"Doesn't she look beautiful, John?" asked Marjorie.
"Uh huh," John said.
Alan touched April's powdered cheek. "My poor baby," he said.
"It's just so damn… awful," Ralph said.
Alan moved away toward the first row of seats.
The Ransoms left the coffin and took the two seats on the left-hand aisle of the first row. Ralph crossed his arms over his chest in a gesture his son had learned from him.
John took a chair one space away from his mother and two spaces from me. Alan was sitting on the other side of the aisle, examining a yellow leaflet.
We listened for a time to the motionless organ music.
I remembered the descriptions of my sister's funeral. April's mourners had filled half of Holy Sepulchre. According to my mother, she had looked "peaceful" and "beautiful." My vibrant sister, sometimes vibrantly unhappy, that furious blond blur, that slammer of doors, that demon of boredom, so emptied out that she had become peaceful? In that case, she had left everything to me, passed everything into my hands.
I wanted to tear the past apart, to dismember it on a bloody table.
I stood up and walked to the back of the room. I took the leaflet from my jacket pocket and read the words on the front of the cover.
Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
I shall fear no evil.
I sat down in the last row of chairs.
Ralph Ransom whispered to his wife, stood up, patted his son's shoulder, and began wandering down the far left side of the chapel. When he got close enough to be heard if he spoke softly, he said, "Hey," as if he just noticed that I had moved to the last row. He jerked his thumb toward the back of the room. "You suppose they got some coffee in that thing?"
That was not the question he wanted to ask.
We went to the table. The coffee was almost completely without taste. For a few seconds the two of us stood at the back of the room, watching the other three look at or not look at April Ransom in her enormous bronze boat.
"I hear you knew my boy in Vietnam."
"I met him there a couple of times."
Now he could ask me.
He looked at me over the top of his cup, swallowed, and grimaced at the heat of the coffee. "You wouldn't happen to be from Millhaven yourself, would you, Professor Underhill?"
"Please," I said, "just call me Tim."
I smiled at him, and he smiled back.
"Are you a Millhaven boy, Tim?"
"I grew up about a block from the St. Alwyn."
"You're Al Underhill's boy," he said. "By God, I knew you reminded me of somebody, and when we were in the car I finally got it—Al Underhill. You take after him."
"I guess I do, a little bit."
He looked at me as though measuring the distance between my father and myself and shook his head. "Al Underhill. I haven't thought about him in forty years. I guess you know he used to work for me, back in the days when I owned the St. Alwyn."
"After John told me that you used to own the hotel, I did."
"We hated like hell to let him go, you know. I knew he had a family. I knew what he was going through. If he could have stayed off the sauce, everything would have worked out all right."
"He couldn't help himself," I said. Ralph Ransom was being kind—he was not going to mention the thefts that had led to my father's firing. Probably he would not have stolen so much if he had managed to stay sober.
"Your sister, wasn't it? That started him off, I mean."
I nodded.
"Terrible thing. I can remember it just like it was yesterday."
"Me, too," I said.
After a moment, he asked, "How is Al these days?"
I told him that my father had died four years ago.
"That's a shame. I liked Al—if it hadn't been for what happened to your sister, he would have been fine."
"Everything would have been different, anyhow." I fought the annoyance I could feel building in me—when my father was in trouble, this man had fired him. I did not want his worthless reassurances.
"Was that kind of a bond between you and John, that your father worked for me?"
My annoyance with this silver-topped country club Narcissus escalated toward anger. "We had other kinds of bonds."
"Oh, I can see that. Sure."
I expected that Ralph would go back to his seat, but he still had something on his mind. Once I heard what it was, my anger shrank to a pinpoint.
"Those were funny days. Terrible days. You're probably too young to remember, but around then, there was a cop here in town who killed four or five people and wrote these words, BLUE ROSE, near the bodies. One of the victims even lived in my hotel. Shook us all up, I can tell you. Almost ruined our business, too. This lunatic, this Dragonette, I guess he was just imitating the other guy."
I put down my cup. "You know, Ralph, I'm very interested in what happened back then."
"Well, it was like this thing now. The whole town went bananas."
"Could we go out in the hallway for a second?"
"Sure, if you want to." He raised his eyebrows quizzically —this was not in his handbook of behavior—and almost tiptoed out.
3
I closed the door behind me. Two or three yards away, Ralph Ransom leaned against the red-flocked wallpaper, his hands back in his pockets. He still had the quizzical expression on his face. He could not figure out my motives, and that made him uneasy. The unease translated into reflexive aggression. He pushed his shoulders off the wall and faced me.
"I thought it would be better to talk about this out here," I said. "A few years ago, I did some research that indicated that Detective Damrosch had nothing to do with the murders."
"Research?" His shoulders went down as he relaxed. "Oh, I get it. You're a history guy, a whaddayacallit. A historian."
"I write books," I said, trying to salvage as much of the truth as possible.
"The old publish or perish thing."
I smiled—in my case, this was not just a slogan.
"I don't know if I can tell you anything."
"Was there anybody you suspected, someone you thought might have been the killer?"
He shrugged. "I always thought it was a guest, some guy who came and went. That's what we had, mostly, salesmen who showed up for a couple of days, checked out, and then came back again for a few more days."
"Was that because of the prostitute?"
"Well, yeah. A couple girls used to sneak up to the rooms. You try, but you can't keep them out. That Fancy, she was one of them. I figured someone caught her stealing from him, or, you know, just got in a fight with her out in back there. And then I thought he might have known that the piano player saw it happen—his room looked right out onto the back of the hotel."
"Musicians stayed at the St. Alwyn, too?"
"Oh yeah, we used to get some jazz musicians. See, we weren't too far from downtown, our rates were good, and we had all-night room service. The musicians were good guests. To tell you the truth, I think they liked the St. Alwyn because of Glenroy Breakstone."
"He lived in the hotel?"
"Oh, sure. Glenroy was there when I bought it, and he was still there when I sold it. He's probably still there! He was one of the few who didn't move out, once all the trouble started. The reason that piano player lived in the hotel, Glenroy recommended him personally. Never any trouble with Glenroy."
"Who used to cause trouble?"
"Well, sometimes guys, you know, might have a bad day and bust up the furniture at night—anything can happen in a hotel, believe me. The ones who went crazy, they got barred. The day manager took care of that. The man kept things shipshape, as much as he could. A haughty bastard, but he didn't stand for any nonsense. Religious fellow, I think. Dependable."