Though she had been leading me toward this connection all the way through her story, I still could not be certain that I understood her. I had become interested in Bob Bandolier, but chiefly as a source for other information and only secondarily as himself, and therefore my next question sounded doubtful. "You mean, you thought that he was the person who murdered my sister?"
"Not at first," she said. "We did not think that at all. But then about a week later, maybe less—" She looked at her husband, and he shrugged.
"Five days," I said. My voice did not seem to be working properly. They both looked at me, and I cleared my throat. "Five days later."
"Five days later, after midnight, the sound of the front door of the building opening and closing woke us both up. Maybe half an hour later, the same sound woke us up again. And when we read the papers the next day—when we read about that woman who was killed in the same place as the little girl, your sister, we wondered."
"You wondered," I said. "And five nights later?"
"We heard the same thing—the front door opening and closing. After David went to work, I went out to buy a newspaper. And there it was. Another person, a musician, had been killed right in the hotel. I ran home and locked myself in our apartment and called David at work."
"Yes," David said. "And what I said to Theresa was, you cannot arrest a man for murder because he leaves his house at night." He seemed more depressed by what he had said forty years ago than by what had happened to his house within the past twenty-four hours.
"And five days later?"
"It was the same," David said. "Exactly the same. Another person is killed."
"And you still didn't go to the police?"
"We might have, even though we were so frightened," Theresa said. "But the next time someone was attacked, Mr. Bandolier was home."
"And what about the time after that?"
"We heard him go out, exactly as before," said David. "Theresa said to me, what if another person tried to kill the young doctor? I said, what if the same person tried to kill the doctor, Theresa? But on the weekends, we began looking for another place to live. Neither of us could sleep in that house anymore."
"Someone else tried to kill Dr. Laing," I said. My feelings were trying to catch up with my mind. I thought that there must be hundreds of questions I should ask these two people. "What did you think after the detective was found dead?"
"What did I think? I did not think. I felt relief," David said.
"Yes, tremendous relief. Because all at once, everyone knew that he was the one. But later—"
She glanced at her husband, who nodded unhappily.
"You had doubts?"
"Yes," she said. "I still thought that some other person might have tried to kill the doctor. And the only person that poor policeman really had any reason to hate so much was that terrible man, the butcher on Muffin Street. And what we thought, what David and I thought—"
"Yes?" I said.
"Was that Mr. Bandolier had murdered people because the hotel had fired him. He could have done a thing like that, he was capable of that. People didn't mean anything to him. And then, of course, there were the roses."
"What roses?" John and I said this more or less in unison.
She looked at me in surprise. "Didn't you say you went to the house?"
I nodded.
"Didn't you see the roses at the front of the house?"
"No." I felt my heart begin to pound.
"Mr. Bandolier loved roses. Whenever he had time, he was out in front, caring for his roses. You would have thought they were his children."
8
Time should have stopped. The sky should have turned black. There should have been a bolt of lightning and crashes of thunder. None of these things happened. I did not pass out, I didn't leap to my feet, I didn't knock the table over. The information I had been searching for, consciously or unconsciously, all of my life had just been given to me by a white-haired woman in a sweatshirt and blue jeans who had known it for forty years, and the only thing that happened was that she and I both picked up our cups and drank more steaming coffee.
I knew the name of the man who had taken my sister's life —he was a horrible human being named Bob Bandolier, Bad Bob, a Nazi of the private life—I might never be able to prove that Bob Bandolier had killed my sister or that he had been the man who called himself Blue Rose, but being able to prove it was weightless beside the satisfaction of knowing his name. I knew his name. I felt like a struck gong.
I looked out of the window. The children who had been rolling down the hill were scampering up over the dense green, holding their arms out toward their parents. Theresa Sunchana reached out to rest her cool hand on my hand.
"I guess the neighbors pulled out the roses after he left," I said. "The house has been empty for years." This statement seemed absurdly empty and anticlimactic, but so would anything else I could have said. The children rushed into the arms of their parents and then spun away, ready for another long giddy flip-flop down Elm Hill. Theresa's hand squeezed mine and drew away.
If he was still alive, I had to find him. I had to see him put in jail, or my sister's hungry spirit would never be free, or I free of it.
"Should we go to the police now?" David asked.
"We must," said Theresa. "If he's still alive, it isn't too late."
I turned away from the window, able to look at Theresa Sunchana now without disintegrating. "Thank you," I said.
She slid her hand across the table again. I put mine on top of it, and she neatly revolved her hand to give me another squeeze before she took her hand back. "He was such a completely terrible human being. He even sent away that adorable little boy. He banished him."
"The boy was better off," David said.
"What little boy was that?" I thought they must have been talking about some boy from the neighborhood, some Pigtown boy like me.
"Fee," she said. "Don't you know about Fee?"
I blinked at her.
"Mr. Bandolier banished him, he cast out his own son," she said.
"His son?" I asked, stupidly.
"Fielding," said David. "We called him Fee—a sweet child."
"I loved that little boy," Theresa told me. "I felt so sorry for him. I wish David and I could have taken him."
Theresa looked down into her cup when the inevitable objection came from David. When he had finished listing the reasons why adopting the child had been an impossibility, she raised her head again. "Sometimes I would see him sitting on the step in front of the house. He looked so cold and abandoned. His father made him go to the movies alone—a five-year-old boy! Sending him to the movies by himself!"
All I wanted to do was to get out of the coffee shop. A number of distressing symptoms had decided to attack simultaneously. I felt hot and slightly dizzy. My breath was caught in my throat.
I looked across the table, but instead of the reassuring figure of Theresa Sunchana, saw the boy from the Green Woman Taproom, the imagined boy who was fighting to come into this world. Behind every figure stood another, insisting on being seen.
9
Allerton, I remembered. Or Allingham, on the side of a stalled truck. Where I dip my buckets, where I fill my pen. David Sunchana's polite, unswervably gentle voice brought me back to the table. "The insurance men. And we have so many things to take from the house."
"Oh, we have a thousand things to do. We'll do them." She was still sitting across from me, and the sun still fell on the scene across the street, where a boy carried a big kite shaped like a dragon uphill.
Theresa Sunchana had not taken her eyes from me. "I'm glad you found us," she said. "You needed to know."