again, and that helps. He says, Well, kid, at least you kept your goddamn initials.' This was delivered in a forceful raspy growl that communicated both affection and exasperation and summoned up George Dubbin with eerie clarity.
'That was good,' I said. 'I bet he sounds just like that.'
'I was always a good mimic.' He smiled at me again. 'At school, I used to drive the teachers crazy.'
The revelation about his name had dissipated the tension between us.
'Talk to me about April Ransom,' I said.
Instead of answering, Byron reached for his cup, stood up, and walked to the table, where he began lining up the bottles filled with brushes. He got them all into a nice straight row at the far end of the table. In order to be able to see him, I stood up, too, but all I could see was his back.
'It's hard to know what to say.' Next he started lining up the tubes of paint. He looked over his shoulder and seemed surprised to see me up on my feet, looking at him. 'I don't think I could just sum her up in a couple of sentences.' He turned all the way around and leaned back against the table. The way he did it made the table seem as if it had been built specifically for this purpose, to be leaned against in precisely that easy, nonchalant way.
'Try. See what comes out.'
He looked up, elongating his pale neck. 'Well, at first I thought she was a sort of ideal patron. She was married, she lived in a good house, she had a lot of money, but she wasn't even a little bit snobbish—when she came here, the first time I met her, she acted like ordinary people. She didn't mind that I lived in a dump, by her standards. After she was here about an hour, I realized that we were getting along really well. It was like we turned into friends right away.'
'She was perceptive,' I said.
'Yeah, but it was more than that. There was a lot going on inside her. She was like a huge hotel, this place with a thousand different rooms.'
'She must have been fascinating,' I said. He walked to the covered windows and brushed the drop cloths with the side of his hand. Once again, I could not see his face.
'Hotel.'
'Excuse me?'
'I said hotel. I said she was like a hotel. That's kind of funny, isn't it?'
'Have you ever been to the St. Alwyn?'
He turned around, slowly. His shoulders were tight, and his hands were slightly raised. 'What's that supposed to mean? Are you asking if I took her there and beat her up and knifed her?'
'To tell you the truth, that thought never occurred to me.'
Dorian relaxed.
'In fact, I don't think she was assaulted in the hotel.'
He frowned at me.
'I think she was originally injured in her Mercedes. Whoever assaulted her probably left a lot of blood in the car.'
'So what happened to it?'
'The police haven't found it yet.'
Dorian wandered back to the daybed. He sat down and drank some of his coffee.
'Do you think her marriage was happy?'
His head jerked up. 'Do you think her husband did it?'
'I'm just asking if you thought she had a happy marriage.'
Dorian did not speak for a long time. He swallowed more coffee. He crossed and uncrossed his legs. He grazed his eye along the row of paintings. He put his chin in his hand. 'I guess her marriage was okay. She never complained about it.'
'You thought about it for a long time.'
He blinked at me. 'Well, I had the feeling that if April weren't so busy, she would have been lonely.' He cleared his throat. 'Because her husband didn't really share her interests, did he? She couldn't talk to him about a lot of stuff.'
'Things she could talk about with you.'
'Well, sure. But I couldn't talk with her about her business—whenever she started up about puts and calls and all that, the only words I ever understood were Michael and Milken. And her job was tremendously important to her.'
'Did she ever say anything to you about moving to San Francisco?'
He cocked his head, moving his jaw as if he were chewing on a sunflower seed. 'Did you hear something about that?' His eyes had become cautious. 'It was more like a remote possibility than anything else. She probably just mentioned it once, when we were out walking, or something.' He cleared his throat again. 'You heard something about that, too?'
'Her father mentioned it to me, but he wasn't too clear about it, either.'
His face cleared. 'Yeah, that makes sense. If April had ever moved anywhere, she would have brought him along. Not to live with her, I mean, but to make sure she could still take care of him. I guess he's getting kind of out of it.'
'You said you went for walks?'
'Sure, sometimes we'd just go walk around.'
'Did you go out for drinks, or anything like that?'
He pondered that. 'When we were still talking about the paintings, we went out for lunch a couple of times. Sometimes we went for drives.'
'Where would you go?'
He threw up his hands and looked rapidly from side to side.
I asked if he minded my asking these questions.
'No, it's just hard to answer. It's not like we went for drives every day or anything. Once we went to the bridge, and April told me about what used to go on at that bar on Water Street, right next to the bridge.'
'Did you ever try to go in there?'
He shook his head. 'It's closed up, you can't go in.'
'Did she ever mention someone named William Writzmann?'
He shook his head again. 'Who's he?'
'It probably isn't important.'
Dorian smiled at me. 'I'll tell you a place we used to go. I never even knew it existed until she showed it to me. Do you know Flory Park, way out on Eastern Shore Drive? There's a rock shelf surrounded by trees that hangs out over the lake. She loved it.'
'Alan took me there,' I said, seeing the two of them going down the trail to the little glen above the lake.
'Well, then, you know.'
'Yes,' I said. 'I know. It's very private.'
'It was private,' he said. He stared at me for a moment, chewing on the nonexistent seed, and jumped up again. He carried the cup into the kitchen. I heard him rinse the cup and open and close the refrigerator. He came out carrying a bottle of Poland Water. 'You want some of this?'
'I still have some coffee left, thanks.'
Dorian went to his table and poured bottled water into his cup. Then he moved one of the tubes of paint a
