That smell got worse and worse, and finally I stopped him one day and asked about Anna. He said she was ill, but he was taking care of her.'
David stirred. 'Theresa told me he was home all day, and I was worried because of the thought of my wife in the same house with that, that mad creature.'
'But I was fine, he never bothered me.'
'Bandolier stayed home all day?' I asked.
'I think he must have been fired.'
'He was,' I said. 'Later, his boss took him back because he was good at his job.'
'I can imagine,' Theresa said. 'He probably made the trains run on time.' She shook her head and sipped her coffee again. 'One day, David and I couldn't take it anymore, thinking about what was going on downstairs. David knocked on their door, and when it opened, we could see straight through into their bedroom—and then we really knew.'
'Yes,' David said.
'Her face was covered in blood. There was a smell of—of rot. That's what it was. He didn't know enough to turn her in bed, and she had bedsores. Her sheets were filthy. It was obvious that she was dying. He came out bellowing and ordered us upstairs.'
'And a little while after that, we saw a doctor come to their door,' said David. 'A terrible doctor. I knew she was dead.'
'I thought he must have finally understood that she was dying and decided to get real medical help. But David was right. A little while after the doctor left, two men came and took her out. She was covered in a sheet. There was never an obituary, there was no funeral, nothing.'
Theresa put her chin in her hand, like John, and turned her head to look out of the big bright window. She sighed, distancing herself from what she was remembering, and leaned back and pushed her hair off her forehead with one hand. 'We didn't know what could happen next. It was a terrible time. Mr. Bandolier had some kind of job, because he went out of the house dressed in his suits. We thought the police would come for him. Even a doctor as terrible as that man who came to his apartment must have known how Mrs. Bandolier had died. But nothing happened, and nothing happened. And then something did happen, Mr. Underhill. But it was nothing like what we expected.'
She looked straight into my eyes again. 'Your sister was killed outside the St. Alwyn Hotel.'
Though she had been leading me toward this connection all the way through her story, I still could not be certain that I understood her. I had become interested in Bob Bandolier, but chiefly as a source for other information and only secondarily as himself, and therefore my next question sounded doubtful. 'You mean, you thought that he was the person who murdered my sister?'
'Not at first,' she said. 'We did not think that at all. But then about a week later, maybe less—' She looked at her husband, and he shrugged.
'Five days,' I said. My voice did not seem to be working properly. They both looked at me, and I cleared my throat. 'Five days later.'
'Five days later, after midnight, the sound of the front door of the building opening and closing woke us both up. Maybe half an hour later, the same sound woke us up again. And when we read the papers the next day—when we read about that woman who was killed in the same place as the little girl, your sister, we wondered.'
'You wondered,' I said. 'And five nights later?'
'We heard the same thing—the front door opening and closing. After David went to work, I went out to buy a newspaper. And there it was. Another person, a musician, had been killed right in the hotel. I ran home and locked myself in our apartment and called David at work.'
'Yes,' David said. 'And what I said to Theresa was, you cannot arrest a man for murder because he leaves his house at night.' He seemed more depressed by what he had said forty years ago than by what had happened to his house within the past twenty-four hours.
'And five days later?'
'It was the same,' David said. 'Exactly the same.
'And you still didn't go to the police?'
'We might have, even though we were so frightened,' Theresa said. 'But the next time someone was attacked, Mr. Bandolier was home.'
'And what about the time after that?'
'We heard him go out, exactly as before,' said David. 'Theresa said to me, what if another person tried to kill the young doctor? I said, what if the same person tried to kill the doctor, Theresa? But on the weekends, we began looking for another place to live. Neither of us could sleep in that house anymore.'
'Someone else tried to kill Dr. Laing,' I said. My feelings were trying to catch up with my mind. I thought that there must be hundreds of questions I should ask these two people. 'What did you think after the detective was found dead?'
'What did I think? I did not think. I felt relief,' David said.
'Yes, tremendous relief. Because all at once, everyone knew that he was the one. But later—'
She glanced at her husband, who nodded unhappily.
'You had doubts?'
'Yes,' she said. 'I still thought that some other person might have tried to kill the doctor. And the only person that poor policeman really had any reason to hate so much was that terrible man, the butcher on Muffin Street. And what we thought, what David and I thought—'
'Yes?' I said.
'Was that Mr. Bandolier had murdered people because the hotel had fired him. He could have done a thing like that, he was capable of that. People didn't mean anything to him. And then, of course, there were the roses.'
'What roses?' John and I said this more or less in unison.
She looked at me in surprise. 'Didn't you say you went to the house?'
I nodded.
'Didn't you see the roses at the front of the house?'
'No.' I felt my heart begin to pound.
'Mr. Bandolier loved roses. Whenever he had time, he was out in front, caring for his roses. You would have thought they were his children.'
Time should have stopped. The sky should have turned black. There should have been a bolt of lightning and crashes of thunder. None of these things happened. I did not pass out, I didn't leap to my feet, I didn't knock the table over. The information I had been searching for, consciously or unconsciously, all of my life had just been given to me by a white-haired woman in a sweatshirt and blue jeans who had known it for forty years, and the only thing that happened was that she and I both picked up our cups and drank more steaming coffee.
I knew the name of the man who had taken my sister's life —he was a horrible human being named Bob Bandolier, Bad Bob, a Nazi of the private life—I might never be able to prove that Bob Bandolier had killed my sister or that he had been the man who called himself Blue Rose, but being able to prove it was weightless beside the satisfaction of knowing his name. I knew his name. I felt like a struck gong.
I looked out of the window. The children who had been rolling down the hill were scampering up over the dense green, holding their arms out toward their parents. Theresa Sunchana reached out to rest her cool hand on my hand.
'I guess the neighbors pulled out the roses after he left,' I said. 'The house has been empty for years.' This statement seemed absurdly empty and anticlimactic, but so would anything else I could have said. The children rushed into the arms of their parents and then spun away, ready for another long giddy flip-flop down Elm Hill. Theresa's hand squeezed mine and drew away.
If he was still alive, I had to find him. I had to see him put in jail, or my sister's hungry spirit would never be free, or I free of it.
