The blur of names rolled endlessly up the screen for a minute. "This takes too long. I'll access it directly." He made the screen go blank except for the directory code and punched in
BREAKSTONE, GLENROY and ENTER.
The machine ticked, and the name, address, and telephone number appeared on the screen, BREAKSTONE, GLENROY 670 LIVERMORE AVE 542-5500.
He winked at me. "Actually, I knew he was still living at the St. Alwyn. I just wanted to show off. Didn't John's father say that Breakstone knew everybody at the hotel? Maybe you can get him to talk to you." He wrote down the saxophone player's telephone number on a piece of paper, and I walked over to get it from him.
"Hold on, let's find out where this wonderful manager was living when the murders were committed."
I stood behind him while he ordered up the Millhaven directory for 1950 and then jumped to the B listings. He found the address in five seconds.
BANDOLIER, ROBERT 17 S SEVENTH ST LIVermore 2-4581.
"Old Bob had a short commute, didn't he? He lived about a block away from the hotel."
"He lived right behind us," I said.
"Maybe we can work out how long he was there." Tom called up the directory for 1960. Bandolier, Robert was still living on South Seventh Street. "Good stable guy." He called up the 1970 directory and found him still there, same address but with a new telephone number. In 1971, still there, but with yet another new telephone number. "Something funny happened here," Tom said. "Why do you change your phone number? Crank calls? Avoiding someone?"
By 1975, he was out of the book. Tom worked backward through 1974, and 1973, and found him again in 1972. "So he moved out of town or into a nursing home or, if our luck just left us, died sometime in 1972." He wrote the address down on the same slip of paper and handed it to me. "Maybe you could go to the house and talk to whoever lives there now. It might be worth asking some of his old neighbors, too. Somebody'll know what happened to him."
He stood up and took a look at the other computers, which were still searching. Then he went to the table and picked up his drink. "Here's to research." I raised my glass of water.
The computer clicked, and information began appearing on the two monitors.
"Well, what do you know?" Tom went back to his desk. "Births and Deaths is talking to us." He leaned forward and began writing something on his pad.
I got up and looked over his shoulder.
WRITZMANN, WILLIAM LEON 346 N 34TH STREET MILLHAVEN birth: 4/16/48.
"We just found a real person," Tom said. "If this is the mystery man following John in the Elvee company car, I'd be surprised if he doesn't turn up again."
"He already has," I said, and told him what I had seen when I had driven John Ransom and Alan Brookner to the morgue that afternoon.
"And you didn't tell me until now?" Tom looked indignant. "You saw him at the Green Woman, doing something really fishy, and then you keep it to yourself? You just flunked Famous Detective School."
He immediately sat down at the computer and began moving through another series of complicated commands. The modem clucked to itself. It looked to me as though he was calling up the city's registry of deeds.
"Well, for one thing I wasn't sure it was him," I said. "And I forgot about it once you started breaking into every office in the state."
"The Green Woman closed down a long time ago," Tom said, still punching in codes.
I asked him what he was doing.
"I want to see who owns that bar. Suppose it's—"
The screen went blank for a half-second, and RECEIVE flashed on and off. Tom whooped and clapped his hands.
THE GREEN WOMAN TAPROOM 21B HORATIO STREET
PURCHASED 01/07/1980, ELVEE HOLDINGS CORP
PURCHASE PRICE $5,000
PURCHASED 05/21/1935, THOMAS MULRONEY
PURCHASE PRICE $3,200
Tom combed his fingers through his hair so that it looked like a haystack. "Who are these people, and what are they doing?" He wrenched himself away from the screen and grinned at me. "I don't have the faintest idea where we're going, but we're certainly getting somewhere. And you certainly saw our friend in the blue Lexus, you sure did, and I take back every bad thing I ever said about you." He returned to the screen and disarranged his hair a little more. "Elvee bought the Green Woman Taproom, and look how little they paid for it. Maybe, do you think, we could even say he, meaning William Writzmann? Writzmann laid out a paltry five thousand. It was nothing but a leaky shell. What good is it? What could he use it for?"
"It looked like he was moving things into it," I said. "There were cardboard boxes next to the car."
"Or taking something out," Tom said. "The place was a shed. The only thing it's good for is storage. Our boy Writzmann bought a five-thousand-dollar shed. Why?"
All this time, Tom was looking back and forth from the screen to me, torturing his hair. "There's only one reason to buy the place. It's the Green Woman Taproom. Writzmann is interested in the Green Woman."
"Maybe he was Mulroney's nephew, and he was helping out the starving widow."
"Or maybe he was very, very interested in the Blue Rose case. Maybe our mysterious friend Writzmann has some connection to Blue Rose himself. He can't be Blue Rose himself, he's too young, but he could be—"
Tom was looking at me, a wild speculative delight shining out from his entire face.
"His son?" I asked. "You think Writzmann is the son of Blue Rose? On the evidence that he bought a rundown bar and stored boxes in it?"
"It's a possibility, isn't it?"
"Writzmann was two years old at the time of the murders. That's pretty young, even for Heinz Stenmitz."
"I'm not so sure about that. You don't like thinking about someone molesting a two-year-old child, but it happens. All you need is a Heinz Stenmitz."
"Do you think this Writzmann murdered April because he found out about her research? Maybe he even saw her looking around the bridge and the taproom."
"Maybe," Tom said. "But why would he murder Grant Hoffman?" He frowned and ran his hand through his soft blond hair, and it fell back into place. "We have to find out what April was actually doing. We need her notes, or her drafts, or whatever she managed to get done. But before that—"
He left the desk, picked up one of the neat white stacks of copied pages and handed it to me. "We have to start reading."
6
So for another hour I sat in the comfortable leather chair, leafing through the police files on the Blue Rose case, deciphering the handwriting of half a dozen policemen and two detectives, Fulton Bishop and William Damrosch. Bishop, who was destined for a long, almost sublimely corrupt career in the Millhaven police department, had been taken off the case after two weeks: his patrons had been protecting him from what they saw as a kind of tar baby. I wished that they had let him investigate for another couple of weeks. His small, tight handwriting was as easy to read as print. His typed reports looked like a good secretary's. Damrosch scribbled even when he was relatively sober and scrawled when he was not. Anything he wrote after about two in the afternoon was a hodgepodge in which whole words disappeared into wormy knots. He typed the way an angry child plays piano. After ten minutes, my head hurt; after twenty, my eyes ached.
By the time I had gone through all the statements and reports, all I had come up with was a sense that very few people had liked Robert Bandolier. The only new thing I learned was that the killings had not been savage mutilations, like the murder of Grant Hoffman and Walter Dragonette's performances: Blue Rose's victims had been stabbed once, neatly, in the heart, and then their throats had been cut. It was as passionless as ritual slaughter.