Less conspicuous, Fontaine poured coffee for himself and sat behind me. He dropped the satchel between his legs.
"The places I run into you," he said.
I did not point out that I could say the same.
"And the things I hear you say." He sighed. "If there's one thing the ordinary policeman hates, it's a mouthy civilian."
"Was I wrong?"
"Don't push your luck." He leaned forward toward me. The bags under his eyes were a little less purple. "What's your best guess as to the time your friend Ransom got home from the hospital on Wednesday morning?"
"You want to check his alibi?"
"I might as well." He smiled. "Hogan and I are representing the department at this municipal extravaganza."
Cops and cop humor.
He noticed my reaction to his joke, and said, "Oh, come on. Don't you know what's going to happen here?"
"If you want to ask me questions, you can take me downtown."
"Now, now. You know that favor you asked me to do?"
"The lost license number?"
"The other favor." He slid the scuffed leather satchel forward and snapped it open to show me a thick wad of typed and handwritten pages.
"The Blue Rose file?"
He nodded, smiling like a big-nosed cat.
I reached for the satchel, and he slid it back between his legs. "You were going to tell me what time your friend got home on Wednesday morning."
"Eight o'clock," I said. "It takes about twenty minutes to walk back from the hospital. I thought you said this was going to be hard to find."
"The whole thing was sitting on top of a file in the basement of the records office. Someone else was curious, and didn't bother putting it back."
"Don't you want to read it first?"
"I copied the whole damn thing," he said. "Get it back to me as soon as you can."
"Why are you doing this for me?"
He smiled at me in his old way, without seeming to move his face. "You wrote that stupid book, which my sergeant adores. And I shall have no other sergeants before him. And maybe there's something to this ridiculous idea after all."
"You think it's ridiculous to think that the new Blue Rose murders are connected to the old ones?"
"Of course it's ridiculous." He leaned forward over the satchel. "By the way, will you please stop trying to be helpful in front of the cameras? As far as the public is concerned, Mrs. Ransom was one of Walter's victims. The man on Livermore Avenue, too."
"He's still unidentified?"
"That's right," Fontaine said. "Why?"
"Have you ever heard of a missing student of John's named Grant Hoffman?"
"No. How long has he been missing?"
"A couple of weeks, I think. He didn't turn up for an appointment with John."
"And you think he could be our victim?"
I shrugged.
"When was the appointment he missed, do you know?"
"On the sixth, I think."
"That's the day after the body was found." Fontaine glanced over at Michael Hogan, who was talking with John's parents. Her face toward the detective, Marjorie was drinking in whatever he was saying. She looked like a girl at a dance.
"Do you happen to know how old this student was?"
"Around thirty," I said, wrenching my attention away from the effect Michael Hogan was making on John's mother. "He was a graduate student."
"After the funeral, maybe we'll—" He stopped talking and stood up. He patted my shoulder. "Get the file back to me in a day or two."
He passed down the row of empty chairs and went up to Michael Hogan. The two detectives parted from the Ransoms and walked a few feet away. Hogan looked quickly, assessingly at me for a long second in which I felt the full weight of his remarkable concentration, then at John. I still felt the impact of his attention. Rapt, Marjorie Ransom continued to stare at the older detective until Ralph tugged her gently back toward the gray-haired broker, and even then she turned her head to catch sight of him over her shoulder. I knew how she felt.
Someone standing beside me said, "Excuse me, are you Tim Underhill?"
I looked up at a stocky man of about thirty-five wearing thick black glasses and a lightweight navy blue suit. He had an expectant expression on his broad, bland face.
I nodded.
"I'm Dick Mueller—from Barnett? We talked on the phone? I wanted to tell you that I'm grateful for your advice—you sure called it. As soon as the press found out about me and, ah, you know, they went crazy. But because you warned me what was going to happen, I could work out how to get in and out of the office."
He sat down in front of me, smiling with the pleasure of the story he was about to tell me. The door clicked open again, and I turned my head to see Tom Pasmore slipping into the chapel behind a young man in jeans and a black jacket. The young man was nearly as pale as Tom, but his thick dark hair and thick black eyebrows made his large eyes blaze. He focused on the coffin as soon as he got into the big room. Tom gave me a little wave and drifted up the side of the room.
"You know what I go through to get to work?" Mueller asked.
I wanted to get rid of Dick Mueller so that I could talk to Tom Pasmore.
"I asked Ross Barnett if he wanted me to—"
I broke into the account of How I Get to My Office. "Was Mr. Barnett going to send April Ransom out to San Francisco to open another office, some kind of joint venture with another brokerage house?"
He blinked at me. His eyes were huge behind the big square lenses. "Did somebody tell you that?"
"Not exactly," I said. "It was more of a rumor."
"Well, there was some talk a while ago about moving into San Francisco." He looked worried now.
"That wasn't what you meant about the 'bridge deal'?"
"Bridge deal?" Then, in a higher tone of voice: "Bridge deal?"
"You told me to tell your secretary—"
He grinned. "Oh, you mean the bridge project. Yeah. To remind me of who you were. And you thought I meant the Golden Gate Bridge?"
"Because of April Ransom."
"Oh, yeah, no, it wasn't anything like that. I was talking about the Horatio Street bridge. In town here. April was nuts about local history."
"She was writing something about the bridge?"
He shook his head. "All I know is, she called it the bridge project. But listen, Ross"—he looked sideways and tilted his head toward the prosperous-looking gray-haired man who had been talking with Ralph Ransom—"worked out this great little plan."
Mueller told me an elaborate story about entering through a hat shop on Palmer Street, going down into the basement, and taking service stairs up to the fourth floor, where he could let himself into the Barnett copy room.
"Clever," I said. I had to say something. Mueller was the sort of person who had to impose what delighted him on anyone who would listen. I tried to picture his encounters with Walter Dragonette, Mueller bubbling away about bond issues and Walter sitting across the desk in a daze, wondering how that big schoolteacher head would look on a shelf in his refrigerator.
"You must miss April Ransom," I said.
He settled back down again. "Oh, sure. She was very important to the office. Sort of a star."
"What was she like, personally? How would you describe her?"
He pursed his lips and glanced at his boss. "April worked harder than anyone on earth. She was smart, she had an amazing memory, and she put in a lot of hours. Tremendous energy."
"Did people like her?"
He shrugged. "Ross, he certainly liked her."
"You sound like you're not saying something."
"Well, I don't know." Mueller looked at his boss again. "This is the kind of a person who's always going ninety miles an hour. If you didn't travel at her speed, too bad for you."