Dorian shot me a blue-eyed glance without altering his posture. "I must have looked at that boy in the Vuillard three or four times before I really saw him—it's so subtle. At first, you just take him for granted, and then the way he's looking out at you takes over the whole painting."
He paused to struggle with his feelings. "That's how we started talking about Bill Damrosch and everything. She was excited about the idea of the bridge, that he was found under a bridge. That sort of ignited her."
I asked him how he had first become interested in Damrosch's story.
"Oh, I heard about him from my father. Lots and lots of times. They were partners for a long time. My dad didn't get on very well with his first wife, so he spent a lot of time with Bill Damrosch. I guess you could say he loved him—he used to say he tried everything he could think of to stop Bill from drinking, but he couldn't, so he started drinking with him." He gave me a frank look. "My father was an alcoholic, but after Bill died, he straightened himself out. In the sixties, when he was getting close to retirement age, he met my mother in a grocery store. Even she says she picked him up. She was twenty-five years younger, but they got married, and a year later I happened along, not exactly according to plan, I gather."
It made sense, if Dorian took after his father—as long as he didn't get fat, women would be trying to pick him up for the next three decades.
"Your father must have been disturbed about the outcome of the Blue Rose case."
He gave me a fierce look. "What outcome? You mean the junk in the papers? That drove him crazy. He almost quit the force, but he loved the work too much." He had calmed down, and now I was getting the frank, level look again. This time there was a touch of censure in it. "He hated your book, by the way. He said you got everything wrong."
"I guess I did."
"What you did was irresponsible. My father knew that Bill Damrosch never killed anybody. He was set up."
"I know that now," I said.
Dorian hooked one foot around his other ankle and started looking stricken again. "I should never have mentioned Damrosch to her. That's how everything started."
"The only people who knew what she was doing with her spare time were one or two brokers at Barnett and the police."
"I told her she should write to the police department."
"It should have worked." I told him what Paul Fontaine had done for me.
Outrage and scorn darkened his face. "Then they're as fucked up as my father said they were. That doesn't make any sense. They should have let her see those records." He glared at the paint-spattered floor for a couple of seconds. "My dad told me he didn't like what happened to the force after he retired— all the new people, like Fontaine. He didn't like the way they worked. He didn't trust their methods. Except for Mike Hogan. My dad thought Mike Hogan was a real cop, and he had a lot of respect for him." Dorian looked suspiciously back up at me.
"So your father was still alive when Fontaine and Hogan joined the force." He was describing any veteran's natural resentment of a brilliant new arrival.
"He's still alive, period. My father is eighty-five, and he's as strong as an ox."
"If it's any consolation, Paul Fontaine told me that he liked my book because it was so ridiculous."
"I'll tell him that." He flashed me a nice white smile. "No, on second thought, maybe I won't."
"Do you think I could talk to your father?"
"I guess." Dorian rubbed his face and looked at me grudgingly for a moment before reaching down behind the end of the day bed to pick up a spiral notebook with a ballpoint pen clipped into its metal rings. He flipped to an empty page and wrote something down. Then he ripped out the page and walked across the floor to hand it to me.
He had printed the name George Dubbin above an address and telephone number.
"George Dubbin?"
"That's his name." Dorian sat down on the bed again. "My name used to be Bryan Dubbin. I thought I could never be a famous painter with a name like that. Francesco Clemente and Bryan Dubbin? As soon as I graduated from UI-Millhaven, I changed it to something that sounded better to me. You don't have to tell me that I was being silly. But it could have been worse—the other name I was considering was Beaumont Darcy. I guess my head was in a pretty decadent place back then."
We both smiled.
"You actually had your name changed officially? You went to city hall, or wherever?"
"It's easy to change your name. You just fill out a form. I did the whole thing through the mail."
"Your father must have been a little…"
"He was, a lot. Big time upset. I see his point. I even agree with him. But he knows I wouldn't do it all over again, and that helps. He says, Well, kid, at least you kept your goddamn initials." This was delivered in a forceful raspy growl that communicated both affection and exasperation and summoned up George Dubbin with eerie clarity.
"That was good," I said. "I bet he sounds just like that."
"I was always a good mimic." He smiled at me again. "At school, I used to drive the teachers crazy."
The revelation about his name had dissipated the tension between us.
"Talk to me about April Ransom," I said.
14
Instead of answering, Byron reached for his cup, stood up, and walked to the table, where he began lining up the bottles filled with brushes. He got them all into a nice straight row at the far end of the table. In order to be able to see him, I stood up, too, but all I could see was his back.
"It's hard to know what to say." Next he started lining up the tubes of paint. He looked over his shoulder and seemed surprised to see me up on my feet, looking at him. "I don't think I could just sum her up in a couple of sentences." He turned all the way around and leaned back against the table. The way he did it made the table seem as if it had been built specifically for this purpose, to be leaned against in precisely that easy, nonchalant way.
"Try. See what comes out."
He looked up, elongating his pale neck. "Well, at first I thought she was a sort of ideal patron. She was married, she lived in a good house, she had a lot of money, but she wasn't even a little bit snobbish—when she came here, the first time I met her, she acted like ordinary people. She didn't mind that I lived in a dump, by her standards. After she was here about an hour, I realized that we were getting along really well. It was like we turned into friends right away."
"She was perceptive," I said.
"Yeah, but it was more than that. There was a lot going on inside her. She was like a huge hotel, this place with a thousand different rooms."
"She must have been fascinating," I said. He walked to the covered windows and brushed the drop cloths with the side of his hand. Once again, I could not see his face.
"Hotel."
"Excuse me?"
"I said hotel. I said she was like a hotel. That's kind of funny, isn't it?"
"Have you ever been to the St. Alwyn?"
He turned around, slowly. His shoulders were tight, and his hands were slightly raised. "What's that supposed to mean? Are you asking if I took her there and beat her up and knifed her?"
"To tell you the truth, that thought never occurred to me."
Dorian relaxed.
"In fact, I don't think she was assaulted in the hotel."
He frowned at me.
"I think she was originally injured in her Mercedes. Whoever assaulted her probably left a lot of blood in the car."
"So what happened to it?"
"The police haven't found it yet."
Dorian wandered back to the daybed. He sat down and drank some of his coffee.
"Do you think her marriage was happy?"