dashboard controls lit up. 'I probably didn't phrase that very well,' I said.
'I have plenty of doubts about you, which is something you ought to know about.' He scowled into the streaming windshield until the blade swept it clean again. 'You don't understand cops very well.'
'I know you're a good detective,' I said. 'You have a great reputation.'
'Leave me out of this, whatever it is.'
'Have you ever heard of—'
'Stop,' he said. 'Just stop.'
About thirty seconds later, the intensity of the rain slackened off to a steady drumming against the windshield and the top of the car. It slanted down from the clouds in visible gray diagonals. Sprays of water flew away from the wheels of the cars around us. Fontaine loosened his hands on the wheel. We were going no more than thirty-five miles an hour. 'Okay,' he said. 'For the sake of my great reputation, tell me what you were going to ask me.'
'I wondered if you ever heard of the Elvee Holdings Corporation.'
For the first time, I saw genuine curiosity in his glance. 'You know, I'm wondering about something myself. Is everyone in New York like you, or are you some kind of special case?'
'We're all full of meaningless little queries,' I said.
The police radio, which had been sputtering and hissing at intervals, uttered a long, incomprehensible message. Fontaine snatched up the receiver and said, 'I'm on the expressway at about Twentieth Street, be there in ten minutes.'
He replaced the receiver. 'I can't take you back to Ransom's. Something came up.' He checked the mirror, looked over his shoulder, and rocketed into the left lane.
Fontaine unrolled his window, letting in a spray of rain, pulled a red light from under his seat, and clapped it on the top of the car. He flicked a switch, and the siren began whooping. From then on, neither of us spoke. Fontaine had to concentrate on controlling the sedan as he muscled it around every car that dared to get in front of him. At the next exit, he swung off the expressway and went zooming up Fifteenth Street Avenue the same way he had terrorized the expressway on our way to Pine Knoll. At intersections, Fontaine twirled the car through the traffic that stopped to let him go by.
Fifteenth Street Avenue brought us into the valley, and factory walls rose up around us. Fontaine turned south on Geothals and rocketed along until we swerved onto Livermore. The streetlights were on in my old neighborhood. The pouring sky looked black.
A long way ahead of us, blinking red-and-blue lights filled the inside lane on the other side of the street. Yellow sawhorses and yellow tape gleamed in the lights. Men in caps and blue rain capes moved through the confusion. As we got closer to the scene, I saw where we were going. I should have known. It had happened again, just as Tom had predicted.
Fontaine didn't even bother to look as we went past the Idle Hour. He went down the end of the block, his siren still whooping, made a tight turn onto the northbound lanes of Livermore, and pulled up behind an ambulance. He was out of the car before it stopped ticking. Curls of steam rose up off the sedan's hood.
I got out of the car, hunched myself against the rain, and followed him toward the Idle Hour.
Four or five uniformed officers were standing just inside the barricades, and two others sat smoking in the patrol car that blocked off the avenue'sinside lane. The rain had kept away the usual crowd. Fontaine darted through a gap in the barricades and began questioning a policeman trying to stand in the shelter of the tavern's overhang. Unlike the others, he was not wearing a rain cape, and his uniform jacket was sodden. The policeman took a notebook from his pocket and bent over the pages to keep them dry as he read to Fontaine. Directly beside him at the level of his shoulders, a red marker spelling the words blue rose burned out from the dirty white planks. I stepped forward and leaned over one of the yellow barricades.
A sheet of loose black plastic lay over a body on the sidewalk. Rainwater puddled and splashed in the hollows in the plastic, and runnels of rainwater sluiced down from the body onto the wet pavement. From the bottom end of the black sheet protruded two stout legs in soaked dark trousers. Feet in basketweave loafers splayed out at ten to two. The cops standing behind the barricade paid no attention to me. Steady rain beat down on my head and shoulders, and my shirt glued itself to my skin.
Fontaine nodded to the rain-drenched young policeman who had found the body and pointed at the words on the side of the tavern. He said something I couldn't hear, and the young policeman said, 'Yes, sir.'
Fontaine crouched down beside the body and pulled back the plastic sheet. The man who had followed John Ransom down Berlin Avenue in a blue Lexus stared unseeing up at the overhang of the Idle Hour. Rain spattered down onto his chest and ran into the slashes in a ragged, blood-soaked shirt. Ridges of white skin surrounded long red wounds. The gray ponytail lay like a pointed brush at the side of his neck. I wiped rain off my face. Dark blood had stiffened on his open suit jacket.
Fontaine took a pair of white rubber gloves from his pocket, pulled them on, and leaned over the body to slide his hand under the bloody lapel. The fabric lifted away from the shirt. Fontaine drew out the slim black wallet I had seen before. He flipped it open. The little badge was still pinned to a flap on the right side. Fontaine lifted the flap. 'The deceased is a gentleman named William Writzmann. Some of us know him better under another name.' He stood up. 'Is Hogan here yet?' The young officer held out a plastic evidence bag, and Fontaine dropped the wallet into it.
One of the men near me said that Hogan was on his way.
Fontaine noticed me behind the barricade and came frowning toward me. 'Mr. Underhill, it's time for you to leave us.'
'Is that Billy Ritz?' I asked. As much rain was falling on the detective as on me, but he still did not look really wet.
Fontaine blinked and turned away.
'He was the man who followed John. The one I told you about at the hospital.' The policemen standing near me edged away and put their hands under their capes.
Fontaine turned around and gave me a gloomy look. 'Go home before you get pneumonia.' He went back to the body, but the young policeman was already pulling the plastic sheet over Writzmann's wet, empty face.
The two closest policemen looked at me with faces nearly as empty as Writzmann's. I nodded to them and walked along the barricades past the front of the tavern. Two blocks away, another dark blue sedan wearing a flashing red bubble like a party hat was moving down South Sixth Street toward the tavern. Rain streaked through the beams of its headlights. I went across Sixth and looked up at the side of the St. Alwyn. A brass circle at the tip of a telescope angled toward the Idle Hour from the corner window of the top floor. I waited for a break in the line of cars moving north in the single open lane and jogged toward the St. Alwyn's entrance.
The night clerk watched me leave a trail of damp footprints on the rug. My shoes squished, and water dripped down inside my collar.
'See all that excitement outside?' He was a dry old man with deep furrows around his mouth, and his black suit had fit him when he was forty or fifty pounds heavier. 'What they got there, a stiff?'
'He looked dead to me,' I said.
He hitched up his shoulder and twitched away, disappointed with my attitude.
When Glenroy Breakstone picked up, I said, 'This is Tim Underhill. I'm down in the lobby.'
'Come up, if that's what you're here for.' No jazz trivia this time.
Glenroy was playing Art Tatum's record with Ben Webster so softly it was just a cushion of sound. He took one look at me and went into his bathroom to get a towel. The only light burning was the lamp next to his records and sound equipment. The windows on Widow Street showed steady rain falling through the diffuse glow thrown up by the streetlights.
Glenroy came back with a worn white towel. 'Dry yourself off, and I'll find you a dry shirt.'
I unbuttoned the shirt and peeled it off my body. While I rubbed myself dry, Glenroy returned to hand me a
