'It has to be Stenmitz's shop, doesn't it?' Tom looked sharply up at me. 'Do you have some doubts about that?'
I said I wasn't sure.
'It's almost unreadable,' he said. 'Wouldn't it be interesting if it were a photograph of something else?'
'What about your computers? Do you have a way to lift off the ink and expose what's underneath?'
Tom thought about it for a couple of seconds, frowning down at the ruined photograph with his chin in his hand. 'The computer can extrapolate from me bits and pieces that are still visible— suggest a reconstruction. There's so much damage here it'll probably offer several versions of the original image.'
'How long would that take?'
'At least a couple of days. It'll have to go through a lot of variations, and some of them will be worthless. To tell you the truth, nearly all of them will be worthless.'
'Are you willing to do it?'
'Are you kidding?' He grinned at me. 'I'll start as soon as you leave. Something bothers you about this picture, doesn't it?'
'I can't put my finger on it,' I said.
'Maybe Bandolier originally intended to kill Stenmitz somewhere else,' Tom said, more to himself than to me. He was looking at an invisible point in space, like a cat.
Then he focused on me again. 'Why did Fee kill April Ransom?'
'To finish what his father started?'
'Did you read that book I gave you?'
We looked at each other for a moment. Finally I said, 'You think that Franklin Bachelor could be Fee Bandolier?'
'I'm sure of it,' Tom said. 'I bet that Fee called his father twice, in '70 and '71, and that's why Bob changed his phone number. When Bob died, Fee inherited the house and sold it to Elvee.'
'Can you get into the draft records from Tangent? We know Fee enlisted under another name right after he graduated from high school, in 1961.'
'None of that information was ever computerized. But if you'd be willing to make a little trip, there's a good chance we could find out.'
'You want me to go to Tangent?'
'I looked through almost every issue of the Tangent
'Wouldn't he give you the information over the phone?'
'Mr. Hubbel is a little cranky. Apparently, war protestors gave him a lot of trouble during the late sixties. Someone tried to blow up the draft office in 1969, and he's still mad. Even after I explained that I was writing a book about the careers of veterans from various areas, he refused to talk to me unless I saw him in person. But he said he kept his own records of every boy from Tangent who went into the army while he ran the board, and if someone will take the trouble to see him in person, he'll make the effort of checking his files.'
'So you do want me to go to Tangent,' I said.
'I booked a ticket on a flight for eleven o'clock tomorrow. If the fog lifts, you can be back for dinner.'
'What name did you use?'
'Yours,' he said. 'He won't talk to anyone but a veteran.'
'Okay. I'll go to Tangent. Now will you tell me what you found in the police records in Allentown, Pennsylvania?'
'Sure,' he said. 'Nothing.'
I stared at him. Tom was almost hugging himself in self-satisfaction.
'And that's the information you uncovered? Could you explain why that's so wonderful?'
'I didn't find anything in the police records because I don't have any access to them. You can't get there from here. I had to do it the hard way, through the newspapers.'
'So you looked in the newspaper and found Jane Wright.' He shook his head, but he was still bubbling over with suppressed delight.
'I don't get it,' I said.
'I didn't find Jane Wright anywhere, remember? So I went back to the Allentown, Pennsylvania, records for anything that even looked close to the name and date on that piece of paper you found in the Green Woman.'
Tom grinned at me again and stood up to walk around the side of the chesterfield. He picked up a manila folder lying next to the computer keyboard on his desk and tucked it under his elbow.
'Our man wants to keep a narrative account of every murder he's done as a kind of written memory. At the same time, someone as intelligent as Fee might work out a way to defuse these records, to make them harmless if anyone else found them. If he turned his own records into a kind of code, he'd have it both ways.'
'A code? You mean, change the names or the dates?'
'Exactly. I ploughed through microfilm of the Allentown paper from the mid-seventies. And in the papers from May 1978, I came across a very likely little murder.'
'Same month, one year off.'
'The victim's name was Judy Rollin. Close enough to Jane Wright to suggest it, but so different that it amounts to a good disguise.' He took the folder from under his elbow, opened it up, and took out the sheet of paper on the bottom. Then he walked back to me and handed me the file. 'Take a look.'
I opened the file, which held copies of three pages of newsprint. Tom had circled one story on each page. The pages had been reduced in size, and the type was just large enough to be read without a magnifying glass. On the first page, the circled story was about the discovery by three teenage boys of the corpse of a young woman who had been knifed to death and then dumped behind an abandoned steel mill. The second story gave the dead woman's name as Judy Rollin, twenty-six, a divorced hairdresser employed at the Hi-Tone Hair Salon last seen at Cookie's, a club five miles from the old steel mill. Mrs. Rollin had gone to the club with two friends who had gone home together, leaving her behind. The third article, headed DOOMED BY LIFE IN THE FAST LANE, was a salacious description of both Judy Rollin and Cookie's. The dead woman had indulged in drugs and alcohol, and the club was said to be 'a well-known place of assignation for drug dealers and their customers.'
The last article was ARRESTED GOOD-TIME GIRL MURDERED KILLS SELF IN CELL. A bartender at Cookie's named Raymond Bledsoe had hanged himself in his cell after confessing to Mrs. Rollin's murder. An informant had provided police with information that Bledsoe regularly sold cocaine to the victim, and Mrs. Rollin's handbag had been found in the trunk of his car. The detective in charge of the case said, 'Unfortunately, it isn't possible for us to provide full-time surveillance for everyone who expresses an unwillingness to spend the rest of their lives in prison.' The name of the detective was Paul Fontaine.
I handed the sheet of paper back to Tom, who slid it into his file.
'Paul Fontaine,' I said. I felt a strange sense of letdown, almost of disappointment.
'So it seems. I'm going to do some more checking, but…' Tom shrugged and spread out his hands.
'He was so confident that he'd never get caught that he didn't bother changing his name when he came to Millhaven.' Then I remembered the last time I'd seen Fontaine. 'My God, I asked him if he'd ever heard of Elvee Holdings.'
'He still doesn't know how close we are. Fontaine just wants you to get out of town. If we can get our friend in Tangent to identify him as Franklin Bachelor, we'll have a real weapon in our hands. And maybe you could fit in a visit to Judy Leatherwood, too.'
'I suppose you have a picture,' I said.
Tom nodded and went back to his desk to pick up a manila envelope. 'I clipped this out of the
