Ransom said, 'Hey, big fella!' His voice was too loud. 'You had us worried!'
'Tim and John, what a pleasure,' said Tom, He was fumbling with the buttons of the vest as his eyes traveled back and forth between us. 'Isn't this something?' He pushed the screen door open, and John Ransom had to step backward to move around it. Still moving around the screen door on the expanse of the front step, Ransom stuck out his right hand. Tom took it and said, 'Well, just imagine.'
'It's been a long time,' John Ransom said. 'Too long.'
'Come on in,' Tom said, and dropped backward into the relative darkness of the house. I could smell traces of the soap and shampoo from his shower as I stepped into the house. Low lamps glowed here and there, on tables and on the walls. The familiar clutter filled the enormous room. I moved away from the door to let John Ransom come in.
'You're very good to agree to—' Ransom stopped talking as he finally saw what the ground floor of Tom Pasmore's house really looked like. He stood with his mouth open for a moment, then recovered himself. 'To agree to see me. It means a lot to me, all the more since I gather from Tim that what you can tell me is, ah, rather on the personal side—'
He was still taking in the interior, which would have matched none of his expectations. Lamont von Heilitz, the previous owner of Tom's house, had turned most of the ground floor into a single enormous room filled with file cases, stacks of books and newspapers, tables strewn with the details of whatever murder was on his mind at the moment, and couches and chairs that seemed randomly placed. Tom Pasmore had changed the room very little. The curtains were still always drawn; old-fashioned upright lamps and green-shaded library lamps still burned here and there around the room, shedding warm illumination on the thousands of books ranged in dark wooden cases along the walls and on the dining table at the rear of the room. Tall stereo speakers stood against the walls, connected to shelves of complicated audio equipment. Compact discs leaned against one another like dominoes on half a dozen bookshelves, and hundreds of others had been stacked into tilting piles on the floor.
Tom said, 'I know this place looks awfully confusing at first glance, but there is, I promise you, a comfortable place to sit down at the other end of the room.' He gestured toward the confusion. 'Shall we?'
John Ransom was still taking in the profusion of filing cabinets and office furniture. Tom struck off through the maze.
'Say, I know I haven't seen you since school,' said John Ransom, 'but I've been reading about you in the papers, and that was an amazing job you did on Whitney Walsh's murder. Amazing. You put it all together from here, huh?'
'Right in this house,' Tom said. He motioned for us to sit on two couches placed at right angles to a glass coffee table stacked with books. An ice bucket, three glasses, a jug of water, and various bottles stood in the middle of the table. 'Everything was right there in the newspapers. Anyone could have seen it, and sooner or later someone else would have.'
'Yeah, but haven't you done the same thing lots of times?' John Ransom sat facing a paneled wall on which hung half a dozen paintings, and I took the couch on the left side of the table. Ransom was eyeing the bottles. Tom seated himself in a matching chair across the table from me.
'Now and then, I manage to point out something other people missed.' Tom looked extremely uncomfortable. 'John, I'm very sorry about what happened to your wife. What a terrible business. Have the police made any progress?'
'I wish I could say yes.'
'How is your wife doing? Do you see signs of improvement?'
'No,' Ransom said, staring at the ice bucket and the bottles.
'I'm so sorry.' Tom paused. 'You must be in the mood for a drink. Can I get anything for you?'
Ransom said he would take vodka on the rocks, and Tom leaned over the table and used silver tongs to drop ice cubes into a thick low glass before filling the glass nearly to the top with vodka. I was watching him act as if there was no more on his mind than making John Ransom comfortable, and I wondered if he would make a drink for himself. I knew, as Ransom did not, that Tom had been out of bed for no more than half an hour.
During the course of telephone conversations in the middle of the night that sometimes lasted for two and three hours, I had sometimes imagined that Tom Pasmore started drinking when he got out of bed and stopped only when he managed to get back into it. He was the loneliest person I had ever met.
Tom's mother had been a weepy drunk all during his childhood, and his father—Victor Pasmore, the man he had thought was his father—had been distant and short-tempered. Tom had known Lamont von Heilitz, his biological father, only a short time before von Heilitz was murdered as a result of the only investigation the two of them had conducted together. Tom had found his father's body upstairs in this house. That investigation had made Tom Pasmore famous at the age of seventeen and left him with two fortunes, but it froze him into the life he still had. He lived in his father's house, he wore his father's clothes, he continued his father's work. He had drifted through the local branch of the University of Illinois, where he wrote a couple of monographs—one about the death of the eighteenth-century poet-forger Thomas Chatterton, the other about the Lindbergh kidnapping—that caused a stir in academic circles. He began law school at Harvard in the year that an English graduate student there was arrested for murder after being found unconscious in a Cambridge motel bedroom with the corpse of his girlfriend. Tom talked to people, thought about things, and presented the police with evidence that led to the freeing of the student and the arrest of a famous English professor. He refused the offer from the parents of the freed student to pay his tuition through the rest of law school. When reporters began following him to his classes, he dropped out and fled back home. He could only be what he was—he was too good at it to be anything else.
I think that was when he started drinking.
Given this history, he still looked surprisingly like the young man he had been: he had all his hair, and, unlike John Ransom, he had not put on a great deal of weight. Despite the old-fashioned, dandyish elegance of his clothes, Tom Pasmore looked more like a college professor than Ransom did. The badges of his drinking, the bags under his eyes, the slight puffiness of his cheeks, and his pallor might have been the result of nothing more than a few too many late nights in a library carrel.
He paused with his hands on the vodka bottle and a new glass, regarding me with his exhausted blue eyes, and I knew that he had seen exactly what was going through my mind.
'Feel like a drink?' He knew all about my history.
John Ransom looked at me speculatively.
'Any soft drink,' I said.
'Ah,' Tom said. 'We'll have to go into the kitchen for that. Why don't you come with me, so you can see what I've got in the fridge?'
I followed him to the back of the room and the kitchen door. The kitchen too had been left as it had been in Lamont von Heilitz's time, with high wooden cupboards, double copper sinks, wainscoting and weak, inadequate lighting. The only modern addition was a gleaming white refrigerator nearly the size of a grand piano. A long length of open cupboards had been cut away to make room for it. Tom swung open the wide door of this object —it was like opening the door of a carriage.
The bottom shelf of the otherwise nearly empty refrigerator held at least a dozen cans each of Coke and Pepsi and a six-pack of club soda in bottles. I chose club soda. Tom dropped ice into a tall glass and poured in the club soda.
'Did you ask him about his wife's car?'
'He said he supposes that it'll turn up.'
'What does he think happened to it?'
'It might have been stolen from in front of the St. Alwyn.'
Tom pursed his lips together. 'Sounds plausible.'
'Did you know that his father owned the St. Alwyn?' I asked.
