'Do you want me with you?'
'You're an executive,' I said. 'Flunkies like me do the dirty work.'
I walked through the heat down the pretty streets toward John Ransom's house. The Sevens, Omdurman Place, Balaclava Place, Victoria Terrace; brick houses matted with ivy, stone houses with ornate entrances and leaded windows, mansard roofs and pointed gables. Sprinklers whirled, and small boys zipped past on ten-speed bicycles. It looked like a world without secrets or violence, a world in which blood had never been shed. A for sale sign had been staked into the neat lawn in front of Alan Brookner's house.
The white Pontiac stood at the curb across from John's house, in the same place I had found it on my first morning back in town. It was squeezed into a parking place just long enough to accommodate it, and I remembered, as I had last night, a noisy little patriot in shorts charging out of his flag-draped fortress to yell about abuse. I walked across sunny Ely Place and went up to John's front door and rang his bell.
He appeared at the narrow window to the left of the door and looked out at me with frowning curiosity—the way you'd look at an encyclopedia salesman who had come back after you'd already bought the books. By the time he opened the door, his expression had altered into something more welcoming.
'Tim! What are you doing back here?'
'Something came up,' I said.
'More research? The book going well?'
'Very well. Can I come in for a minute?'
'Well, sure.' He stepped back and let me in. 'When did you get in? Just now?'
'Yesterday afternoon.'
'Well, you shouldn't be staying in a hotel. Check out and come back here, stay as long as you like. I just got some information about houses for sale in Perigord, we could go over it together.'
'I'm not in a hotel,' I said. 'I'm staying with Tom Pasmore.'
'That stuck-up phony.'
John had followed me into the living room. When I sat down on the couch facing the wall of paintings, he said, 'Why don't you make yourself at home?'
'Thanks again for sending me the Vuillard,' I said. He had not rearranged the paintings to compensate for its absence, and the place where it had been looked naked.
He was standing beside the couch, looking down at me, uncertain of my mood or intentions. 'I knew you appreciated it. And like I said, I couldn't have it in my house anymore—it was too much for me.'
'I'm sure it was,' I said.
He gave me the encyclopedia salesman look again and then moved his face into a smile and sat down on the arm of a chair. 'Did you come here just to thank me for the painting?'
'I wanted to tell you some things,' I said.
'Why do I think that sounds ominous?' He hitched his knee up beside him on the fat arm of the chair and kept his smile. John was wearing a dark green polo shirt, faded jeans, and penny loafers without socks. He looked like a stockbroker on a weekend break.
'Before we get into them, I want to hear how Alan's doing.'
'Before we get into these mysterious 'things'? Don't you think I'll want to talk to you afterward?'
I reminded myself that John Ransom was pretty smart, after all. 'Not at all,' I said. 'You might want to talk to me night and day.'
'Night and day.' He tucked his foot in closer to his thigh.
'Let's try to keep that tone.' He looked up, theatrically. 'Well, Alan. Dear old Alan. I don't suppose you ever saw him when he was out at County.'
'I stopped in for five minutes, on the way to the airport.' He raised his eyebrows. 'Did you? Well, in that case, you know how bad he was. Since then—really, since I moved him into Golden Manor—he's come a long way. They've been giving him good care, which they damn well better, considering how much the place costs.'
'Does he mind being there?'
John shook his head. 'I think he likes it. He knows he'll be taken care of if anything happens to him. And the women are all crazy about him.'
'Do you visit him often?'
'Maybe once a week. That's about enough for both of us.'
'I suppose that's right,' I said.
He narrowed his eyes and bit on his lower lip. He didn't get it. 'So what did you want to tell me?'
'In a day or two, this whole town is going to go crazy all over again. There'll be another big shakeup in the police department.'
He snapped his fingers and then pointed at me, grinning with delight. 'You bastard, you found those papers. That's it, isn't it?'
'I found the papers,' I said.
'You're right! This town is going to lose its mind. How many people did Fontaine kill, anyway? Do you know?'
'It wasn't Fontaine. It's the man who killed Fontaine.'
His mouth opened, and his mouth twitched in and out of a grin. He was trying to decide if I were serious.
'You can't be trying to tell me that you think Alan—'
He hadn't even been interested enough to ask about the ballistics report. 'Alan didn't shoot Paul Fontaine,' I said. 'Alan shot me. Someone was hiding between the houses across the street. I think he must have had some kind of assault rifle. Alan, you, me—we had nothing to do with it at all. He was already there by the time we got to the house. He was with Fontaine in the ghetto. Maybe he even saw him call me here. He probably followed him to the house.'
'So the guy in Ohio identified the wrong man?'
'No, he identified the right one. I just didn't understand what he was doing.'
John pressed a palm to his cheek and regarded me without speaking for a couple of seconds. 'I don't suppose I have to know the whole story,' he finally said.
'No, it's not important now. And I never saw you today, and you never saw me. Nothing I tell you, nothing you tell me, ever leaves this house. I want you to understand that.'
He nodded, a little puzzled about the notion of his telling me anything, but eager enough to grasp what he thought was the main point. 'Okay. So who was it?'
'Michael Hogan,' I said. 'The person you knew as Franklin Bachelor changed his name to Michael Hogan. Right now, he's lying dead on the floor of the Beldame Oriental with a gun in his hand and the words BLUE ROSE written beside his body. In black marker.'
John took in my words avidly, nodding slowly and appreciatively.
'Isobel Archer is going to wangle her way inside the theater and find his body. A couple of days from now, she and a few other people, including the FBI, will get photocopies of the notes he took on his killings. About half of them are handwritten, and there won't be any doubt that Hogan wrote them.'
'Did you kill him?'
'Look, John,' I said. 'If I killed a detective in Millhaven, I should never tell anyone about it. Right? But I want you to understand that everything we say here is only between us. It'll never leave this room. So the answer is yes. I shot him.'
