The Throat

I thought: not unless she wanted a little seediness. "I know her—you never met her. I've been married to her for fourteen years, and you've only seen a picture of her. She would never have gone into that place."

Of course, John was right. He did know her, and I had been merely drawing inferences from a newspaper photograph and what had seemed to me the striking degree of calculation that had created her art collection.

"Wait a second," I said. "What was the room number?"

"The maid found April in room 218. Room 218 of the St. Alwyn Hotel." He smiled at me. "I wondered when you were going to get around to asking that question."

It was the same room in which James Treadwell had been murdered, also by someone who had signed the wall with the words blue rose.

"And your detective doesn't think that's significant?"

Ransom threw up his hands. "As far as the police are concerned, nothing that happened back in 1950 has any connection to what happened to my wife. William Damrosch got them all off the hook. He killed himself, the murders ended, that's it."

"You said the first victim was found on Livermore Avenue." Ransom nodded, fiercely. "Where on Livermore Avenue?"

"You tell me. You know where it was."

"In that little tunnel behind the St. Alwyn?"

Ransom smiled at me. "Well, that's where I'd bet they found the body. The newspaper wasn't specific—they just said 'in the vicinity of the St. Alwyn Hotel.' It never occurred to me that it might be the same place where the first victim was found in the fifties until April, until they found, um, until they found her. You know. In that room." His smile had become ghastly—I think he had lost control over his face. "And I couldn't be sure about anything, because all I had to go on was your book, The Divided Man. I didn't know if you'd changed any of the places…"

"No," I said. "I didn't."

"So then I read your book and thought I might call just to see—"

"If I still thought that Damrosch was the man you call Blue Rose."

He nodded. That dead smile was fading, but he still looked as if a fishhook had caught in his mouth. "And you said no."

"And so—" I paused, stunned by what I had just learned. "And so, what it looks like is that Blue Rose is not only killing people in Millhaven again, but killing them in the same places he used forty years ago."

"That's the way it looks to me," Ransom said. "The question is, can we get anyone else to believe it?"

7

"They'll believe it in a hurry after one more murder," I said. "The third one was the exception I mentioned before— the doctor," said Ransom.

"I thought you were talking about your wife."

He frowned at me. "Well, in the book, the third one was the doctor. Big house on the east side."

"There won't be one on the east side," I said.

"Look at what's happening," Ransom said. "It'll be at the same address. Where the doctor died."

"The doctor didn't die. That was one of the things I changed when I wrote the book. Whoever tried to kill Buzz Laing, Dr. Laing, cut his throat and wrote blue rose on his bedroom wall, but ran away without noticing that he wasn't dead yet. Laing came to in time and managed to stop the bleeding and get himself to a hospital."

"What do you mean, 'whoever tried to kill him'? It was Blue Rose."

I shook my head.

"Are you sure about this?"

"As sure as I can be without evidence," I said. "In fact, I think the same person who cut Buzz Laing's throat also killed Damrosch and set it up to look like suicide."

Ransom opened his mouth and then closed it again. "Killed Damrosch?"

I smiled at him—Ransom looked a little punchy. "Some information about the Blue Rose case turned up a couple of years ago when I was working on a book about Tom Pasmore and Lamont von Heilitz." He started to say something, and I held up my hand. "You probably remember hearing about von Heilitz, and I guess you went to school with Tom."

"I was a year behind him at Brooks-Lowood. What in the world could he have to do with the Blue Rose murders?"

"He didn't have anything to do with them, but he knows who tried to kill Buzz Laing. And who murdered William Damrosch."

"Who is this?" Ransom seemed furious with excitement. "Is he still alive?"

"No, he's not. And I think it would be better for Tom to tell you the story. It's really his story, for one thing."

"Will he be willing to tell it to me?"

"I called him before I left New York. He'll tell you what he thinks happened to Buzz Laing and Detective Damrosch."

"Okay." Ransom nodded. He considered this. "When do I get to talk to him?"

"He'd probably be willing to see us tonight, if you like."

"Could I hire him?"

Almost every resident of Millhaven over the age of thirty would probably have known that Tom Pasmore had worked for a time as a private investigator. Twenty years ago, even the Bangkok papers had run the story of how an independent investigator, a self-styled "amateur of crime" living in the obscure city of Millhaven, Illinois, had brilliantly reinterpreted all the evidence and records in the case of Whitney Walsh, the president of TransWorld Insurance, who had been shot to death near the ninth hole of his country club in Harrison, New York. A groundskeeper with a longstanding grudge against Walsh had been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Working on his own and without ever leaving Millhaven, Tom Pasmore had succeeded in identifying and locating the essential piece of evidence necessary to arrest and convict the real murderer, a former employee. The innocent man had been freed, and after he had told his story to a number of newspapers and national magazines, it was learned that Tom Pasmore had done essentially the same thing in perhaps a dozen cases: he had used public information and trial records to get innocent men out of jail and guilty ones in. The Walsh case had merely been the most prominent. There followed, in the same newspapers and magazines, a number of lurid stories about "The Real-Life Sherlock Holmes," each containing the titillating information that the wizard habitually refused payment for his investigations, that he had a fortune of something between ten and twenty million dollars, that he lived alone in a house he seldom left, that he dressed with an odd, old-fashioned formality. These revelations came to a climax with the information that Tom Pasmore was the natural son of Lamont von Heilitz, the man who had been the inspiration for the radio character Lamont Cranston—"The Shadow." By the time all of this had emerged, Tom ceased to give interviews. As far as anyone knew, he also ceased to work—scorched into retirement by unwelcome publicity. The press never unearthed another incident in which Tom Pasmore of Millhaven, Illinois, intervened from afar to free an innocent man and jail a guilty one for murder. Yet from my contact with him, I thought it was almost certain that he continued his work anonymously, and that he had created the illusion of retirement to maintain in absolute darkness the secret the press had not discovered, that he had long been the lover of a woman married into one of Millhaven's wealthiest families.

Tom would never consent to being hired by John Ransom, and I told him so.

"Why not, if he's willing to come over?"

"In the first place, he was never for hire. And ever since the Walsh case, he's wanted people to think that he doesn't even work. And secondly, Tom is not willing to 'come over.' If you want to see him, we'll have to go to his house."

"But I went to school with him!"

"Were you friends?"

"Pasmore didn't have friends. He didn't want any." This suggested another thought, and he turned his head from the study of his interlaced hands to revolve his suspicious face toward mine. "Since he's so insistent on keeping out of sight, why is he willing to talk to me now?"

"He'd rather explain to you himself what happened to Buzz Laing and Detective Damrosch. You'll see why."

Ransom shrugged and looked at his watch. "I'm usually back at the hospital by now. Maybe Pasmore could join us for dinner?"

"We have to go to his house," I said.

He thought about it for a while. "So maybe we could have an audience with His Holiness between visiting April and going for dinner? Or is there something else about the sacred schedule of Thomas Pasmore that you haven't told me yet?"

"Well, his day generally starts pretty late," I said. "But if you point me toward the telephone, I'll give him some advance warning."

Ransom waved his hand toward the front of the room, and I remembered passing a high telephone table in the entrance hall. I stood up and left the room. Through the arch, I saw Ransom get up and walk toward the paintings. He stood in front of the Vuillard with his hands in his pockets, frowning at the lonely figures beneath the tree. Tom Pasmore would still be asleep, I knew, but he kept his answering machine switched on to take messages during the day. Tom's dry, light voice told me to leave a message, and I said that Ransom and I would like to see him around seven—I'd call him from the hospital to see if that was all right.

Ransom spun around as I came back into the room. "Well, did Sherlock agree to meet before midnight?"

"I left a message on his machine. When we're ready to leave the hospital, I'll try him again. It'll probably be all right."

"I suppose I ought to be grateful he's willing to see me at all, right?" He looked angrily at me, then down at his watch. He jammed his hands into his trousers pockets and glared at me, waiting for the answer to a rhetorical question.

"He'll probably be grateful to see you, too," I said.

He jerked a hand from his pocket and ran it over his thinning hair. "Okay, okay," he said. "I'm sorry." He motioned me back toward the entrance hall and the front door.

8

Once we were outside and on the sidewalk, I waited for John Ransom to move toward his car. He turned left toward Berlin Avenue and kept walking without pausing at any of the cars parked along the curb. I hurried to catch up with him.

"I hope you don't mind walking. It's humid, but this is about the only exercise I get. And the hospital isn't really very far."

"I walk all over New York. It's fine with me."

"If it's all right with you, we could even walk to Tom Pasmore's house after we leave the hospital. He still lives on Eastern Shore Road?"

I nodded. "Across the street from where he grew up."

Ransom gave me a curious look, and I explained that Tom had moved long ago into the old von Heilitz house.

"So he's still right there on Eastern Shore Road. Lucky guy. I wish I could have taken over my family's old house. But my parents moved to Arizona when my father sold his properties in town."

We turned north to walk down Berlin Avenue, and traffic noises, the sound of horns and the hiss of tires on asphalt, took shape in the air. Summer school students from the college moved up the block in twos and threes, heading toward afternoon classes.

Ransom gave me a wry glance. "He did all right on the deal, of course, but I wish he'd held onto those properties. The St. Alwyn alone went for about eight hundred thousand, and today it would be worth something like three million. We get a lot more conventions in town than we used to, and a decent hotel has a lot of potential."

"Your father owned the St. Alwyn?"

"And the rest of that block." He shook his head slowly and smiled when he saw my expression. "I guess I assumed you knew that. It adds a little irony to the situation. The place was run much better when my father owned it, let me tell you. It was as good as any hotel anywhere. But I don't think the fact that my father owned the place twenty years ago has anything to do with April winding up in room 218, do you?"

"Probably not." Not unless his father's ownership of the hotel had something to do with the first Blue Rose murders, I thought, and dismissed the idea.

"I still wish the old man had held out until the city turned around," said Ransom. "An academic salary doesn't go very far. Especially an Arkham College salary."

"April must have more than compensated for that," I said.

He shook his head. "April's money is hers, not mine. I never wanted to have the feeling that I could just dip into the money she made on her own."

Ransom smiled at some memory, and the sunlight softened the unhappiness in his face.

"I have an old Pontiac I bought secondhand for when I have to drive somewhere. April's car is a Mercedes 500SL. She worked hard—spent all night in her office sometimes. It was her money, all right."

"Is there a lot of it?"

He gave me a grim look. "If she dies, I'll be a well-off widower. But the money didn't have anything to do with who she really was."

"It could look like a motive to people who don't understand your marriage."

"Like the wonderful Millhaven police department?" He laughed—a short, ugly bark. "That's just another reason for us to learn Blue Rose's name. As if we needed one."

9

WE came around the bend past the third-floor patients' lounge, and a short, aggressive-looking policeman in his twenties lounged out of one of the doorways. His name tag read MANGILOTTI. He checked his watch, then gave Ransom what he thought was a hard look. I got a hard look, too.

"Did she say anything, officer?" Ransom asked.

"Who's this?" The little policeman moved in front of me, as if to keep me from entering the room. The top of his uniform hat came up to my chin.

"I'm just a friend," I said.

Ransom had already stepped into the room, and the policeman turned his head to follow him. Then he tilted his head and gave me another glare. Both of us heard a woman inside the hospital room say that Mrs. Ransom had not spoken yet.

The cop backed away and turned around and went into the room to make sure he didn't miss anything. I followed him into the sunny white room. Sprays of flowers in vases covered every flat surface—vases filled with lilies and roses and peonies crowded the long windowsill. The odor of the lilies filled the room. John Ransom and an efficient-looking woman in a white uniform stood on the far side of the bed. The curtains around the bed had been pushed back and were bunched against the wall on both sides of the patient's head. April Ransom lay in a complex tangle of wires, tubes, and cords that stretched from the bed to a bank of machines and monitors. A clear bag on a pole dripped glucose into her veins. Thin white tubes had been fed into her nose, and electrodes were fastened to her neck and the sides of her head with white stars of tape. The sheet over her body covered a catheter and other tubes. Her head lay flat on the bed, and her eyes were closed. The left side of her face was a single enormous blue-purple bruise, and another long blue bruise covered her right jaw. Wedges of hair had been shaved back from her forehead, making it look even broader and whiter. Fine lines lay across it, and two nearly invisible lines bracketed her wide mouth. Her lips had no color. She looked as if several layers of skin had been peeled from the sections of her face left unbruised. She had only the smallest resemblance to the woman in the newspaper photograph.

"You brought company today," said the nurse.

John Ransom spoke our names, Eliza Morgan, Tim Underhill, and we nodded at each other across the bed. The policeman walked to the back of the room and sat down beneath the row of windows. "Tim is going to stay with me for a while, Eliza," John said.

"It'll be nice for you to have some company," said the nurse. She looked at me from the other side of the bed, letting me adjust to the sight of April Ransom.

Ransom said, "You've heard me speak about Tim Underhill, April. He's here to visit you, too. Are you feeling any better today?" He moved a section of the sheet aside and closed his hand around hers. I saw a flash of white bandage pads and even whiter tape around her upper arm. "Pretty soon you'll be strong enough to come home again."

He looked up at me. "She looked a lot worse last Wednesday, when they finally let me see her. I really thought she was going to die that day, but she pulled through, didn't she, Eliza?"

"She sure did," the nurse said. "Been fighting ever since."

Ransom leaned over the bed and began speaking to his wife in a steady, comforting voice. I moved away from the bed. The policeman seated beneath the row of bright windows straightened up in his chair and looked at me brightly and aggressively. His left hand wandered toward the bulge of the notebook in his shirt pocket.

"The patients' lounge is usually empty around this time," the nurse said, and smiled at me.

I walked down the curving hallway to the entrance of a large room lined with green couches and chairs, some of them arranged around plain polished wooden tables. Two overweight women in T-shirts that adhered to their bodies smoked and played cards in a litter of splayed magazines and paper bags at a table in the far corner. They had pulled one of the curtains across the nearest window. An elderly woman in a gray suit occupied a chair eight feet from them with her back to an uncovered window, reading a Barbara Pym novel as if her life depended on it. I moved toward the windows in the left-hand corner of the room, and the old woman glanced up from her book and stabbed me with a look fiercer than anything Officer Mangelotti could have produced.

I heard footsteps behind me and turned around to see April Ransom's private duty nurse carrying a pouchy black handbag into the lounge. The old woman glared at her, too. Eliza Morgan plopped her bag onto one of the tables near the entrance and motioned me toward her. She fished around in the big handbag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and looked at me apologetically. "This is the only place in this whole wing of the hospital where smoking is allowed," she said in a voice not far above a whisper. She lit the cigarette with a match, tossed the match into a blackened copper ashtray, blew out a white feather of smoke, and sat down. "I know it's a filthy habit, but I'm cutting way down. I have one an hour during my shift here, and one after dinner, and that's it. Well, that's almost the truth. Right at the start of my shift, I sit in here and smoke three or four of the darned things; otherwise I'd never make it through the first hour." She leaned forward and lowered her voice again. "If Mrs. Rollins gave you a dirty look when you came in, it's because she was afraid you were going to start polluting the place. I distress her no end, because she doesn't think nurses should smoke at all— probably they shouldn't!"

I smiled at her—she was a nice looking woman a few years older than I was. Her short black hair looked clean and silky, and her brisk friendliness stopped far short of being intrusive.

"I suppose you've been here ever since Mrs. Ransom was put into the hospital," I said.

She nodded, exhaling another vigorous plume of smoke. "Mr. Ransom hired me as soon as he heard."

She put her hand on her bag. "You're staying with him?"

I nodded.

"Just get him to talk—he's an interesting man, but he doesn't know half of what's going on inside him. It'd be terrible if he started to fall apart."

"Tell me," I said. "Does his wife have a chance? Do you think she'll come out of her coma?"

She leaned across the table. "You just be there to help him, if you're a friend of his." She made sure that I had heard this and then straightened her back and snubbed out the cigarette, having said all she intended to say.

"I guess that's an answer," I said, and we both stood up.

"Who ever said there were answers?"

Then she came toward me, and her dark eyes looked huge in her small, competent face. She put the flat of her hand on my chest. "I shouldn't be saying any of this, but if Mrs. Ransom dies, you should go through his medicine chest and hide any prescription tranquilizers. And you shouldn't let him drink too much. He's had a good marriage for a long time, and if he loses it, he's going to become someone he wouldn't even recognize now."

She gave my chest a single, admonitory pat, dropped her hand, and turned around again without saying another word. I followed her back into April Ransom's room. John was leaning over the side of the bed, saying things too soft to be overheard. April looked like a white husk.

It was past five, and Tom Pasmore was probably out of bed. I asked Eliza where to find a pay telephone, and she sent me around the nurses' station and down a hallway to another bank of elevators. A row of six telephones hung opposite the elevators, none of them in use. Swinging doors opened to wide corridors on both sides. Green, red, and blue arrows streaked up and down the floor in lines, indicating the way to various departments.

Tom Pasmore answered after five or six rings. Yes, it would be fine if we came around seven-thirty. I could tell that he was disappointed—on the few occasions Tom welcomed company, he liked it to arrive late and stay until dawn. He seemed intrigued that we would be on foot.

"Does Ransom walk everywhere? Would he walk downtown, say, from Ely Place?"

"He drove me to his house from the airport," I said.

"In his or his wife's car?"

"His. His wife has a Mercedes, I guess."

"Is it parked in front of their house?"

"I didn't notice. Why?"

He laughed. "He has two cars and he's marching you all over the east side."

"I walk everywhere, too. I don't mind."

"Well, I'll have some cold towels and iced lemonade ready for you when you trudge up the driveway at the break of dawn. In the meantime, see if you can find out what happened to his wife's car."

I promised to try. Then I hung up and turned around to find myself facing a huge broad-shouldered guy with a gray ponytail and beard, the gold dot of an earring in one ear, and a four-button double-breasted Armani suit. He sneered at me as he moved toward the phone. I sneered back. I felt like Philip Marlowe.

10

At seven John Ransom and I walked out of the hospital and went down the hedge-lined path to Berlin Avenue. He moved quickly but heedlessly, as if he were all by himself in an empty landscape. The air could have been squeezed like a sponge, and the temperature had cooled off to something like eighty-five. There was still at least an hour and a half of sunlight. Ransom hesitated when we reached the sidewalk. For a second I thought he might wade out into the crowded avenue—I didn't think he could see anything but the room he had just left. Instead of stepping off the curb, he let his head drop so that his chin pressed into the layer of fat beneath it. He wiped his face with his hands. "Okay," he said, more to himself than to me. Then he looked at me. "Well, now you've seen her. What do you think?"

"You must be doing her some good, coming every day," I said.

"I hope so." Ransom shoved his hands into his pockets. For a moment he looked like a balding, overweight version of the Brooks-Lowood student he had been. "I think she's lost some weight in the past few days. And that big bruise seems to have stopped fading. Wouldn't you think that's a bad sign, when a bruise won't fade?"

I asked him what her doctor had said.

"As usual, nothing at all."

"Well, Eliza Morgan will do everything possible for April," I said. "At least you know she's getting good care."

He looked at me sharply. "She sneaks away to smoke cigarettes in the lounge, did you notice? I don't think nurses should smoke, and I don't think April should be left alone."

"Isn't that cop always there?"

Ransom shrugged and began walking back down the way we had come. "He spends most of his time staring out of the window." His hands were still stuffed into his trousers pockets, and he hunched over a little as he walked. He looked over at me and shook his head.

I said, "It can't be easy to see April like that."

He sighed—sighed up from his heels. "Tim, she's dying right in front of me."

We both stopped walking. Ransom covered his face with his hands for a moment. A few people walking past us stared at the unusual sight of a grown man in a handsome gray suit crying in public. When he lowered his hands, moisture shone on his red face. "Now I'm a public embarrassment." He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face.

"Do you still want to see Tom Pasmore? Would you rather just go home?"

"Are you kidding?"

He straightened his spine and began moving down the sidewalk again, past the card shop and the grocery store and the florist with its striped awning and its sidewalk display of flowers. "Whatever happened to April's Mercedes? I don't think I saw it when we left the house."

Ransom frowned at me. "You hardly could have. It's gone. I suppose it'll turn up eventually—I've had other things to think about."

"Where do you think it is?"

"To tell you the truth, I don't care what happened to the car. It was insured. It's just a car."

We walked several more blocks through the heat, not talking. Now and then John Ransom pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and blotted his forehead. We were getting closer to the UI campus, and bookstores and little restaurants had replaced the grocery stores and florists. The Royal, Millhaven's only art film house, was showing a season of thrillers from the forties and fifties—the marquee showed a complicated schedule beginning with a double feature of Double Indemnity and Kiss Me Deadly and ending, sometime in August, with Pickup on South Street and Strangers on a Train. In between they were running From Dangerous Depths, The Big Combo, The Asphalt Jungle, Chicago Deadline, DOA, The Hitchhiker, Laura, Out of the Past, Notorious. These were the movies of my youth, and I remembered the pleasure of slipping into the cool of the Beldame Oriental on a hot day, of buying popcorn and watching a doom-laden film noir in the nearly empty theater.

Suddenly I remembered the nightmare I'd had on the morning of the day John Ransom had called me—the thick hands on the big white plate. Cutting off human flesh, chewing it, spitting it out in revulsion. The heat made me feel dizzy, and the memory of the dream brought with it the gritty taste of depression. I stopped moving and looked up at the marquee.

"You okay?" Ransom said, turning around just ahead of me.

The title of one of the films seemed to float out an inch or two from the others—a trick of vision, or of the light. "Have you ever heard of a movie called From Dangerous Depths?" I asked. "I don't know anything about it."

Ransom walked back to join me. He looked up at the crowded marquee. "Cornball title, isn't it?"

Ransom plunged across Berlin Avenue and walked east on a block lined with three-story frame and redbrick houses separated by thick low hedges. Some of the tiny front lawns were littered with bicycles and children's toys, and all of them bore brown streaks like burn scars. Rock and roll drifted down from an upstairs window, tinny and lifeless.

"I remember Tom Pasmore," Ransom said. "The guy was an absolute loner. He didn't really have any friends. The money was his grandfather's, wasn't it? His father didn't amount to much—I think he ran out on them in Tom's senior year."

That was the sort of detail everyone at Brooks-Lowood would have known.

"And his mother was an alcoholic," Ransom said. "Pretty lady, though. Is she still alive?"

"She died about ten years ago."

"And now he's retired? He doesn't do anything at all?"

"I suppose just looking after his money is a full-time job."

"April could have done that for him," Ransom said.

We crossed Waterloo Parade and walked another block in silence while Ransom thought about his wife.

After we crossed Balaclava Lane, the houses began to be slightly larger, set farther apart on larger lots. Between Berlin Avenue and Eastern Shore Drive, the value of the property increases with every block—walking eastward, we were moving toward John Ransom's childhood neighborhood.

Ransom's silence continued across Omdurman Road, Victoria Terrace, Salisbury Road. We reached the long street called The Sevens, where sprawling houses on vast lawns silently asserted that they were just as good as the houses one block farther east, on Eastern Shore Road. He stopped walking and wiped his forehead again. "When I was a kid, I walked all over this neighborhood. Now it seems so foreign to me. It's as if I never lived here at all."

"Aren't the same people basically still here?"

"Nope—my parents' generation died or moved to the west coast of Florida, and people my age all moved out to Riverwood. Even Brooks-Lowood moved, did you know that? Four years ago, they sold the plant and built a big Georgian campus out in Riverwood."

He looked around, and for a moment he seemed to be considering buying one of the big showy houses. "Most people like April, people with new money, they bought places out in Riverwood. She wouldn't hear of it. April liked being in the city—she liked being able to walk. She liked that little house of ours, and she liked it just where it is."

He was using the past tense, I noticed, and I felt a wave of pity for all he was going through.

"Sometimes," he said. "I get so discouraged."

We walked up the rest of the block and turned right onto Eastern Shore Drive. Mansions of every conceivable style lined both sides of the wide road. Huge brick piles with turrets and towers, half-timbered Tudor structures, Moorish fantasies, giant stone palaces with stained-glass windows—money expressing itself unselfconsciously and unfettered by taste. Competing with one another, the people who built these enormous structures had bought grandeur by the yard.

Eventually, I pointed out Tom Pasmore's house. It was on the west side of the drive, not the lake side, and dark green vines grew up the gray stone of its facade. As always in Lamont von Heilitz's day, the curtains were closed against the light.

We went up the walk to the front door, and I rang the bell. We waited for what seemed a long time. John Ransom gave me the look he'd give a student who did not hand in a paper on time. I pressed the bell again. Maybe twenty seconds passed.

"Are you sure His Lordship is up?"

"Hold on," I said. Inside the house, footsteps came toward the door.

After shooting me another critical glance, John pulled his damp handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the back of his neck and his forehead. The lock clicked. He squared his shoulders and worked his face into a pretty good imitation of a smile. The door swung open, and Tom Pasmore stood on the other side of the screen, blinking and smiling back. He was wearing a pale blue suit with a double-breasted vest still partially unbuttoned over a snowy white shirt and a dark blue silk tie. Comb marks separated his damp hair. He looked tired and a little out of focus.

11

Ransom said, "Hey, big fella!" His voice was too loud. "You had us worried!"

"Tim and John, what a pleasure," said Tom, He was fumbling with the buttons of the vest as his eyes traveled back and forth between us. "Isn't this something?" He pushed the screen door open, and John Ransom had to step backward to move around it. Still moving around the screen door on the expanse of the front step, Ransom stuck out his right hand. Tom took it and said, "Well, just imagine."

"It's been a long time," John Ransom said. "Too long."

"Come on in," Tom said, and dropped backward into the relative darkness of the house. I could smell traces of the soap and shampoo from his shower as I stepped into the house. Low lamps glowed here and there, on tables and on the walls. The familiar clutter filled the enormous room. I moved away from the door to let John Ransom come in.

"You're very good to agree to—" Ransom stopped talking as he finally saw what the ground floor of Tom Pasmore's house really looked like. He stood with his mouth open for a moment, then recovered himself. "To agree to see me. It means a lot to me, all the more since I gather from Tim that what you can tell me is, ah, rather on the personal side—"

He was still taking in the interior, which would have matched none of his expectations. Lamont von Heilitz, the previous owner of Tom's house, had turned most of the ground floor into a single enormous room filled with file cases, stacks of books and newspapers, tables strewn with the details of whatever murder was on his mind at the moment, and couches and chairs that seemed randomly placed. Tom Pasmore had changed the room very little. The curtains were still always drawn; old-fashioned upright lamps and green-shaded library lamps still burned here and there around the room, shedding warm illumination on the thousands of books ranged in dark wooden cases along the walls and on the dining table at the rear of the room. Tall stereo speakers stood against the walls, connected to shelves of complicated audio equipment. Compact discs leaned against one another like dominoes on half a dozen bookshelves, and hundreds of others had been stacked into tilting piles on the floor.

Tom said, "I know this place looks awfully confusing at first glance, but there is, I promise you, a comfortable place to sit down at the other end of the room." He gestured toward the confusion. "Shall we?"

John Ransom was still taking in the profusion of filing cabinets and office furniture. Tom struck off through the maze.

"Say, I know I haven't seen you since school," said John Ransom, "but I've been reading about you in the papers, and that was an amazing job you did on Whitney Walsh's murder. Amazing. You put it all together from here, huh?"

"Right in this house," Tom said. He motioned for us to sit on two couches placed at right angles to a glass coffee table stacked with books. An ice bucket, three glasses, a jug of water, and various bottles stood in the middle of the table. "Everything was right there in the newspapers. Anyone could have seen it, and sooner or later someone else would have."

"Yeah, but haven't you done the same thing lots of times?" John Ransom sat facing a paneled wall on which hung half a dozen paintings, and I took the couch on the left side of the table. Ransom was eyeing the bottles. Tom seated himself in a matching chair across the table from me.

"Now and then, I manage to point out something other people missed." Tom looked extremely uncomfortable. "John, I'm very sorry about what happened to your wife. What a terrible business. Have the police made any progress?"

"I wish I could say yes."

"How is your wife doing? Do you see signs of improvement?"

"No," Ransom said, staring at the ice bucket and the bottles.

"I'm so sorry." Tom paused. "You must be in the mood for a drink. Can I get anything for you?"

Ransom said he would take vodka on the rocks, and Tom leaned over the table and used silver tongs to drop ice cubes into a thick low glass before filling the glass nearly to the top with vodka. I was watching him act as if there was no more on his mind than making John Ransom comfortable, and I wondered if he would make a drink for himself. I knew, as Ransom did not, that Tom had been out of bed for no more than half an hour.

During the course of telephone conversations in the middle of the night that sometimes lasted for two and three hours, I had sometimes imagined that Tom Pasmore started drinking when he got out of bed and stopped only when he managed to get back into it. He was the loneliest person I had ever met.

Tom's mother had been a weepy drunk all during his childhood, and his father—Victor Pasmore, the man he had thought was his father—had been distant and short-tempered. Tom had known Lamont von Heilitz, his biological father, only a short time before von Heilitz was murdered as a result of the only investigation the two of them had conducted together. Tom had found his father's body upstairs in this house. That investigation had made Tom Pasmore famous at the age of seventeen and left him with two fortunes, but it froze him into the life he still had. He lived in his father's house, he wore his father's clothes, he continued his father's work. He had drifted through the local branch of the University of Illinois, where he wrote a couple of monographs—one about the death of the eighteenth-century poet-forger Thomas Chatterton, the other about the Lindbergh kidnapping—that caused a stir in academic circles. He began law school at Harvard in the year that an English graduate student there was arrested for murder after being found unconscious in a Cambridge motel bedroom with the corpse of his girlfriend. Tom talked to people, thought about things, and presented the police with evidence that led to the freeing of the student and the arrest of a famous English professor. He refused the offer from the parents of the freed student to pay his tuition through the rest of law school. When reporters began following him to his classes, he dropped out and fled back home. He could only be what he was—he was too good at it to be anything else.

I think that was when he started drinking.

Given this history, he still looked surprisingly like the young man he had been: he had all his hair, and, unlike John Ransom, he had not put on a great deal of weight. Despite the old-fashioned, dandyish elegance of his clothes, Tom Pasmore looked more like a college professor than Ransom did. The badges of his drinking, the bags under his eyes, the slight puffiness of his cheeks, and his pallor might have been the result of nothing more than a few too many late nights in a library carrel.

He paused with his hands on the vodka bottle and a new glass, regarding me with his exhausted blue eyes, and I knew that he had seen exactly what was going through my mind.

"Feel like a drink?" He knew all about my history.

John Ransom looked at me speculatively.

"Any soft drink," I said.

"Ah," Tom said. "We'll have to go into the kitchen for that. Why don't you come with me, so you can see what I've got in the fridge?"

I followed him to the back of the room and the kitchen door. The kitchen too had been left as it had been in Lamont von Heilitz's time, with high wooden cupboards, double copper sinks, wainscoting and weak, inadequate lighting. The only modern addition was a gleaming white refrigerator nearly the size of a grand piano. A long length of open cupboards had been cut away to make room for it. Tom swung open the wide door of this object —it was like opening the door of a carriage.

The bottom shelf of the otherwise nearly empty refrigerator held at least a dozen cans each of Coke and Pepsi and a six-pack of club soda in bottles. I chose club soda. Tom dropped ice into a tall glass and poured in the club soda.

"Did you ask him about his wife's car?"

"He said he supposes that it'll turn up."

"What does he think happened to it?"

"It might have been stolen from in front of the St. Alwyn."

Tom pursed his lips together. "Sounds plausible."

"Did you know that his father owned the St. Alwyn?" I asked.

Tom raised his eyes to mine, and I saw the glimmer of something like a sparkle in them. "Did he, now?" he said, in such a way that I could not tell whether or not he had already known it. Before I was able to ask, a yelp of pain or astonishment came from the other room, accompanied by a thud and another yelp, this time clearly one of pain.

I laughed, for I suddenly knew exactly what had happened. "John finally saw your paintings," I said.

Tom lifted his eyebrows. He gestured ironically toward the door.

When we came out of the kitchen, John Ransom was standing on the other side of the table, looking at the paintings that hung on that wall. Ransom was bending down to rub his knee, and his mouth was open. He turned to stare at us. "Did you hurt yourself?" Tom asked.

"You own a Maurice Denis," John Ransom said, straightening up. "You own a Paul Ranson, for God's sakes!"

"You're interested in their work?"

"My God, that's a beautiful Bonnard up there," John said. He shook his head. "I'm just astounded. Yes, well, my wife and I own a lot of work by the Nabis, but we don't—" But we don't have anything as good as that, he had been going to say.

"I'm particularly fond of that one," said Tom. "You collect the Nabis?"

"It's so rare to see them in other people's houses…" For a moment Ransom gaped at the paintings. The Bonnard was a small oil painting of a nude woman drying her hair in a shaft of sunlight.

"I don't go into other people's houses very much," Tom said. He moved around to his chair, sat down, regarded the bottles and the ice bucket for a moment, and then poured himself a drink of another, less expensive brand of vodka than the one he had given John Ransom. His hand was completely steady. He took a small, businesslike sip. Then he smiled at me. I sat down across from him. A small spot of color like rouge appeared in both of his cheeks.

"I wonder if you've ever thought about selling anything," John said, and turned expectantly around.

"No, I've never thought about that," Tom said.

"Would you mind if I asked where you found some of this work?"

"I found them exactly where you found them," Tom said. "On the back wall of this room."

"How could you—?"

"I inherited them when Lamont von Heilitz left me this house in his will. I suppose he bought them in Paris, sometime in the twenties." For a second more he indulged John Ransom, who looked as if he wanted to pull out a magnifying glass and scrutinize the brush strokes on a four-foot-square Maurice Denis, and then he said, "I gathered that you were interested in talking about the Blue Rose murders."

Ransom's head snapped around.

"I read what the Ledger had to say about the assault on your wife. You must want to learn whatever you can about the earlier cases."

"Yes, absolutely," Ransom said, finally leaving the painting and walking a little tentatively back to his seat.

"Now that Lamont von Heilitz's name has come up, it may be as well to go into it."

Ransom slid onto the other couch. He cleared his throat, and when Tom said nothing, swallowed some of his vodka before beginning. "Did Mr. von Heilitz ever do any work on the Blue Rose murders?"

"It was a matter of timing," Tom said. He glanced at the glass he had set on the table, but did not reach for it. "He was busy with cases all over the country. And then, it seemed to come to a neat conclusion. I think it bothered him, though. Some of the pieces didn't seem to fit, and by the time I got to know him, he was just beginning to think about it again. And then I met someone at Eagle Lake who had been connected to the case."

He bent forward, lifted his glass and took another measured sip. I had never had the good luck to meet Lamont von Heilitz, but as I looked at Tom Pasmore, I had the uncanny feeling that I was seeing the old detective before me. John Ransom might have been seeing him, too, from the sudden tension in his posture.

"Who did you meet at Eagle Lake?" John asked. This was the privately owned resort in northern Wisconsin to which a select portion of Millhaven's society families went every summer.

"In order to tell you about this," Tom said, "I have to explain some private things about my family. I want to ask you not to repeat what I have to say."

John promised.

"Then let me tell you a story," Tom said.

12

"You probably remember meeting my mother now and then, at school functions."

"I remember your mother," Ransom said. "She was a beautiful woman."

"And fragile. I'm sure you remember that, too. My mother would spend whole days in her bedroom. Sometimes she'd cry for hours, and even she didn't know why, she'd just stay up there and weep. I used to get so angry with her for not being like anyone else's mother… Well, instead of getting angry, I should have been thinking about what could have made her be so helpless." Tom let that sink in for a moment, then reached for his glass again. His pale lips made a round aperture for the slightly larger sip of vodka. He hated having to tell this story, I saw. He was telling it because he would have hated my telling it even more, and because he thought that John Ransom ought to know it. He set the glass down and said, "I suppose you knew something about my grandfather."

John blinked. "Glendenning Upshaw? Of course. A powerful man." He hesitated. "Passed away in your senior year. Suicide, I remember."

Tom glanced at me, for we both knew the real circumstances of his grandfather's death. Then he looked back at John. "Yes, he was powerful. He made a fortune in Millhaven, and he had some political influence. He was a terrible man in almost every way, and he had a lot of secrets. But there was one secret he had to protect above all the others, because he would have been ruined if it ever came out. He killed three people to protect this secret, and he nearly succeeded in killing a fourth. His wife learned about it in 1923, and she drowned herself in Eagle Lake—it destroyed her."

Tom looked down at his hands in his lap. He raised his eyes to mine, briefly, and then looked at John Ransom. "My grandfather fired all his servants when my mother was about two. He never hired any more, even after his wife died. He couldn't afford to have anyone discover that he was raping his daughter."

"Raping?" Ransom sounded incredulous.

"Maybe he didn't have to use force, but he forced or coerced my mother into having sex with him from the time she was about two until she was fourteen."

"And in all that time, no one found out?"

Tom took another swallow, I think from relief that he had finally said it. "He went to great lengths to make sure that would never happen. For obvious reasons, my mother went to the doctor he had always used. In the early fifties, this doctor took on a young partner. Needless to say, the young doctor, Buzz Laing, did not get my mother as one of his patients."

"Okay, Buzz Laing," Ransom said. "Everybody always thought he was the fourth Blue Rose victim, but Tim told me that he was attacked by someone else. What did he do, find out about your mother?"

"Buzz took the office records home at night to build up backgrounds on his patients. One night he just grabbed the wrong file. What he saw there disturbed him, and he went back to his partner to discuss it. Years before, the older doctor had recorded all the classic signs of sexual abuse—vaginal bleeding, vaginal warts, change in personality, nightmares. Et cetera, et cetera. It was all there in the records."

When Tom set his glass down, it was empty. Ransom pushed his own glass toward him, and Tom added ice and vodka to it.

"So the older doctor called your grandfather," John Ransom said when Tom had taken his seat again.

"One night Buzz Laing came home and went upstairs, and a big man grabbed him from behind and almost cut his head off. He was left for dead, but he managed to stop the bleeding and call for help. The man who had tried to kill him had written blue rose on his bedroom wall, and everyone assumed that Laing was the fourth victim."

"But what about William Damrosch? He had been Laing's lover. That butcher, Stenmitz, had abused him. And the case ended when he killed himself."

"If the case ended, why are you sitting here listening to ancient history?"

"But how could your grandfather know about some detective's private life?"

"He had a close friend in the police department. A sort of a protege—they did each other a lot of good, over the years. This character made sure he knew everything that might be useful to him, and he shared whatever he found out with my grandfather. That was one of his functions."

"So this cop—"

"Told my grandfather about Damrosch's history. My grandfather, good old Glendenning Upshaw, saw how he could wrap everything up into one neat little package."

"He killed Damrosch, too?"

"I think he followed him home one night, waited three or four hours or however long he thought it would take Damrosch to get too drunk to fight back, and then just knocked on his door. Damrosch let him in, and my grandfather got his gun away from him and shot him in the head. Then he printed blue rose on a piece of paper and let himself out. Case closed."

Tom leaned back in the chair.

"And after that, the murders stopped."

"They stopped with the murder of Heinz Stenmitz."

Ransom considered this. "Why do you think Blue Rose stopped killing people for forty years? Or do you even think it's the same person who attacked my wife?"

"That's a possibility."

"Have you noticed that the new attacks took place on the same sites as the old ones?"

Tom nodded.

"So he's repeating himself, isn't he?"

"If it's the same man," Tom said.

"Why do you say that? What are you thinking?"

Tom Pasmore looked as if he were thinking about nothing but getting us out of his house. His head lolled against the back of the chair. I thought he wanted us to leave so that he could get to work. His day was just beginning. He surprised me by answering Ransom's question. "Well, I always thought it might have something to do with place."

"It has something to do with place, all right," Ransom said. He set down his empty glass. There was a band of red across his cheekbones. "It's his neighborhood. He kills where he lives."

"No one knows the identity of the man on Livermore Avenue, is that right?"

"Some homeless guy who thought he was going to get a handful of change."

Tom nodded in acknowledgment rather than agreement. "That's a possibility, too."

"Well, sure," John Ransom said.

Tom nodded absentmindedly.

"I mean, who goes unidentified these days? Everybody carries credit cards, cards for automatic teller machines, driver's licenses…"

"Yes, it makes sense, it makes sense," Tom said. He was still staring at some indeterminate point in the middle of the room.

Ransom shifted forward on the couch. He rocked his empty glass back and forth on the table for a moment. He raised his eyes to the paintings Lamont von Heilitz had bought in Paris sixty years ago. "You're not really retired, are you, Tom? Don't you still do a little work here and there, without telling anybody about it?"

Tom smiled—slowly, almost luxuriantly.

"You do," Ransom said, though that was not what I thought the strange inward smile meant.

"I don't know if you would call it work," Tom said. "Sometimes something catches my attention. I hear a little music."

"Don't you hear it now?"

Tom focused on him. "What are you asking me?"

"We've known each other a long time. When my wife is beaten and stabbed by a man who committed Millhaven's most notable unsolved murders, I would think you couldn't help but be interested."

"I was interested enough to invite you here."

"I'm asking you to work for me."

"I don't take clients," Tom said. "Sorry."

"I need your help." John Ransom leaned toward Tom with his hands out, separated by a distance roughly the length of a football. "You have a wonderful gift, and I want that gift working for me." Tom seemed hardly to be listening. "On top of everything else, I'm giving you the chance to learn the name of the Blue Rose murderer."

Tom slumped down in his chair so that his knees jutted out and his chin rested on his chest. He brought his joined hands beneath his lower lip and regarded Ransom with a steady speculation. He seemed more comfortable, more actually present than at any other time during the evening.

"Were you considering offering me some payment for this assistance?"

"Absolutely," John Ransom said. "If that's what you want."

"What sort of payment?"

Ransom looked flustered. He glanced at me as if asking for help and raised his hands. "Well, that's difficult to answer. Ten thousand dollars?"

"Ten thousand. For identifying the man who attacked your wife. For getting the man you call Blue Rose behind bars."

"It could be twenty thousand," John said. "It could even be thirty."

"I see." Tom pushed himself back into an upright position, placed his hands on the arms of his chair, and pushed himself up. "Well, I hope that what I told you will be of some help to you. It's been good to see you again, John."

I stood up, too. John Ransom stayed seated on the couch, looking back and forth between Tom and me. "That's it? Tom, we were talking about an offer. Please tell me you'll consider it."

"I'm afraid I'm not for hire," Tom said. "Not even for the splendid sum of thirty thousand dollars."

Ransom looked completely baffled. Reluctantly, he pushed himself up from the couch. "If thirty thousand isn't enough, tell me how much you want. I want you on my team."

"I'll do what I can," Tom said. He moved toward the maze of files and the front door.

Ransom stood his ground. "What does that mean?"

"I'll check in from time to time," Tom said.

Ransom shrugged and shoved his hands in his pockets. He and I went around opposite sides of the glass table toward Tom. For the first time I looked down at the stacks of books beside the bottles and the ice bucket and was surprised to see that, like the books on John Ransom's table, nearly all of them were about Vietnam. But they were not novels—most of the books on the table seemed to be military histories, written by retired officers. The US Infantry in Vietnam. Small Unit Actions in Vietnam, 1965-66. History of the Green Berets.

"I wanted you to know how I felt," Ransom was saying. "I had to give it a try."

"It was very flattering," Tom said. They were both working their way toward the door.

I caught up with them just as Ransom looked back over his shoulder to see the paintings on the long back wall. "And if you're ever interested in selling some of your art, I hope you'll speak to me first."

"Well," Tom said. He opened the door to scorching heat and the end of daylight. Above the roofs of the lakefront houses, the moon had already risen into a darkening sky in which a few shadowy clouds drifted in a wind too far up to do us any good.

"Thanks for your help," said John Ransom, holding out his hand. Tom took it, and Ransom raised one shoulder and grimaced, squeezing hard to show his gratitude.

"By the way," Tom said, and Ransom relaxed his grip. Tom pulled back his hand. "I wonder if you've been thinking about the possibility that the attack on your wife was actually directed at you?"

"I don't see what you mean." John Ransom probed me with a look, trying to see if I had made sense of this question. "You mean Blue Rose thought April might be me?"

"No." Tom smiled and leaned against the door frame. "Of course not." He looked across the street, then up and down, and finally at the sky. Outside, in the natural light, his skin looked like paper that had been crumpled, then smoothed out. "I just wondered if you could think of someone who might want to get at you through your wife. Someone who wanted to hurt you very badly."

"There isn't anyone like that," Ransom said.

Down the block, a small car turned the corner onto Eastern Shore Road, came some twenty feet in our direction, then swung over to the side of the road and parked. The driver did not leave the car.

"I don't think Blue Rose could know anything about April or me," said Ransom. "That's not how these guys work."

"I'm sure that's right," Tom said. "I hope everything turns out well for you, John. Good-bye, Tim." He gave me a little wave and waited for us to move down onto the walk. He waved again, smiling, and closed his door. It was like seeing him disappear into a fortress.

"What was that about?" Ransom asked.

"Let's get some dinner," I said.

13

John Ransom spent most of dinner complaining. Tom Pasmore was one of those geniuses who didn't seem too perceptive. Tom was a drunk who acted like the pope. Sat all day in that closed-up house and pounded down the vodka. Even back in school, Pasmore had been like the Invisible Man, never played football, hardly had any friends—this pretty girl, this knockout, Sarah Spence, long long legs, great body, turned out she had a kind of a thing for old Tom Pasmore, always wondered how the hell old Tom managed that…

I didn't tell Ransom that I thought Sarah Spence, now Sarah Youngblood, had been the driver of the car that had turned the corner and pulled discreetly up to the curb thirty feet from Tom Pasmore's house as we were leaving. I knew that she visited Tom, and I knew that he wished to keep her visits secret, but I knew nothing else about their relationship. I had the impression that they spent a lot of time talking to each other—Sarah Spence Youngblood was the only person in the whole of Millhaven who had free access to Tom Pasmore's house, and in those long evenings and nights after she slipped through his front door, after the bottles were opened and while the ice cubes settled in the brass bucket, I think he talked to her—I think she had become the person he most needed, maybe the only person he needed, because she was the person who knew most about him.

John Ransom and I were in Jimmy's, an old east-side restaurant on Berlin Avenue. Jimmy's was a nice wood-paneled place with comfortable banquettes and low lights and a long bar. It could have been a restaurant anywhere in Manhattan, where all of its tables would have been filled; because we were in Millhaven and it was nearly nine o'clock, we were nearly the only customers.

John Ransom ordered a Far Niente cabernet and made a ceremonial little fuss over tasting it.

Our food came, a sirloin for Ransom, shrimp scampi for me. He forgot Tom Pasmore and started talking about India and Mina's ashram. "This wonderful being was beautiful, eighteen years old, very modest, and she spoke in short plain sentences. Sometimes she cooked breakfast, and she cleaned her little rooms by herself, like a servant. But everyone around her realized that she had this extraordinary power—she had great wisdom. Mina put her hands on my soul and opened me up. I'll never stop being grateful, and I'll never forget what I learned from her." He chewed for a bit, swallowed, took a mouthful of wine. "By the time I was in graduate school, Mina had become well known. People began to understand that she represented one very pure version of mystic experience. Because I had studied with her, I had a certain authority. Everything unfolded from her—it was like having studied with a great scholar. And in fact, it was like that, but more profound."

"Haven't you ever been tempted to go back and see her again?"

"I can't," he said. "She was absolutely firm about that. I had to move on."

"How does it affect your life now?" I asked, really curious about what he would say.

"It's helping me make it through," he said.

He finished off the food on his plate, then looked at his watch. "Would you mind if I called the hospital? I ought to check in."

He signaled the waiter for the check, drank the last of the wine, and stood up. He pulled a handful of change from his pocket and went toward the pay telephone in a corridor at the back of the restaurant.

The waiter brought the check on a saucer, and I turned it over and read the amount and gave the waiter a credit card. Before the waiter returned with the charge slip, Ransom came charging back toward the table. He grabbed my arm. "This is—this is unbelievable. They think she might be coming out of her coma. Where's the check?"

"I gave him a card."

"You can't do that," he said. "Don't be crazy. I want to pay the thing and get over there."

"Go to the hospital, John. I'll walk back to your house and wait for you."

"Well, how much was it?" He dug in his trousers pockets for something, then rummaged in the pockets of his suit jacket.

"I already paid. Take off."

He gave me a look of real exasperation and fished a key from his jacket pocket and held it out without giving it to me. "That was an expensive bottle of wine. And my entree cost twice as much as yours." He looked at the key as if he had forgotten it, then handed it to me. "I still say you can't pay for this dinner."

"You get the next one," I said.

He was almost hopping in his eagerness to get to the hospital, but he saw the waiter coming toward us with the credit card slip and leaned over my shoulder to see the amount while I figured out the tip and signed. "You tip too much," he said. "That's on your head."

"Will you get away?" I said, and pushed him toward the door.

14

Apart from two UI students in T-shirts and shorts walking into a bar called Axel's Tuxedo, the sidewalks outside Jimmy's were empty. John Ransom was moving quickly away from me, swinging his arms and going north along Berlin Avenue to Shady Mount, and as he went from relative darkness into the bright lights beneath the Royal's marquee, his lightweight suit changed color, like a chameleon's hide.

In two or three seconds Ransom passed back into the darkness on the other side of the marquee. A car started up on the opposite side of the street. Ransom was about fifty feet away, still clearly in sight, moving quickly and steadily through the pools of yellow light cast by the street lamps.

I turned around to go up the block and saw a blue car move away from the curb across the street. For a second I stopped moving, aware that something had caught in my memory. Just before the car slid into the light spilling out from the Royal's marquee, I had it: the same car had pulled over to the curb on Eastern Shore Drive so that we would be out of sight when Sarah Spence Youngblood drove into Tom Pasmore's driveway. Then light from the movie theater fell on the car, and instead of Sarah Youngblood, a man with big shoulders and long gray hair pulled back into a ponytail sat behind the wheel. The light caught the dot of a gold earring in his left ear. It was the man I had almost bumped into at the hospital pay phones. He had followed us to Tom Pasmore's house, then to Jimmy's, and now he was following John to the hospital.

And since I had seen him first at the hospital, he must have followed us there, too. I turned to watch the blue car creep down the street.

The driver bumped along behind John. Whenever his target got too far in front of him, he nudged the car out into the left lane and slowly rolled forward another twenty or thirty feet before cutting back into the curb. If there had been much other traffic, he would not have been noticeable in any way.

I walked along behind him, stopping when he stopped. I could hear the soles of Ransom's shoes ticking against the sidewalks. The man in the blue car swung away from the curb and purred along the nearly empty street, tracking him like a predator.

Still hurrying along, Ransom was now only a block from the hospital, moving in and out of the circles of light on the sidewalk. The man in the blue car pulled out of an unlighted spot and rolled down the street. He surprised me by going right past Ransom. I thought he had seen me in his rearview mirror and swore at myself for not even getting his license number. Then he surprised me again and swung into the curb across the street from the hospital. I saw his head move as he found John Ransom in his side mirror.

I started walking faster.

Ransom turned into the narrow path between tall hedges that led up to the visitors' entrance at Shady Mount. The door of the blue car opened, and the driver got out. He pushed the door shut behind him and began to amble across the street. He was about my height, and he walked with a slightly tilted-back swagger. The apostrophe of gray hair jutted out from his head and fell against his back. His big shoulders swung, and the loose jacket of the suit billowed a little. I saw that his hips were surprisingly wide and that his belly was heavy and soft. The way he moved, his hips floating, made him look like he was swimming through the humid air.

I got my notebook out of my pocket and wrote down the number of his license plate. The blue car was a Lexus. He stepped up onto the sidewalk and turned into the path. He had given John Ransom enough time to get into an elevator. I walked down the block as quickly as I could, and by the time I turned into the path, he was just letting the visitors' door close behind him. I jogged up the path and came through the door while he was still floating along toward the elevator. I went across the nearly empty lobby and touched him on the shoulder.

He looked over his shoulder to see who had touched him. His face twitched with irritation, and he turned around to face me. "Something I can help you with?" he said. His voice was unadulterated Millhaven, fiat, choppy, and slightly nasal.

"Why are you following John Ransom?" I asked.

He sneered at me—only half of his face moved. "You must be outa your mind."

He started to turn away, but I caught his arm. "Who told you to follow Ransom?"

"And who the hell are you?"

I told him my name.

He looked around the lobby. Two of the clerks behind the long desk sat unnaturally still at their computer keyboards, pretending not to be eavesdropping. The man frowned and led me away from the elevators, toward the far side of the lobby and a row of empty chairs. Then he squared off in front of me and looked me up and down. He was trying to decide how to handle me.

"If you really want to help this guy Ransom, I think you should go back to wherever you came from," he said finally.

"Is that a threat?"

"You really don't understand," he said. "I got nothing to do with you." He wheeled around and started moving fast toward the visitors' entrance.

"Maybe one of these nervous clerks should call the police."

He whirled to confront me. His face was an unhealthy red. "You want police? Listen, you asshole, I'm with the police."

He reached into his back pocket and came out with a fat black wallet. He flipped it open to show me one of the little gold badges given to officers' wives and contributors to police causes.

"That's impressive," I said.

He stuck his broad forefinger into my chest, hard, and pushed his big face toward me. "You don't know what you're messing with, you stupid fuck."

Then he marched past me and out the door. I walked after him and watched him jam the wallet back into his pants on the way down the walk between the hedges. He moved across the street without bothering to look for other cars. He pulled open the door of the Lexus, bent down, and squeezed himself in. He slammed the door, started the car, and looked out of the open window to see me watching him. His face seemed to fill the entire space of the window. He twitched the car out into Berlin Avenue and roared off.

I walked off the sidewalk and watched his taillights diminish as he moved away. The brake lights flashed as he stopped at a traffic light two blocks down. The Lexus went another block north on Berlin Avenue and then turned left without bothering to signal. There was no other car on the street, and the night seemed huge and black.

I went back up between the hedges and into the hospital.

15

Before I got to the elevator, a police car pulled up into the ambulance bay outside the Emergency Room. Dazzling red and blue lights flashed like Morse code through the corridor. A few clerks leaned over the partition. A short balding man with an oversized nose got out of the car. The detective charged through the parting glass doors. A nurse skittered toward him, grinning and holding her hands clasped beneath her chin. The detective said something I couldn't hear, picked her up, and carried her along a few steps before whispering something into her ear and depositing her on the ground again just at the beginning of the corridor. Bent double, the nurse gasped and waved at his back before straightening up and smoothing out her uniform.

The detective held me with his eyes as he moved toward me.

I stopped and waited. As soon as he got into the lobby, he said, "Go on, get the elevator, don't just stand there." He waved me toward the buttons. The clerks who had been leaning over the partition to see what was going on smiled at him and then at each other. "You were going to call the elevator, weren't you?"

I nodded and went to the closed doors and pushed the up button.

The detective nodded at the clerks. His heavy face seemed immobile, but his eyes gleamed.

"You didn't call us, did you?"

"No," I said.

"We're all right, then."

I smiled, and the gleam died theatrically from his eye. He was a real comedian, with his saggy face and his unpressed suit. "Police should never go to hospitals." He had the kind of face that could express subtleties of feeling without seeming to move in any way. "Will you get inside that thing, please?" The elevator had opened up before us.

I got in and he followed me. I pushed the third floor button. The elevator ascended and stopped. He left the elevator, taking the turns that would lead him to April Ransom's room. I followed. We went past the nurses' station and rounded the bend of the circular corridor. A young uniformed officer came out of April's room.

"Well?" the detective said.

"This could actually happen," said the uniformed policeman. His nameplate read Thompson. "Who is this, sir?"

The detective looked back at me. "Who's this? I don't know who this is. Who are you?"

"I'm a friend of John Ransom's," I said.

"News gets around fast," the detective said. He led the way into April's room.

John Ransom and a doctor who looked like a college freshman were standing on the far side of the bed. Ransom looked slightly stunned. He looked up when he saw me—his eyes moved to the unkempt detective, then back to me. "Tim? What's going on?"

"What is going on?" asked the detective. "We got more people in here than the Marx Brothers. Didn't you call this guy?"

"No, I didn't call him," John said. "We had dinner together."

"I see," said the detective. "How is Mrs. Ransom doing, then?"

John looked vague and uncertain. "Ah, well…"

"Good, incisive," said the detective. "Doctor?"

"Mrs. Ransom is showing definite signs of improvement," said the doctor. His voice was a thick plank of dark brown wood.

"Does it look like the lady might actually be able to say something, or are we standing in the line at Lourdes here?"

"There are definite indications," said the doctor. The heavy wooden voice sounded as if it were coming from a much larger and older person who was standing behind him.

John looked wildly at me across the bed. "Tim, she might actually come out of it."

The detective came up behind him and insinuated himself at the bedside. "I'm Paul Fontaine, and the assault on your friend's wife is related to a homicide case I'm handling."

"Tim Underhill," I said.

He cocked his big oval head. "Well, Tim Underhill. I read one of your books. The Divided Man. It was crappy. It was ridiculous. I liked it."

"Thanks," I said.

"Now, what was it you came here to tell Mr. Ransom, unless it is something you would prefer to conceal from our efficient police department?"

I looked at him. "Will you write down a license number for me?"

"Thompson," he said, and the young policeman took out his pad.

I read the license number of the man's car from the page in my notebook. "It's a blue Lexus. The owner followed John and me all day long. When I stopped him in the lobby downstairs, he flashed a toy badge and said he was a policeman. He ran away just before you got here."

"Uh huh," said Fontaine. "That's interesting. I'll do something about that. Do you remember anything about this man? Anything distinguishing?"

"He's a gray-haired guy with a ponytail. Gold post earring in his left ear. About six-two and probably two hundred and thirty pounds. Big belly and wide hips, like a woman's hips. I think he was wearing an Armani suit."

"Oh, one of the Armani gang." He permitted himself to smile. He took the paper with the license number from Thompson and put it in his jacket pocket.

"Following me?" John asked.

"I saw him here this afternoon. He trailed us to Eastern Shore Drive, then down to Jimmy's. He was going to come up to this floor, but I stopped him in the lobby."

"That was a pity," Fontaine said. "Did this character really say that he was a policeman?"

I tried to remember. "I think he said that he was with the police."

Fontaine pursed his mouth. "Sort of like saying you're with the band."

"He showed me one of those little gold badges."

"I'll look into it." He turned away from me. "Thompson, visiting hours are over. We are going to wait around to see if Mrs. Ransom comes out of her coma and says anything useful. Mr. Underhill can wait in the lounge, if he likes."

Thompson gave me a sharp look and stepped back from the bed.

"John, I'll wait for you at home," I said.

He smiled weakly and pressed his wife's hand. Thompson came around the end of the bed and gestured almost apologetically toward the door.

Thompson followed me out of the door. We went past the nurses' station in silence. The two women behind the counter pretended unsuccessfully not to stare.

Thompson did not speak until we had almost reached the elevators. "I just wanted to say," he began, then looked around to make sure that nobody was listening. "Don't get Detective Fontaine wrong. He's crazy, that's all, but he's a great detective. In interrogation rooms, he's like a genius."

"A crazy genius," I said, and pushed the button.

"Yeah." Officer Thompson looked a bit embarrassed. He put his hands behind his back. "You know what we call him? He's called Fantastic Paul Fontaine. That's how good he is."

"Then he ought to be able to find out who owns that blue Lexus," I said.

"He'll find out," Thompson said. "But he might not tell you he found out."

16

I let myself into the house and groped for a light switch. A hot red dot on the answering machine blinked on and off from the telephone stand, signaling that calls had been recorded. The rest of the downstairs was a deep, velvet black. Central air conditioning made the interior of Ransom's house feel like a refrigerator. I found a switch just beside the frame and turned on a glass-and-bronze overhead lamp that looked as if it had been made to hold a candle. Then I closed the door. A switch next to the entrance to the living room turned on most of the lamps inside the room. I went in and collapsed onto a sofa.

Eventually I went up to the guest room. It looked like a room in a forty-dollar-a-night hotel. I hung my clothes in the closet beside the door. Then I brought two books back downstairs, The Nag Hammadi Library and a paperback Sue Grafton novel. I picked a chair facing the fireplace and opened the book of gnostic texts and read for a long time, waiting for John Ransom to bring good news home from the hospital.

Around eleven I decided to call New York and see if I could talk to a man named An Vinh, whom I had first met in Vietnam.

Six years ago, when my old friend Tina Pumo was killed, he left Saigon, his restaurant, to Vinh, who had been both chef and assistant manager. Vinh eventually gave half of the restaurant to Maggie Lah, Tina's old girlfriend, who had taken over its management while she began work on her Philosophy M.A. at NYU. We all lived above the restaurant, in various lofts.

I hadn't seen Vinh for two or three days, and I missed his cool unsentimental common sense.

It was eleven o'clock in Millhaven, midnight in New York. With any luck, Vinh would have turned the restaurant over to the staff and gone upstairs for an hour or so, until it was time to close up and balance the day's receipts. I went into the foyer and dialed Vinh's number on the telephone next to the blinking answering machine. After two rings, I got the clunk of another machine picking up and heard Vinh's terse message: Not home. Buzzing silence, and the chime of the tone. "Me," I said. "Having wonderful time, wish you were here. I'll try you downstairs."

Maggie Lah answered the telephone in the restaurant office and burst into laughter at the sound of my voice. "You couldn't take your hometown for even half a day? Why don't you come back here, where you belong?"

"I'll probably come back soon."

"You found everything out in one day?" Maggie laughed again. "You're better than Tom Pasmore, you're better than Lamont von Heilitz"

"I didn't find anything out," I said. "But April Ransom seems to be getting better."

"You can't come home until you find something out," she said. "Too humiliating. I suppose you want Vinh. He's standing right here, hold on."

In a second I heard Vinh's voice saying my name, and at once I felt more at peace with myself and the world I was in. I began telling him what had happened during the day, leaving nothing out—someone like Vinh is not upset by the appearance of a familiar ghost.

"Your sister is hungry," he said. "That's why she shows herself to you. Hungry. Bring her to the restaurant, we take care of that."

"I know what she wants, and it isn't food," I said, but his words had suddenly reminded me of John Ransom seated in the front seat of a muddy jeep.

"You in a circus," Vinh said. "Too old for the circus. When you were twenty-one, twenty-two, you love circuses. Now you completely different, you know. Better."

"You think so?" I asked, a little startled.

"Totally," Vinh said, using the approximate English that served him so well. "You don't need the circus anymore." He laughed. "I think you should go away from Millhaven. Nothing there for you anymore, that's for sure."

"What brought all this on?" I asked.

"Remember how you used to be? Loud and rough. Now you don't puff your chest out. Don't get high, go crazy, either."

I had that twinge of pain you feel when someone confronts you with the young idiot you used to be. "Well, I was a soldier then."

"You were a circus bear," Vinh said, and laughed. "Now you a soldier."

After a little more conversation, Vinh gave the phone to Maggie, and she gave me a little more trouble, and then we hung up. It was nearly twelve. I left one of the lights burning and took the Sue Grafton novel upstairs with me.

17

The front door slammed shut and woke me up. I sat up in an unfamiliar bed. What hotel was this, in what city? I could hear someone climbing the stairs. The sneering face of the gray-haired man with the ponytail swam onto my inner screen. I could identify him, and he was going to try to kill me as he had tried to kill April Ransom. The heavy footsteps reached the landing. I rolled off the bed. My mouth was dry and my head pounded. Adrenaline sparkled through my body. I stationed myself behind the door and braced myself.

The footsteps thudded toward my door and went past it without even hesitating. A second later, another door opened and closed.

And then I remembered where I was. I heard John Ransom groan as he fell onto his bed. I unpeeled myself from the wall.

It was a few minutes past eight o'clock in the morning.

I knocked on Ransom's bedroom door. A barely audible voice told me to come in.

I pushed open the door and stepped inside the dark room. It was more than three times the size of the guest room. Beyond the bed, on the opposite side of the room, a wall of mirrors on closet doors dimly reflected the opening door and my shadowy face. His suit jacket lay crumpled on the floor next to the bed. Ransom lay face-down across the mattress. Garish suspenders made a bright Y across his back.

"How is she doing?" I asked. "Is she out of the coma?"

Ransom rolled onto his side and blinked at me as if he were not quite sure who I was. He pursed his lips and exhaled, then pushed himself upright. "God, what a night." He bent forward and pulled off his soft brown wingtips. He tossed them toward the closet, and they thudded onto the carpet. "April's doing a lot better, but she's not out of the woods yet." He shrugged his shoulders from beneath his suspenders and let them droop to his sides.

Ransom smiled up at me, and I realized how tired he looked when he was not smiling. "But things look good, according to the doctor." He untied his tie and threw it toward a sofa. The tie fell short and fluttered onto the rose-colored carpet. "I'm going to get a few hours' sleep and then go back to Shady Mount." He grunted and pushed himself to the bottom end of the bed.

Two enormous paintings hung on facing walls, a male nude lying on lush grass, a female nude leaning forward against a tree on outstretched arms, both figures outlined in the Nabis manner. They were the most sensual Nabis paintings I had ever seen. John Ransom saw me looking back and forth from one to the other, and he cleared his throat as he unbuttoned his shirt.

"You like those?"

I nodded.

"April bought them from a local kid last year. I thought he was kind of a hustler." He threw his shirt onto the floor, dropped his keys, change, and bills onto an end table, unbuckled his belt, undid his trousers and pushed them down. He pulled his legs out of them, yanked off his socks, and half-scooted, half-crawled up the bed. A sour, sweaty odor came from his body. "I'm sorry, but I'm really out."

He began to scoot under the light blanket and the top sheet. Then he stopped moving, kneeling on the bed and holding up the covers. His belly bulged over the top of his boxer shorts. "You want to use the car? You could look around in Pigtown, see if it looks any—"

He flopped onto his sheets and smacked his hand on his forehead. "I'm sorry, Tim. I'm even more tired than I thought."

"It's okay," I said. "Even the people who live there call it Pigtown."

This was not strictly true—the people who lived in my old neighborhood had always resented the name—but it seemed to help him. "Good for them," he said. He groped for the pulled-back sheet and tugged it up. Then he rolled his head on the pillow and looked at me with bloodshot eyes. "White Pontiac."

"I guess I will take a look around," I said.

Ransom closed his eyes, shuddered, and fell asleep.

PART FOUR

WALTER DRAGONETTE

1

On the way to my old neighborhood, I realized that I wanted to go somewhere else first and turned Ransom's white Pontiac onto Redwing Avenue and drove past traces of the old Millhaven—neighborhood bars in places that were not real neighborhoods anymore. Blistering morning sun seemed to wish to push the low wood and stone buildings down into the baking sidewalks. Millhaven, my Millhaven, was thinning out all around me, disappearing into a generic midwestern cityscape.

I would have been less convinced of the disappearance of the old Millhaven if I had turned on the radio and heard Paul Fontaine and Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan announcing the arrest of the soon-to-be-notorious serial killer Walter Dragonette, the Meat Man, but I left the radio off and remained ignorant of his name for another few hours.

Two or three miles went by in a blur of traffic and concrete on the east-west expressway. Ahead of me, the enormous wedding cake of the baseball stadium grew larger and larger, and I turned off on the exit just before it. This early in the morning, only the groundskeepers' cars stood in the vast parking lot. Two blocks past the stadium, I turned in through the open gates of Pine Knoll Cemetery and parked near the gray stone guardhouse. When I got out, the heat struck me like a lion's breath. Rows of differently sized headstones stretched off behind the guard's office like a messy Arlington. Furry hemlock trees ranged along the far end. White gravel paths divided the perfect grass. Sprinklers whirled glittering sprays of water in the distance. Thirty feet away, an angular old man in a white shirt, black tie, black trousers, and black military hat puttered through the rows of headstones, picking up beer cans and candy wrappers left behind by teenagers who had climbed into the cemetery after the baseball game last night.

The graves I wanted lay in the older section of Pine Knoll, near the high stone wall that borders the left side of the cemetery. The three headstones stood in a row: Albert Hoover Underhill, Louise Shade Underhill, April Shade Underhill. The first two headstones, newer than April's, still looked new, bone-dry in the drenching sun. All three would have been warm to the touch. The grass was kept very short, and individual green blades glistened in the sun.

If I had anything to say to these graves, or they to me, now was the time to say it. I waited, standing in the sun, holding my hands before me. A few bright moments came forward from a swirling darkness: sitting safe and warm on the davenport with my mother, watching drivers wading through waist-high snow after abandoning their cars; April skipping rope on the sidewalk; lying in bed with a fever on St. Patrick's Day while my mother cleaned the house, singing along with the Irish songs on the radio. Even these were tinged with regret, pain, sorrow.

It was as if some terrible secret lay buried beneath the headstones, in the way a more vibrant, more real Millhaven burned and glowed beneath the surface of everything I saw.

2

Twenty minutes later, I turned south off the expressway at Goethals Street and continued south in the shadows of the cloverleaf overpasses. The seedy photography studios and failing dress shops gave way to the high blank walls of the tanneries and breweries. I caught the odor of hops and the other, darker odor that came from whatever the tanners did in the tanneries. Dented, hard-worked vans lined the street, and men on their breaks leaned against the dingy walls, smoking. In the partial light, their faces were the color of metal shavings.

Goethals Street reverted to the jarring old cobblestones, and I turned right at a corner where a topless bar was selling shots of brandy and beer chasers to a boisterous night-shift crowd. A block south I turned onto Livermore Avenue. The great concrete shadow of the viaduct floated away overhead, and the big corporate prisons vanished behind me. I was back in Pigtown.

The places where the big interlocking elms once stood had been filled with cement slabs. The sun fell flat and hard on the few people, most of them in their sixties and seventies, who toiled past the empty barber shops and barred liquor stores. My breath caught in my throat, and I slowed down to twenty-five, the speed limit. The avenue was almost as empty as the sidewalks, and so few cars had parked at the curb that the meter stands cast straight parallel shadows.

Everything seemed familiar and unfamiliar at once, as if I had often dreamed of but never seen this section of Livermore Avenue. Little frame houses like those on the side streets stood alongside tarpaper taverns and gas stations and diners. Once every couple of blocks, a big new grocery store or a bank with a drive-through window had replaced the old structures, but most of the buildings I had seen as a child wandering far from home still stood. For a moment, I felt like that child again, and each half-remembered building that I passed shone out at me. These buildings seemed uncomplicatedly beautiful, with their chipped paint and dirty brick, the unlighted neon signs in their streaky windows. I felt stripped of layers of skin. My hands began to tremble. I pulled over to the empty curb and waited for it to pass.

The sight of my family's graves had cracked my shell. The world trembled around me, about to blaze. The archaic story preserved in fragments about Orpheus and Lot's wife says—look back, lose everything.

3

The yellow crime scene ribbons closing off the end of the brick passage behind the St. Alwyn drooped as though melted by the sun. I leaned as far inside the little tunnel as I could without touching the tape. The place where my sister had been murdered was larger than I remembered it, about ten feet long and nine feet high at the top of the rounded arch. Wind, humidity, or the feet of policemen had gradually erased the chalked outline from the gritty concrete floor of the passage.

Then I looked up and saw the words. I stopped breathing. They had been printed across a row of bricks five feet above the ground in letters about a foot high. The words slanted slightly upward, as if the man writing them had been tilting to one side. The letters were black and thin, inky, and imperfections in the bricks made them look chewed, blue rose, another time capsule.

I backed away from the crime scene tape and turned around to face Livermore Avenue. Imaginary pain began to sing in my right leg. Fire traveled lightly through my bones, concentrating on all the little cracks and welds.

Then the child I had been, who lived within me and saw through my eyes, spoke the truth with wordless eloquence, as he always does.

A madman from my own childhood, a creature of darkness I had once glimpsed in the narrow alley at my back, had returned to take more lives. The man with the ponytail might have assaulted April Ransom and imitated his method, but the real Blue Rose was walking through the streets of Millhaven like a man inhabited by an awakened demon. John Ransom was right. The man who called himself Blue Rose was sitting over a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee in his kitchen, he was switching on his television to see if we were in for cooler weather, he was closing his front door to take a stroll through the sunlight.

Tom Pasmore had said something about place being the factor that linked the victims. Like his mentor, Tom Pasmore never told you everything he knew; he waited for you to catch up. I went up to the corner and crossed when the light changed, thinking about the places where Blue Rose had killed people forty years ago.

One outside the St. Alwyn, one inside. One across the street, outside the Idle Hour, the small white frame building directly in front of me. One, the butcher, two blocks away outside his shop. These four were the genuine Blue Rose murders. Standing at the side of the Idle Hour, I turned around to look across the street.

Three of the four original murders had happened on the doorstep of the St. Alwyn Hotel, if not inside.

I looked across the street at the old hotel, trying to put myself in the past. The St. Alwyn had been built at the beginning of the century, when the south side had thrived, and it still had traces of its original elegance. At the entrance on Widow Street, around the corner, broad marble steps led up to a huge dark wooden door with brass fittings. The name of the hotel was carved into a stone arch over the front door. From where I stood, I could see only the side of the hotel. Over the years it had darkened to a dirty gray. Nine rows of windows, most of them covered on the inside by brown shades, punctuated the stone. The St. Alwyn looked defeated, worn out by time. It had not looked very different forty years ago.

4

Our old house stood four doors up the block, a foursquare rectangular wooden building with two concrete steps up to the front door, windows on both sides of the door, two windows in line with these on the second floor, and a small patchy front lawn. It looked like a child's drawing. During my childhood, the top floor had been painted brown and the bottom one yellow. Later, my father had painted the entire house a sad, terrible shade of green, but the new owners had restored it to the original colors.

The old house hardly affected me. It was like a shell I had grown out of and left behind. I'd been more moved at Pine Knoll Cemetery—just driving into Pigtown on Livermore Avenue had affected me more deeply. I tried to let the deep currents, the currents that connect you to the rest of life, run through me, but I felt like a stone. What I remembered about the old house had to do with an old Underwood upright on a pine desk in a bedroom where blue roses climbed up the wallpaper, with onionskin paper and typewriter ribbons, and with telling stories to charm the darkness: a memory of frustration and concentration, and of time disappearing into a bright elastic eternity.

Then there was one more place I had to see, and I walked back down South Sixth, crossed Livermore, and turned south.

From two blocks away I saw the marquee sagging toward the sidewalk, and my heart moved in my chest. The Beldame Oriental had not survived the last three decades as well as the Royal. Sliding glass panels crusty with stains had once protected the letters that spelled out the titles of the films. Nothing remained of the ornate detail I thought I remembered.

Two narrow glass doors opened off the sidewalk. Behind them, before a set of black lacquered doors, the glass cubicle of the ticket booth was only dimly visible through the smudgy glass. Jagged pieces of cement and smoke-colored grit littered the black-and-white tile floor between the two sets of doors. The paltriness, the meanness of this distance—the stingy littleness of the entire theater—gave me a shock so deep that at the moment I was scarcely aware of it.

I stepped back and looked down the street for the real Beldame Oriental. Then I went up to the two narrow glass doors and tried either to push myself inside the old theater or simply to see better—I didn't know which. My reflection moved forward to meet me, and we touched.

An enormous block of feeling loosed itself from its secret moorings and moved up into my chest. My throat tightened and my breathing stopped. My eyes sparkled. I drew in a ragged breath, for a moment uncertain if I were going to stay on my feet. I could not even tell if it were joy or anguish. It was just naked feeling, straight from the heart of my childhood. It even tasted like childhood. I pushed myself away from the old theater and wobbled over the sidewalk to lean on a parking meter.

Warmth on my head and shoulders brought me a little way back to myself, and I blew my nose into my handkerchief and straightened up. I stuffed the handkerchief back into my pocket. I moved away from the parking meter and pressed my hands over my eyes.

Across the street, a little old man in a baggy double-breasted suit and a white T-shirt was staring at me. He turned to look at some friends inside a diner and made a circular motion at his temple with his forefinger.

I uttered some noise halfway between a sigh and a groan. It was no wonder that I had been afraid to come back to Millhaven, if things like this were going to happen to me. All that saved me from another spell was the sudden memory of what I'd read in the gnostic gospel while I waited for John to come back from the hospital: If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

I was trying to bring it forth—had been trying to bring it forth since I stood in front of the graves in Pine Knoll cemetery —but what in the world was it?

5

I nearly went straight back to the Pontiac and returned to John Ransom's house. At the back of my mind was the idea of booking a seat back to New York on the evening flight. I was no longer so sure I cared about what had happened more than forty years ago in, near, or because of the St. Alwyn Hotel. I had already written that book.

Either in spite of or because of the experience I'd just had, I suddenly felt hungry. Whatever I was going to do would have to wait until I ate some sort of breakfast. The neon scimitar in the restaurant window had not been turned on yet, but an open sign hung from the inside doorknob. I went into the hotel for a morning paper at the desk.

What I saw when I came into the lobby must have been almost exactly what Glenroy Breakstone and his piano player, the murdered James Treadwell, had known forty years ago; and what my father had seen, walking across the lobby to his elevator. Worn leather furniture and squat brass spittoons stood on an enormous, threadbare oriental rug. One low-wattage bulb burned behind a green glass shade next to a couch.

A small stack of the morning's Ledger lay on the desk. I picked one up and slid thirty-five cents toward the clerk. He was sitting down behind the desk with his chin in his hand, concentrating on the newspaper folded over his knees. He heard the sound of the coins and looked up at me. The whites of his eyes flared. "Oh! Sorry!" He glanced at the three copies that remained on the desk. "Got to get up early to get a paper today," he said, and reached for the coins. I looked at my watch. It was nine-thirty: the St. Alwyn got up late.

I carried the paper into Sinbad's Cavern. A few silent men ate their breakfasts at the bar, and two couples had taken the tables at the front of the room. A waitress in a dark blue dress that looked too sophisticated for early morning was standing at the end of the bar, talking with the young woman in a white shirt and black bow tie working behind it. The place was quiet as a library. I sat down in an empty booth and waved at the waitress until she grabbed a menu off the bar and hurried over. She was wearing high heels, and she looked a little flushed, but it might have been her makeup.

She put the menu before me. "I'm sorry, but it's so hard to concentrate today. I'll get you some coffee and be right back."

I opened the menu. The waitress went to a serving stand on the near side of the bar and came back with a glass pot of coffee. She filled my cup. "Nobody around here can believe it," she said. "Nobody."

"I'll believe anything today," I said.

She stared at me. She was about twenty-two, and all the makeup made her look like a startled clown. Then her face hardened, and she took her pad from a side pocket of the sleek blue suit. "Are you ready to order, sir?"

"One poached egg and whole wheat toast, please." She wrote it down wordlessly and walked back through the empty tables and brushed through the aluminum door to the kitchen.

I looked at the blond girl in the bow tie at the end of the bar and at the couples seated at the far tables. All of them had sections of the morning newspaper opened before them. Even the men eating on stools at the bar were reading the Ledger. The waitress emerged from the kitchen, stabbed me with a glance, and whispered something to the girl behind the bar.

The only customers not engrossed in their morning papers were four silent men arranged around a table across the room. The two men in suits affected an elaborate disengagement from the others, who might have been truck drivers, and from each other. All four ignored the cups before them. They had the air of people who had been waiting for a long time. The sense of mutual distrust was so strong that I wondered what had brought them together. One of the men in suits saw me looking at them and snapped his head sideways, his face stiff with discomfort.

My copy of the Ledger lay folded on the table in front of me. I pulled it toward me, turned it over, and momentarily forgot the men across the room and everything I had thought and experienced that morning as I took in the big banner headline. Beneath it was a color photograph of dozens of uniformed and plainclothes policemen standing on the front lawn of a small white frame house. One of the detectives was the joker I had met at the hospital the previous night, Paul Fontaine. Another, a tall commanding-looking man with an indented hairline, deep lines in his face, and a William Powell mustache, was identified as Fontaine's immediate superior, Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan. Almost as soon as I began to read the article to the left of the photograph, I saw that, among at least a dozen other unsuspected killings, the murder of the unknown man in the passage behind the St. Alwyn and the attack on April Ransom had been solved. A twenty-six-year-old clerk in the Glax Corporation's accounts department named Walter Dragonette had confessed. In fact, he had confessed to everything under the sun. If he had thought of it, he would have confessed to strangling the little princes in the tower.

The big headline read: HORROR IN NORTH SIDE HOME.

The story all but obliterated the rest of the news. Five million dollars' worth of cocaine had been seized from a fishing boat, an unnamed woman claimed that a Kennedy nephew had raped her in New York three years before being charged with rape in Palm Beach, and a state representative had been using military planes for personal trips: the rest of the paper, like every issue of the Ledger to come out for a week, dealt almost exclusively with the young man who, when surrounded and asked, "Is your name Walter Dragonette?" by a squad of policemen, had said, "Well, I guess you know."

"What do we know?" asked a policeman pointing a gun at his chest. "That I'm the Meat Man," answered Dragonette. He smiled a charming, self-deprecating smile. "Otherwise, I must have a lot of unpaid parking tickets."

The Ledger reporters had done an astonishing amount of work. They had managed to get the beginning of the saga of Walter Dragonette, his history and deeds, out onto the street only a couple of hours after they were discovered. The reporters had been busy, but so had Walter Dragonette.

Dragonette's little white house on North Twentieth Street, only a block south of the Arkham College campus, was in the midst of a "transitional" area, meaning that it had once been entirely white and was now 60 to 70 percent black. In this lay the roots of much of the troubles that came later. Dragonette's black neighbors claimed that when they had called the police to complain of the sounds of struggle, the thudding blows and late-night screaming they had heard coming from the little white house, the officers had never done anything more than drive down the street—sometimes they ridiculed the caller, saying that these sounds were hardly rare in their neighborhood, now, were they? If the caller wanted peace, why didn't she try moving out to Riverwood—it was always nice and quiet, out in Riverwood. When one male caller had persisted, the policeman who had answered the telephone delivered a long comic monologue which ended, "And how about you, Rastus, when you hit your old lady upside the head, do you want us charging there and giving you heat? And if we did, do you actually think she'd swear out a complaint?" Rastus, in this case a forty-five-year-old English teacher named Kenneth Johnson, heard cackling laughter in the background.

After someone was missing for three or four days, the police took notes and filled out forms, but generally declined to take matters further—the missing son or brother, the missing husband (especially the missing husband) would turn up sooner or later. Or they would not. What were the police supposed to do, make a house-to-house search for a dude who had decided to get a divorce without paperwork?

Under these circumstances, the neighborhood people had not even thought of calling the police to complain about the sounds of electrical saws and drills they had sometimes heard coming from the little white house, nor about the odors of rotting meat, sometimes of excrement, that drifted through its walls and windows.

They knew little of the presentable-looking young man who had lived in the house with his mother and now lived there alone. He was friendly. He looked intelligent and he wore suits to work. He had a shy little smile, and he was friendly in a distant way with everybody in the neighborhood. The older residents had known and respected his mother, Florence Dragonette, who had worked at Shady Mount Hospital for better than forty years.

Mrs. Dragonette, a widow in her early thirties with an iron-bound reputation and a tiny baby, had moved into the little white house when North Twentieth Street had been nearly as respectable as she was herself. She had raised that child by herself. She put the boy through school. Florence and her son had been a quiet, decent pair. Walter had never needed many friends—oh, he got into a little trouble now and then, but nothing like the other boys. He was shy and sensitive; he pretty much kept to himself. When you saw them eating dinner together on their regular Saturday nights at Huff's restaurant, you saw how polite he was to his mother, how friendly but not familiar to the waiters, just a perfect little gentleman. Florence Dragonette had died in her sleep three years ago, and Walter took care of all the details by himself: doctor, casket, cemetery plot, funeral service. You'd think he'd have been all broken up, but instead he kept his grief and sorrow on the inside and made sure everything was done just the way she would have wanted it. Some of the neighbors had come to the funeral, it was a neighborly thing to do, you didn't need an invitation, and there was Walter in a nice gray suit, shaking hands and smiling his little smile, holding all that grief inside him.

After that, Walter had come out of himself a little bit more. He went out at night and he brought people home with him. Sometimes the neighbors heard loud music coming from the house late at night, loud music and laughter, shouting, screaming—things they had never heard while his mother was alive.

"Oh, I'm really sorry," Walter would say the next day, standing next to the little blue Reliant his mother had driven, anxious to get to work, polite and charming and slightly shamefaced. "I didn't know it got so noisy in there. You know. I certainly don't want to disturb anybody."

Every now and then, late at night, he played his records and his television a little too loud. The neighbors smelled rotting meat and came up to him as he was watering his lawn and said—You put out rat poison, Walter? Seems like a rat or two musta died underneath your floorboards. And Walter held the hose carefully away from his neighbor and said, Oh, gosh, I'm really sorry about that smell. Every now and then that old freezer of ours just ups and dies and then everything in it goes off. I'd buy a new one in a minute, but I can't afford a new freezer right now.

6

Walter Dragonette's curtains had been open only two or three inches, a narrow gap, ordinarily nothing but entirely wide enough for two small boys, Akeem and Kwanza Johnson, to look through, giggling and jostling each other out of the way, fighting to press their faces up against the glass.

Akeem and Kwanza, nine and seven, lived across the street from Walter Dragonette. Their father was Kenneth Johnson, the English teacher who had been addressed as "Rastus" by a Millhaven policeman eighteen months before. The Johnson house had four bedrooms and a porch and a second floor, and Mr. Johnson had himself installed in his living room floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves, every spacious shelf of which was packed with books. Subsidiary piles of books stood on the coffee table, on the night-stands and end tables, on the floor, and even on top of the twelve-inch black-and-white television that was the only set Mr. Johnson had in his house.

Akeem and Kwanza Johnson were much more interested in television than in books. They hated the old black-and-white set in their kitchen. They wanted to watch TV in the living room, the way their friends did, and they wanted to watch it in color on a big screen. Akeem and Kwanza would have settled for a twenty-one-inch set, as long as it was color, but what they really wanted, what they dreamed of persuading their father to buy, was something roughly the size of the oak bookshelves. And they knew that their neighbor across the street owned such a television set. They had been hearing him watch late-night horror movies for years, and they knew Walter's TV had to be dope. Walter's TV set was so great their father called up the police twice to complain about it. Walter's TV set was so bad that you could hear it all the way across the street.

On the night before the morning when Walter Dragonette greeted fifteen armed policemen by telling them that he was the Meat Man, nine-year-old Akeem Johnson had come awake to hear the faint but unmistakable sounds of a grade-A horror movie coming from the speakers of the wonderful television set across the street. His father never let him go to horror movies and did not permit them on the television set at home, but a friend of Akeem's had shown him videotapes of Jason in his hockey mask and Freddy Krueger in his hat, and he knew what horror movies sounded like. What he was listening to, faint as it was, made Jason and Freddy sound like wimps. It had to be one of those movies he had heard about but never seen, like The Evil Dead or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where folks got hunted down and cut up, man, right there in your face. Akeem heard a man howling like a dog, sobbing like a woman, roaring, screeching, wailing…

He got out of bed and walked to his window and looked across the street. Instead of meeting as they usually did, Walter's curtains showed a narrow gap filled with yellow light. Akeem realized that if he got out of bed and sneaked out of the house, he could hide beneath the window, peek in, and actually watch the movie playing on Walter's big television. He also realized that he was not going to do that. What he could do, however, was wait for Walter to leave his house in the morning, and then just walk across the street and take a look inside that window and at least see if Walter's TV was the beast it sounded like.

The faint sounds from across the street came to an end as the movie shifted to one of the boring parts that always followed the excitement.

In the morning, Akeem went down to the kitchen and poured milk over his Cocoa Puffs and parked himself at the kitchen table where he could watch Walter's house through the window. About ten minutes later, his little brother dragged in, rubbing his eyes and complaining about a bad dream. After Akeem told him what he was doing, Kwanza got his own bowl of cereal and sat beside him at the table, and the two of them watched the house across the street like a pair of burglars.

Walter burst through his front door just after seven. He was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, so wherever he was going, he would have to come back to change clothes before he went to work. Walter hustled down his walk, looked over both his shoulders as he unlocked his car, got in, and zoomed off.

"Okay?" Akeem asked.

"Yo," said his brother.

They slid out of their chairs and went to the front door. Akeem quietly unlocked and opened it. They stepped outside, and Akeem gently let the door slide back into the frame without quite closing. The brothers walked over their front lawn. The dew pasted grass shavings to their bare feet. They felt funny and exposed when they stepped onto Walter's front yard and ran up to the window hunched over. Akeem reached the window first, but Kwanza butted him sideways, like a little goat, before he got a good look in through the curtains.

"You take your turn," Akeem said. "Yo, this was my idea."

"Me too, I wanna look too," Kwanza complained, and slipped in front of him when he bent his face again to the uncovered stripe of glass. Both boys peered in to see the enormous television set.

At first, it looked as though Walter had been painting his living room. Most of the furniture had been pushed against the far wall, and newspapers covered the floor. "Akeem," Kwanza said.

"Where is that thing?" Akeem said. "I know it's here, no way it ain't here."

"Akeem," his brother said again, in exactly the same tone of voice.

Akeem looked down at the floor where his brother was pointing, and he too saw the corpse of a large, heavy black man stretched out in a swamp of bloody newspapers. The man's head lay some feet away, rolled on its side so that it seemed to be contemplating the broken hacksaw blade stuck halfway through what had been its left shoulder. The broad back, about the color of the Cocoa Puffs dissolving into mush back on the Johnsons' kitchen table, stared up at them. Deep cuts punctured it, and sections of skin had been sliced off, leaving red horizontal gashes.

A few houses away, a car started up, and both boys screamed, thinking that Walter had come back and caught them. Akeem was the first to be able to move, and he stepped back and put his right arm around his brother's waist and pulled him away from Walter's house.

"Akeem, it wasn't no movie," Kwanza said.

Too shocked and frightened to speak, Akeem grimaced at him, frantically gesturing that Kwanza should start running for home right now. "Damn," Kwanza said, and sprinted away like a jackrabbit. In seconds they were pounding up their own lawn toward the front door.

Akeem yanked the door open, and the boys tumbled inside.

"It wasn't no movie," Kwanza said. "It wasn't—"

Akeem ran up the stairs toward his parents' bedroom.

He woke up his father, shaking his shoulder and babbling about a dead man with his head cut off across the street, this guy was all dead, his head was all cut off, blood was all around…

Kenneth Johnson told his wife to stop screaming at the kid. "You saw a dead man in the house across the street? Mr. Dragonette's house?"

Akeem nodded. He had begun to cry, and his brother sidled into the bedroom to witness this astonishing spectacle.

"And you saw it, too?"

Kwanza nodded. "It wasn't no movie."

His wife sat up straight and grabbed Akeem and pulled him into her chest. She gave her husband a warning look.

"Don't worry, I'm not going over there," he said. "I'm calling the police. We'll see what happens this time."

Two policemen pulled up in a black-and-white about ten minutes later. One of them marched up to the Johnson house and rang the bell, and the other sauntered across the lawn and peered through the gap in the curtains. Just as Kenneth Johnson opened the door, the second policeman stepped away from the window with a stunned expression on his face. "I think your friend would like you to join him," Johnson said to the man on his doorstep.

Before another twenty minutes had passed, six unmarked police cars had been installed up and down the street. The original black-and-white and one other stood parked around the corners at both ends of the block. While they all waited, a young policewoman with a soothing voice talked to Kwanza and Akeem in the living room. Kenneth Johnson sat on one side of the boys, his wife on the other.

"You've heard loud noises from the Dragonette house on other occasions in the past?"

Kwanza and Akeem nodded, and their father said, "We all heard those noises, and a couple of times, I called to complain. Don't you keep a record of complaints down at the station?"

She smiled at him and said in her soothing voice, "In all justice, Mr. Johnson, the situation we have now is a good deal more serious than a loud argument."

Johnson frowned until the smile wilted. "I don't know for sure, but I'm willing to bet that Walter over there seldom stopped at the argument stage."

It took the policewoman a moment to understand this remark. When she did understand it, she shook her head. "This is Millhaven, Mr. Johnson."

"Apparently it is." He paused to consider something. "You know, I wonder if that fellow over there even owns a freezer."

This irrelevance was too much for the young woman. She stood up from where she had been kneeling in front of the two boys and patted Kwanza's head before closing her notebook and tucking her pen into her pocket.

Johnson said, "I can't help it, I'm sorry for you people."

"This is Millhaven," the policewoman repeated. "If you'll permit me, I want to suggest that your boys have already been through enough for one day. In situations of this kind, counseling is always recommended, and I can provide you with the names of—"

"My God," Johnson said. "You still don't get it."

The policewoman said, "Thank you for your cooperation," and walked away to stand in front of the Johnsons' living room window and wait for Walter Dragonette to come back home.

7

An hour and a half before Walter Dragonette was due at his desk in the accounts department, the old blue Reliant appeared at the end of the block. Other cars up and down the street began backing out of driveways and easing away from the curb. The lurking patrol cars swung into the street at either end and slowly moved toward the white house in the middle of the block. Walter Dragonette drove blithely down his street and pulled up in front of his house. He opened his door and put a foot on the concrete.

The two squad cars sped forward and spun sideways, their tires squealing, to block the ends of the street. The unmarked cars raced up to the Reliant, and in an instant the street was filled with policemen pointing guns at the young man getting out of his car.

Kenneth Johnson, who described all of this to me, including what his children had done to bring such enveloping turmoil upon the Millhaven police department, told me later that when Walter Dragonette got out of his car and faced all those cops and guns, he gave them his secret smile.

The police ordered him away from his car, and he cheerfully moved. They spoke, and Walter told them that he was the Meat Man. Yes, of course he would come down to the station with them. Well, certainly he would put down the paper bag in his hand. What was in the bag? Well, the only thing in the bag was the hacksaw blade he had just purchased. That was why he had left the house—to get a new hacksaw blade. Paul Fontaine, who still knew nothing about what had happened to April Ransom since he and John Ransom had left her bedside that morning, took a card from his jacket pocket and read Dragonette his rights under the Miranda decision. Walter Dragonette eagerly nodded that yes, he understood all of that. He'd want a lawyer, that was for sure, but he didn't mind talking now. It was time to talk, wouldn't the detective agree?

Detective Fontaine certainly did think that it was time to talk. And would Mr. Dragonette permit the police to search his house?

The Meat Man took his eyes from Detective Fontaine's interesting face to smile and nod at Akeem and Kwanza, who were looking at him through their living room window. "Oh, by all means—I mean, they really should look through the place, really they should." Then he looked back at Detective Fontaine. "Are they prepared for what they're going to find?"

"What are they going to find, Mr. Dragonette?" asked Sergeant Hogan.

"My people," the Meat Man said. "Why else would you be here?"

Hogan asked, "Which people are we talking about, Walter?"

"If you don't know about my people—" He licked his lips, and twisted his head to look over his shoulder to see his little white house. "If you don't know about them, what made you come here?" His eyes moved from Fontaine to Hogan and back again. They did not answer him. He put his hand over his mouth and giggled. "Well, whoever goes into my house is in for a little surprise."

8

I never heard the waitress put the plate on the table. Eventually I realized that I could smell toast, looked up, and saw breakfast steaming beside my right elbow. I moved the plate in front of me and ate while I read about what the first policemen inside Walter Dragonette's house had found there.

First, of course, had been Alfonzo Dakins, whose shoulder joint had broken Dragonette's hacksaw blade and forced him into an early morning trip to the hardware store. Alfonzo Dakins had met Walter Dragonette in a gay bar called The Roost, accompanied him home, accepted a beer treated with a substantial quantity of Halcion, posed for a nude Polaroid photograph, and passed out. He had partially reawakened to find Walter's hands around his neck. The struggle that followed this discovery had awakened Akeem Johnson. If Dakins had not been woozy with Halcion and alcohol, he would easily have killed Dragonette, but the smaller man managed to hit him with a beer bottle and to snap handcuffs on him while he recovered.

Roaring, Dakins had gotten back on his feet with his hands cuffed in front of him, and Dragonette stabbed him in the back a couple of times to slow him down. Then he stabbed him in the neck. Dakins had chased him into the kitchen, and Walter banged him on the head with a cast-iron frying pan. Dakins dropped to his knees, and Walter slammed the heavy pan against the side of his head and knocked him out more successfully than the first time.

He covered the living room floor with old newspapers and dragged Dakins out of the kitchen. Three more layers of papers went around and beneath his body. Then Walter had removed the trousers, underwear, and socks he had been wearing, mounted Dakins's huge chest, and finished the job of strangling him.

He had photographed Dakins once more.

Then he had "punished" Dakins for giving him so much unnecessary trouble and stabbed him half a dozen times in the back. When he felt that Dakins had been punished enough, he had anal intercourse with his dead body. Afterward, he went into the kitchen for his hacksaw and cut off Dakins's big bowling-ball head. Then the blade had broken.

On the top shelf of Dragonette's refrigerator, the police discovered four other severed heads, two of black males, one of a white male, and one of a white female who appeared to be in her early teens. The second shelf contained an unopened loaf of Branola bread, half a pound of ground chuck in a supermarket wrapper, a squeezable plastic container of French's mustard, and a six-pack of Pforzheimer beer. On the third shelf down stood two large sealed jugs each containing two severed penises, a human heart on a white china plate, and a human liver wrapped in Clingfilm. In the vegetable crisper on the right side of the refrigerator were a moldering head of iceberg lettuce, an opened bag of carrots, and three withered tomatoes. In the left crisper, police found two human hands, one partially stripped of its flesh.

Human Hand, on the list of Les Viandes.

On a shelf in the hall closet, in a row with two felt hats, one gray, one brown, were three skulls that had been completely cleaned of flesh. Two topcoats, brown and gray, a red-and-blue down jacket, and a brown leather jacket, hung from hangers; beneath the two jackets was a sixty-seven-gallon metal drum with three headless torsos floating in a dark liquid at first thought to be acid but later identified as tap water. Beside the drum was a spray can of Lysol disinfectant and two bottles of liquid bleach. When the big drum had been removed from the closet, a smaller drum was discovered behind it. Inside the second drum, two penises, five hands, and one foot had been kept in a liquid later determined to be tap water, vodka, rubbing alcohol, and pickle juice.

A row of skulls stood as bookends and decorations on a long shelf in the living room—they had been meticulously cleaned and painted with a gray lacquer that made them look artificial, like Halloween jokes. (The books that separated the skulls, chiefly cookbooks and manuals of etiquette, had belonged to Florence Dragonette.)

A long freezer in excellent working condition stood against one wall of the living room. When the policemen opened the freezer, they discovered six more heads, three male and three female, each of these encased in a large food-storage bag, two pairs of male human legs without feet, a freezer bag of entrails labeled STUDY, a large quantity of pickles that had been drained and dumped into a brown paper bag, two pounds of ground round, and the hand of a preteen female, minus three fingers. To the left of the freezer were an electric drill, an electrical saw, a box of baking soda, and a stainless-steel carving knife.

A manila envelope on top of a dresser in the bedroom contained hundreds of Polaroid photographs of bodies before death, after death, and after dismemberment. Behind the house, police found a number of black plastic garbage sacks filled with bones and rotting flesh. One policeman described Dragonette's backyard as a "trash dump." Bones and bone fragments littered the uncut grass, along with ripped clothes, old magazines, some discarded eyeglasses and one partial upper plate, and broken pieces of electrical equipment.

The initial assessment of the investigating officers was that the remains of at least nineteen people, and possibly as many as another five, had been located in Dragonette's house. An Associated Press reporter made the obvious point that this made the Dragonette case—the "Meat Man" case—among the worst instances of multiple murder in American history, and, to prove the point, listed some of the competition:

1980s: about fifty murdered women, most of them prostitutes, found near the Green River in the Seattle-Tacoma area

1978: the bodies of thirty-three young men and boys found at John Wayne Gacy's house in suburban Chicago

1970s: twenty-six tortured and murdered youths discovered in the Houston area, and Elmer Wayne Henley convicted in six of the deaths

1971: the bodies of twenty-five farmworkers killed by Juan Corona discovered in California

The reporter went on to list James Huberty, who killed twenty-one people in a McDonald's; Charles Whitman, who killed sixteen people by sniping from a tower in Texas; George Banks, the murderer of twelve people in Pennsylvania; and several others, including Howard Unruh of Camden, New Jersey, who in 1948 shot and killed thirteen people in the space of twelve minutes and said, "I'd have killed a thousand if I'd had enough bullets." In the heat of his research, the AP reporter forgot to mention Ted Bundy and Henry Lee Lucas, both of whom were responsible for more deaths than any of these; and it is possible that he had never heard of Ed Gein, with whom Walter Dragonette had several things in common, although Walter Dragonette had certainly never heard of him.

A college professor in Boston who had written a book about mass murderers and serial killers said—presumably via telephone to the offices of the Ledger—that serial killers "tended to be either of the disorganized or the organized type," and that Walter Dragonette seemed to him "a perfect example of the disorganized type." Disorganized serial killers, said the professor, acted on impulse, were usually white male loners in their thirties with blue-collar jobs and a history of failed relationships. (Walter Dragonette, in spite of the professor's confidence, had a white-collar job and had known exactly one supremely successful relationship in all his life, that with his mother.) Disorganized serial killers liked to keep the evidence around the house. They were easier to catch than the organized killers, who chose their victims carefully and covered their tracks.

And how, the Ledger asked, could anyone do what Walter Dragonette had done? How could Lizzy Borden have done it? How could Jack the Ripper have done it? And how, for the Ledger writers did remember this name, could Ed Gein have dug those women out of their graves and skinned their bodies? If the professor in Boston could not answer this question—for wasn't this question the essential question?—then the Ledger needed more experts. It had no trouble finding them.

A psychologist at a state mental hospital in Chicago offered the suggestion that "none of these people will win any mental health awards," and that they cut up their victims' bodies to conceal what they had done. He blamed "violent pornography" for their actions.

A criminologist in San Francisco who had written a "true crime" book about a serial killer in California blamed the anonymity of modern life. A Millhaven priest blamed the loss of traditional religious values. A University of Chicago sociologist blamed the disappearance of the traditional family. The clinical director of the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital told the Ledger that serial killers "confused sex and aggression." The head of a crime task force in New York blamed the relaxation of sexual mores which had made homosexuality and "perversion in general" more acceptable. Someone blamed sunspots, and someone else blamed "the climate of economic despair that is all around us now."

A woman holding her two-year-old daughter on her shoulders in the crowd that had already collected in front of the white house on North Twentieth Street thought that Walter Dragonette did it because he wanted to be famous, and that the plan was going to work out just fine: "Well, take me, I came down here, didn't I? This is history, right here. In six months, everything you see in front of you is going to be a miniseries on Channel Two."

These were the Ledger's answers to the question of how anyone could do the things Walter Dragonette had confessed to doing.

One article claimed that "the eyes of the world, from Akron to Australia, from Boise to Britain, from Cleveland to Canton" had "turned toward a white, one-story house in Millhaven." Neighbors were talking to reporters from the BBC and news teams from three networks. One Philadelphia reporter was heard asking a resident of North Twentieth Street to describe what he called "the stench of death." And here came the answer, written down by two reporters: "A real bad stink, real bad."

Another article reported that 961 men, women, and children were missing in the state of Illinois. A spokesman for the FBI said that if you were over twenty-one, you had the right to be missing.

Arkham College officials warned their students to be careful about crime on campus, although students interviewed felt little concern for their own safety. "It's just too strange to worry about," said Shelley Manigault of Ladysmith, Wisconsin. "To me, it's a lot more frightening to think about the position of women in society than about what one twisted white guy does when he's inside his house."

The Ledger reported that Walter Dragonette had been friendless in high school, where his grades had varied from A to F. Classmates recalled that his sense of humor had been "weird." He had been fascinated with the Blue Rose murders and had once run for class treasurer under the name Blue Rose, earning a schoolwide total of two votes. In the sixth grade, he had collected the corpses of small animals from the streets and empty lots and experimented with ways of cleaning their skeletons. In the eighth grade, he had privately exhibited in a plush-lined cigar box an object he had claimed to be the skeletal hand of a five-year-old boy. Those who had seen the object declared that it had been a monkey's paw. For several days on end, he had pretended to be blind, coming to school with dark glasses and a white cane, and once he had nearly managed to persuade his homeroom teacher that he had amnesia. Twice during the time that he attended Carl Sandburg High School, Dragonette had used chalk to draw the outlines of bodies on the floor of the gymnasium. He told Detective Fontaine and Sergeant Hogan that the outlines were of the bodies of people he had actually killed—killed while he was in high school.

For Dragonette claimed to have killed a small child named Wesley Drum in 1979, after having sex with him in a vacant lot. He said that when he was a sophomore at Carl Sandburg, the year he ran for class treasurer under the name Blue Rose, he had killed a woman who picked him up while he was hitchhiking—stabbed her with an army surplus knife while she stopped at a red light. He could not remember her name, but he knew that he had stuck her right in the chest, and then stuck her a couple more times while she was still getting used to the idea. He grabbed her purse and jumped out of the car a couple of seconds after the light changed. He was sorry that he had stolen the lady's purse, and he wanted it known that he would be happy to return the $14.78 it had contained to her family, if someone would give him the right name and address.

Both of these stories matched unsolved murders in Millhaven. Five-year-old Wesley Drum had been found dead and mutilated (though still in possession of both hands) in an empty lot behind Arkham College in 1979, and in 1980, Walter Dragonette's fifteenth year, Annette Bulmer, a thirty-four-year-old mother of two dying from numerous deep stab wounds, had been pulled from a stalled car at the intersection of Twelfth Street and Arkham Boulevard.

Walter readily gave the police what the Ledger called "assistance" on "several prominent recent cases."

I continued to leaf through the paper as I finished my breakfast, realizing that now I was free to do whatever I liked. April Ransom was recovering, and her confessed attacker had been arrested. A sick little monster who called himself the Meat Man had diverted himself from his amusements (or whatever it was when you killed people and had sex with their corpses) long enough to reenact the Blue Rose murders. No retired soldier in his sixties, back from Korea and Germany, patrolled Livermore Avenue in search of fresh victims: no murderer's rose garden grew in the backyard of a well-kept little house in Pigtown. The past was still buried with the rest of my family in Pine Knoll.

I folded the paper and waved to the waitress. When she came over to my booth, I told her that I could see why she'd been having trouble concentrating on her work this morning.

"Well, yeah," she said, warming up. "Things like that don't happen in Millhaven—they're not supposed to."

9

The machine answered when I called Ransom from the St. Alwyn's lobby, so he was either still asleep or already back at the hospital.

I walked back to the Pontiac, made a U-turn on Livermore Avenue, and drove back beneath the viaduct toward Shady Mount.

Because I didn't want to be bothered with a meter, I turned into one of the side streets on the other side of Berlin Avenue and parked in front of a small redbrick house. A big flag hung from an upstairs window and a yellow ribbon had been tied into a grandiose bow on the front door. I walked across the empty street in the middle of the block, wondering if April Ransom had already opened her eyes and asked what had happened to her.

It was my last afternoon in Millhaven, I realized.

For a moment, opening the visitors' door, I wondered what name I would give to my unfinished book; and then, for the first time in a long dry time, the book jumped into life within me—I wanted to write a chapter about Charlie Carpenter's childhood. It would be a lengthy tour of hell. For the first time in months, I saw my characters in color and three dimensions, breathing city-flavored air and scheming for the things they thought they needed.

These fantasies occupied me pleasantly as I waited for, and then rode up in, the elevator. I barely noticed the two policemen who stepped inside the elevator behind me. The radios on their belts crackled as we ascended and stepped out of the elevator on the third floor. It was like having an escort. As burly and contained as a pair of Clydesdales, the two policemen moved around me and then turned the corner toward the nurses' station.

I rounded the corner a few seconds behind them. The policemen turned right at the nurses' station and went toward April Ransom's room through a surprising number of people. Uniformed police, plainclothes detectives, and what looked like a few civilians formed a disorganized crowd that extended from the station all the way around the curve to Mrs. Ransom's room. The scene reminded me uncomfortably of the photograph of Walter Dragonette's front lawn. All these men seemed to be talking to one another in little groups. An air of exhaustion and frustration, distinct as cigar smoke, hung over all of them.

One or two cops glanced at me as I came nearer to the nurses' station. Officer Mangelotti was seated in a wheelchair before the counter. A white bandage stained red over his ear wrapped around his head, leaving his face so exposed it looked peeled. A man with a monkish hairline knelt in front of the wheelchair, speaking quietly. Mangelotti looked up and saw me. The man in front of him stood up and turned around to show me his saggy clown's face and drooping nose. It was Detective Fontaine.

His face twitched in a sorrowful smile. "Someone I know wants to meet you," he said. Plummy pouches hung underneath his eyes.

A uniformed policeman nearly seven feet tall moved toward me out of the corridor leading to April Ransom's room. "Sir, unless you are on the medical staff of this hospital you will have to vacate this area." He began shooing me away, blocking me from seeing whatever was going on behind him. "Immediately, sir."

"Leave him be, Sonny," Fontaine said.

The enormous cop turned to make sure he had heard correctly. It was like watching the movement of a large blue tree. Behind him two men pushed a gurney out of one of the rooms along the curve of the corridor. A body covered with a white sheet lay on the gurney. Three other policemen, two men in white coats, and a mustached man in a lightweight blue pinstriped suit followed the gurney out of the room. The last man looked familiar. Before the blue tree cut off my view, I caught a glimpse of Eliza Morgan leaning against the inner wall of the circular corridor. She moved away from the wall as the men pushed the gurney past her.

Paul Fontaine came up beside the big officer. He looked like the other man's monkey. "Leave us alone, Sonny."

The big cop cleared his throat with a noise that sounded like a drain unblocking. He said, "Yes, sir," and walked away.

"I told you police should never go to hospitals, didn't I?" His eyes looked poached above the purple bags, and I remembered that he had been up all night long, first here, then at North Twentieth Street, and then back here again. "Do you know what happened?" A kind of animation moved in his face, but at a level beneath the skin, so that whatever he was feeling showed only as a momentary flash in his sagging eyes.

"I thought I'd find John Ransom here."

"We got him at home. I thought you were staying with him."

"My God," I said. "Tell me what happened."

His eyes widened, and his face went still. "You don't know?" The men in white coats pushed the gurney past us, and three policemen came along behind them. Fontaine and I looked down at the small covered body. I remembered Eliza Morgan leaning against the wall, and suddenly I understood whose body it was. For a moment my stomach turned gray—it felt as though everything from the bottom of my rib cage to my bowels had gone flat and dead, mushy.

"Somebody—?" I tried again. "Somebody killed April Ransom?"

Fontaine nodded. "Have you seen the newspaper this morning? Watch any morning news? Listen to the radio?"

"I read the paper," I said. "I know about that man, ah, Walter Dragonette. You arrested him."

"We arrested him," Fontaine said. He made it sound like a sad joke. "We did. We just didn't do it soon enough."

"But he confessed to attacking Mrs. Ransom. In the Ledger—"

"He didn't confess to attacking her," Fontaine said. "He confessed to killing her."

"But Mangelotti and Eliza Morgan were in that room."

"The nurse went for a cigarette right after she came on duty."

"What happened to Mangelotti?"

"While Mrs. Morgan was out of the room, our friend Walter sauntered past the nurses' station without anybody seeing him, ducked into the room, and clobbered Mangelotti on the side of the head with a hammer. Or something resembling a hammer. Our stalwart officer was seated beside the bed at the time, reading entries in his notebook. Then our friend beat Mrs. Ransom to death with the same hammer." He looked up at me and then over at Mangelotti. He looked as if he had bitten into something sour. "This time, he didn't bother signing the wall. And then he walked away past the patients' lounge and went downstairs and got into his car to go to the hardware store for a hacksaw blade." He looked at me again. Anger and disgust burned in his tired eyes. "He had to wait for the hardware store to open, so we had to wait. In the meantime, the nurse left the patients' lounge and found the body. She yelled for the doctors, but it was too late."

"So Dragonette knew that she was about to come out of her coma?"

He nodded. "Walter called to ask about her condition this morning. It must have been the last thing he did before he left home. Doesn't that make you feel all warm and happy on the inside?" His eyes had gotten a little wild, and red lines threaded through the whites. He mimed picking up a telephone. "Hello, I just wanted to see how my dear lovely friend April Ransom is getting along, yes yes… Oh, you don't say, really, well, isn't that sweet? In that case, I'll just be popping in to pay her a little social call, oh my yes indeedy, as soon, that is, as I cut the head off the guy on my living room floor, so you go ahead and make sure that she'll be alone, and if you can't arrange that, please see that nobody but Officer Mangelotti is alone in the room with her, yes, that's M-A-N-G-E-L-O-DOUBLE T-I—"

He did not stop so much as strangle on his own emotions. The other policemen watched him surreptitiously. In his wheelchair, Mangelotti heard every word, and flinched at the spelling of his name. He looked like a slaughterhouse cow.

"I don't get it," I said. "He went to all that trouble to protect himself, and the second you guys get out of your cars and wave your guns at him, he says, Well, I didn't just kill everybody inside there, I also knifed those Blue Rose people. And then he was so lucky—to get here exactly when the nurse went out of the room. It seems a little unlikely."

Fontaine reared back and widened his bloodshot eyes. "You want to talk about unlikely? Unlikely doesn't count anymore."

"No, but it confuses the civilians," said a voice behind me. I turned around to see the man in the pinstriped suit who had followed April Ransom's body out of her room. Deep vertical lines cut down his face on either side of his thin forties mustache. His light brown hair was combed straight back, exposing deep indentations in his hairline. He had looked familiar to me earlier because I had seen his picture in the paper that morning. He was Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan, Fontaine's superior.

Hogan put his hand on Fontaine's elbow.

"This is the guy who wanted to meet you," Fontaine said.

I sensed immediately that I was in the presence of a real detective, someone even Tom Pasmore would respect. Michael Hogan possessed a powerful personal authority. Hogan had the uncomplicated masculinity of old movie stars like Clark Gable or William Holden, both of whom he resembled in a generalized, real-world fashion. You could see Hogan commanding a three-masted schooner through a heavy storm or sentencing mutineers to death on the yardarm. His offhand remark about "civilians" seemed perfectly in character.

What I was most conscious of at the moment when Michael Hogan shook my hand was that I wanted his approval—that most abject, adolescent desire.

And then, in the midst of the crowd of policemen and hospital staff, he did an astonishing thing. He gave me his approval.

"Didn't you write The Divided Man?" I barely had time to nod before he said, "That was a very perceptive book. Ever read it, Paul?"

As amazed as myself, Fontaine said, "Read it?"

"About the last word on the Blue Rose business."

"Oh, yes," said Fontaine. "Yes."

"It was the last word before Walter Dragonette came along," I said.

Hogan smiled at me as if I had said something clever. "Nobody is very happy about Mr. Dragonette," Hogan said, and changed the subject without losing any of his remarkable civility. "I suppose you came here to find your friend Ransom."

"I did, yes," I said. "I tried calling him, but all I got was the machine. Does he know—he does know what happened, doesn't he?"

"Yes, yes, yes," Hogan said, sounding like an ancient uncle rocking in front of a fire. "After Paul and I got the call about his wife, we got him at home."

"You heard April had been killed before Dragonette confessed to doing it?" I asked. I didn't quite know why, but this seemed important.

"That's probably enough," said Paul Fontaine. Before I saw the implications of my question, he sensed an implied criticism. "We've got work to do, Mr. Underhill. If you'd like to see your friend—"

Hogan had immediately understood the nature of this criticism. He raised his eyebrows and broke into what Fontaine was saying. "We usually hear about crimes before we get confessions."

"I know that," I said. "It's more that I was wondering if Walter Dragonette heard about this crime before he confessed to it."

"It was a good clean confession," Fontaine said.

Fontaine was beginning to look irritated, and Hogan moved to mollify him. "He knew where she was being held. That information was never released. There are eight hospitals in Millhaven. When we asked Dragonette the name of the hospital where he had killed April Ransom, he said Shady Mount."

"Did he know her room number?"

"No," Hogan said, and at the same time Fontaine said, "Yes."

"Paul means he knew the floor she was on," Hogan said. "He wouldn't know that unless he'd been here."

"Then how did he know where to find her in the first place?" I asked. "I don't suppose the switchboard gave out information about her."

"We really haven't had the time to fully interrogate Mister Dragonette," said Hogan.

The uniformed officers moving back and forth between April Ransom's room slowed down as they passed us.

"You could meet your friend Ransom down on Armory Place," Hogan said. "He's waiting for Paul to begin Dragonette's interrogation. And Paul, I think you could usefully start matters down there."

He turned back to me. "You know where Armory Place is?"

I nodded.

"Follow Paul and park in the police lot. You and Mister Ransom could watch some of the interrogation." He asked Fontaine, "Is that okay with you?"

Fontaine nodded.

Downstairs, an elderly woman seated at a computer on one of the desks behind the counter looked up at us and twitched as if her chair had just given her an electric shock. April Ransom's murder had unsettled the entire hospital. Fontaine said he would wait for me at the entrance to the hospital parking lot.

"I know how to get to police headquarters," I reminded him.

"Yeah, but if you try to get into the lot without me, somebody might mistake you for a reporter," he said.

I trotted across the street and went up the block. Before I could put the key into the Pontiac's door, a heavyset man in Bermuda shorts and a blue button-down shirt came rushing out of the front door of the house with the flag and the yellow ribbon. "Just hold it right there," he shouted. "I got something to say to you."

I unlocked the door and waited for him to cross his lawn. He had a big belly and thin hairy legs, and his bulldog face was flushed pink. He came within ten feet of me and jabbed his finger at me. "Do you see any signs saying hospital parking on this street? The parking places on this street are not for you people —you can park at the meters, or go around to the hospital lot. I am sick and tired of being abused."

"Abused? You don't know what the word means." I opened the car door.

"Wait up there." He circled around the front of my car, still pointing at my chest. "These—are—our—spaces. I paid a lot of money to live in this neighborhood, and people like you treat it like a public park. This morning, some guy was sitting on my lawn—on my lawn! He got out of his car and he sat down on my lawn, like he owned it, and then he went over to the hospital!"

"Your yellow ribbon made him feel at home," I said, and got into the car.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"He thought it was a free country." I started the car while he told me all about freedom. He was a patriot, and he had a lot of thoughts on the subject that people like me wouldn't understand.

10

Fontaine's blue sedan led me downtown through a city that seemed deserted. The illusion of emptiness vanished as soon as we drove past the entrance to Armory Place. The newspaper articles had already brought perhaps a hundred people to the front of police headquarters. Signs bristled up over their heads. The crowd spilled down the wide steps of the huge gray building and flowed out onto the wide plaza between it and city hall. At the top of the steps, a man diminished by distance shouted into a bullhorn. Camera crews wound through his audience, recording it all for the evening news.

The blue sedan turned right at the end of the plaza, and a block later turned right again into an unmarked lane. A sign announced NO ACCESS POLICE VEHICLES ONLY.

Red brick walls hemmed in the narrow lane. I followed Fontaine's car into a wide rectangular parking lot crowded with police cars. Uniformed officers dwarfed by the high walls leaned against the cars, talking. The back of the police headquarters loomed on the opposite side of the lot. A few policemen turned their heads when the Pontiac came in. When I pulled into an empty space alongside Fontaine, two of them appeared at my door.

Fontaine got out of his car and said, "Don't shoot him, he's with me."

Without looking back, he took off toward a black metal door in the rear of the headquarters building. The two cops stepped aside, and I hurried after him.

Like an old grade school, the police building was a warren of dark corridors with scuffed wooden floors, rows of doors with pebbled glass windows, and clanging staircases. Fontaine charged ahead past a crowded bulletin board and the open door to a locker room. A half-naked man sitting on a bench called out, "How's Mangelotti?"

"Dead," Fontaine said.

He double-jumped up a staircase and banged open a door marked homicide. I followed him into a room where half a dozen men seated at desks froze at the sight of me. "He's with me," Fontaine said. "Let's get down to business and interrogate that piece of batshit right now." The men had already stopped paying attention to me. "Let's give him the chance to explain himself." Fontaine took off his suit jacket and put it over the back of a chair. Files and loose papers lay stacked on his desk. "Let's wrap up every unsolved murder on our books and start all over again with a clean slate. And then everybody will go home happy."

He rolled up his sleeves. The room smelled of sweat and stale cigarette smoke. It was a little bit hotter than the street. "Now don't lose your head," said a man at the back of the room.

"That's good," Fontaine said.

"Say, Paul," said a detective with a round, chubby face who looked up at him from the next desk, "did it ever occur to you, and I'm sure it did, that your prisoner in there gave a whole new meaning to the expression, to give good head?"

"I'm grateful to you for that insight," Fontaine said. "When he starts to get hungry, I'll send one of you in to work things out with him."

"Paul, is it my imagination, or is there a strange smell in here?" He sniffed the air.

"Ah, the smell," Fontaine said. "Do you know what our friend said when this odor was pointed out to him?"

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem?" said the other policeman.

"Not quite. He said, and I quote, I've been meaning to do something about that."

Every man in the room cracked up. Fontaine regarded them stoically, as if he were resigned to their childishness. "Gentlemen, gentlemen. I am using the suspect's exact words. He is a person of good intentions. The man fully intended to do something about the smell, which was as offensive to him as it was to his neighbors." He raised his arms in mock appeal and slowly turned around in a complete circle.

A hidden connection that had struck me almost since I had walked into the detectives' office finally surfaced: these men reminded me of the body squad. The homicide detectives were as caustic and exclusionary as Scoot and Ratman and the others, and their humor was as corrosive. Because they handled death all day long, they had to make it funny.

"Are we set up for taping in Number One?" Fontaine asked.

"Are you kidding?" asked the detective with the chubby face. Short blond hair like feathers stuck flat to his head, and his peaceful blue eyes were set as far apart as an ox's. "That baby is set to go."

"Good," Fontaine said.

"Can we, uh, watch this, if we want to?" asked the blond detective.

"I like to watch," intoned a broad-shouldered detective with a heavy mustache that frothed over his upper lip. "I want to watch."

"You are free to join Mr. Underhill and Mr. Ransom in the booth," Fontaine said, with as much dignity as possible.

"Show time," said the detective across the room who had advised Fontaine not to lose his head. He was a slim man with skin the color of light coffee and an almost delicate, ironic face. Alone of all the men in the room, he still had on his suit jacket.

"My colleagues, the ghouls," Fontaine said to me.

"These guys remind me of Vietnam."

Something within Fontaine slowed down by an almost imperceptible degree. "You were there? That's how you know Ransom?"

"I met him there," I said. "But I knew him from Millhaven." ,

"You go to Brooks-Lowood, too?"

"Holy Sepulchre," I said. "I grew up on South Sixth Street."

"Bastian there is from your part of town."

Bastian was the corrupt cherub with feathery blond hair and wide-set blue eyes. "I used to go to those athletes' suppers at your school," he said. "When I played football at St. Ignatius. I remember your coach. A real character."

"Christ wouldn't have dropped the ball," I said, mystifying the other men.

"Jesus stands facing the goalposts," Bastian said. He was looking upward, holding one hand on his heart and pointing toward an invisible horizon with the other.

"In his heart is a powerful will to win. He knows the odds are against him, but he also knows that at the end of the day, victory will be his." I knew this even better than Bastian, having had to listen to it day after day for three years.

"Righteousness is a—is a what?" Bastian looked straight up at the fluorescent lights.

"Righteousness is a mighty—"

"A mighty fire!" Bastian yelled, sounding a lot more like Mr. Schoonhaven than I did. He was still pointing at the distant goalposts with his hand clamped to his heart.

"That was it," I said. "It came with hamburgers and Hawaiian Punch."

"Well, now that we're prepared," Fontaine said. "Bastian, get Dragonette out of the cell and put him in Number One. The rest of you who are coming, let's move, okay?"

At last I understood that he had not been trying to leave me behind when he came sprinting into the building. In spite of his exhaustion, he had been excited by the upcoming interrogation. His urgency was the expression of an intense desire to get into that room.

He moved toward the door, and the black detective and the big man with the energetic mustache stood up to follow. Bastian left the room through a side door and went down the long corridor I had briefly glimpsed.

The rest of us began moving down toward the front of the building. The hallway was slightly cooler than the squad room. "First things first," Fontaine said, and ducked into a room with an open door. Tube lighting fell on two formica-topped tables and a number of assorted chairs. Three men drinking coffee at one of the tables looked up at Fontaine. "You were at the hospital?" one of them asked.

"Just got back." Fontaine went up to one of two coffee machines, took a thick paper cup off a stack, and poured hot black coffee into it.

"How's Mangelotti?"

"We could lose him." He sipped from the coffee. I poured for myself.

On the side wall of the coffee room hung a big rectangle of white paper covered with names written in red or black marker. It was divided into three sections, corresponding to the three homicide shifts. Lieutenant Ross McCandless commanded the first shift. Michael Hogan and William Greider were his detective sergeants. From the list of names written in black and red marker beneath Hogan's, April Ransom jumped out at me. It was written in red marker.

The other two detectives helped themselves to coffee and introduced themselves. The black detective was named Wheeler, the big man Monroe. "You know what bugs me about those people out in front?" Monroe asked me. "If they had any sense, they'd be cheering because we got this guy behind bars."

"You mean you want gratitude?" Fontaine drew another cup of coffee and led the three of us out of the lounge. Over his shoulder, he said, "I'll tell you one good thing, anyhow. There's going to be a mile of black ink on the board in a couple of hours."

On the other side of the lounge we entered the new part of the building. The floor was gray linoleum and the walls were pale blue with clear glass windows. The air conditioning worked, and the corridor felt almost cool. The three of us rounded a corner, and John Ransom looked up from a plastic chair pushed against one of the blue walls. He looked no more rested than Fontaine. John was wearing khaki pants and a white dress shirt, and he had obviously showered and shaved just before or after he had learned that his wife had been murdered. He looked like a half-empty sack. I wondered how long he had been sitting by himself.

"God, Tim, I'm glad you're here," he said, jumping up. "So you know? They told you?"

"Detective Fontaine told me what happened." I did not want to tell him that I had seen April's body being taken from her room. "John, I'm so sorry."

Ransom held up his hands as if to capture something. "It's unbelievable. She was getting better—this guy, this monster, found out she was getting better—"

Fontaine stepped before him. "We're going to let you and your friend observe a portion of my interrogation. Do you still want to do it?"

Ransom nodded.

"Then let me show you where you'll be sitting. Want any coffee?"

Ransom shook his head, and Fontaine took us past the glass wall of a vast darkened room where a few people sat smoking as they waited to be questioned.

He nodded for Wheeler to open a blond wooden door. Six or seven feet down the corridor an identical door bore a dark blue plaque with the white numeral 1 at its center. Fontaine waved me in first, and I stepped into a dark chamber furnished with six chairs at a wooden table. In front of the table, a window looked into a larger, brighter room where a slim young man in a white T-shirt sat at a slight angle to a gray metal table. He was sliding a red aluminum ashtray aimlessly back and forth across the table. His face was without any expression at all.

I sat down in the last chair, and Detective Wheeler entered and took the chair beside me. John Ransom followed him. He made an involuntary grunt when he saw Walter Dragonette, and then he sat down beside the black detective. Monroe stepped inside and sat down on the other side of Ransom. Everything had been choreographed so that a couple of detectives would be able to restrain Ransom, if it turned out to be necessary.

Fontaine stepped inside. "Dragonette can't see or hear you, but please don't make any loud noises or touch the glass. All right?"

"Yes," Ransom said.

"I'll come back when the first part of the interrogation is over."

He stepped outside, and Wheeler stood up and closed the door. Walter Dragonette looked like a man killing time in an airport. Every now and then he smiled at the ting-ting-ting of the flimsy ashtray as he tapped it against the table. A key turned in the door behind him, and he stopped toying with the ashtray to look over his shoulder.

A uniformed officer let in Paul Fontaine. He held a file clamped under his arm and a container of coffee in each hand.

"Hello, Walter," Fontaine said.

"Hi! I remember you from this morning." Walter sat up straight and folded his hands together on the table. He twisted to watch Fontaine go to the end of the table. "Do we finally get to talk now?"

"That's right," Fontaine said. "I brought you some coffee."

"Oh thanks, but I don't drink coffee." Dragonette gave his torso a curious little shake.

"Whatever you say." Fontaine removed the plastic top from one container and dropped it into a wastebasket. "Sure you won't change your mind?"

"Caffeine's bad for you," said Dragonette.

"Smoke?" Fontaine placed a nearly full packet of Marlboros on the table.

"No, but it's fine with me if you want to."

Fontaine raised his eyebrows and tapped a cigarette from the pack.

"I just want to say one thing right at the start of this," said Dragonette.

Fontaine lit the cigarette with a match and blew out smoke, extinguishing the match and quieting Dragonette with a wave of the hand. "You will be able to say everything you want to, Walter, but first we have to take care of some details."

"I'm sorry."

"That's all right, Walter. Please give me your name, address, and date of birth."

"My name is Walter Donald Dragonette, and my address is 3421 North Twentieth Street, where I have resided all of my life since being born on September 20, 1965."

"And you have waived the presence of an attorney."

"I'll get a lawyer later. I want to talk to you first."

"The only other thing I have to say is that this conversation is being videotaped so that we can refer to it later."

"Oh, that's a good idea." Dragonette looked up at the ceiling, and then over his shoulder, and grinned and pointed at us. "I get it! The camera's behind that mirror, isn't it?"

"No, it isn't," Fontaine said.

"Is it on now? And are you sure it's working?"

"It's on now," Fontaine said.

"So now we can start?"

"We're starting right now," Fontaine said.

11

The following is a record of the conversation that followed.

WD: Okay. I have one thing I want to say right away, because it's important that you know about this. I was sexually abused when I was just a little boy, seven years old. The man who did it was a neighbor down the street, and his name was Mr. Lancer. I don't know his first name. He moved away the year after that. But he used to invite me into his house, and then he'd, you know, he'd do things to me. I hated it. Anyhow, I've been thinking about things, about why I'm here and all, and I think that's the whole explanation for everything, right there, Mr. Lancer.

PF: Did you ever tell anyone about Mr. Lancer? Did you ever tell your mother?

WD: How could I? I hardly even know how to describe it to myself! And besides that, I didn't think my mother would believe me. Because she liked Mr. Lancer. He helped keep up the tone of the neighborhood. Do you know what he was? He was a photographer, and he took baby pictures, and pictures of children. You bet he did. He took pictures of me without my clothes on.

PF: Is that all he did?

WD: Oh, no. Didn't I say he abused me? Well, that's what he did. Sexually. That's the really important part. He made me play with him. With his, you know, his thing. I had to put it in my mouth and everything, and he took pictures. I wonder if those pictures are in magazines. He had magazines with pictures of little boys.

PF: You took pictures, didn't you, Walter?

WD: Did you see them? The ones in the envelope?

PF: Yes.

WD: Well, now you know why I took them.

PF: Was that the only reason you took pictures?

WD: I don't know. I sort of had to do that. It's important to remember things, it's very important. And then there was one other reason.

PF: What was it?

WD: Well, I could use them to decide what I was going to eat. When I got home from work. That's why I sometimes called the pictures, the envelope of pictures, the "menu." Because it was like a list of what I had. I was always going to get the pictures organized into a nice scrapbook, with the names and everything, but you got me before I got around to it. That's okay, though. I'm not mad or anything. It was really just having the pictures, really, not putting them in a book.

PF: And help you pick out what you were going to eat.

WD: It was the menu. Like those restaurants that have pictures of the food. And besides, you can wander down Memory Lane, and have those experiences again. But even after you sort of used up the picture, it's still a trophy—like an animal head you put on a wall. Because a long time ago, I figured out that that's what I was, a hunter. A predator. Believe me, I wouldn't have chosen it, there's a lot of work involved, and you have to have incredible secrecy, but it chose me and there it was. You can't go back, you know.

PF: Tell me about when you figured out that you were a predator. And I want to hear about how you got interested in the old Blue Rose murders.

WD: Oh. Well, the first thing was, I read this book called The Divided Man, and it was about this screwed-up cop who found out that he killed people and then he killed himself. The book was about Millhaven! I knew all the streets! That was really interesting to me, especially after my mother told me that the whole thing was real. So I learned from her that there used to be this man who killed people and wrote blue rose on the wall, or whatever, near the bodies. Only it wasn't the policeman.

PF: It wasn't?

WD: Couldn't be, never ever. No way. No. Way. That detective in the book, he wasn't a predator at all. I knew that—I just didn't know what you called it, yet. But whoever it really was, he was like my real dad. He was like me, but before me. He hunted them down, and he killed them. Back then, the only things I killed were animals, just for practice, so I could see what it was like. Cats and dogs, a lot of cats and dogs. You could use a knife, and it was pretty easy. The hard part was getting the skeletons clean. Nobody really knows how much work that is. You really have to scrub, and the smell can get pretty bad.

PF: You thought that the Blue Rose murderer was your father?

WD: No, I thought he was my real dad. No matter whether he was my actual father or not. My mother never told me much about my dad, so he could have been anybody. But after I read that book and found out how real it was, I knew I was like that man's real son, because I was like following in his footsteps.

PF: And so, a couple of weeks ago, you decided to copy what he had done?

WD: You noticed? I wasn't sure anyone would notice.

PF: Notice what?

WD: You know. You almost said it.

PF: You say it.

WD: The places—they were the same places. You knew that, didn't you?

PF: Those Blue Rose murders were a long time ago.

WD: There's no excuse for ignorance like that. You didn't notice because you never knew in the first place. I think that's really second-rate.

PF: I agree with you.

WD: Well, you should. It's shoddy.

PF: You went to a lot of trouble to recreate the Blue Rose murders, and nobody noticed. Noticed the details, I mean.

WD: People never notice anything. It's disgusting. They never even noticed that all those people were missing. Now I suppose nobody'll even notice that I got arrested, or all the things I did.

PF: You don't have to worry about that, Walter. You are becoming very well known. You're already notorious.

WD: Well, that's all wrong, too. There isn't anything special about me.

PF: Tell me about killing the man on Livermore Street.

WD: The man on Livermore Street? He was just a guy. I was waiting in that little alley or whatever you call it, in back of that hotel. A man came along. It was, let's see, about midnight. I asked him some question, who knows, like if he could help me carry something into the hotel through the back door. He stopped walking. I think I said I'd give him five bucks. Then he stepped toward me, and I stabbed him. I kept on stabbing him until he fell down. Then I wrote BLUE ROSE on the brick wall. I had this marker I brought along, and it worked fine.

PF: Can you describe the man? His age, his appearance, maybe his clothes?

WD: Real, real ordinary guy. I didn't even pay much attention to him. He might have been about thirty, but I'm not even too sure of that. It was dark.

PF: What about the woman?

WD: Oh, Mrs. Ransom? That was different. Her, I knew.

PF: How did you know her?

WD: Well, I didn't actually know her to speak to, or anything like that. But I knew who she was. My mother left some money when she died, about twenty thousand dollars, and I wanted to take care of it. So I used to go down to Barnett and Company to see Mr. Richard Mueller, he invested the money for me? And I'd see him maybe once a month. For a while I did, anyhow, before things got kind of hectic around here. Mrs. Ransom was in the office next to Mr. Mueller's, and so I'd see her most times I went there. She was a really pretty woman. I liked her. And then her picture was in the paper that time she won the big award. So I decided to use her for the second Blue Rose person, the one in the St. Alwyn, room 218. It had to be the right room.

PF: How did you get her to the hotel?

WD: I called her at the office and said that I had to tell her something about Mr. Mueller. I made it sound like it was really bad. I insisted that she meet me at the hotel, and I said that I lived there. So I met her in the bar, and I said that I had to show her these papers that were in my room because I was afraid to take them anywhere. I knew room 218 was empty because I looked at it just before dinner, when I snuck in the back door. The locks are no good in the St. Alwyn, and there are never any people in the halls. She said she'd come up to see the papers, and when we got into the room I stabbed her.

PF: Is that all you did?

WD: No. I hit her, too. That was even in the newspapers.

PF: How many times did you stab Mrs. Ransom?

WD: Maybe seven, eight times. About that many times.

PF: And where did you stab her?

WD: In the stomach and chest area. I don't really remember this.

PF: You didn't take pictures.

WD: I only took pictures at home.

PF: Did you get to the room by going through the lobby?

WD: We walked straight through the lobby and went up in the elevator.

PF: The clerk on duty claims he never saw Mrs. Ransom that night.

WD: He didn't. We didn't see him, either. It's the St. Alwyn, not the Pforzheimer. Those guys don't stay behind the desk.

PF: How did you leave?

WD: I walked down the stairs and went out the back door. I don't think anybody saw me.

PF: You thought you had killed her.

WD: Killing her was the whole idea.

PF: Tell me about what you did this morning.

WD: All of it?

PF: Let's leave out Alfonzo Dakins for now, and just concentrate on Mrs. Ransom.

WD: Okay. Let me think about it for a second. All right. This morning, I was worried. I knew Mrs. Ransom was getting better, and—

PF: How did you know that?

WD: First, I found out what hospital she was at by calling Shady Mount and saying I was Mrs. Ransom's husband, and could they put me through to her room? See, I was going to keep calling hospitals until I got to the right one. I just started with Shady Mount because that's the one I knew best. On account of my mom. She worked there, did you know that?

PF: Yes,

WD: Good. So I called up and asked if they could put me through, and the switchboard lady said no, Mrs. Ransom didn't have a phone, and if I was her husband I'd know that. Well, that was really dumb. If you wanted everybody to guess where she was right away, you put her in the right place. Everybody like Mrs. Ransom goes to Shady Mount. My mom told me that when I was just a little boy, and it's still true. So I'm sorry to criticize you and everything, but you didn't even try to hide her. That's really sloppy, if you want my opinion.

PF: So you knew she was at Shady Mount, but how did you find out about her condition? And how did you learn her room number?

WD: Oh, those things were real easy. You know how I said that my mom used to work at Shady Mount? Well, sometimes, of course, she used to take me there with her, and I knew a lot of the people who worked in the office. They were my mom's friends—Cleota Williams, Margie Meister, Budge Dewdrop, Mary Graebel. They were a whole crowd. Went out for coffee and everything. When my mom died, I used to think that maybe I should kill Budge or Mary so that she'd have company. Because dead people are just like you and me, they still want things. They look at us all the time, and they miss being alive. We have taste and color and smells and feelings, and they don't have any of those things. They stare at us, they don't miss anything. They really see what's going on, and we hardly ever really see that. We're too busy thinking about things and getting everything wrong, so we miss ninety percent of what's happening.

PF: I still don't know how you found out that—

WD: Oh, my goodness, of course you don't. Please forgive me! I'm really sorry. I was talking about my mom's friends, wasn't I? Really, my mouth should have a zipper on it, sometimes. Anyhow. Anyhow, as I was saying, Cleota died and Margie Meister retired and went to Florida, but Budge Dewdrop and Mary Graebel still work in the office at Shady Mount. Now Budge decided for some reason that I was a horrible person about the time my mother died, and she won't even talk to me anymore. So I think I should have killed her. After all, I saved her life! And she just turns her back on me!

PF: But your mother's other friend, Mary Graebel—

WD: She still remembers that I used to come in there when I was a little boy and everything, and of course I like to stop by the Shady Mount office every now and then and just chew the fat. So the whole thing was just as easy as pie. I stopped in on my lunch hour yesterday, and Mary and I had a nice long gabfest. And she told me all about their celebrity patient, and how she had a police guard and a private nurse, and how she was suddenly getting better up there on the third floor, and everything. And I could see fat old Budge Dewdrop fuming and fretting away all by herself over by the file cabinets, but Budge is too scared of me, I think, to do anything really overt. So she just gave us these looks, you know, these big looks. And I found out what I had to do.

PF: And this Mary Graebel told you that the private duty nurse took breaks every hour?

WD: No, I got lucky there. She was leaving the room just when I turned into the hallway. So I got in there fast. And I did it. Then I got out, fast.

PF: Tell me about the officer in the room.

WD: Well, I had to kill him, too, of course.

PF: Did you?

WD: What do you mean? Do you mean, did I really have to kill him, or did I really kill him?

PF: I'm not really sure I follow that.

WD: I'm just—forget it. Maybe I don't remember the officer who was in the room very well. It's a little blurry. Everything had to happen very fast, and I was nervous. But I know I heard you tell someone that the officer from the hospital was dead. You were walking past the cells, and I overheard what you said. You said, "He's dead."

PF: I was exaggerating.

WD: Okay, so I was exaggerating too. When I said that I killed him.

PF: How did you try to kill the officer?

WD: I don't remember. It isn't clear. My mind was all excited.

PF: What happened to the hammer? You didn't have it when you came back to your house.

WD: I threw it away. I threw it into the river on my way back from the hospital.

PF: You threw it into the Millhaven River?

WD: From that bridge, the bridge right next to the Green Woman. You know, where they found that dead woman. The prostitute.

PF: What dead woman are we talking about now, Walter? Is this someone else you killed?

WD: God. You people don't remember anything. Of course she wasn't someone I killed, I'm talking about something that happened a long time ago. The woman was the mother of William Damrosch, the cop. He was down there, too—he was a baby, and they found him on the riverbank, almost dead. Don't you ever read? This is all in The Divided Man.

PF: I'm not sure I know why you want to bring this up.

WD: Because it's what I was thinking about! When I was driving across the bridge. I saw the Green Woman Taproom, and I remembered what happened on the riverbank, the woman, the prostitute, and her poor little baby, who grew up to be William Damrosch. He was called Esterhaz in the book. I was driving across the bridge. I thought about the woman and the baby—I always think about them, when I drive over the river there, alongside the Green Woman Taproom. Because all that is connected into the Blue Rose murders. And they never caught that man, did they? He just got clean away. Unless you're dumb enough to think it was Damrosch, which I guess you are.

PF: Actually, I'm a lot more interested in you.

WD: Well, anyhow, I tossed the hammer right through the car window into the river. And then I drove right on home and met you. And I decided that it was time to tell the truth about everything. Time for everything to come out into the open.

PF: Well, we're grateful for your cooperation, Walter. I want to ask you about one detail before we break. You say that your mother's friend, her name was, let's see, her name was Budge Dewdrop, stopped talking to you after your mother's death. Do you have any idea why she did that?

WD: No.

PF: None? No idea at all?

WD: I told you. I don't have any idea.

PF: How did your mother die, Walter?

WD: She just died. In her sleep. It was very peaceful, the way she would have wanted it.

PF: Your mother would have been very unhappy if she had discovered some of your activities, wouldn't she, Walter?

WD: Well. I suppose you could say that. She never liked it about the animals.

PF: Did she ever tell her friends about the animals?

WD: Oh, no. Well, maybe Budge.

PF: And she never knew that you had killed people, did she?

WD: No. Of course she didn't.

PF: Was she ever curious about anything that made you uneasy? Did she ever suspect anything?

WD: I don't want to talk about this.

PF: What do you think she said to her friend Budge?

WD: She never told me, but she must have said something.

PF: Because Budge acted like she was afraid of you.

WD: She should have been afraid of me.

PF: Walter, did your mother ever find one of your trophies?

WD: I said, I don't want to talk about this.

PF: But you said it was time for everything to come out into the open. Tell me what happened.

WD: What?

PF: You told me about the mother who was dead on the riverbank. Now tell me about your mother.

WD: (Inaudible.)

PF: I know this is hard to do, but I also know that you want to do it. You want me to know everything, even this. Walter, what did your mother find?

WD: It was a kind of a diary. I used to hide it in a jacket in my closet—in the inside pocket. She wasn't snooping or anything, she just wanted to take the jacket to the cleaners. And she found the diary. It was kind of a notebook. I had some things in there, and she asked me about them.

PF: What kind of things?

WD: Like initials. And some words like tattoo or scar. Stuff like red hair. One of them said bloody towel. She must have talked to Budge Dewdrop about it. She shouldn't have!

PF: Did she ask you about the diary?

WD: Sure, of course. But I never thought she believed me.

PF: So she was suspicious before that.

WD: I don't know. I just don't know.

PF: Tell me how your mother died, Walter

WD: It doesn't really matter anymore, does it? With all these other people, I mean.

PF: It matters to you, and it matters to me. Tell me about it, Walter.

WD: Well, this is what happened. It was the day after she found my diary. When she came home from work, she acted a little funny. I knew right away what it meant. She'd been talking to somebody, and she was guilty about that. I don't even know what she said, really, but I knew it had to do with the diary. I made dinner, like I always did, and she went to bed early instead of staying up and watching television with me. I was very distressed, but I don't think I showed it. I stayed up late, though I hardly understood what was going on in the movie, and I had two glasses of Harvey's Bristol Cream, which is something I never did. Finally the movie was over, even though I couldn't remember what happened in it. I only watched it for Ida Lupino, really—I always liked Ida Lupino. I washed my glass and turned off the lights and went upstairs. I was just going to look in my mother's room before I went to bed. So I opened the door and went inside her room. And it was so dark in there I had to go up next to the bed to see her. I went right up next to her. And I said to myself, if she wakes up, I'll just say good night and go to bed. And I stood there next to her for a long time. I thought about everything. I even thought about Mr. Lancer. If I hadn't had those two glasses of Harvey's Bristol Cream, I don't think any of this would have happened.

PF: Go on, Walter. Do you have a handkerchief?

WD: Of course I have a handkerchief. I have a dozen handkerchiefs. It's okay, I mean, I'm okay. Anyhow, I was standing next to my, ah, my mother. She was really asleep. I didn't intend to do anything at all. And it didn't feel like I was doing anything. It was like nothing at all was happening. I leaned over and pulled the extra pillow over her face. And she didn't wake up, see? She didn't move at all. So nothing at all was happening. And then I just pushed down on the pillow. And I closed my eyes and I held the pillow down. And after a while I took it off and went to bed. In my own bedroom. The next morning, I made us both breakfast, but she wouldn't come when I said it was ready, so I went to her room and found her in her bed, and I knew right away that she was dead. Well, there it was. I called the police right from the bedroom. And then I went into the kitchen and threw away the food and waited until they came.

PF: And when the police came, what did you tell them about your mother's death?

WD: I told them she died in her sleep. And that was true.

PF: But not the whole truth, was it, Walter?

WD: No. But I hardly knew what the whole truth was.

PF: I can see that. Walter, we're going to take a break now, and I'm going to give you a couple of minutes to be by yourself. Will you be all right?

WD: Just let me be by myself for a while, okay?

12

Fontaine pushed back his chair and stood up. He nodded twice and turned away from Dragonette.

"Were you satisfied with that, Mr. Ransom?" Wheeler asked. "Is there any doubt in your mind as to the identity of your wife's murderer?"

"How could there be?" John asked.

Paul Fontaine saved me from speaking by opening the door and stepping inside the booth. "I think that's all you'll have to watch, Mr. Ransom. Go home and get some rest. If anything else turns up, we'll be in touch with you."

"At least," Wheeler said, "you know why he killed your wife."

"He killed her because he liked her," Ransom said. "She had the office next door to his broker's." He sounded dumbfounded, almost stunned.

"That was good work, Paul," Wheeler said, standing up.

We all stood up. Fontaine stepped out of the booth, and the rest of us followed him out into the light of the corridor.

"You did a number on him," Monroe said.

Fontaine gave him a sad smile. "I figure we'll have our charges ready by the end of the day. We have to get this one wrapped up with something more than our usual blinding speed, or the brass is going to have us cleaning toilets. I hate to admit this, but my getting Walter to admit that he killed his mother isn't going to mean anything to the lieutenant."

"Well, McCandless didn't actually have a mother," Monroe said. "He came into the world via the Big Bang Theory."

Fontaine stepped backward and regarded Wheeler and Monroe with mock horror. "You two must have a couple of unsolved murders left to mull over."

"There are no more unsolved murders in Millhaven," said Monroe. "Haven't you heard?"

He grinned at Ransom and me and turned away to walk back through the corridors to the Homicide office. Wheeler went with him.

"Seems you have another fan in Mr. Dragonette," Fontaine said to me.

"It's too bad he couldn't tell us who the original Blue Rose was, while he was telling us who he wasn't."

Out of the interrogation room, Fontaine's skin appeared to be some shade halfway between yellow and green, like an old piece of lettuce.

"Did the new cases ever cause you to look up the records for the old ones?" I asked him.

"Blue Rose was way before my time."

"Do you think I could look at those records?" He was staring at me, and I said, "I'm still very curious about the Blue Rose case."

"You do research for books after you write them?"

John Ransom turned ponderously toward me. "What's the point?"

"Yes, what is the point, Mr. Underhill?"

"It's a personal matter," I said.

Fontaine blinked, twice, very slowly. "Those records are a hot item. Well, since Mike Hogan is such an admirer of yours, we might be able to permit that breach of our normally fortresslike confidentiality. Of course, we have to find those records first. I'll let you know. Thank you for giving us your time, Mr. Ransom. be calling you as things progress."

Ransom waved at him and began to move away toward the old part of the building.

Something else occurred to me, and I asked Fontaine another question. "Did you ever find out the name of the man was who was following John? The gray-haired man driving the Lexus?"

Fontaine pursed his lips. The lines around his eyes and mouth deepened, and the soft, saggy parts of his face seemed to get even more mournful. "I forgot all about that," he said. "Do you think there's any point in—?"

He smiled and shrugged, and it seemed to me that part of the meaning of all this courtesy was that, in some fashion or another, he had just lied to me. A second later, it seemed impossible that Fontaine would deceive me about such a trivial matter. I watched him walking back toward the interrogation room, hunched over in his shapeless suit. What he had done in the interrogation room had made me free again, but I did not feel free.

Fontaine looked sideways at a tall policeman who came out into the corridor holding a typed form and grabbed his elbow before he could get away. I remembered seeing the younger man at the hospital that morning.

"Sonny, will you see that these two gentlemen find their way downstairs to the parking lot? I'd do it myself, but I have to get back to an interrogation."

"Yes, sir," Sonny said. "There must be a couple hundred people on the steps. How do they get those signs made so fast?"

"They don't have jobs."

Sonny laughed and advanced toward us like Paul Bunyan moving in on a pine forest.

As we clanged down the metal stairs in the old part of the building, Sonny told John that he was sorry about his wife's death. "The whole department's sorry," he said. "It was sort of like something you couldn't believe, when we first heard it in the car this morning. I was with Detective Fontaine, bringing that guy into the station."

I asked, "You were all in the car together when the report came in about Mrs. Ransom?"

He turned around on the stairs and looked up at me. "That's what I just said."

"You were driving, and you could hear the report."

"Clear as a bell."

"What did it say?"

"For God's sake, Tim," said John Ransom.

"I just want to know what the report said."

"Well, the woman who called it in was pretty excited." Sonny began moving more slowly down the stairs, gripping the handrail and looking back over his shoulder. "She said that Mrs. Ransom had been beaten to death in her room, excuse me, sir."

"And did she say something about Officer Mangelotti?"

"Yeah, she said he was injured. She was new, and she must have been excited—she forgot to use the codes."

"What the hell is this about, Tim? I don't want to know about this," Ransom said. "What difference does it make?"

"None, probably," I said.

"Dragonette spilled the beans right away," Sonny said. "He told Fontaine, he says, If you guys had worked faster, you could have saved her, too. Fontaine says, Are you confessing to the murder of April Ransom, and he says, Of course. I killed her, didn't I?"

He got to the bottom of the stairs and strode down the corridor that had reminded me of an old grade school when I had pursued Paul Fontaine into the building. Now all of it felt tainted by what I had heard upstairs. The announcements and papers on the bulletin board looked like brutal jokes, GUNS FOR SALE GOOD & CHEAP. NEED A DIVORCE LAWYER WITH 20 YEARS POLICE EXPERIENCE? KARATE FOR COPS. Someone had already put up a yellow sheet with these words printed in block capitals at its top:

PEOPLE WALTER DRAGONETTE SHOULD HAVE ASKED HOME. The name of Millhaven's mayor, Merlin Waterford, was first on the list.

"Here you go." Sonny held the door to the parking lot open with an outstretched arm and backed away so that he did not completely fill the frame. John Ransom squeezed past him, grimacing, and I ducked through the space between the big cop and the frame. Sonny smiled down at me.

"Take it easy, now," he said, and let the door close behind us.

All the cops standing around in the parking lot stared at us as we walked toward Ransom's car. The sides of the buildings around us, red brick and gray stone, leaned inward, and the watching policemen looked like caged animals. Everything was grimy with age and suppressed violence.

Ransom collapsed into the passenger seat. A few cops with cement faces started moving toward our car. I got in and started the engine. Before I could put it in gear, one of the cops appeared beside me and leaned in the open window. His face was very close to mine. Whiskey blotches burned on his fleshy cheeks, and his eyes were pale and dead. Damrosch, I thought. Two others stood in back of the car.

"You had business here?" he said.

"We were with Paul Fontaine," I said.

"Were you." It was not a question.

"This is John Ransom. The husband of April Ransom."

The terrible face recoiled. "Get out, get going." He stood up and stepped back and waved me away. The cops behind the car melted away.