and held down the horn until it swerved into the next lane, and then he roared past it.
I asked where we were going.
His glare was as solid as a blow. 'I'm taking you to Bob Bandolier. Do me a favor and keep your mouth shut until we get there.'
Fontaine blew the cars in front of us into smoke. When the stadium floated into view, he flicked the turn indicator and changed lanes at the same time. Brakes squealed behind us. Fontaine kept moving in an implacable diagonal line until he got across the expressway. He was still doing seventy when we squirted onto the off-ramp. Holding down the horn, he blasted through a red light. The tires whined and the car heeled over to the left as he dodged through the traffic and turned south. We roared past the stadium and slowed down only when we reached Pine Knoll.
Fontaine turned in through the gates and rolled up to the guardhouse. He cut off the engine. 'Okay, get out.'
'Where am I going to meet him, in the afterlife?' I asked, but he left the car and stood in the slanting sun until I got out and walked toward him, and then he began moving quickly up a gravel path toward the area where my parents and my sister were buried. By now, I was regretting my crack about the afterlife. The sprinklers were quiet, and the groundskeeper had gone home. We were the only people in the cemetery. Fontaine moved steadily and without looking back toward the stone wall at the far left.
He left the path about thirty feet before the row of graves I had visited earlier and led me up along a row of graves with small white headstones, some decorated with bright, wilting roses and lilies. He stopped at a bare white marker. I came up beside him and read what was carved into the stone. ROBERT C. BANDOLIER 21 SEPTEMBER 1919—22 MARCH 1972.
'You have anything to say?'
'A Virgo. That figures.'
I thought he was going to hit me. Fontaine unclenched his fists. His saggy face twitched. He didn't look anything like a comedian. He stared at the ground, then looked back up at me. 'Bob Bandolier has been dead for twenty years. He did not ignite the propane tanks at the house in Elm Hill.'
'No,' I said.
'Nobody is interested in this man.' Fontaine's voice was flat and emphatic. 'You can't prove he was the Blue Rose killer, and neither can anyone else. The case came to an end in 1950. That's that. Even if we wanted to open it up again, which would be absurd, the conclusion would be exactly the same.
'Can I ask you a couple of questions?'
'Is that clear! Do you understand me?'
'Yes. Now can I ask you a few things?'
'If you have to.' Fontaine visibly settled himself and stared off toward the row of hemlocks, far in the distance.
'Did you hear the substance of what the Sunchanas had to say about Bob Bandolier?'
'Unfortunately.'
'Didn't you think there was some chance they might be right?'
He grimaced as if he had a headache. 'Next question.'
'How did you know how to find this grave?'
He turned his head and squinted at me. His chest rose and fell. 'That's a hell of a question. It's none of your business. Are you through?'
'Do the Elm Hill police think that the explosion at the Sunchana house was accidental?'
'That's none of your business, either.'
I couldn't ask him any of the questions I really wanted answered. What seemed a safer, more neutral question suddenly occurred to me, and, thoughtlessly, I asked it. 'Do you know if Bandolier's middle initial stood for Casement?' As soon as I said it, I realized that I had announced a knowledge of Elvee Holdings.
He stared up at the sky. It was just beginning to get dark, and heavy gray clouds were sailing toward us from over the hemlocks, their edges turned pink and gold by the declining sun. Fontaine sighed. 'Casement was Bandolier's middle name. It was on his death certificate. He died of a longstanding brain tumor. Is that it, or do you have some more meaningless questions?'
I shook my head, and he shoved his hands in his pockets and stamped back toward the car.
Might as well go for broke, I thought, and called out, 'Does the name Belinski mean anything to you? Andrew Belinski?'
He stopped walking to turn around and glower at me. 'As a matter of fact, not that it's any business of yours, that was what we called the head of the homicide unit when I came to Millhaven. He was one of the finest men I ever met. He took on most of the people I work with now.'
'That's what you called him?'
Fontaine kicked at the gravel, already sorry he had answered the question. 'His name was Belin, but his mother was Polish, and people just called him Belinski. It started off as a joke, I guess, and it stuck. Are you coming with me, or do you want to walk back to the east side?'
I followed him toward the car, looking aimlessly at the headstones and thinking about what he had told me. Then a name jumped out at me from a chipped headstone, and I looked at it again to make sure I had seen it correctly, HEINZ FRIEDRICH STINMITZ , 1892-1950. That was all. The stone had not merely been chipped; chunks had been knocked off, and parts of the curved top were vaguely serrated, as if someone had attacked it with a hammer. I stared at the battered stone for a moment, feeling numb and tired, and then walked back to the car. Fontaine was revving the engine, sending belches of black smoke out of the exhaust pipe.
As soon as I got back into the car, I realized that Fee Bandolier had to be a Millhaven policeman—he had appropriated a name only a cop would know.
By the time Fontaine rolled up the looping ramp to the expressway, the heavy clouds I had seen coming in from the west had blotted out the sky. The temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees. Fontaine got to the end of the ramp and moved slowly forward until a truck hummed past, then nudged the sedan into the space behind it. He checked his rearview mirror before changing into the second lane. I rolled up my window against the sudden cold and looked over at him. He was pretending I wasn't there. I leaned back against the seat, and we drove peacefully back toward the middle of town.
A raindrop the size of an egg struck my side of the windshield; a few seconds later, another noisily landed in the center of the windshield. Fontaine sighed. The radio spooled out crackling nonsense. Two more fat raindrops plopped onto the windshield.
'Are you going to go back to New York soon, Underhill?'
The question surprised me. 'In a little while, probably.'
'We all make mistakes.'
After a little silence, Fontaine said, 'I don't know why you'd want to hang around here now.' The big raindrops were landing on the windshield at the rate of one per second, and we could hear them striking the roof of the car like hailstones.
'Have you ever had doubts about this police department?'
He looked at me sharply, suspiciously. 'What?'
The clouds opened up, and a cascade of water slammed against the windshield. Fontaine snapped on the wipers, and peered forward into the blur until they began to work. He pulled out the knob for the headlights, and the
