"What I don't understand," he said, "is how Hubbel identified Paul Fontaine. Hogan was in that picture, standing right next to Fontaine. So how could Hubbel make a mistake like that?"
"He had lousy eyesight," I said.
"That bad?"
"He had to put his eyes right up to what he was looking at. His nose practically touched the paper."
"So he actually examined the photograph very carefully." Tom was facing me, leaning forward with the envelope in his hands.
"It looked to me like he did."
"Let's see if we can solve this one." He opened the flap and drew the newspaper photograph out of the envelope. Tom set the envelope on his desk and carried the photograph and his drink to the couch and sat beside me. He leaned forward and placed the photograph between us on the table. "How did he identify Fontaine?"
"He pointed at him."
"Right at Fontaine?"
"Right at him," I said. "Dead bang at Paul Fontaine."
"Show me."
I leaned over and looked at the picture of Walter Dragonette's front lawn crowded with uniformed and plainclothes policemen. "Well," I said, "it was right in front of him, for one thing."
"Move it."
I slid the photograph before me. "Then he pointed at Fontaine."
"Point at him."
I reached out and planted my finger on Paul Fontaine's face, just as Edward Hubbel had done in Tangent, Ohio. My finger, like Edward Hubbel's, covered his entire face.
"Yes," Tom said. "I wondered about that."
"About what?"
"Look at what you're doing," Tom said. "If you put your finger there, who are you pointing at?"
"You know who I'm pointing at," I said. Tom leaned, lifted my hand off the photograph, and slid it across the table so that it was directly in front of him. He placed his finger over Fontaine's face exactly as I had. The tip of his finger aimed directly at the next man in the picture, Michael Hogan. "Whose face am I pointing at?" Tom asked.
I stared down at the photograph. He wasn't pointing at Fontaine, he was obliterating him.
"I bet it wasn't Ross McCandless who canceled the trip to Tangent," Tom said. "What do you think?"
"I think—I think I'm an idiot," I said. "Maybe a moron. Whichever one is dumber."
"I would have thought he meant Fontaine, too. Because, like you, I would have expected him to identify Fontaine."
"Yes, but…"
"Tim, there isn't any blame."
"Fontaine must have looked into Elvee Holdings. John and I led Hogan straight to him, and all he wanted to do was get my help."
"Hogan would have killed Fontaine whether you and John were there or not, and he would have blamed it on random violence. All you did was confirm that another shooter was present that night."
"Hogan."
"Sure. You just gave them a nice convenient eyewitness." He took another swallow of his drink, seeing that he had succeeded in banishing most of my guilt. "And even if you hadn't seen some indistinct figure, wasn't McCandless intent on making you say that you had? It made everything easier for him."
"I guess that's right," I said, "but I still think I'm going to retire to Florida."
He smiled at me. "I'm going to bed, too—I want us to get those papers as soon as possible tomorrow morning. This morning, I mean."
"Are you going to tell me where they are?"
"You tell me."
"I don't have the faintest idea," I said.
"What's the last place left? It's right in front of us."
"I don't appreciate this," I said.
"It starts with E," he said, smiling.
"Erewhon," I said, and Tom kept smiling. Then I remembered what we had learned when we first began looking into Elvee. "Oh," I said. "Oh."
"That's right," Tom said.
"And it was only a couple of blocks from the Beldame Oriental, so he probably moved them around five or six yesterday evening, right after he got off shift."
"Say it."
"Expresspost," I said. "The mail drop on South Fourth Street."
"See?" Tom said. "I told you you knew."
Shortly afterward, I went upstairs to Frederick Delius and the alligator, undressed, and crawled into bed to get four hours of restless, dream-ridden sleep. I woke up to the smell of toast and the knowledge that the most difficult day I was to have in Millhaven had just begun.
PART SEVENTEEN
JOHN RANSOM
1
By eight-thirty the sun was already high over the rooftops of South Fourth Street, and we stepped out of the car's briskly conditioned air into ninety-degree heat that almost instantly plastered my shirt to my sides. Tom Pasmore was wearing one of his Lamont von Heilitz specials, a blue three-piece windowpane check suit that made him look as if he had just arrived from Buckingham Palace. I had on more or less what I'd worn on the airplane, jeans and a black double-breasted jacket over a white button-down shirt, and I looked like the guy who held the horses.
Expresspost Mail and Fax was a bright white shopfront with its name painted in drastic red letters above a long window with a view of a clean white counter at which a man with rimless glasses and a red tie stood flipping through a catalogue. The bronze doors of individual mail receptacles lined the walls behind him.
We came through the door, and the man closed the catalogue and placed it on a shelf beneath the counter and looked eagerly from Tom to me and back to Tom. "Can I do something for you?" he said.
"Yes, thanks," Tom said. "I want to pick up the papers that my colleague deposited here for the Elvee Corporation yesterday evening."
A shadow of uncertainty passed over the clerk's face. "Your colleague? Mister Belin?"
"That's him," Tom said. He brought the key out of his pocket and put it on the counter in front of the clerk.
"Well, Mister Belin said he was going to do that himself." He looked over his shoulder at a rank of the locked boxes. "We can't give you a refund, or anything like that,"
"That's all right," Tom said.
"Maybe you should tell me your name, in case he comes back."
"Casement," Tom said.
"Well, I guess it'll be all right." The clerk picked up the key.
"We're grateful for your help," Tom said.
The clerk turned away and went to the wall to his right, twiddling the key in his fingers. The boxes in the bottom row were the size of the containers used to ship dogs on airplanes. When he had nearly reached the rear of the shop, the clerk knelt down and put the key into a lock.
He looked back up at Tom. "Look—since you already paid for the week, I can reserve this one for you until the time is up. That way, if you want to use it again, you won't have to pay twice."
"I'll pass that on to Mister Belin," Tom said.
The clerk began pulling stacks of paper stuffed into manila folders out of the box.
2
WE carried the long cardboard container the clerk had given us up the stairs to the office, Tom in front and me behind him. On the way back, Tom had stopped off at a stationery store and bought six reams of copy paper, four of which were now distributed across the tops of the files, with the other two slipped down beside the files at each end of the box. Halfway up the stairs, the handholds started to rip, and we had to carry the box the rest of the way by holding the bottom.
The box went on the floor beside the copy machine. Tom flipped its square black switch, and the machine hummed and flashed. I picked up one of the fat manila folders and opened it up. Papers of varying sizes and colors filled it, some of them closely filled with single-space typing that ran from edge to edge without margins, other crowded with the handwriting I had first seen in the basement of the Green Woman. I turned to one of the typed pages.