I went to the back of the laundromat, took the paper on which I had written Dorian's phone number and address from my wallet, and dialed the number.
"You're who?" he asked.
I told him my name again. "We spoke on the phone once when you called the Ransom house. I'm the person who told you that she had died."
"Oh. I remember talking to you."
"You said I might come to your place to talk about April Ransom."
"I don't know… I'm working, well, I'm sort of trying to work…"
"I'm just around the corner, at the laundromat."
"Well, I guess you could come over. It's the third house from the corner, the one with the red door."
The dark-haired, pale young man I had seen at April's funeral cracked open the vermillion door in the little brown house and leaned out, gave me a quick, nervous glance, and then looked up and down the block. He was dressed in a black T-shirt and faded black jeans. He pulled himself back inside. "You're a friend of John Ransom's, aren't you? I saw you with him at the funeral."
"I saw you there, too."
He licked his lips. He had fine blue eyes and a handsome mouth. "Look, you didn't come here to make trouble or anything, did you? I'm not sure I understand what you're doing."
"I want to talk about April Ransom," I said. "I'm a writer, and I've been reading her manuscript, 'The Bridge Project.' It was going to be a wonderful book."
"I guess you might as well come in." He backed away.
What had been the front room was a studio with drop cloths on the floor, tubes of paint and a lot of brushes in cans strewn over a paint-spattered table, and a low daybed. At its head, large, unframed canvases were stacked back to front against the wall, showing the big staples that fastened the fabric to the stretchers; others hung in an uneven row along the opposite wall. An opening on the far side of the room led into a dark kitchen. Tan drop cloths covered the two windows at the front of the house, and a smaller cloth that looked like a towel had been nailed up over the kitchen window. A bare light bulb burned on a cord in the middle of the room. Directly beneath it, a long canvas stood on an easel.
"Where did you find her manuscript? Did John have it?"
"It was at her father's house. She used to work on it there."
Dorian moved to the table and began wiping a brush with a limp cloth. "That makes sense. You want some coffee?"
"That would be nice."
He went into the kitchen to pour water into an old-fashioned metal percolator, and I walked around the room, looking at his paintings.
Nothing like the nudes in the Ransoms' bedroom, they resembled a collaboration between Francis Bacon and panels from a modernist graphic novel. In all of the paintings, dark forms and figures, sometimes slashed with white or brilliant red, moved forward out of a darker background. Then a detail jumped out at me from the paintings, and I grunted with surprise. A small, pale blue rose appeared in each of the paintings: in the buttonhole of the suit worn by a screaming man, floating in the air above a bloody corpse and a kneeling man, on the cover of a notebook lying on a desk beside a slumped body, in the mirror of a crowded bar where a man in a raincoat turned a distorted face toward the viewer. The paintings seemed like responses to April's manuscript, or visual parallels to it.
"Sugar?" Dorian called from the kitchen. "Milk?" I realized that I had not eaten all day, and asked for both. He came out of the kitchen and gave me, a cup filled to the top with sweet white coffee. He turned to look at the paintings with me and raised his cup to his lips. When he lowered the cup, he said, "I've spent so much time with this work, I hardly know what it looks like anymore. What do you think?"
"They're very good," I said. "When did you change your style?"
"In art school, this was at Yale, I was interested in abstraction, even though no one else was, and I started getting into that flat, outlined, Japanese-y Nabi kind of work right around the time I graduated. To me, it was a natural outgrowth of what I was doing, but everybody hated it." He smiled at me. "I knew I wouldn't have a chance in New York, so I came back here to Millhaven, where you can live a lot cheaper."
"John said that a gallery owner gave your name to April." He looked away abruptly, as if this was an embarrassing subject. "Yeah, Carol Judd, she has a little gallery downtown. Carol knew my work because I took my slides in when I first got back. Carol always liked me, and we used to talk about my having a show there sometime." He smiled again, but not at me, and the smile faded back into his usual earnestness when I asked another question.
"So that was how you first met April Ransom?" He nodded, and his eyes drifted over the row of paintings. "Uh huh. She understood what I was after." He paused for a second. "There was a kind of appreciation between us right from the start. We talked about what she wanted, and she decided that instead of buying any of the work I'd already done, she would commission two big paintings. So that's how I got to know her."
He took his eyes off the paintings, set his cup on the table covered with paints and brushes, and swung around a sway-backed chair in front of the easel so that it faced the bed. Two tapestry cushions were wedged into the tilted back support. When I sat down, the cushions met my back in all the right places.
Dorian sat on the camp bed. Looking at his paintings had comforted him, and he seemed more relaxed.
"You must have spent a lot of time talking with her," I said.
"It was wonderful. Sometimes, if John was out of town or teaching late, she'd invite me to her house so I could just sit in front of all those paintings she had."
"Didn't she want you to meet John?"
He pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, as if he were working out a problem. "Well, I did meet John, of course. I went there for dinner twice, and the first time was all right, John was polite and the conversation was fine, but the second time I went, he barely spoke to me. It seemed like their paintings were just possessions for him—like sports cars, or something."
I had the nasty feeling that, for John, having Byron Dorian around the house would have been something like an insult. He was young and almost absurdly good-looking while appearing to be entirely without vanity—John would have accepted him more easily if his looks had been undermined by obvious self-regard.
Then something else occurred to me, something I should have understood as soon as I saw the paintings on the walls.
"You're the one who got April interested in the Blue Rose case," I said. "You were the person who first told her about William Damrosch."
He actually blushed.
"That's what all these paintings are about—Damrosch."
His eyes flew to the paintings again. This time, they could not comfort him. He looked too anguished to speak.
"The boy in the Vuillard painting reminded you of Damrosch, and you told her about him," I said. "That doesn't make you responsible for her death."
This sentence, intended to be helpful, had the opposite effect.
Like a girl, Dorian pushed his knees together, propped his elbow on them, and twisted sideways with his chin in his hand. An almost visible cloud of pain surrounded him.
"I'm fascinated by Damrosch, too," I said. "It's hard not to be. When I was in Vietnam, I wrote two novels in my head, and the second, The Divided Man, was all about Damrosch."