I sat down, taking care not to upset his tray. Beside the bowl of soup and a small plate containing the crusts of what had been a sandwich stood a bud vase with a pink, folded rose. A linen napkin was flattened across Alan's snowy white shirt and dark red tie. He leaned toward me. "Did you see that woman? That's Eliza. You can't have her. She's mine."
"I'm glad you like her."
"Splendid woman."
I nodded. Alan leaned back and started on his soup.
Geoffrey Bough, Isobel Archer, Joe Ruddier, and three reporters I did not recognize sat at a round table under Jimbo's kindly, now slightly uncertain gaze.
"—extraordinary number of brutal murders in a community of this size," Isobel purred, "and I wonder at the sight of Arden Vass parading himself in front of television cameras during the funerals of persons whose murders may as yet be unsolved, despite—"
"Despite what, get your foot out of your mouth,"Joe Ruddier yelled, his red face exploding up from his collar without the usual buffer provided by the neck.
"—despite the ridiculous readiness of certain of my colleagues to believe everything they're told," Isobel smoothly finished.
Eliza Morgan handed me a tray identical to Alan's, but without a rose. A delicious odor of fresh mushrooms drifted up from the soup. "There's more, if you'd like." She crossed in front of me to sit in a chair near Alan.
Jimbo was trying to wrestle back control of the panel. Joe Ruddier was bellowing, "If you don't like it here, Miss Archer, try it in Russia, see how far you get!"
"I guess it's interesting to imagine, Isobel," said Geoffrey Bough, but got no further.
"Oh, we d all imagine that, if we could!"yelled Ruddier.
"Miss Archer," Jimbo desperately interposed, "in the light of the widespread civic disturbance in our city these days, can you think it is responsible to bring further criticism against—"
"Exactly!"Ruddier bellowed.
"Is it responsible not to?" Isobel asked.
"I'd shoot myself right now if I thought it would protect one good cop!"
"What an interesting concept," Isobel said, with great sweetness. "More to the point, and for the moment setting aside the two recent Blue Rose murders, let's consider the murder of Frank Waldo, a local businessman with an interesting reputation—"
"I'm afraid you're getting off the subject, Isobel."
"We'll get 'em and put 'em away! We always do!"
"We always put somebody away." Isobel turned, grinning Geoffrey Bough into a smoking ruin with a glance.
"Who?" I asked. "What was that?"
"Are you done, Alan?" Eliza asked. She stood up to remove his tray.
"Who did she say was killed?" I asked.
"A man named Waldo," Eliza said, returning to the room. "I read about it in the Ledger, one of the back pages."
"Was he found dead on Livermore Avenue? Outside a bar called the Idle Hour?"
"I think they found him at the airport," she said. "Would you like to see the paper?"
I had read only as far as the article about the fire in Elm Hill. I said that I would, yes, and Eliza left the room again to bring me the folded second section.
The mutilated body of Francis (Frankie) Waldo, owner and president of the Idaho Wholesale Meat Co., had been found in the trunk of a Ford Galaxy located in the long-term parking garage at Millhaven airport at approximately three o'clock in the morning. An airport employee had noticed blood dripping from the trunk. According to police sources, Mr. Waldo was nearing criminal indictment.
I wondered what Billy Ritz had done to make Waldo look so happy and what had gone wrong with their arrangement.
"Oh, Tim, I suppose you'd be interested in that thing April was writing? The bridge project?"
Alan was looking at me hopefully. "You know, the history piece about the old Blue Rose murders?"
"It's here?" I asked.
Alan nodded. "April used to work on it in my dining room, off and on. I guess John hardly let her work on it at home, but she could always tell him she was coming over here to spend time with the old man."
I remembered the dust-covered papers on Alan's dining room table.
"I plain forgot about the whole thing," he said. "That cleaning woman, she must have thought they were my papers, and she just picked 'em up, dusted underneath, and put 'em back. Eliza asked me about them yesterday."
"I'll get them for you, if you like," Eliza said. "Have you had enough to eat?"
"Yes, it was wonderful," I said, and lifted the tray and hitched forward.
In seconds, Eliza returned with a manila folder in her hands.
10
The manuscript was not the chronological account of the Blue Rose murders I had assumed it would be, given my stereotypical preconceptions concerning the sorts of books likely to be written by stockbrokers. April Ransom's manuscript was an unclassifiable mix of genres. The Bridge Project was the book's actual title, not merely a convenient reference. It was clear that April intended this title to mean that the book itself was a bridge of sorts—between historical research and journalism, between event and setting, between herself and the boy in the painting called The Juniper Tree, between the reader and William Damrosch. She had taken an epigraph from Hart Crane.
Through the bound cable strands, the arching path
Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings,—
….........................................................................................
As though a god were issue of the strings…
April had begun by examining the history of the Horatio Street bridge. In 1875, one citizen had complained in the columns of the Ledger that a bridge connecting Horatio Street to the west side of the Millhaven River would carry the infections of crime and disease into healthy sections of the city. One civic leader referred to the bridge as "That Ill-Starred Monstrosity which has supplanted an honest Ferryman." Immediately upon completion, the bridge had been the site of a hideous crime, the abduction of an infant from a carriage by a wild, ragged figure on horseback. The man boarded the carriage, snatched the child from its nurse, and then remounted his horse, which had kept pace. The kidnapper had spun his mount around and galloped off into the warren of slums and tenements on the east side of the river. Two days later, an extensive police search discovered the corpse on a crude altar in the Green Woman's basement. The abductor was never identified.
April had uncovered the old local story of the ancient man with battered white wings discovered in a packing case on the riverbank by a band of children who had stoned him to death, mocking the creature's terrible, foreign cries as the stones struck him. I too had run across the story, but April had located old newspaper accounts of the legend and related the angel figure to the epidemic of influenza which had killed nearly a third of the Irish population that lived near the bridge. Nonetheless, she reported, an individual known only as M. Angel had been listed in police documents from 1911 as a death, from stoning and had subsequently been buried in the city's old potter's field (now vanished beneath a section of the east-west freeway).
The Green Woman Taproom, originally the ferryman's shanty, made frequent appearances in the police documents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Apart from being the scene of the occasional brawls, stabbings, and shootings not uncommon in rough taverns of the period, the Green Woman had distinguished itself as the informal headquarters of the Illuminated Ones, the most vicious gang in the city's history. The leaders of the Illuminated Ones, said to be the same men who as children had killed the mysterious M. Angel, organized robberies and murders throughout Millhaven and were said to have controlled criminal activity in both Milwaukee and Chicago. In 1914, the taproom burned down in a suspicious fire, killing three of the five leaders of the Illuminated Ones. The remaining two appeared to divert themselves into legal activity, bought vast houses on Eastern Shore Drive, and became active in Millhaven politics.