His head jerked up. "Do you think her husband did it?"
"I'm just asking if you thought she had a happy marriage."
Dorian did not speak for a long time. He swallowed more coffee. He crossed and uncrossed his legs. He grazed his eye along the row of paintings. He put his chin in his hand. "I guess her marriage was okay. She never complained about it."
"You thought about it for a long time."
He blinked at me. "Well, I had the feeling that if April weren't so busy, she would have been lonely." He cleared his throat. "Because her husband didn't really share her interests, did he? She couldn't talk to him about a lot of stuff."
"Things she could talk about with you."
"Well, sure. But I couldn't talk with her about her business—whenever she started up about puts and calls and all that, the only words I ever understood were Michael and Milken. And her job was tremendously important to her."
"Did she ever say anything to you about moving to San Francisco?"
He cocked his head, moving his jaw as if he were chewing on a sunflower seed. "Did you hear something about that?" His eyes had become cautious. "It was more like a remote possibility than anything else. She probably just mentioned it once, when we were out walking, or something." He cleared his throat again. "You heard something about that, too?"
"Her father mentioned it to me, but he wasn't too clear about it, either."
His face cleared. "Yeah, that makes sense. If April had ever moved anywhere, she would have brought him along. Not to live with her, I mean, but to make sure she could still take care of him. I guess he's getting kind of out of it."
"You said you went for walks?"
"Sure, sometimes we'd just go walk around."
"Did you go out for drinks, or anything like that?"
He pondered that. "When we were still talking about the paintings, we went out for lunch a couple of times. Sometimes we went for drives."
"Where would you go?"
He threw up his hands and looked rapidly from side to side.
I asked if he minded my asking these questions.
"No, it's just hard to answer. It's not like we went for drives every day or anything. Once we went to the bridge, and April told me about what used to go on at that bar on Water Street, right next to the bridge."
"Did you ever try to go in there?"
He shook his head. "It's closed up, you can't go in."
"Did she ever mention someone named William Writzmann?"
He shook his head again. "Who's he?"
"It probably isn't important."
Dorian smiled at me. "I'll tell you a place we used to go. I never even knew it existed until she showed it to me. Do you know Flory Park, way out on Eastern Shore Drive? There's a rock shelf surrounded by trees that hangs out over the lake. She loved it."
"Alan took me there," I said, seeing the two of them going down the trail to the little glen above the lake.
"Well, then, you know."
"Yes," I said. "I know. It's very private."
"It was private," he said. He stared at me for a moment, chewing on the nonexistent seed, and jumped up again. He carried the cup into the kitchen. I heard him rinse the cup and open and close the refrigerator. He came out carrying a bottle of Poland Water. "You want some of this?"
"I still have some coffee left, thanks."
Dorian went to his table and poured bottled water into his cup. Then he moved one of the tubes of paint a fraction of an inch. "I ought to get back to work soon." He closed both hands around the cup. "Unless you want to buy a painting, I don't think I can spare much more time."
"I do want to buy one of your paintings," I said. "I like your work a lot."
"Are you trying to bribe me, or something like that?"
"I'm trying to buy one of your paintings," I said. "I've been thinking about doing that since I first saw them."
"Really?" He managed to smile at me again. "Which one do you want?" His hands were all right now, and he moved toward the paintings on the wall.
"The men in the bar."
He nodded. "Yeah, I like that one, too." He turned doubtfully to me. "You really want to buy it?"
I nodded. "If you can pack it for shipping."
"I can do that, sure."
"How much do you want?"
"God. I never thought about that yet." He grinned. "Nobody but April ever even saw them before this. A thousand?"
"That's fine," I said. "I have your address, and I'll send you a check from John's house. Have UPS ship it to this address." I took one of my cards from my wallet and gave it to Dorian.
"This is really nice of you."
I told him I was happy to have the painting, and we went toward the door. "When you looked up and down the street before you let me in, did you think that John might be out there?"
He stopped moving, his hand already on the doorknob. Then he opened the door and let in a blaze of sudden light.
"Anything you did is okay with me, Byron," I said. He looked as if he wanted to flee back into the artificial light. "You were tremendously helpful to her."
Dorian shuddered, as if a winter wind were streaming through the open door. "I'm not going to say any more to you. I don't know what you want."
"All I want from you is that painting," I said, and held out my hand. He hesitated a second before taking it.
15
After all that, I did not want to just drive back to Ely Place. I had to let everything sort itself out in my mind before I went back to John's house. The satisfaction of knowing that Bob Bandolier was the Blue Rose murderer had left me. Before anything like it could return, I had to know who had killed April Ransom. I sat behind the wheel of the Pontiac until I noticed that Dorian was peeking out at me through a dimple in one of the drop cloths.
I drove away without any idea of where I would go. I would be like April Ransom, I thought, like April Ransom at the wheel of her Mercedes, Byron Dorian in the other seat. I'd just drive, and see where I wound up.
16
I had gone no more than five blocks when it occurred to me that I had, in effect, done no more than to swap one ghost for another. Where I had seen April Underhill's disgruntled spirit, now I would find myself seeing April Ransom's.
A series of images marched across my inner eye. I saw Walter Dragonette sitting across the battered table from Paul Fontaine, crying victim, victim, victim; then saw Scoot, my old partner in the body squad at Camp White Star, bending to dismember the corpse of Captain Havens. I saw the human jigsaw puzzles sealed up in the body bags; the boy in the hut at Bong To; April Ransom and Anna Bandolier lying unconscious on their beds, separated by space and time. A meaning which seemed nearly close enough to touch connected these images. The figure with an outstretched hand stepping out of death or the imaginative space offers the pearl. On the open palm is written a word no one can read, a word that cannot be spoken.
17
I had returned on automatic pilot to my old neighborhood and was turning from South Sixth Street onto Muffin Street. It was one of those sleepy pockets of commerce that had long ago inserted itself into a residential area, like the row of shops near Byron Dorian's studio but even less successful, and two little shops with soaped windows flanked a store where bins of bargain shoes soaked up sunlight on the pavement.
On the other side of the shoe store was the site of Heinz Stenmitz's two-story frame house. A wide X of boards blocked the entrance to the porch, and vertical pallets of nailed boards covered the windows. On the other side of the house, the site of the butcher shop with its triangular sign, was an empty lot filled with skimpy yellow ragweed and bright sprays of Queen Anne's lace. The weeds led down into a roughly rectangular hollow in the middle of the lot. Red bricks and gray concrete blocks lay among the weeds around the perimeter of the hollow. That vacancy seemed right to me. No one had debased the site with an apartment building or a video shop. Like his house, it had been left to rot away.