telephone the night before. Tom snatched my hanging bag and stepped back to grin at me. He looked revived, younger, and more vital than when he had visited me in the hospital. Everything about him seemed fresh, and the freshness was more than an aura of soap, shampoo, and clear blue eyes: it was the result of an awakened excitement, a readiness to join the fray.
Tom asked about my shoulder and said, 'This might be crazy—it's so little evidence, to bring you all the way back here.'
We were walking through the long gray tube, lined with windows on the runway side, that led from the gate into the center of the terminal.
'I don't care how little it is.' I felt the truth of it as soon as I had spoken—the size of the evidence didn't matter when the evidence was right. If we could apply pressure in the right place, a dead woman in a small town in Ohio would let us pry open the door to the past. Tom and I had worked out a way to do that on the telephone last night. 'I liked Paul Fontaine, and even though I had what looked like proof, I never—'
'I could never quite believe it, either,' Tom said. 'It all fit together so neatly, but it still felt wrong.'
'But this old queen in Tangent, Hubbel, pointed right at him. He couldn't see very well, but he wasn't blind.'
'So he made a mistake,' Tom said. 'Or we're making one. We'll find out, soon enough.'
The glass doors opened before us, and we walked outside. Across the curving access road, hard bright sunlight fell onto the miles of pale concrete of the short-term parking lot. I stepped down off the curb, and Tom said, 'No, I parked up this way.'
He gestured toward the far end of the passenger loading zone, where a shiny blue Jaguar Vanden Plas sat in the shade of the terminal just below a NO PARKING sign. 'I didn't know you had a car,' I said.
'It mainly lives in my garage.' He opened the trunk and put my bags inside, then lowered the lid again. The trunk made a sound like the closing of a bank vault. 'Something came over me, I guess. I saw it in a showroom window, and I had to have it. That was ten years ago. Guess how many miles it has on it.'
'Fifty thousand,' I said, thinking I was being conservative. In ten years, you could put fifty thousand miles on your car just by driving once a week to the grocery store.
'Eight,' he said. 'I don't get out much.'
The interior of the car looked like the cockpit of a private jet. When Tom turned the key, the car made the noise of an enormous, extremely self-satisfied cat being stroked in a pool of sunlight. 'Lots of times, when I can't stand being in the house anymore, when I'm stuck or when there's something I know I'm not seeing, I go out into the garage and take the car apart. I don't just clean the spark plugs, I clean the
He brought me out of this reverie with a question. 'If we're not wasting our time and Fontaine was innocent, who else could it be? Who is Fee Bandolier?'
This was what I had been considering during the flight. 'He has to be one of the men who used Billy Ritz as an informant. According to Glenroy, that means he's either Hogan, Monroe, or McCandless.'
'Do you have a favorite?'
I shook my head. 'I think we can rule out McCandless on grounds of age.'
Tom asked me how old I thought McCandless was, and I said about fifty-seven or fifty-eight, maybe sixty.
'Guess again. He's no older than fifty. He just looks that way.'
'Good Lord,' I said, realizing that the intimidating figure who had questioned me in the hospital was about my own age. He instantly became my favorite candidate.
'How about you?' I asked. 'Who do you think he could be?'
'Well, I managed to get into the city's personnel files, and I went through most of the police department, looking for their hiring dates.'
'And?'
'And Ross McCandless, Joseph Monroe, and Michael Hogan were all hired from other police departments within a few months of each other in 1979. So was Paul Fontaine. Andy Belin hired all four of them.'
'I don't suppose one of them came from Allerton?'
'None of them came from anywhere in Ohio—McCandless claims to be from Massachusetts, Monroe says he's from California, and Hogan's file sa
'Well, at least we each have the same list,' I said.
'Now all we have to do is figure out what to do with it,' Tom said, and for the rest of the drive to Eastern Shore Road we talked about that—what to do with the people on our list.
His garage looked a lot more like the service bays in the gas stations on Houston Street than an operating room. I think it might have been even messier than the service bays. For some reason, I found this reassuring. We got the bags out of the Jaguar's trunk, walked through the piles of rags and boxes of tools, and after Tom swung down the door of the old garage, went into the house through the kitchen door. I felt a surge of pleasure— it was good to be in Tom Pasmore's house again.
He led me upstairs and past his office to a narrow, nearly vertical staircase which had once led up to the servants' rooms on the third floor. An only slightly worn gray-and-blue carpet with a floral pattern covered the stairs and extended into the third-floor hallway. Over each of the three doors hung an elaborately hand-painted sign announcing the name of the room. Dude Ranch Bunkhouse, Henry VIII Chamber, Florida Suite.
'I bet you thought I was kidding,' Tom said. 'Lamont's parents really were a little strange, I think. Now Dude Ranch has saddles and Wanted posters and bleached skulls, Henry has a suit of armor and an enclosed bed that's probably too small for you, and Florida has violent wallpaper, rattan chairs, and a stuffed alligator. But it's big.'
'I'll take it,' I said. 'Delius once wrote something called 'Florida Suite.' '
He opened the door to a set of rooms with dormer windows and white wallpaper printed with the flat patterns of enormous fronds—it reminded me of Saigon's dining room. Yellow cushions brightened the rattan furniture, and the eight-foot alligator grinned toward a closet, as if waiting for dinner to walk out.
'Funny you should remember that,' Tom said. 'There's a picture of Delius in the bedroom. Do you need help hanging up your things? No? Then I'll meet you in my office, one floor down, whenever you're ready.'
I took my bags into the bedroom and heard him walk out of the suite. Over a glass-topped bamboo table with conch shells hung a photograph of Delius that made him look like the physics master in a prewar English public school. Frederick Delius and an alligator, that seemed about right. I washed my hands and face, wincing a little when I moved my right arm the wrong way, dried myself off, and went downstairs to give Tom the last part of the plan we had been working out in the car.
'Dick Mueller was the first person to mention April's project to you, wasn't he? So he hints that he came across something in the manuscript.'
'Something worth a lot of money.'
'And then he arranges our meeting. And our boy gets rattled.'
'We hope,' I said. We were seated on the chesterfield in Tom's office, with the three surreal computer dreams spread out on the table before us. Now that we knew the identity of the building in the defaced photograph, the computer's lunatic suggestions made a kind of sense—the pyramids and ocean liners were exaggerations of the marquee, and the glass guardhouses had grown out of the ticket booth. Bob Bandolier had intended to murder
