in, garbage out. There just wasn't enough information for it to work with. But I guess we know what it really is, anyhow, don't we?'
'Stenmitz's shop had a kind of triangular sign over the window. That must be what suggested all this—' I pointed at the rearing structures of the upper floors.
'I guess.' Tom swept the pages together in a gesture of disappointment and disgust. 'It would have been nice if…'
'If I recognized some other building?'
'I don't want it to be over yet,' Tom said. 'But boy, is it over. You want to keep these? Bring a souvenir home with you?'
I didn't say that I already had a souvenir—I wanted to keep the computer's hallucinations. I'd fasten them to the refrigerator, beneath the picture of Ted Bundy's mother.
Tom came back the next day with the news that Arden Vass had offered to resign as soon as a suitable replacement could be found. He had expected the mayor to refuse his offer, but Merlin Waterford had immediately announced that he was accepting the resignation of his old friend, albeit with the greatest sorrow, and the Committee for a Just Millhaven would be given a voice in the selection of the new chief. The officer who had killed the teenage boy was under suspension, pending a hearing. Tom stayed for an hour, and when he left, we promised to stay in touch.
John Ransom came in half an hour before the end of visiting hours and told me that he had decided what he wanted to do— buy a farmhouse in the Dordogne where he could work on his book and rent an apartment in Paris for weekends and vacations in the city. 'I need a city,' he said. 'I want a lot of quiet for my work, but I'm no country mouse. Once I'm set up, I want you to come over, spend some time with me. Will you do that?'
'Sure,' I said. 'It'd be nice. This visit turned out to be a little hectic.'
'Hectic? It was a nightmare. I was out of my mind most of the time.' John had stayed on his feet during his visit, and he jammed his hands in his pockets and executed a hesitant half-turn, clocking toward the sunny window and then back to me again. 'I'll see you tomorrow when you come around to get your things. Ah, I just have to say how much I appreciate everything you did here, Tim. You were great. You were fantastic. I'll never forget it.'
'It was quite a ride,' I said.
'I want to give you a present. I've been giving this a lot of thought, and while nothing could really repay you for everything you did, I want to give you that painting you liked so much. The Vuillard. Please take it. I want you to have it.'
I looked up at him, too stunned to speak.
'I can't look at the thing anymore, anyhow. There's too much of April in it. And I don't want to sell it. So do me a favor and take it, will you?'
'If you really want to give it to me,' I said.
'It's yours. I'll take care of the paperwork and have some good art handlers pack it up and ship it to you. Thanks.' He fidgeted for a while, having run out of things to say, and then he was gone.
Four hours before my flight was scheduled to take off, John called to say that he was in a meeting with his lawyers and couldn't get out. Would I mind letting myself in with the extra key and then pushing it through the mail slot after I locked up again? He'd get the painting off to me as soon as he had the time and be in touch soon to let me know how his plans were developing. 'And good luck with the book,' he said. 'I know how important it is to you.'
Five minutes later, Tom Pasmore called. 'I tried to wangle a ride out to the airport with you, but Hogan turned me down. I'll call you in a day or two to see how you're doing.'
'Tom,' I said, suddenly filled with an idea, 'why don't you move to New York? You'd love it, you'd make hundreds of interesting friends, and there'd never be any shortage of problems to work on.'
'What?' he said in a voice filled with mock outrage. 'And abandon my roots?'
Officer Mangelotti stood beside me like a guard dog as I signed myself out of the hospital, drove me to Ely Place, and trudged around the house while I struggled with the problem of one-armed packing. The curved blue splint covering my right arm from fingers to shoulder made it impossible for me to carry downstairs both the hanging bag and the carryon, and Mangelotti stood glumly in the living room and watched me go back up and down the stairs. When I came down the second time, he said, 'These are real paintings, like oil paintings, right?'
'Right,' I said.
'I wouldn't put this crap in a doghouse.' He watched me pick up both bags with my left hand and then followed me out through the door, waited while I locked up, and let me put the bags in the trunk by myself. 'You don't move too fast,' he said.
I looked at my watch as he turned onto Berlin Avenue—it was still an hour and a half before my flight. 'I want to make a stop before we get to the airport,' I said. 'It won't take long.'
'The sergeant didn't say anything about a stop.'
'You don't have to tell him about it.'
'You sure get royal treatment,' he said. 'Where's this stop you want me to make?'
'County Hospital.'
'At least it's on the way to the lousy airport,' Mangelotti said.
A nurse in a permanent state of rage took me at quick-march tempo down a corridor lined with ancient men and women in wheelchairs. Some of them were mumbling to themselves and plucking at their thin cotton robes. They were the lively ones. The air smelled of urine and disinfectant, and a gleaming skin of water had seeped halfway out into the corridor, occasionally swelling into puddles that reached the opposite wall. The nurse flew over the puddles without explaining, apologizing, or looking down. They had been there a long time.
Unasked, Mangelotti had refused to leave the car and told me that I had fifteen minutes, tops. It had taken about seven minutes to get someone to tell me where Alan was being kept and another five of jogging along behind the nurse through miles of corridors to get this far. She rounded another corner, squeezed past a gurney on which an unconscious old woman lay covered to the neck by a stained white sheet, and came to a halt by the entrance to a dim open ward that looked like a homeless shelter for the aged. Rows of beds no more than three feet apart stood in ranks along each wall. Dirty windows at the far end admitted a tired substance more like fog than light.
In a robot voice, the nurse said, 'Bed twenty-three.' She dismissed me with her eyes and about-faced to disappear back around the corner.
The old men in the beds were as identical as clones, so institutionalized as to be without any individuality— white hair on white pillows, wrinkled, sagging faces, dull eyes and open mouths. Then the details of an arched, beaky nose, a crusty bald head, a protruding tongue, began to emerge. The mumbles of the few old men not asleep or permanently stupefied sounded like mistakes. I saw the numeral 16 on the bed in front of me and moved down the row to 23.
Flyaway white hair surrounded a shrunken face and a working mouth. I would have walked right past him if I hadn't looked first at the number. Alan's thrusting eyebrows had flourished at the expense of the rest of his body. I supposed he had always possessed those branchy, tangled eyebrows, but everything else about him had kept me from noticing them. Even his extraordinary voice had shrunk, and whatever he was saying vanished into a barely audible whisper. 'Alan,' I said, 'this is Tim. Can you hear me?'
