"We have to do some shopping," I said.
"You know what I mean."
I chewed for a little while, thinking. "We have to work out a way to get him to take us to those notes. And I've been running a few lines of research. I want to continue with those."
"What kind of research?"
"I'll tell you when I have some results." I didn't want to tell him about Tom Pasmore.
"Does that mean that you want to use the car again?"
"A little later, if that's all right," I said.
"Okay. I really do have to get down to the college to take care of my syllabus and a few other things. Maybe you could drive me there and pick me up later?"
"Are you going to set up Alan's courses, too?"
"I don't have any choice. April's estate is still locked up, until it gets out of probate."
I didn't want to ask him about the size of April's estate.
"It'll be a couple of million," he said. "Two something, according to the lawyers. Plus about half a million from her life insurance. Taxes will eat up a lot of it."
"There'll be a lot left over," I said.
"Not enough."
"Enough for what?"
"To be comfortable, I mean, really comfortable, for the rest of my life," he said. "Maybe I'll want to travel for a while. You know what?" He leaned back and looked at me frankly. "I have gone through an amazing amount of shit in my life, and I don't want any more. I just want the money to be there."
"While you travel," I said.
"That's right. Maybe I'll write a book. You know what this is about, don't you? I've been locked up inside Millhaven and Arkham College for a long time, and I have to find a new direction."
He looked at me, hard, and I nodded. This sounded almost like the old John Ransom, the one for whose sake I had come to Millhaven.
"After all, I've been Alan Brookner's constant companion for about ten years. I could bring his ideas to the popular audience. People are always ready for real insights packaged in an accessible way. Think about Joseph Campbell. Think about Bill Moyers. I'm ready to move on to the next level."
"So let's see if I get this right," I said. "First you're going to travel around the world, and then you're going to popularize Alan's ideas, and after that you're going to be on television."
"Come off it, I'm serious," he said. "I want to take time off to rethink my own experience and see if I can write a book that would do some good. Then I could take it from there."
"I like a man with a great dream," I said.
"I think it is a great dream." John looked at me for a couple of beats, trying to figure out if I was making fun of him and ready to feel injured.
"When you do the book, I could help you find the right agent."
He nodded. "Great, thanks, Tim. By the way."
I looked attentively at him, wondering what was next.
"If the fog lets up by tomorrow, I'm going to take the car out of Purdum and drive it to Chicago. You know, like I said? Feel like coming along?"
He wanted me to drive him to Purdum—he probably wanted me to drive the Mercedes to Chicago, too. "I have lots of things to do tomorrow," I said, not knowing how true that statement was. "We'll see what happens."
John seemed inclined to stay downstairs with the television. Jimbo was telling us that police had reported half a dozen cases of vandalism and looting in stores along Messmer Avenue, the main shopping street in Millhaven's black ghetto. Merlin Waterford had refused to acknowledge the existence of the Committee for a Just Millhaven, claiming that "the capture of one lunatic does not justify tinkering with our superb system of local government."
I picked up 365 Days, a book by a doctor named Ronald Glasser who had treated servicemen wounded in Vietnam, and took it upstairs with me.
9
I laid the four photographs on the bed and stretched out beside them. In soft brown-gray tones, visible to various degrees beneath the ballpoint scribbles, the brick passage behind the St. Alwyn, room 218, the flank of the Idle Hour, and what had to be Heinz Stenmitz's butcher shop looked back at me. A powerful sense of time past—of difference—came from them. The arched passage and the exterior of the Idle Hour had not changed in forty years, but everything around them had been through wars, recessions, and the long disillusionment that followed the narcotic Reagan years.
I looked at the photograph of the hotel room where James Treadwell had died, set it aside and held the fourth photograph under the bedside lamp. It had to be the butcher shop, but something still troubled me—then I remembered the stench of blood and Mr. Stenmitz bending his great blond beast-head toward me. I dropped the photo onto the bed and picked up 365 Days.
Around three-thirty, John began hollering up the stairs that we'd better get going if we wanted to get to Arkham by four. I got into a jacket and put the four photographs in the pocket.
John was standing at the bottom of the stairs, holding a black briefcase. His other hand was balled into a pocket of the silk jacket. "Where will you be going, anyhow?" he asked me.
"I'll probably hit the computers at the university library," I said.
"Ah," he said, as if now he had everything finally figured out.
"There might be some more information about Elvee."
He leaned forward and peered at my eyes. "Are you all right? Your eyes are red."
"I ran out of Murine. If I get involved in something at the library, would you mind taking a cab home?"
"Try to wrap it up before seven," he said, looking grumpy. "After that, everything snaps shut like a trap. Budget cuts."
Twenty minutes later, I dropped John off in front of Arkham's seedy quadrangle and watched him disappear into the heavy gray clouds. A few dim lights burned down from windows in the dark shapes of the college buildings. In the fog, Arkham looked like an insane asylum on the moors. Then I cruised slowly down the street. When a pay telephone swam up out of the murk, I double-parked the car and called Tom's number.
After his message ended, I said that I had to see him as soon as possible, he should call me as soon as he got up, I had to be back at John's—
The line clicked. "Come on over," Tom said.
"You're up already?"
"I'm still up," he said.
10
"Do you know how many Allentowns there are in America?" Tom asked me. "Twenty-one. Some of them aren't even in the standard atlases. I didn't bother with Allentown, Georgia, Allentown, Florida, Allentown, Utah, or Allentown, Delaware, because they all have populations under three thousand—it's an arbitrary cutoff, but not even Fee Bandolier could get away with committing a string of murders in a town that size."
The start-up menus glowed from the monitors of his computers. Tom looked a little pale and his hair was rumpled, but the only other indication that he hadn't slept in twenty-four hours was that his necktie had been pulled below the undone top button of his shirt. He was wearing the same long silk robe he'd had on the other day.
"So I went through every one of the sixteen other Allentowns, looking for a Jane Wright who had been murdered in May 1977. Nothing. No Jane Wright. Most of these towns are so small that there were no murders at all in that month. All I could do then was go back to Allentown, Pennsylvania, and take another look."
"And?"
"I found something good."
"Are you going to tell me about it?"
"In time." Tom smiled at me. "You sounded like you had something pretty good yourself, on the phone."
There was no point in trying to get him to say anything until he was ready. I took a sip of his coffee and said, "April Ransom's car is in a garage in Purdum. John panicked when he found it in front of his house with blood all over the seats, and he took it to Alan's garage and cleaned it up and then stashed it out of town."