I opened the envelope and took out the photograph of Paul Fontaine standing in front of Walter Dragonette's house in the midst of a lot of other officers. Then I looked back up at Tom and said that Judy Leatherwood wasn't going to believe that I was showing her the photograph to straighten out an insurance matter.
'That part's up to you.' Tom said. 'You have a well developed imagination, don't you?'
The last thing he said to me before he closed the door was 'Be careful.' I didn't think he was talking about driving in the fog
PART TWELVE
The flight to Tangent, Ohio, took off at twelve fifty-five, nearly two hours late. For most of the morning, I thought the plane would never leave, and I kept calling the airport to see if the flight had been cancelled. A young man at the ticket counter assured me that although some arriving aircraft had been rerouted, there were no problems with takeoffs. So while John took a cab to the suburbs to pick up his wife's car, I drove out to the airport at a rousing twenty-five miles an hour, passed a couple of fender-benders without having one, and left the Pontiac in the long-term parking garage.
Our flight boarded at a quarter to eleven, and at a quarter after, the captain announced that the tower was going to take advantage of a reduction in the fog to land aircraft that had been stacked up above us for several hours. He apologized for the delay, but said that it would not last much longer than thirty minutes.
After an hour, the stewardesses passed out free drinks and extra packets of honey-roasted nuts. I spent the time reading the last two day's issues of the
The death of William Writzmann, alias Billy Ritz, took up only three inches of type on page five of the second section of yesterday's paper. Five grams of cocaine, divided into a dozen smaller quantities and double-wrapped in plastic pill envelopes, had been found in his suit pockets. Detective Paul Fontaine, interviewed at the scene, speculated that Writzmann had been murdered during a drug transaction, although other possibilities were under investigation. When questioned about the words written above the body, Fontaine replied, 'At present, we think this was an attempt to mislead our investigation.'
The next day, two patrons of the Home Plate Lounge remembered seeing Billy Ritz with Frankie Waldo. Geoffrey Bough examined the life of Frankie Waldo and came to certain conclusions he was careful, over the course of three long columns, not to state. Over the past fifteen years, the Idaho Meat Company had lost ground to national distributors organized into vertical conglomerates; yet Waldo's salary had tripled by 1990. In the mid- eighties, he had purchased a twelve-room house on four acres in Riverwood; a year later, he divorced his wife, married a woman fifteen years younger than himself, and bought a duplex apartment in the Waterfront Towers.
The source of this affluence was his acquisition of Reed & Armor, a rival meat company that had gone into disarray after its president, Jacob Reed, disappeared in February of 1983—Reed had gone out for lunch one day and never been seen again. Waldo immediately stepped in, bought the disintegrating company for a fraction of its real value, and merged the resources of the two firms. It was the operations of this new company that had roused the suspicions of various regulatory agencies, as well as the Internal Revenue Service.
Various persons who chose to remain anonymous reported having seen William Writzmann, known as Billy Ritz, in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs with Mr. Waldo, beginning in late 1982. I would have bet a year's royalties that these persons were all Paul Fontaine, rewriting history to suggest that Billy Ritz had killed Jacob Reed so that Ritz and Waldo could launder drug money through a profitable meat company.
I thought that Waldo was just a guy who spent too much money on stupid things. Eventually, he made the error of turning to Billy Ritz to get himself out of the hole. After that, he was nothing more than a victim with a glitzy apartment and a lakefront view. Paul Fontaine had Ritz murder Waldo in a way that looked like a gang killing. When Billy's body turned up, it was just the bigger dealers taking out the little ones. I wondered if anyone but me would ever wonder why a big-time dealer like Billy Ritz was walking around with separate grams and half grams in his pockets.
And then I reminded myself that I still had no real evidence that Paul Fontaine was Fee Bandolier. That was part of the reason I was sitting on a stalled airplane, waiting to take off for Ohio. I didn't even want Fee to be Paul Fontaine—I liked Fontaine.
The plane took off into a clinging layer of fog that soon thickened into dark wool. Then we shot out of the soft, clinging darkness into radiant light. The plane made a wide circle in the sudden light, and I looked down at Millhaven through the little window. A dirty, wrinkled blanket lay over the city. After ten minutes, the blanket had begun to admit shafts of light. Five minutes later, the land lay clear and green beneath us.
The speakers overhead hissed and crackled. The pilot's unflappable voice cut through the static. 'You people might be interested in knowing that we departed Millhaven just before the tower decided to shut down operations until further notice. That inversion bowl that caused all the trouble is still stickin' around, so I congratulate you on not having chosen a later flight. Thank you for your patience.'
An hour later, we landed at a terminal that looked like a ranch house with a conning tower. I walked through a long waiting room with rows of plastic chairs to the pay telephones and dialed the number Tom Pasmore had given me. A deep voice jerky with anxiety answered after four or five rings.
'You're the writer fellow I was talking to? Suppose you tell me what outfit you were in.' I told him.
'You bring your discharge papers?'
'No, sir,' I said. 'Was that part of the agreement?'
'How do I know you're not some peacenik?'
'I have a few genuine scars,' I said.
'What camp were you stationed at and who was the CO there?'
It was like talking to Glenroy Breakstone. 'Camp Crandall. The CO was Colonel Harrison Pflug.' After a second, I said, 'Known as the Tin Man.'
'Come out and let me get a look at you.' He gave me a complicated set of directions involving a shopping mall, a little red house, a big rock, a dirt road, and an electric fence.
At the rental counter, I signed up for every available kind of insurance and took the keys to a Chrysler Imperial. The young woman waved her hand toward the glass doors at what looked like a mile of parking lot. 'Row D, space 20. You can't miss it. It's red.'
I carried my briefcase out into the sun and walked across the lot until I came up to a cherry-red car about the size of a houseboat. It should have had a raccoon tail on the antenna and a pair of fuzzy dice in the front window. I opened the door and let the ordinary heat trickle into the oven of the interior. When I got in, the car smelled like a Big Mac box.
About forty minutes later, I finally backtracked to a boulder slightly smaller than the one I had chosen, found my way to a dirt road that vanished into an empty field, and bounced the Chrysler's tires along the ruts until the road split into two forks. One aimed toward a far-off farmhouse, and the other veered left into a grove of oak trees. I looked into the trees and saw flashes of yellow and the glint of metal. I turned left.
Huge yellow ribbons had been tied head-high around each of the trees, and on the high cross-hatched metal fence that ran through them a black-and-white sign said: DANGER ELECTRIFIED FENCE NO TRESPASSERS. I got out of the car and went up to the fence. Fifty feet away, the dirt road ended at a white garage. Beside it stood a square, three-story white house with a raised porch and fluted columns. I pushed a button in the squawk box next
