“What happened?” Hanratty said, his voice tight.
“You better ask one of the detectives.”
What surprised him, two steps across the threshold, was how strange the familiar place appeared. Violence had a way of doing that — of altering forever a setting one once took pleasure in.
From behind, a voice said, “May I be of any help?”
He turned to see a gray-haired detective in an expensive gray suit and a regimental striped tie step forward. He wore his ID tag pinned to his left lapel.
Hanratty once again explained who he was.
“You’re the piano player.”
“Yes,” Hanratty said. “Why?”
“Sullivan said you’d vouch for him.”
“David? The bartender?”
“Right. We’ve got him in custody.”
“Custody.”
The detective, who looked as much like a banker as a cop, nodded. “For killing the owner of this place, Kenny Bentley.”
Hanratty felt shock travel from his chest all the way out to the ends of his extremities. He could easily enough imagine the scenario Detective Keller (that being the name on the ID) had just sketched out. Sally Carson had come to work beaten up once again and David, unable to control himself, had grabbed Kenny and—
“Stabbed,” the detective said. “In his office.”
Hanratty was jarred back into reality. “You said stabbed?”
“Yes.”
“No way.”
“What?”
“David might beat him to death. Or choke him. But stab him — no way.”
“You may be a great piano player, Mr. Hanratty, but I can’t say that I put much stock in your abilities as a detective.”
As he finished speaking, a white-coated man from the crime lab came out of Kenny Bentley’s private office and drew Keller aside.
Hanratty looked around again. The chairs had not been taken down from the tables. The lights behind the long, elegant bar had not been lit. The stage seemed ridiculously small and shabby. Even the Steinway lacked sheen.
“I need to go have one more look at the body, Mr. Hanratty,” Keller said. “You’ll excuse me.”
Without quite knowing why, Hanratty said, “Mind if I go?”
Keller offered a bitter smile. “You hated him, too, and want to make sure he’s dead?”
“Oh, I hated him. But that isn’t why I want to go.”
“No?”
“No. I just can’t believe David is the killer.”
Keller shrugged and exchanged an ironic glance with the crime lab man. “Well, if you enjoy looking at corpses, Mr. Hanratty, then I guess I can’t see any harm in your coming along.”
The office showed virtually no sign of struggle. The flocked red wallpaper and gaslight-style wall fixtures and huge leather-padded desk all suggested Kenny Bentley’s fascination with the Barbary Coast of the 1900s.
Bentley’s face was down on his desk. A common wood-handled butcher knife protruded from the right side of his spine. It had not been pushed all the way in, a good three inches of metal blade still showing.
Hanratty said, “Even if David had stabbed him, you don’t think he would have pushed the knife all the way in — with his strength and his anger?”
Keller’s eyes narrowed. Obviously Hanratty’s comment had made sense to him.
Hanratty moved around the desk. Kenny Bentley’s body already smelled sourly of decay.
“Hey,” Keller said, “don’t touch anything.”
“I won’t.”
Hanratty examined the proximity of a pencil to Bentley’s right hand. He leaned over and stared at a single word scrawled in a dying man’s clumsy script.
The word was “Harcourt.”
Keller must have caught Hanratty’s surprised expression. “Something I might be interested in, Mr. Hanratty?”
Hanratty shook his head. “Guess not.” He took his cigarettes from his trench coat and stuck one carefully between his lips. “Maybe I’ll go have myself a drink.”
Keller, no longer so unfriendly, said, “Maybe seeing him dead proves you didn’t hate him quite as much as you thought, huh?”
“Oh, no,” Hanratty said. “It proves that I hated him even more than I thought.”
“What?” Keller said.
But Hanratty didn’t answer. He just went out of the office and across the small dance floor to the bar where he had himself several good belts of Chivas while the police finished their work.
Two hours later, Keller came over and said, “Afraid we’re going to have to throw you out, Mr. Hanratty. We’re closing down for the night.”
The ambulance people had come and gone, as had at least a dozen other people. Now Kenny Bentley was headed for the morgue.
Hanratty set down his drink and said, “Fine.”
He went outside. The wind and snow whipped at him. Whatever kind of drunk he’d been building was quickly banished by the chill. He walked ten blocks, along a black wrought iron fence on the other side of which was the sprawling river, its pollutants frozen for the moment by ice.
When he figured he’d walked half an hour, he turned around and went back the way he’d come, back to Kenny’s place.
He had a key to the back door so getting in was no problem, even if the police signs warning of CRIME SCENE were ominous. Inside was shadowy and warm. He went to the dressing room. He took off his trench coat and went immediately to the closet where he lifted off the plywood rectangle that covered the duct.
This time, he made the trip in less than fifteen minutes.
When he’d constructed another jerry-rigged ladder and gotten up on it and clicked on the flashlight, he got a brief glimpse of her without the Cinderella mask. She must have been sleeping and he’d surprised her. The lair was the same as before, reminding him of an animal’s cave.
This time he recognized the horrible raw burns for what they were. Not radiation, but acid.
As she grappled on the mask, he said, “I know who you are.”
“I knew you’d figure it out.”
“You worked for Kenny Bentley two years ago and went to the Harcourt Academy, which is a music school for particularly gifted people. Kenny got jealous of you and threw acid on you and you were so ashamed of your looks that you took up living down here where nobody could see you.”
“Please turn out the light.”
“All right.”
Once again, he spoke to her in darkness. The sewer system echoed with their voices. The amber eyes of rats flicked through the gloom.
“I went to doctors,” she said. “But they couldn’t help me.”
“Why didn’t you turn Kenny in?”
“Because I wanted my own kind of vengeance. Just seeing him go to prison wouldn’t have satisfied me.”
“They think somebody else killed him. A nice young kid named David Sullivan.”
“I know. I crawled up the duct and heard the police talking and then arresting him.” Pause. “Get ready to catch something, Mr. Hanratty.”
From the blackness a small white oblong of paper drifted down to his hands.
“That’s a complete confession, Mr. Hanratty. Your friend will be freed as soon as you hand it over to the police.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You know something, Mr. Hanratty, I sincerely believe you are.”
The gunshot came just after her words, deafening as the noise of it bounced off the walls of her small lair, acrid as the odor of gunpowder filled his nostrils.
“My God,” he said. “My God.”
He stood there on his rickety makeshift ladder for a long time, thinking of her hideous face and her beautiful songs.
When he jumped free of the boxes and stuffed the envelope into his trousers, he realized he was crying, the way he sometimes cried when he played her songs.
He paused for a moment and angled the flashlight beam up the wall and across the dark opening again.