door opening.
'I hope he can put it all behind him,' Ralph said.
John's voice, full of loud false cheer, called out, 'Is everybody okay? Everything all set?'
Ralph wiped his hand across his mouth and shouted back, 'Have a nice walk?'
'Hot out there,' John said. He walked into the kitchen, and Marjorie came trailing behind him, smiling and showing all her teeth. John was wearing loose, faded jeans and a dark green linen sports coat buttoned over his belly. His face shone with perspiration. He glanced at me, twisting his mouth to demonstrate his exasperation, and said, 'Those two the only bags?'
'That and your mother's carryon,' Ralph said. 'We're all set, think we ought to get moving?'
'Plenty of time,' John said. 'If we leave in twenty minutes, you'll still have about an hour before they call your flight.'
He sat down between Ralph and myself at the table. Marjorie stood behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. 'It's good for you to walk so much,' she said. 'But, honey, you could sure use a little loosening up. Your shoulders are so tight!' She stood behind him and kneaded his shoulders. 'Why don't you take off that jacket? You're all wetl' John grunted and twitched her off.
At the airport, Ralph insisted that we not walk them to the gate. 'Too much trouble to park—we'll say good- bye here.' Marjorie tilted her head for a kiss beside the suitcases. 'Just take it easy until your teaching starts again,' she said.
Ralph hugged his stiff, resisting son, and said, 'You're quite a guy.' We watched them go through the automatic doors in their Easter Bunny suits. When the glass doors closed, John got in the passenger seat and cranked down the window. 'I want to break something,' he said. 'Preferably something nice and big.' Ralph and Marjorie were moving uncertainly toward the lines of people at the airline desks. Ralph groped in a zippered pocket of the running suit, brought out their tickets, and stooped over to pull his suitcase toward the end of the line. 'I guess they'll get there,' John said. He leaned back against the seat.
I pulled away from the curb and circled around the terminals back to the access road.
'I have to tell you what happened last night,' I said. 'The people I went out to see in Elm Hill were nearly killed in a fire.'
'Oh, Jesus.' John turned to look behind us. 'I saw you checking the mirror on the way out here. Did anyone follow us out here?'
'I don't think so.'
He was almost kneeling on the seat, scanning the cars behind us. 'I don't see any blue Lexus, but probably he's got more than one car, don't you think?'
'I don't even know who
'William Writzmann. Wasn't that the name you said last night?'
'Yes, but who is he?'
He waved the question away. 'Tell me about the fire.'
I described what I had read in the newspaper and told him about my conversation with Fontaine.
'I'm fed up with these cops.' John hoisted himself around, pulled his left leg up onto the seat, and twitched down the hem of the green jacket. 'After it turned out that Walter Dragonette's confession was false, all they think of is hauling me down to the station. Whose negligence got her killed in the first place?'
He twitched his jacket down over his belly again and put his left arm up on the back of the seat. He kept an eye on the traffic behind us. 'I'm not letting Fontaine stand in my way.' He turned his head to give me a hard look. 'Still willing to stay and help me?'
'I want to find Bob Bandolier.'
'William Writzmann is the one I want to find,' John said.
'We're going to have to be careful,' I said, meaning no more than that we would have to keep out of Fontaine's way.
'You want to see careful?' John tapped my shoulder. 'Look.' I turned my head, and he unbuttoned the linen jacket and held it out from his side. The curved handle of a handgun stuck up out of the waistband of his trousers. 'After you took it away from Alan, I put it in my safety deposit box. This morning, I went down to the bank and got it out.'
'This is a bad idea,' I said. 'In fact, it's a really terrible idea.'
'I know how to handle a firearm, for God's sake. So do you, so stop looking so disapproving.'
My effort to stop looking as disapproving as I felt was at least good enough to make him stop smirking at me.
'What were you going to do next?' he asked me.
'If I can find the Sunchanas, I'd like to talk to them. Maybe I could learn something if I knocked on a few more doors on South Seventh Street.'
'There's no reason to go back to Pigtown,' John said.
'Do you remember my telling you about the old couple I talked to, the ones who lived next to the Bandolier house? The woman, Hannah Belknap, told me that late at night she sometimes sees a man sitting alone in the living room.' I then went through Frank Belknap's response to his wife's story and his private words to me on the sidewalk.
'It's Writzmann,' John said. 'He burns down houses.'
'Hold on. This soldier threatened Belknap twenty years ago. Fontaine says propane tanks aren't the safest things in the world.'
'Do you really believe that?'
'No,' I confessed. 'I think somebody followed me to the Sunchanas and decided to stop them from talking to me. That means we're not supposed to learn something about Bob Bandolier.'
'I'd like to pay a call on Oscar Writzmann before we do anything else. Maybe I can get something out of him. Will you let me try?'
'Not if you're going to pull that gun on him.'
'I'm going to ask him if he has a son named William.'
Against my better judgment, I left the north-south expressway at the point in downtown Millhaven where it connects with the east-west expressway. Once again I turned west. From the loop of the interchange, the tall square shapes of the Pforzheimer and the Hepton hotels stood like ancient monuments among the scoops and angles, the peaks and slabs of the new buildings east of the Millhaven River.
John watched the skyline as we curved down the ramp into the sparse traffic moving west.
'Every cop in town is going to be watching the marchers this afternoon. I think we could take the Green Woman to pieces and put it back together again without anybody noticing.'
At Teutonia, I began the long diagonal north through the strip of Piggly Wiggly supermarkets, bowling alleys, and fast-food franchises. 'Do you know if Alan lets anyone use his garage?'
'He might have let Grant use it for storage.' John looked at me as if I were playing some game he did not understand yet. 'Why?'
'The woman who lives across the street saw someone in his garage on the night April was attacked.'
Unconsciously, he touched the butt of the gun through his jacket. His face looked blander than ever, but a nerve under his right eye started jumping. 'What did she see, exactly?'
'Only the door going down. She thought it might have been Grant, because she'd seen him around. But Grant was already dead.'
'Well, actually, that was me,' John said. 'I didn't know anybody saw me, or I would have mentioned it before
