We looked at each other for a moment, and then I laughed, too.
"I think we know a lot about Blue Rose," Tom said, still smiling at his own vehemence. "He didn't stop because my grandfather had just guaranteed his immunity from arrest by killing William Damrosch. We've been assuming that all along, but, now that I have Blue Rose in a kind of focus, I think he stopped because he was finished—he was finished even before he murdered Heinz Stenmitz. He accomplished what he set out to do— he paid back the St. Alwyn for whatever it did to him. If he thought the St. Alwyn had still owed him something, he would have gone on leaving a fresh corpse draped around the place every five days until he was satisfied."
"So what set him off all over again two weeks ago?"
"Maybe he started brooding about his old grudge and decided to make life miserable for the son of his old employer."
"And maybe he won't stop until he kills John."
"John is certainly the center of these new murders," Tom said. "Which puts you pretty close to that center, if you haven't noticed."
"You mean Blue Rose might decide to make me his next victim?"
"Hasn't it occurred to you that you might be in some danger?"
It sounds stupid, but it had not occurred to me, and Tom must have seen the doubt and consternation I felt.
"Tim, if you want to go back to your life, there's no reason not to. Forget everything we talked about earlier. You can tell John that you have to meet a deadline, fly home to New York, and go back to your real work."
"Somehow," I said, trying to express what I had never put into words until this moment, "my work seems related to everything we've been talking about. Every now and then I get the feeling that some answer, some key, is all around me, and that all I have to do is open my eyes." Tom was looking at me very intently, not betraying anything. "Besides, I want to learn Blue Rose's name. I'm not going to run out now. I don't want to go back to New York and get a phone call from you a week from now telling me John was found knifed to death outside the Idle Hour."
"As long as you remember that this isn't a book."
"It isn't Little Women, anyhow," I said.
"Okay." He looked across the room at the monitor on his desk, where SEARCHING still pulsed on and off. "Tell me about Ralph Ransom."
5
After I described my conversation with John's father at the funeral, Tom said, "I didn't know your father used to work at the St. Alwyn."
"Eight years," I said. "He ran the elevator. He was fired not too long after the murders ended. His drinking got worse after my sister was killed. About a year later, he straightened himself out and got a job on the assembly line at the Glax Corporation."
"Your sister?" Tom said. "You had a sister who was killed? I didn't know about that." He looked at me hard, and I saw consciousness come into his face. "You mean that she was murdered."
I nodded, too moved by the speed and accuracy of his intelligence to speak.
"Did this happen near your house?" He meant: did it happen near the hotel?
I told him where April was murdered.
"When?"
I thought he already knew, but I told him the date and then said that I had been running across the street to help her when I was hit by the car. Tom knew all about that, but he had known nothing else.
"Tim," he said, and blinked. I wondered what was going through his mind. Something had amazed him. He began again. "That was five days before Arlette Monaghan's murder." He sat there looking at me with his mouth open.
I felt as if my mouth, too, was hanging open. I had always been secretly convinced that Blue Rose was my sister's murderer, but until this moment I had never thought about the sequence of the dates.
"That's why you're in Millhaven," he said. Then he stared blindly at the table and said it to himself: "That's why he's in Millhaven." He turned almost wonderingly to me again. "You didn't come back here for John's sake, you wanted to find out who killed your sister."
"I came back to do both," I said.
"And you saw him," Tom said. "By God, you actually saw Blue Rose."
"For about a second. I never saw his face—just a shape."
"You devil. You dog. You—you're a deep one." He was shaking his head. "I'm going to have to keep my eye on you. You've been sitting on this information since you were seven years old, and you don't come up with it until now." He put a hand on top of his head, as if it might otherwise fly off. "All this time, there was another Blue Rose murder that no one knew about. He didn't get to write his slogan, because you came along and got run over. So he waited five days and did it all over again." He was looking at me with undiminished wonder. "And afterward no one would ever connect your sister with Blue Rose because she didn't tie in with Damrosch in any way. You didn't even put it in your book."
He took his hand off the top of his head and examined me. "What else have you got locked up there inside yourself?"
"I think that's it," I said.
"What was your sister's name?"
"April," I said.
He was staring at me again. "No wonder you had to come. No wonder you won't leave."
"I'll leave when I learn who he was."
"It must be like—like all the rest of your childhood was haunted by some kind of monster. For you, there was a real bogeyman."
"The Minotaur," I said.
"Yes." Tom's eyes were glowing with intelligence, sympathy, and some other quantity, something like appreciation. Then the computer made a clicking sound, and both of us looked at the screen. Lines of information were appearing on the gray background. We stood up and went to the desk.
BELINSKI, ANDREW THEODORE 146 TURNER ST VALLEY HILL BIRTH: 6/1/1940 DEATH: 6/8/1940.
CONCLUSION BELINSKI SEARCH.
CASEMENT, LEON CONCLUSION CASEMENT SEARCH.
"We must have been talking when the Belinski information came through. This Andrew Belinski was never an officer of Elvee Holding, though—he was a week old when he died, which is the only reason his death date got into the computer. When they're that close, they usually punch them in. And there's nothing on the computer for Leon Casement. We should be getting Writzmann through in about ten minutes."
We turned away from the machine. I went back to the chair and poured Poland water from a bottle on the coffee table into a glass and added ice from the bucket. Tom was walking backward and forward in front of the table with his hands in his pockets, sneaking little looks at me now and then.
Finally he stopped pacing. "Your father probably knew him."
That was right, I realized—my father had probably known the Minotaur.
"Ralph Ransom couldn't think of anyone else he fired around that time? I think we ought to start with that angle, until we come up with something else. He or one of his managers fired this guy—the Minotaur. And in revenge, the Minotaur set out to ruin the hotel. If you start asking about that, and there was some other motive, it will probably come up."
"You're asking people to remember a long way back."
"I know." He went to the second workstation and sat on the chair in front of the computer. "What was that day manager's name again?"
"Bandolier," I said. "Bob Bandolier."
"Let's see if he's still in the book." Tom called up the directory on the other machine and scrolled down the list of names beginning with B. "No Bandolier. Maybe he's in a nursing home, or maybe he moved out of town. Just for the fun of it, let's look for good old Glenroy."