The Throat

It was the same room in which James Treadwell had been murdered, also by someone who had signed the wall with the words blue rose.

'And your detective doesn't think that's significant?'

Ransom threw up his hands. 'As far as the police are concerned, nothing that happened back in 1950 has any connection to what happened to my wife. William Damrosch got them all off the hook. He killed himself, the murders ended, that's it.'

'You said the first victim was found on Livermore Avenue.' Ransom nodded, fiercely. 'Where on Livermore Avenue?'

'You tell me. You know where it was.'

'In that little tunnel behind the St. Alwyn?'

Ransom smiled at me. 'Well, that's where I'd bet they found the body. The newspaper wasn't specific—they just said 'in the vicinity of the St. Alwyn Hotel.' It never occurred to me that it might be the same place where the first victim was found in the fifties until April, until they found, um, until they found her. You know. In that room.' His smile had become ghastly—I think he had lost control over his face. 'And I couldn't be sure about anything, because all I had to go on was your book, The Divided Man. I didn't know if you'd changed any of the places…'

'No,' I said. 'I didn't.'

'So then I read your book and thought I might call just to see—'

'If I still thought that Damrosch was the man you call Blue Rose.'

He nodded. That dead smile was fading, but he still looked as if a fishhook had caught in his mouth. 'And you said no.'

'And so—' I paused, stunned by what I had just learned. 'And so, what it looks like is that Blue Rose is not only killing people in Millhaven again, but killing them in the same places he used forty years ago.'

'That's the way it looks to me,' Ransom said. 'The question is, can we get anyone else to believe it?'

7

'They'll believe it in a hurry after one more murder,' I said. 'The third one was the exception I mentioned before— the doctor,' said Ransom.

'I thought you were talking about your wife.'

He frowned at me. 'Well, in the book, the third one was the doctor. Big house on the east side.'

'There won't be one on the east side,' I said.

'Look at what's happening,' Ransom said. 'It'll be at the same address. Where the doctor died.'

'The doctor didn't die. That was one of the things I changed when I wrote the book. Whoever tried to kill Buzz Laing, Dr. Laing, cut his throat and wrote blue rose on his bedroom wall, but ran away without noticing that he wasn't dead yet. Laing came to in time and managed to stop the bleeding and get himself to a hospital.'

'What do you mean, 'whoever tried to kill him'? It was Blue Rose.'

I shook my head.

'Are you sure about this?'

'As sure as I can be without evidence,' I said. 'In fact, I think the same person who cut Buzz Laing's throat also killed Damrosch and set it up to look like suicide.'

Ransom opened his mouth and then closed it again. 'Killed Damrosch?'

I smiled at him—Ransom looked a little punchy. 'Some information about the Blue Rose case turned up a couple of years ago when I was working on a book about Tom Pasmore and Lamont von Heilitz.' He started to say something, and I held up my hand. 'You probably remember hearing about von Heilitz, and I guess you went to school with Tom.'

'I was a year behind him at Brooks-Lowood. What in the world could he have to do with the Blue Rose murders?'

'He didn't have anything to do with them, but he knows who tried to kill Buzz Laing. And who murdered William Damrosch.'

'Who is this?' Ransom seemed furious with excitement. 'Is he still alive?'

'No, he's not. And I think it would be better for Tom to tell you the story. It's really his story, for one thing.'

'Will he be willing to tell it to me?'

'I called him before I left New York. He'll tell you what he thinks happened to Buzz Laing and Detective Damrosch.'

'Okay.' Ransom nodded. He considered this. 'When do I get to talk to him?'

'He'd probably be willing to see us tonight, if you like.'

'Could I hire him?'

Almost every resident of Millhaven over the age of thirty would probably have known that Tom Pasmore had worked for a time as a private investigator. Twenty years ago, even the Bangkok papers had run the story of how an independent investigator, a self-styled 'amateur of crime' living in the obscure city of Millhaven, Illinois, had brilliantly reinterpreted all the evidence and records in the case of Whitney Walsh, the president of TransWorld Insurance, who had been shot to death near the ninth hole of his country club in Harrison, New York. A groundskeeper with a longstanding grudge against Walsh had been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Working on his own and without ever leaving Millhaven, Tom Pasmore had succeeded in identifying and locating the essential piece of evidence necessary to arrest and convict the real murderer, a former employee. The innocent man had been freed, and after he had told his story to a number of newspapers and national magazines, it was learned that Tom Pasmore had done essentially the same thing in perhaps a dozen cases: he had used public information and trial records to get innocent men out of jail and guilty ones in. The Walsh case had merely been the most prominent. There followed, in the same newspapers and magazines, a number of lurid stories about 'The Real-Life Sherlock Holmes,' each containing the titillating information that the wizard habitually refused payment for his investigations, that he had a fortune of something between ten and twenty million dollars, that he lived alone in a house he seldom left, that he dressed with an odd, old-fashioned formality. These revelations came to a climax with the information that Tom Pasmore was the natural son of Lamont von Heilitz, the man who had been the inspiration for the radio character Lamont Cranston—'The Shadow.' By the time all of this had emerged, Tom ceased to give interviews. As far as anyone knew, he also ceased to work—scorched into retirement by unwelcome publicity. The press never unearthed another incident in which Tom Pasmore of Millhaven, Illinois, intervened from afar to free an innocent man and jail a guilty one for murder. Yet from my contact with him, I thought it was almost certain that he continued his work anonymously, and that he had created the illusion of retirement to maintain in absolute darkness the secret the press had not discovered, that he had long been the lover of a woman married into one of Millhaven's wealthiest families.

Tom would never consent to being hired by John Ransom, and I told him so.

'Why not, if he's willing to come over?'

'In the first place, he was never for hire. And ever since the Walsh case, he's wanted people to think that he doesn't even work. And secondly, Tom is not willing to 'come over.' If you want to see him, we'll have to go to his house.'

'But I went to school with him!'

'Were you friends?'