forward with his hands on his knees,
smiling to himself. Then I knew. "Oh, it can't be," I said.

Tom put his
finger to his lips. "Shhh."

"If I'm
right…" I said.

"Wait."
RECEIVE
flashed in the upper left corner of the screen. "Here we go," Tom said,
and leaned back. A column of information sped down the screen.

17 SOUTH
SEVENTH STREET

PURCHASED
04/12/1979 ELVEE HOLDINGS CORP 314 SOUTH FOURTH STREET MILLHAVEN IL

PURCHASE
PRICE $1,000

PURCHASED
05/01/1943 ROBERT BANDOLIER 14B SOUTH WINNETKA STREET MILLHAVEN IL

PURCHASE
PRICE $3,800

"Good old
Elvee Holdings," Tom said, virtually hugging himself in gleeful
self-congratulation and smiling like a new father.

"My God," I
said. "A real connection."

"That's
right. A real connection between the two Blue Rose cases. What if Bob
Bandolier is the man who's been following you?"

"Why would he
do that?"

"If he tried
to kill the Sunchanas after seeing you in Elm Hill, he didn't want them
to tell you something."

I nodded.

"What is it?"

"They knew
that he killed his wife. They told me about the roses."

"The Belknaps
could have told you about the roses. And a doctor signed Anna
Bandolier's death certificate. She's been dead so long that no one
could prove that she had been beaten. But the Sunchanas knew about the
existence of Fielding Bandolier."

"But anyone
who asked the Sunchanas the right questions would find out what he had
done."

"And find out
that he had a son. I think the person who followed you was Fee."

I stopped
breathing. Fee Bandolier had tried to kill the Sunchanas. Then I
realized what a long leap Tom had made. "Why do you even think that Fee
came back to Millhaven? He's had forty years to get as far away as he
can."

Tom asked me
if I remembered the price Elvee had paid for the house on South Seventh.

I looked at
the screen of the monitor, but the letters and numbers were too small
to read from across the room. "I think it was something like ten
thousand dollars."

"Take a look."

I walked up
beside him and looked at the screen.

"A thousand?"

"You saw ten
thousand because you expected to see something like that. Elvee bought
the house for next to nothing. I think that means that Elvee Holdings
is Fee Bandolier. And Fee protects himself here, too, by putting up a
smoke screen of fake directors and a convenience address."

"Why would
Bob give him his house? He sent him away when he was five. As far as we
know, he never saw him again." Tom held up his hands. He didn't know.
Then another of Tom's conclusions fell into place for me. "You think
Fee Bandolier was the man in uniform, the soldier who threatened Frank
Belknap."

"That's
right. I think he came back to take possession of the house."

"He's a scary
guy."

"I think Fee
Bandolier is a very scary guy," Tom said.

"I want to
see if we can talk to Judy Leatherwood," he said. "Go down the hall to
the bedroom and pick up the telephone next to the bed when I tell you.
In the meantime, I'll try to get her number from Information."

He pulled a
telephone book out of a drawer and started looking for dialing codes in
Ohio. I went into the hall, pushed open the door to a darkened room,
and went inside and turned on the light. A telephone stood on an end
table at the side of a double bed.

"Success,"
Tom called out. "Pick up now."

I put the
receiver to my ear and heard the musical plunk, plunk, plunk of the
dialing. The Leatherwood telephone rang three times before a woman
picked it up and said, "Hello?" in a quavery voice.

"Am I
speaking to Mrs. Judith Leatherwood?" Tom asked.

"Well, yes,
you are," said the quavery voice. She was faintly alarmed by the
official-sounding voice coming from Tom's mouth.

"Mrs.
Leatherwood, this is Henry Bell from the Mid-States Insurance Company.
I'm in the Millhaven office, and I promise you I'm not trying to sell
you insurance. We have a five-thousand-dollar death benefit to pay out,
and I am trying to locate the beneficiary. Our field agents have
discovered that this beneficiary was last known to be living with you
and your husband."

"Someone left
money to my son?"

"The name of
the recipient, at least as it's listed on the policy here in front of
me, is Fielding Bandolier. Did you adopt Mr. Bandolier?"