'Pasmore didn't have friends. He didn't want any.' This suggested another thought, and he turned his head from the study of his interlaced hands to revolve his suspicious face toward mine. 'Since he's so insistent on keeping out of sight, why is he willing to talk to me now?'
'He'd rather explain to you himself what happened to Buzz Laing and Detective Damrosch. You'll see why.'
Ransom shrugged and looked at his watch. 'I'm usually back at the hospital by now. Maybe Pasmore could join us for dinner?'
'We have to go to his house,' I said.
He thought about it for a while. 'So maybe we could have an audience with His Holiness between visiting April and going for dinner? Or is there something else about the sacred schedule of Thomas Pasmore that you haven't told me yet?'
'Well, his day generally starts pretty late,' I said. 'But if you point me toward the telephone, I'll give him some advance warning.'
Ransom waved his hand toward the front of the room, and I remembered passing a high telephone table in the entrance hall. I stood up and left the room. Through the arch, I saw Ransom get up and walk toward the paintings. He stood in front of the Vuillard with his hands in his pockets, frowning at the lonely figures beneath the tree. Tom Pasmore would still be asleep, I knew, but he kept his answering machine switched on to take messages during the day. Tom's dry, light voice told me to leave a message, and I said that Ransom and I would like to see him around seven—I'd call him from the hospital to see if that was all right.
Ransom spun around as I came back into the room. 'Well, did Sherlock agree to meet before midnight?'
'I left a message on his machine. When we're ready to leave the hospital, I'll try him again. It'll probably be all right.'
'I suppose I ought to be grateful he's willing to see me at all, right?' He looked angrily at me, then down at his watch. He jammed his hands into his trousers pockets and glared at me, waiting for the answer to a rhetorical question.
'He'll probably be grateful to see you, too,' I said.
He jerked a hand from his pocket and ran it over his thinning hair. 'Okay, okay,' he said. 'I'm sorry.' He motioned me back toward the entrance hall and the front door.
Once we were outside and on the sidewalk, I waited for John Ransom to move toward his car. He turned left toward Berlin Avenue and kept walking without pausing at any of the cars parked along the curb. I hurried to catch up with him.
'I hope you don't mind walking. It's humid, but this is about the only exercise I get. And the hospital isn't really very far.'
'I walk all over New York. It's fine with me.'
'If it's all right with you, we could even walk to Tom Pasmore's house after we leave the hospital. He still lives on Eastern Shore Road?'
I nodded. 'Across the street from where he grew up.'
Ransom gave me a curious look, and I explained that Tom had moved long ago into the old von Heilitz house.
'So he's still right there on Eastern Shore Road. Lucky guy. I wish I could have taken over my family's old house. But my parents moved to Arizona when my father sold his properties in town.'
We turned north to walk down Berlin Avenue, and traffic noises, the sound of horns and the hiss of tires on asphalt, took shape in the air. Summer school students from the college moved up the block in twos and threes, heading toward afternoon classes.
Ransom gave me a wry glance. 'He did all right on the deal, of course, but I wish he'd held onto those properties. The St. Alwyn alone went for about eight hundred thousand, and today it would be worth something like three million. We get a lot more conventions in town than we used to, and a decent hotel has a lot of potential.'
'Your father owned the St. Alwyn?'
'And the rest of that block.' He shook his head slowly and smiled when he saw my expression. 'I guess I assumed you knew that. It adds a little irony to the situation. The place was run much better when my father owned it, let me tell you. It was as good as any hotel anywhere. But I don't think the fact that my father owned the place twenty years ago has anything to do with April winding up in room 218, do you?'
'Probably not.' Not unless his father's ownership of the hotel had something to do with the first Blue Rose murders, I thought, and dismissed the idea.
'I still wish the old man had held out until the city turned around,' said Ransom. 'An academic salary doesn't go very far. Especially an Arkham College salary.'
'April must have more than compensated for that,' I said.
He shook his head. 'April's money is hers, not mine. I never wanted to have the feeling that I could just dip into the money she made on her own.'
Ransom smiled at some memory, and the sunlight softened the unhappiness in his face.
'I have an old Pontiac I bought secondhand for when I have to drive somewhere. April's car is a Mercedes 500SL. She worked hard—spent all night in her office sometimes. It was her money, all right.'
'Is there a lot of it?'
He gave me a grim look. 'If she dies, I'll be a well-off widower. But the money didn't have anything to do with who she really was.'
'It could look like a motive to people who don't understand your marriage.'
'Like the wonderful Millhaven police department?' He laughed—a short, ugly bark. 'That's just another reason for us to learn Blue Rose's name. As if we needed one.'
WE came around the bend past the third-floor patients' lounge, and a short, aggressive-looking policeman in his twenties lounged out of one of the doorways. His name tag read MANGILOTTI. He checked his watch, then gave Ransom what he thought was a hard look. I got a hard look, too.
'Did she say anything, officer?' Ransom asked.
'Who's this?' The little policeman moved in front of me, as if to keep me from entering the room. The top of his uniform hat came up to my chin.
'I'm just a friend,' I said.
Ransom had already stepped into the room, and the policeman turned his head to follow him. Then he tilted his head and gave me another glare. Both of us heard a woman inside the hospital room say that Mrs. Ransom had not spoken yet.
The cop backed away and turned around and went into the room to make sure he didn't miss anything. I followed him into the sunny white room. Sprays of flowers in vases covered every flat surface—vases filled with lilies and roses and peonies crowded the long windowsill. The odor of the lilies filled the room. John Ransom and an efficient-looking woman in a white uniform stood on the far side of the bed. The curtains around the bed had been pushed back and were bunched against the wall on both sides of the patient's head. April Ransom lay in a complex tangle of wires, tubes, and cords that stretched from the bed to a bank of machines and monitors. A clear bag on a pole dripped glucose into her veins. Thin white tubes had been fed into her nose, and electrodes were fastened to her neck and the sides of her head with white stars of tape. The sheet over her body covered a catheter and other tubes. Her head lay flat on the bed, and her eyes were closed. The left side of her face was a single enormous blue-purple bruise, and another long blue bruise covered her right jaw. Wedges of hair had been shaved back from her forehead, making it look even broader and whiter. Fine lines lay across it, and two nearly invisible lines bracketed her wide mouth. Her lips had no color. She looked as if several layers of skin had been peeled from the
