"Do you remember his name?"
He laughed out loud. "You bet I do. Bob Bandolier. You wouldn't want to go around a golf course with that guy, but he was one hell of a manager."
"Maybe I could talk to him."
"Maybe. Bob stayed on when I sold the place—guy was practically married to the St. Alwyn. And I'll tell you someone else—Glenroy Breakstone. Nothing passed him by, you can bet on that. He pretty much knew everybody that worked at the hotel."
"Were he and Bob Bandolier friends?"
"Bob Bandolier didn't have friends," Ralph said, and laughed again. "And Bob would never get tight with, you know, a black guy."
"Would he talk to me?"
"You never know." He checked his watch and looked at the door to the chapel. "Hey, if you find something out, would you tell me? I'd be interested."
We went back into the enormous room. John looked up at us from beside the table.
Ralph said, "Who's supposed to fill all these chairs?"
John morosely examined the empty chairs. "People from Barnett and clients, I suppose. And the reporters will show up." He scowled down at a plastic cup. "They're hovering out there like blowflies."
There was a moment of silence. Separately, Marjorie Ransom and Alan Brookner came down the center aisle. Marjorie said a few words to Alan. He nodded uncertainly, as if he had not really heard her.
I poured coffee for them. For a moment we all wordlessly regarded the coffin.
"Nice flowers," Ralph said.
"I just said that," said Marjorie. "Didn't I, Alan?"
"Yes, yes," Alan said. "Oh John, I haven't asked you about what happened at police headquarters. How long were you interrogated?"
John closed his eyes. Marjorie whirled toward Alan, sloshing coffee over her right hand. She transferred the cup and waved her hand in the air, trying to dry it. Ralph gave her a handkerchief, but he was looking from John to Alan and back to John.
"You were interrogated?"
"No, Dad. I wasn't interrogated."
"Well, why would the police want to talk to you? They already got the guy."
"It looks as though Dragonette gave a false confession."
"What?" Marjorie said. "Everybody knows he did it."
"It doesn't work out right. He didn't have enough time to go to the hospital for the change of shift, go to the hardware store and buy what he needed, then get back home when he did. The clerk who sold him the hacksaw said they had a long conversation. Dragonette couldn't have made it to the east side and back. He just wanted to take the credit."
"Well, that man must be crazy," Marjoiiie said.
For the first time that day, Alan smiled.
"Johnny, I still don't get why the police wanted to question you," said his father.
"You know how police are. They want to go over and over the same ground. They want me to remember everybody I saw on my way into the hospital, everybody I saw on the way out, anything that might help them."
"They're not trying to—"
"Of course not. I left the hospital and walked straight home. Tim heard me come in around five past eight." John looked at me. "They'll probably want you to verify that."
I said I was glad I could help.
"Are they coming to the funeral?" Ralph asked.
"Oh, yeah," John said. "Our ever-vigilant police force will be in attendance."
"You didn't say a word about any of this. We wouldn't have known anything about it, if Alan hadn't spoken up."
"The important thing is that April is gone," John said. "That's what we should be thinking about."
"Not who killed her?" Alan boomed, turning each word into a cannonball.
"Alan, stop yelling at me," John said.
"The man who did this to my daughter is garbage!" Through some natural extra capacity, Alan's ordinary speaking voice was twice as loud as a normal person's, and when he opened it up, it sounded like a race car on a long straight road. Even now, when he was nearly rattling the windows, he was not really trying to shout. "He does not deserve to live!"
Blushing, John walked away.
Just Call Me Joyce peeked in. "Is anything wrong? My goodness, there's enough noise in here to wake the know you what."
Alan cleared his throat. "Guess I make a lot of noise when I get excited."
"The others will be here in about fifteen minutes." Joyce gave us a thoroughly insincere smile and backed out. Her father must have been hovering in the hallway. Clearly audible through the door, Joyce said, "Didn't these people ever hear of Valium?"
Even Alan grinned, minutely.
He twisted around to look for John, who was winding back toward us, hands in his pockets like his father, his eyes on the pale carpet. "John, is Grant Hoffman coming?"
I remembered Alan asking about Hoffman when he was dressed in filthy shorts and roaches scrambled through the pizza boxes in his sink.
"I have no idea," John said.
"One of our best Ph.D. candidates," Alan said to Marjorie.
"He started off with me, but we moved him over to John two years ago. He dropped out of sight—which is odd, because Grant is an excellent student."
"He was okay," John said.
"Grant usually saw me after his conferences with John, but last time, he never showed up."
"Never showed up for our conference on the sixth, either," John said. "I wasted an hour, not to mention all the time I spent going to and fro on the bus."
"He came to your house?" I asked Alan.
"Absolutely," Alan said. "About once a week. Sometimes, he gave me a hand with cleaning up the kitchen, and we'd gab about the progress of his thesis, all kinds of stuff."
"So call the guy up," Ralph said to his son.
"I've been a little busy," John said. "Anyhow, Hoffman didn't have a telephone. He lived in a single room downtown somewhere, and you had to call him through his landlady. Not that I ever called him." He looked at me. "Hoffman used to teach high school in a little town downstate. He saved up some money, and he came here to do graduate work with Alan. He was at least thirty."
"Do graduate students disappear like that?"
"Now and then they slink away."
"People like Grant Hoffman don't slink away," Alan said.
"I don't want to waste my time worrying about Grant Hoffman. There must be people who would notice if he got hit by a bus, or if he decided to change his name and move to Las Vegas."
The door opened. Just Call Me Joyce led a number of men in conservative gray and blue suits into the chapel. After a moment a few women, also dressed in dark suits but younger than the men, became visible in their midst. These new arrivals moved toward John, who took them to his parents.
I sat down in a chair on the aisle. Ralph and one of the older brokers, a man whose hair was only a slightly darker gray than his own, sidled off to the side of the big room and began talking in low voices.
The door clicked open again. I turned around on my seat and saw Paul Fontaine and Michael Hogan entering the room. Fontaine was carrying a beat-up brown satchel slightly too large to be called a briefcase. He and Hogan went to different sides of the room. That powerful and unaffected natural authority that distinguished Michael Hogan radiated out from him like an aura and caused most of the people in the room, especially the women, to glance at him. I suppose great actors also have this capacity, to automatically draw attention toward themselves. And Hogan had the blessing of looking something like an actor without at all looking theatrical—his kind of utterly male handsomeness, cast in the very lines of reliability, steadiness, honesty, and a tough intelligence, was of the sort that other men found reassuring, not threatening. As I watched Hogan moving to the far side of the room under the approving glances of April's mourners, glances he seemed not to notice, it occurred to me that he actually was the kind of person that an older generation of leading men had impersonated on screen, and I was grateful that he was in charge of April's case.