Tom's mother had been a weepy drunk all during his childhood, and his father—Victor Pasmore, the man he had thought was his father—had been distant and short-tempered. Tom had known Lamont von Heilitz, his biological father, only a short time before von Heilitz was murdered as a result of the only investigation the two of them had conducted together. Tom had found his father's body upstairs in this house. That investigation had made Tom Pasmore famous at the age of seventeen and left him with two fortunes, but it froze him into the life he still had. He lived in his father's house, he wore his father's clothes, he continued his father's work. He had drifted through the local branch of the University of Illinois, where he wrote a couple of monographs—one about the death of the eighteenth-century poet-forger Thomas Chatterton, the other about the Lindbergh kidnapping—that caused a stir in academic circles. He began law school at Harvard in the year that an English graduate student there was arrested for murder after being found unconscious in a Cambridge motel bedroom with the corpse of his girlfriend. Tom talked to people, thought about things, and presented the police with evidence that led to the freeing of the student and the arrest of a famous English professor. He refused the offer from the parents of the freed student to pay his tuition through the rest of law school. When reporters began following him to his classes, he dropped out and fled back home. He could only be what he was—he was too good at it to be anything else.
I think that was when he started drinking.
Given this history, he still looked surprisingly like the young man he had been: he had all his hair, and, unlike John Ransom, he had not put on a great deal of weight. Despite the old-fashioned, dandyish elegance of his clothes, Tom Pasmore looked more like a college professor than Ransom did. The badges of his drinking, the bags under his eyes, the slight puffiness of his cheeks, and his pallor might have been the result of nothing more than a few too many late nights in a library carrel.
He paused with his hands on the vodka bottle and a new glass, regarding me with his exhausted blue eyes, and I knew that he had seen exactly what was going through my mind.
"Feel like a drink?" He knew all about my history.
John Ransom looked at me speculatively.
"Any soft drink," I said.
"Ah," Tom said. "We'll have to go into the kitchen for that. Why don't you come with me, so you can see what I've got in the fridge?"
I followed him to the back of the room and the kitchen door. The kitchen too had been left as it had been in Lamont von Heilitz's time, with high wooden cupboards, double copper sinks, wainscoting and weak, inadequate lighting. The only modern addition was a gleaming white refrigerator nearly the size of a grand piano. A long length of open cupboards had been cut away to make room for it. Tom swung open the wide door of this object —it was like opening the door of a carriage.
The bottom shelf of the otherwise nearly empty refrigerator held at least a dozen cans each of Coke and Pepsi and a six-pack of club soda in bottles. I chose club soda. Tom dropped ice into a tall glass and poured in the club soda.
"Did you ask him about his wife's car?"
"He said he supposes that it'll turn up."
"What does he think happened to it?"
"It might have been stolen from in front of the St. Alwyn."
Tom pursed his lips together. "Sounds plausible."
"Did you know that his father owned the St. Alwyn?" I asked.
Tom raised his eyes to mine, and I saw the glimmer of something like a sparkle in them. "Did he, now?" he said, in such a way that I could not tell whether or not he had already known it. Before I was able to ask, a yelp of pain or astonishment came from the other room, accompanied by a thud and another yelp, this time clearly one of pain.
I laughed, for I suddenly knew exactly what had happened. "John finally saw your paintings," I said.
Tom lifted his eyebrows. He gestured ironically toward the door.
When we came out of the kitchen, John Ransom was standing on the other side of the table, looking at the paintings that hung on that wall. Ransom was bending down to rub his knee, and his mouth was open. He turned to stare at us. "Did you hurt yourself?" Tom asked.
"You own a Maurice Denis," John Ransom said, straightening up. "You own a Paul Ranson, for God's sakes!"
"You're interested in their work?"
"My God, that's a beautiful Bonnard up there," John said. He shook his head. "I'm just astounded. Yes, well, my wife and I own a lot of work by the Nabis, but we don't—" But we don't have anything as good as that, he had been going to say.
"I'm particularly fond of that one," said Tom. "You collect the Nabis?"
"It's so rare to see them in other people's houses…" For a moment Ransom gaped at the paintings. The Bonnard was a small oil painting of a nude woman drying her hair in a shaft of sunlight.
"I don't go into other people's houses very much," Tom said. He moved around to his chair, sat down, regarded the bottles and the ice bucket for a moment, and then poured himself a drink of another, less expensive brand of vodka than the one he had given John Ransom. His hand was completely steady. He took a small, businesslike sip. Then he smiled at me. I sat down across from him. A small spot of color like rouge appeared in both of his cheeks.
"I wonder if you've ever thought about selling anything," John said, and turned expectantly around.
"No, I've never thought about that," Tom said.
"Would you mind if I asked where you found some of this work?"
"I found them exactly where you found them," Tom said. "On the back wall of this room."
"How could you—?"
"I inherited them when Lamont von Heilitz left me this house in his will. I suppose he bought them in Paris, sometime in the twenties." For a second more he indulged John Ransom, who looked as if he wanted to pull out a magnifying glass and scrutinize the brush strokes on a four-foot-square Maurice Denis, and then he said, "I gathered that you were interested in talking about the Blue Rose murders."
Ransom's head snapped around.
"I read what the Ledger had to say about the assault on your wife. You must want to learn whatever you can about the earlier cases."
"Yes, absolutely," Ransom said, finally leaving the painting and walking a little tentatively back to his seat.
"Now that Lamont von Heilitz's name has come up, it may be as well to go into it."
Ransom slid onto the other couch. He cleared his throat, and when Tom said nothing, swallowed some of his vodka before beginning. "Did Mr. von Heilitz ever do any work on the Blue Rose murders?"
"It was a matter of timing," Tom said. He glanced at the glass he had set on the table, but did not reach for it. "He was busy with cases all over the country. And then, it seemed to come to a neat conclusion. I think it bothered him, though. Some of the pieces didn't seem to fit, and by the time I got to know him, he was just beginning to think about it again. And then I met someone at Eagle Lake who had been connected to the case."
He bent forward, lifted his glass and took another measured sip. I had never had the good luck to meet Lamont von Heilitz, but as I looked at Tom Pasmore, I had the uncanny feeling that I was seeing the old detective before me. John Ransom might have been seeing him, too, from the sudden tension in his posture.
"Who did you meet at Eagle Lake?" John asked. This was the privately owned resort in northern Wisconsin to which a select portion of Millhaven's society families went every summer.