from my visit earlier that day. 'The driver turned out to be Billy Ritz.'
'And what did you do with the license number?'
'The next day I went to the hospital without knowing that April had been killed, saw Paul Fontaine along with a lot of policemen on her floor, and gave him the license number.'
McCandless looked briefly at Sonny. 'You gave it to Fontaine?'
'Actually, I read it to him out of my notebook. I thought I had given him the sheet of paper, but at April's funeral, I opened my notebook and saw that I still had it. That afternoon, when John and Alan and I went to the morgue to identify Grant Hoffman's body, I saw the same car parked next to the Green Woman Taproom.' I told him about seeing Billy Ritz putting cardboard boxes in his trunk. McCandless was still waiting to see how all this led to Elvee Holdings. I repeated what I had told John about working with a computer at the university library. 'It turned out that a company named Elvee Holdings owned both the car and the Green Woman. I got the names and addresses of the corporate officers.' When I gave him the names, McCandless could not keep from registering surprise—he'd been busy with the consequences of the riot, and he was starting his own research with me.
'We're checking on Elvee right now, and I suppose we'll come up with the same information,' he said. 'Did you understand the significance of the name Andrew Belinski?'
'Not at the time.'
'And you say you got all this information by using a computer at the university library?'
'That's right,' I said.
He didn't believe me—he must have known that I wouldn't be able to get motor vehicle records through a university computer—but he wasn't going to press the point. 'Someday, you'll have to show me how you did that.'
'I guess I got lucky,' I said. 'Did John tell you that I have a long-standing interest in the old Blue Rose murders? That's why he called me.'
'Go on,' he said.
For something like ten minutes, I told him about meeting the Belknaps, hearing about Bob Bandolier, visiting the Sunchanas, and for the first time learning of the existence of Fielding Bandolier. The computer told me that Elvee owned Bob Bandolier's old house. A vanity press book by a retired colonel gave me an idea about a soldier, supposedly killed in action, who had an old grudge against John Ransom. I talked about Judy Leatherwood and Edward Hubbel.
'You saw no need to come to the police with all this information.'
'I did go to the police,' I said. 'I went to Fontaine. He was the detective in charge of April's case. Once I mentioned the Sunchanas, Fontaine ordered me to stay away from the old Blue Rose murders, and then he suggested that I get out of town. When I didn't, he took me himself to Bob Bandolier's grave, in order to prove that Bandolier couldn't have had anything to do with the new deaths. He was the one who told me about Andy Belin's nickname, by the way, but he denied knowing anything about Elvee.'
McCandless nodded. 'Ransom said he called you to arrange a meeting near the St. Alwyn.'
'He found out that I had gone to his old hometown in Ohio. When I came back, somebody tried to run me off the highway in the fog. Fontaine wanted me dead, but he didn't know what I had learned from Hubbel.'
McCandless hitched his chair an inch closer to the bed. 'Then this woman on South Seventh Street called you.' We were getting to the red meat now, and I had the feeling that something was going on that I did not quite understand. McCandless seemed to grow heavier and denser with concentration, as if he were now willing me to put things in a way that would match a prearranged pattern. The only pattern I could see grew out of what I had already told him, and I alluded again to the agreement Hannah Belknap had made with me.
He nodded. That was explanatory, but unimportant.
A cart rattled past the door, and someone down the hall began shouting.
'What did you have in mind when you decided to go to the Bandolier house?'
'I wanted to surprise Fontaine. John and I thought we could knock him out or overpower him and find the boxes of notes.' I looked down the bed at Sonny, but Sonny was still made of stone.
'What was the point of bringing that old man along with you?'
'Alan can be extremely insistent. He didn't give us much choice.'
'Apparently, a lot of people heard Professor Brookner threaten to kill the man who murdered his daughter. I guess he was insistent then, too.'
I remembered the funeral—John must have told them about Alan's outburst. 'I ordered him to stay in the car, but he wanted to be close to the action, and he followed us on the other side of the street.'
'You had already been inside the house.'
I nodded. 'Looking for his records—those boxes he moved out of the Green Woman. You found them, didn't you?'
'No,' McCandless said.
I felt my stomach sinking toward the mattress.
'How'd you happen to get in, that first time?'
'The back door wasn't locked,' I said.
'Really,' McCandless said. 'He left the place open. Like the Green Woman, right? You went up there, you found the lock broken.'
'Right,' I said. 'So I went in and had a look around.'
'That's probably a real common activity in New York, breaking and entering. Out here, we sort of frown on it.' The man down the hall started shouting again, but the dead eyes never left mine. 'Anyhow, let's say you and your buddy got in there. There's an interesting little present down in the basement, but no boxes full of good stuff. On the other hand, you picked up something, didn't you? A piece of paper.'
I'd been carrying that paper around in my jacket pocket ever since Tom gave it back to me. I had forgotten all about it, and someone at the hospital had turned it over to the police. 'Tampering with evidence carries a little weight, too.' John had told him all about getting into the house and the tavern, and they were keeping him at Armory Place until McCandless decided what to do with me. The decision had to do with the way I answered his questions—unless I helped him push reality into the shape he wanted, he'd be happy to mess up my life with as many criminal charges as he could think up.
'I might even be tempted to think that you and your pal brought along the old man because you knew he'd shoot Fontaine as soon as he had the chance.'
'We told him to stay in the car,' I said, wearily. 'We didn't want him anywhere near us. This is crazy. John didn't let him have the gun, he took it. We didn't even have a real plan.' The pain dialed itself up a couple of notches. It was a long time until my next injection. 'Look, if you saw the paper, you understood what it was, right? You saw that it was about a woman in Allentown. Fontaine worked in Allentown.'
'Yeah.' McCandless sighed. 'But we don't have anything that proves he killed anybody there. And this conversation isn't really about Paul Fontaine anymore. It's about you.'
He abruptly stood up and walked over to the window. He rubbed his face, looking out at the street. Sunlight blazed on the building across the street. McCandless tugged at his belt and turned slowly around. 'I have to think about this city. At this point, things could go a couple of different ways. There's going to be a lot of changes in the department. You got a guy in Ohio who says Fontaine was somebody else. What I got is a dead detective and the tail end of a riot. What I don't need is a lot of publicity about another serial killer in Millhaven,
'Too much,' I said.
'Everything in the world is politics.' He walked back to the chair, planted his hands on its back, and leaned forward. 'Let's talk about what happened when Fontaine got shot.'
He looked up as the door swung open. The blond doctor I had met last night took two steps into the room, froze, and turned right around and walked out again.
'When we're done,' McCandless said, 'all this is settled for good. After this, there are going to be no surprises. On the night of the riot, you went down to that house with the intention of overpowering and capturing a man you had reason to believe had killed two people. You intended to turn him over to the police.'
