Detective Fontaine, I am writing to you because of your splendid reputation as an investigator. Can you see that I too am talking about an investigation, one back into a fascinating time? I trust that you will at least give me the courtesy of a reply.
Yours in hope,
April Ransom
"She was jiving him," John said. "Yours in hope? April would never say anything like that."
"Do you think she might ever have taken a look at the Green Woman?"
He straightened up and looked at me. "I'm beginning to wonder if I was ever qualified to answer questions like that." He threw up his arms. "I didn't even really know what she was working on!"
"She didn't either, exactly," I said. "It was only partly a historical paper."
"She couldn't be satisfied!" John said, stepping toward me. "That's it. She wasn't satisfied with being a star at Barnett, she wasn't satisfied with doing the same kind of articles anybody else would write, she wasn't…" He clamped his mouth shut and looked moodily at the manuscript file. "Well, let's get downtown before the damn march is all over." He threw open the door and stormed outside.
As soon as he was in the car, he bent over, placed a hand on my thigh and his head on my knee, and reached under my seat. "Oh, no," I said.
"Oh, yes." John straightened up, holding the revolver. "I hate to say it, but we might need this."
"Then count me out."
"Okay, I'll go alone." He leaned back, held in his stomach, and slid the gun into his trousers. Then he looked back at me. "I don't think we'll need a gun, Tim. But if we meet someone, I want to have something to fall back on. Don't you want to take a look at the place?"
I nodded.
"This is just backup."
I started the car, but did not take my eyes off him. "Like at Writzmann's?"
"I made a mistake." He grinned, and I turned the car off. He held up his hands, palms out. "No, I mean it, I shouldn't have done that, and I'm sorry. Come on, Tim."
I started the car again. "Just don't do that again. Ever."
He was shaking his head and hitching the jacket around the curved tusk of the handle. "But suppose some guy walks in when we're there. Wouldn't you feel easier if you knew we had a little firepower?"
"If it were in my hands, maybe," I said.
Wordlessly, John opened his jacket, pulled the gun out of his trousers, and handed it to me. I put it on the seat beside me and felt it press uncomfortably into my thigh. When I came to a red light, I picked it up and pushed the barrel into the left side of my belt. The light turned green, and I jerked the car forward.
"Why would Alan buy a gun?"
John smiled at me. "April got it for him. She knew he kept a lot of cash in the house, in spite of her efforts to get the money into the bank. I guess she figured that if someone broke in, all Alan had to do was wave that cannon around, and the burglar would get out as soon as he could."
"If he was just supposed to wave it around, she shouldn't have bought him any bullets."
"She didn't," John said. "She just told him to point the gun at anyone who broke in. One day last year when she was out of town, Alan called, all pissed off that April didn't trust him enough to give him bullets, he could handle a gun better than I could—"
"Is that true?" Alan Brookner did not seem like a man who would have spent a great deal of time firing guns.
"Got me. Anyhow, he chewed me out until I gave up and took him to a shop down on Central Divide. He bought two boxes of hollow points. I don't know if he ever told April, but I sure didn't."
As I drove down Horatio Street, distant crowd noises came to us from the direction of Illinois Avenue and the other side of the river. Voices shouting slogans into bullhorns rose above mingled cheers and boos.
I looked south toward Illinois at the next cross street. A thick pack of people, some of them waving signs, blocked the avenue. As gaudy and remote as a knight in armor, a mounted policeman in a riot helmet trotted past them. As soon as I got across the street, the march vanished again into distant noise.
The tenements along this section of Horatio Street looked deserted. A few men sat drinking beer and playing cards in parked cars.
"You looked through that file?" I asked.
"Funny, isn't it?"
"Well, they never did ask about who had been fired recently."
"You didn't notice? Come on." He sat up on the car seat and stared at me to see if I was just pretending to be unobservant. "Who is the one guy they should have talked to? Who knew more about the St. Alwyn than anyone else?"
"Your father."
"They talked to my father."
I remembered that and tried another name. "Glenroy Breakstone, but I read his statements, too."
"You're not thinking."
"Then tell me."
He sat there twisted sideways, looking at me with an infuriating little smile on his lips. "There are no statements from the famous Bob Bandolier. Isn't that a little bit strange?"
2
"You must be mistaken," I said. He snorted. "I'm sure I read about Bob Bandolier in those statements."
"Other people mention him from time to time. But he wasn't working in the hotel when the murders took place. So for Damrosch—probably Bandolier never crossed his mind at all."
With the bridge directly before us, I turned left onto Water Street. Forty feet away, the Green Woman Taproom sat on its concrete slab across from the tenements. Pigeons waddled and strutted over the slashes of graffiti.
Ten feet beyond the front of the bar, a fifteen-foot section of the concrete sloped down smoothly to meet the roadbed. Pigeons ambled and flapped away from my tires. I drove slowly up past the left side of the bar. The second, raised section of the tavern ended in a flat frame wall with an inset door.
I swung around the back of the building and swerved in behind it. Tarpaper covered the back of the building. Above the back door, two windows were punched into the high blank facade. Ransom and I softly closed our doors. Now nearly at the Illinois Avenue bridge, cut from view by the curve of the river and the prisonlike walls of an abandoned factory, the army advanced. An outsize, brawling voice bellowed, "Justice for all people! Justice for all people!"
Pigeons moved jerkily across SKUZ SUKS and KILL MEE DEATH.
A blaze of whiteness caught my eye, and I turned toward it —the harsh sunlight poured down like a beam onto a dove standing absolutely still on the concrete.
I looked at Ransom's white, shadowless face across the top of the car. "Maybe someone took those pages out of the file."
"Why?"
"So April wouldn't see them. So we wouldn't see them. So nobody would ever see them."
"Suppose we try to get inside this place before the march breaks up?" Ransom said.
3
John pulled open the screen door and fought with the knob. Then he banged his shoulder against the door. I pulled out the revolver and came up beside him. He was fighting the knob again. I got closer and saw that he was pulling on a steel padlock. I pushed him aside and pointed the gun barrel at the lock.
"Cool it, Wyatt." John pushed down the barrel with a forefinger. He went back to the car and opened the trunk. After an excruciating period that must have been shorter than it seemed, he pushed down the lid and came toward me carrying a jack handle. I stepped aside, and John slid the rod into the shackle of the padlock. Then he twisted the rod until the lock froze it and pulled down heavily on the top end of the rod. His face compressed, and his shoulders bulged in the linen jacket. His face turned dull red. I pulled up on the bottom of the rod. Something between us suddenly went soft and malleable, like putty, and the shackle broke.