The Throat

I drove through the jolting, pitted passage between the high municipal buildings and turned back out onto the street. Somewhere in the distance people were chanting. John Ransom sighed. I looked at him, and he leaned forward to switch on the radio. A bland radio voice said, "… accounts still coming in, and some of these are conflicting, but there seems to be little doubt that Walter Dragonette was responsible for at least twenty-five deaths. Cannibalism and torture have been widely rumored. A spontaneous demonstration is now in progress in front of police head—"

Ransom punched a button, and trumpet music filled the car —Clifford Brown playing "Joy Spring." I looked at Ransom in surprise, and he said, "The Arkham College radio station programs four hours of jazz every day." He slumped back into his seat. He had just wanted to stop hearing about Walter Dragonette.

I turned the corner and drove past the entrance to Armory Place. Clifford Brown, dead for more than thirty years, uttered a phrase that obliterated death and time with a confident, offhand eloquence. The music nearly lifted me out of the depression Walter Dragonette had evoked. I remembered hearing the same phrase all those years ago in Camp Crandall.

Ransom turned his head to look at the big crowd filling half of Armory Place. Three times as many people as had been there earlier covered the steps of police headquarters and the plaza. Signs punched up and down. One of them read VASS MUST GO. An amplified voice bawled that it was sick of living in fear.

I asked John Ransom who Vass was.

"Police chief," he mumbled.

"Mind if we take a little detour?" I asked.

Ransom shook his head.

I left the yelling crowd behind me and continued on to Horatio Street, on the far side of the Ledger building and the Center for the Performing Arts. Horatio Street led us through a district given over to two-story brick warehouses, gas stations, liquor stores, and two brave little art galleries that seemed to be trying to turn the area into another Soho.

Clifford Brown played on, and the sunlight dazzled off the glass windows and the tops of cars. Ransom sat back in his seat without speaking, his right hand curled over his mouth, his eyes open but unseeing. At the entrance to the bridge, a sign announced that vehicles weighing over one ton were barred. I rolled across the rumbling old bridge and stopped on its far side. John Ransom looked as if he were sleeping with his eyes open. I got out and looked down at the river and its banks. Between high straight concrete walls, the black river moved sluggishly toward Lake Michigan. It was about fifteen or twenty feet deep and so dark that it could have been bottomless. Muddy banks littered with tires and rotting wooden crates extended from the concrete walls to the water.

Sixty years ago, this had been an Irish neighborhood, filled with the rowdy, violent men who had built roads and installed trolley tracks; for a brief time, the tenements had housed the men who worked in the warehouses across the river; for an even briefer time, students from Arkham and the local university campus had taken them over for their cheap rents. The crime they attracted had driven all the students away, and now these blocks were inhabited by people who threw their garbage and old furniture out onto the streets. The Green Woman Taproom had been affected by the same blight.

The tavern was a small two-story building with a slanting roof built on a concrete slab that jutted out over the river's east bank. Asymmetrical additions had been built onto its back end. Before the construction of Armory Place, the bar had been a hangout for civil servants and off-duty cops. During summers, hopeful versions of Irish food had been served at round white tables overlooking the river—"Mrs. O'Reilly's lamb shanks" and "Paddy Murphy's Irish Stew." Now the tables were gone, and spray-painted graffiti drooled across the empty concrete, SKUZ SUCKS. ROMI 22. KILL MEE DEATH. A Pforzheimer beer sign hung crookedly in a window zigzagged with strips of tape. On a bitter winter night, people had laughed and drunk and argued in there while twenty feet away, someone murdered a woman holding an infant. "Wasn't it a crazy story?" said a voice at my shoulder. Startled, I jumped and looked around to see John Ransom standing just behind me. The car gaped open at the side of the road. The two of us were alone in the sunny desolation. Ransom looked ghostly, insubstantial, his face bleached by the light and his pale clothing. For a second I thought he meant that William Damrosch's story was crazy, and I nodded.

"That lunatic," he said, looking at the garbage strewn along the baked riverbank. "He saw my wife in his broker's office!" He moved forward and stared down at the river. The black water was moving so slowly it seemed to be still. A shine coated it like a skin of ice.

I looked at Ransom. Some faint color had come back to his face, but he still looked on the verge of disappearing. "To tell you the truth, I'm still bothered that he heard about April's murder before he confessed. And he didn't know that Mangelotti had been hit on the head with something instead of being stabbed."

"He forgot. Besides, Fontaine didn't seem to mind."

"That bothers me, too," I said. "Fontaine and Hogan want to get a lot of black marker on that board in the lounge."

Ransom's face went white again. He moved back toward the car and sat down on the passenger seat. His hands were shaking. His whole face worked as he tried to swallow. He glanced up at me sidelong, as if he were checking to see if I were really taking all of this in. "Could we get back to my house, please?"

He said nothing at all during the rest of the drive to Ely Place.

13

Inside, John pushed the playback button on his answering machine. Out of the harsh, dissolving sunlight, he looked more substantial, less on the verge of disappearance.

He straightened up when the tape had finished rewinding, and his eyes swam up to meet mine. The true lines of his face— the leaner, more masculine face I had seen years ago-—rose through the cushion of flesh that had disguised them.

"One of those messages is from me," I said. "I called you here before going over to the hospital."

He nodded.

I went through the arch into the living room and sat down on the couch facing the Vuillard painting. The first caller, I remembered, had left a message yesterday—Ransom had not been able to check his machine since we had left the house together yesterday afternoon. A tinny but clearly audible voice said, "John? Mister Ransom? Are you home?" I leaned over the table and picked up one of the Vietnam books and opened it at random. "I guess not," the voice said. "Ah, this is Byron Dorian, and I apologize for calling, but I really want to find out how April, how Mrs. Ransom is doing. Shady Mount won't even confirm that she's there. I know how hard this must be for you, but could you call me when you get back? It's important to me. Or I'll call you. I just want to hear something—not knowing is so hard. Okay. Bye."

Another voice. "Hello John, this is Dick Mueller. Everybody down at Barnett is wondering about April and hoping that there's been some improvement. We all sympathize completely with what you're going through, John." Ransom let go of an enormous sigh. "Please give me a ring here at the office or at home to let me know the state of play. My home number is 474-0653. Hope to hear from you soon. Bye now."

I bet the Meat Man's broker had gone through a queasy morning, once he sat down to his scrambled eggs with his copy of the Ledger.

The next call was mine from the St. Alwyn, and I tried to block out that thicker, deeper, wheezier imitation of my real voice by focusing on the paintings in front of me.

Then a voice much deeper and wheezier than mine erupted through the little speakers. "John? John? What's going on? I'm supposed to be going on a trip. I don't understand—I don't understand where my daughter is. Can't you tell me something? Call me back or get over here soon, will you. Where the hell is April?" Loud breathing blasted through the tape hiss as the caller seemed to wait for an answer. "Goddamn it anyhow," he said, and breathed for another ten seconds. The caller banged the receiver on the body of the telephone a few times before he succeeded in hanging up.

"Oh, God," Ransom said. "Just what I need. April's father. I told you about him—Alan Brookner? Can you believe this? He's supposed to be teaching his course on Eastern Religions next year, as well as the course on the Concept of the Sacred that we do together." He put his hands on top of his head, as if he were trying to keep it from exploding upward like a gusher, and wandered back through the arch.

I put the book back on the coffee table.

Still holding down the top of his head, Ransom released an enormous sigh. "I guess I'd better call him back. We might have to go over there."

I said that was okay with me.

"In fact, maybe I'll let you call back these other people, too, after we're done with Alan."

"Anything, fine," I said.

"I'd better get back to Alan," John said. He lowered his hands and returned to the telephone.

He dialed and then fidgeted impatiently during a long series of rings. Finally he said, "Okay," to me and turned to face the wall, tilting his head back. "Alan, this is John. I just got your call… Yes, I can hear that… No, April isn't here, Alan, she had to go away. Look, do you want me to come over?… Sure, no problem, I'll be right there. Calm down, Alan, I'll be coming up the walk in a minute or two."

He hung up and came back into the living room, looking so harassed that I wanted to order him to have a drink and go to bed. He had not even had breakfast, and now it was nearly two o'clock. "I'm sorry about this, but let's get it over with," he said.

"Aren't you going to drive?" I asked him when he went past the Pontiac and continued walking east on Ely Place.

"Alan only lives two blocks away, and even though we got lucky just now, you can never get a parking place around here. People are ready to kill each other for parking places." He glanced back at me, and I sped up and joined him so that we were striding along together.

"A guy across from the hospital came out and yelled at me this morning for parking in front of his house," I said. "I guess I'm lucky he didn't shoot."

Ransom grunted and jerked his thumb rightward as we got near the next corner. The collar of his white shirt was dark with moisture, and the front of his shirt stuck to his chest in amoeba-shaped damp patches.

"He was especially indignant because someone sat down on his lawn and then got up and headed for the hospital."

Ransom gave me a startled look, like a deer spotting a hunter in the forest. "Well." He looked forward again and plunged along. "I'm sorry to put you through all this aggravation."

"I thought Alan Brookner was a hero of yours."

"He's been having a certain amount of trouble."

"He doesn't even know that April was injured?"

He nodded and stuffed his hands in his pockets. "I'd appreciate it if you'd sort of go along with me on this one. I can't tell him that April is dead."

"Isn't he going to read it in the newspapers?"

"Not likely," John said. "This is it."

The first house on the east side of the block was a substantial three-story red brick Georgian building with a fanlight over the door and symmetrical windows in decorative embrasures. Tall oak trees grew on the lawn, and the grass was wild and long, overgrown with knee-high weeds. "I keep forgetting to have something done about the grass," John said, sounding as if he wanted to asphalt the lawn. Rolls of yellowing newspaper in rubber bands peeked out of the weeds, some of them so weathered they looked like the artificial logs in gas fireplaces.

"It won't be too clean in there," he told me. "We hired a maid for him last year, but she quit just before April went into the hospital, and I haven't been…" He shrugged.

"Doesn't he ever go outside?" I asked.

Ransom shook his head and pounded on the door again, then flattened his hands over his face. "He's having one of his days. I should have known." He brought a heavy bunch of keys out of his pocket and searched through them before finding the one he inserted into the lock. He opened the door. "Alan? Alan, I'm here, and I brought a friend."

He stepped inside and motioned for me to follow him.

I waded through the unopened envelopes that littered the blue elephant-foot Persian rug in the entry. Untidy heaps of books and magazines covered all but a narrow footpath going up the bottom steps of a curving staircase. John stooped to pick up a handful of letters and carried them into the next room. "Alan?" He shook his head in frustration and tossed the letters onto a brown leather chesterfield.

Large oil paintings of families arranged before English country houses hung on the long wall opposite me. Rows of books filled the other three walls, and unjacketed books lay over the larger rose-colored Indian carpet that rolled across the room. Splayed books, torn pages of typing paper, and plates of congealed fried eggs, curling slices of bread, and charred hot dogs covered the broad mantel and a wide leather-topped table in front of the chesterfield. All the lights burned. Something in the room made my eyes sting as if I'd been swimming in an overchlorinated pool.

"What a mess," John said. "Everything would be fine if the maid hadn't quit—look, he's been ripping up a manuscript."

Big fluffy balls of gray dust fluttered away from his shoes. He pushed open a window set into the bookshelves on the side of the room.

I caught a faint but definite smell of excrement.

A big wheezy old man's baritone boomed out, "John? Is that you, John?"

Ransom turned wearily to me and raised his voice. "I'm downstairs!"

"Downstairs?" The old man sounded like he had a built-in megaphone. "Did I call you?"

Ransom's face sagged. "Yes. You called me."

"You bring April with you? We're supposed to go on a trip."

Footsteps came down the staircase.

"I don't know if I'm ready for this," Ransom said.

"Who are you talking to? Grant? Is Grant Hoffman here?"

The footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs. John said, "No, it's a friend of mine, not Grant Hoffman."

An old man with streaming white hair and long, skinny arms and legs padded into the room wearing only a pair of underpants stained with successive layers of yellow. His knees and elbows looked too large for the rest of him, as big as boles on trees. White hair foamed from his skinny chest, and loose, gossamer hairs drifted around his neck and the underside of his chin. If he had not been hunched over, he would have been my height. A ripe, sour odor came in with him. His eyes were simian and very bright.

"Where's Grant?" he bellowed. "I heard you talking to him." The incandescent eyes focused on me, and his face closed like a clamshell. "Who's this? Did he come for April?"

"No, Alan, this is my friend, Tim Underhill. April is out of town."

"That's ridiculous." The angry chimpanzee face swung back to scowl at Ransom. "April would tell me if she went out of town. Did you tell me that she went out of town?"

"Several times."

The old man walked up to us on his knotted stork's legs. His hair floated around his head. "Well, I don't remember everything, I suppose. Friend of John's, are ye? You know my daughter?"

The odor increased as he got closer, and the stinging in my eyes got worse.

"I don't, no," I said.

"Too bad. She'd knock your bobby sox off. You want a drink? A drink's what you need, if you're gonna tangle with April."

"He doesn't drink," John said. "And you shouldn't have any more."

"Come on in the kitchen with me, everything you need's in there."

"Alan, I have to get you upstairs," John said. "You need to get cleaned up." .

"I had a shower this morning." He jerked his head toward a door on the right-hand side of the room, grinning at me to let me know that we could cut loose in the kitchen if we got rid of this turkey. Then his face closed up again, and he gave John an unfriendly look. "You can come in the kitchen too, if you tell me where April is. If you know. Which I doubt."

He crunched my elbow in his bony claw and pulled at my arm.

"Okay, let's see what the kitchen is like," John said.

"I don't drink to excess," said Alan Brookner. "I drink exactly the amount I want to drink. That's different. Drunks drink to excess."

He tugged me across the room. Brown streaks and spatters had dried onto his legs.

"Ever meet my daughter?"

"No."

"She's a pistol. Man like you would appreciate her." He banged his forearm against the door in the wall of books, and it flew open as if on springs.

We were moving down a hallway lined with framed diplomas and awards and certificates. Among the awards were a few family photographs, and I saw a younger, robust Alan Brookner with his tweedy arm around a beaming blond girl only a few inches shorter than himself. They looked like they owned the world—confidence surrounded them like a shield.

Brookner went past the photograph without looking at it, as he must have done a dozen times every day. His smell was much more intense in the hallway. White fur like packed spiderwebs covered his bony shoulders. "Get a good woman and pray she'll outlive you. That's the ticket."

He thrust his way through another door and pulled me into a cluttered junk pile of a kitchen before the door swung shut. The smell of rotting food helped mask Brookner's stench. The door swung back by itself and struck John Ransom, who said, "Damn!"

"You ever think about damnation, John? Fascinating concept, full of ambiguity. In heaven we lose our characters in the perpetual glorification of God, but in hell we continue to be ourselves. What's more, we think we deserve damnation, and Christianity tells us our first ancestors cursed us with it, Augustine said that even Nature was damned, and—" He dropped my arm and spun around. "Now where the hell is that bottle? Those bottles, I should say."

Empty Dewar's bottles stood against the splashboard of the sink counter, and a paper bag full of empty bottles stood beside the back door. Pizza delivery boxes lay strewn over the counters and tipped into the sink, where familiar brown insects roamed over and through them, scuttling across the crusty plates and upended glasses.

"Ask and ye shall receive," Brookner said, fetching an unopened bottle of Scotch from a case beneath the sink. He slammed it down on the counter, and the roaches in the sink slipped inside the nearest pizza boxes. He broke the seal and twisted the cap off. "Glasses up there," he said to me, nodding at a cupboard near my head.

I opened the cupboard. Five highball glasses stood widely scattered on a shelf that could have held thirty. I brought down three and set them in front of Brookner. He looked a little like a disreputable Indian holy man.

"Oh well, today I could use a drink," Ransom said. "Let's have one, and then we'll get you taken care of."

"Tell me where April is." Brookner gripped the bottle and glared at him out of his monkey face.

"April is out of town," John said.

"Investment poo-bahs don't go dillydallying when their customers need them. Is she at home? Is she sick?"

"She's in San Francisco," John said. He reached and took the bottle from his father-in-law the way a cop would take a handgun from a confused teenager.

"And what in Tophet is my daughter doing in San Francisco?"

Ransom poured half an inch of whiskey into a glass and gave it to the old man. "Barnett is going to merge with another investment house, and there's been talk about April getting a promotion and running a separate office out there."

"What's the other investment house?" Brookner drank all of the whiskey in two gulps. He held out his glass without looking at it. Liquid shone on his jutting lower lip.

"Bear, Stearns," John said. He poured a good slug of whiskey into his own glass and slowly took a mouthful.

"She won't go. My daughter won't leave me." He was still holding out his glass, and John poured another inch of whiskey into it. "We were—we were supposed to go somewhere together." He gestured at me with the bottle.

I shook my head.

"Go on, he wants one too, can't you see?"

Ransom twisted sideways, poured whiskey into the third glass, and handed it to me.

"Here's looking at you, kid," Brookner said, and raised his glass to his mouth. He drank half of his whiskey and checked to see if I was still interested in having a good time.

I raised my glass and swallowed a tiny bit of the Scotch. It tasted hot, like something living. I moved away from the old man and set my glass on a long pine table. Then I noticed what else was on the table. "Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay," Brookner boomed out in his disconcertingly healthy voice. "All the whores are in luck today." He sucked at his drink.

Next to my glass was a revolver and stack of twenty-dollar bills that must have added up to at least four or five hundred dollars. Beside that was a stack of tens, just as high. A taller pile of fives stood beside that, and about a hundred singles lay in a heap like a pile of leaves at the end of the table. I made some sort of noise, and the old man turned around and saw what I was looking at.

"My bank," he said. "Worked it out myself. So I can pay the delivery boys. This way they can't cheat ya, get it? Make change lickety-split. The gun there is my security system. I grab it and watch them count it out."

"Delivery boys?" John asked.

"From the pizza place, the one with the radio vans. And the liquor store. Generally I asks 'em if they'd like a little blast. Mostly they just take the money and run."

"I bet they do," John said.

"Uh-oh, my stomach feels bad." The old man palped his stringy belly with his right hand. "All of a sudden." He groaned.

"Get upstairs," John said. "You don't want to have an accident in here. I'll come with you. You're going to have a shower."

"I already had—"

"Then you'll have another one." Ransom turned him around and pushed him through the swinging door.

Brookner bellowed about his stomach as they went up a second staircase at the back of the house. The loud voice went from room to room. I poured whiskey over the roaches, and they scampered back into the pizza boxes. When I got tired of watching them, I sat down next to the piles of money and waited. After a little while, I began stacking the pizza boxes and flattening them out so that I could squeeze them into the garbage can. Then I squirted soap over the heap of dishes in the sink and turned on the hot water.

15

About forty minutes later Ransom came back into the kitchen and stopped short when he saw what I was doing. His wide, pale face clouded over, but after a moment of hesitation, he pulled a white dish towel from a drawer and began wiping dishes. "Thanks, Tim," he said. "The place was a mess, wasn't it? What did you do with all the stuff that was lying around?"

"I found a couple of garbage bags," I said. "There weren't all that many dishes, so I decided to take care of them while you hosed the old man down. Did he get sick?"

"He just complained a lot. I pushed him into the shower and made sure he used soap. He goes into these funny states, he doesn't remember how to do the simplest things. Other times, like when he was down here, he seems almost in control—not really rational, of course, but kind of on top of things."

I wondered what the other times were like if I had seen Alan Brookner when he was on top of things.

We finished washing and drying the dishes.

"Where is he now?"

"Back in bed. As soon as he was dry, he passed out. Which is exactly what I want to do. Would you mind us getting out of here?"

I pulled the plug in the sink and wiped my hands on the wet towel. "Did you ever figure out what that trip was that he kept talking about?"

He opened the kitchen door and fiddled with the knob so that the door would lock behind us when he closed it. "Trip? April used to take him to the zoo, the museum, places like that. Alan isn't really up for any excursion, as you probably noticed."

"And this was one of his good days?"

We went outside by the kitchen door and walked around the side of the house. The overgrown grass baked in the sunlight. One of the big oak trees had been split by lightning, and an entire side had turned black and leafless. Everything, house, lawn, and trees, needed care.

"Well, everything he said was coherent, as far as I remember. He would have been better if he hadn't been drinking for a couple of days."

We came out of the tall grass onto the sidewalk and began walking back to Ely Place. Prickly little brown balls clung to my trousers like Velcro. I pulled fresh moist air into my lungs.

"He's supposed to teach next year?"

"He made it through last year with only a couple of funny episodes."

I asked how old he was.

"Seventy-six."

"Why hasn't he retired?"

John laughed—an unhappy bark. "He's Alan Brookner. He can stay on as long as he wants. But if he goes, the whole department goes with him."

"Why is that?"

"I'm the rest of the department."

"Are you looking for a new job?"

"Anything could happen. Alan might snap out of it."

We walked along in silence for a time.

"I suppose I ought to get him a new cleaning woman," he said finally.

"I think you ought to start checking out nursing homes," I told him.

"On my salary?"

"Doesn't he have money of his own?"

"Oh yes," he said. "I suppose there's some of that."

16

When we got back to his house, Ransom asked me if I wanted something from the kitchen. We went through a dining room dominated by a baronial table and into a modern kitchen with a refrigerator the size of a double bed and deep counters lined with two food processors, a pasta machine, a blender, and a bread maker. Ransom opened a cabinet and brought down two glasses from a crowded shelf. He shoved them one after the other into the ice-making contraption on the front of the refrigerator and filled them with silvery crescents of ice. "Some kind of water? Soft drink?"

"Anything," I said.

He swung open the refrigerator, took out a bottle of water with a picture of an iceberg on the label, broke the seal, and filled my glass. He handed me the glass, returned the bottle, and pulled bags of sliced meat and wrapped cheeses and a loaf of bread from the shelves. Mayonnaise, mustard in a stone crock, margarine, a head of romaine lettuce. He lined all of this up on the butcher block counter between us, and then set two plates and knives and forks beside them. Then he closed the refrigerator and opened the freezer door on shelves of frozen cuts of meat, a stack of frozen dinners, a big frozen pizza wedged in like a truck tire, and two shelves filled with bottles of vodka resting on their sides—Absolut Peppar and Citron; Finlandia; Japanese vodka; Polish vodka; Stolichnaya Cristal; pale green vodkas and pale brown vodkas and vodkas with things floating inside the bottles, long strands of grass, cherries, chunks of lemon, grapes. I leaned forward to get a better look.

He yanked out the Cristal, unscrewed the cap, and poured his glass half full. "Really ought to chill the glass," he mumbled, "but it's not every day that your wife dies, and then you have to shove a seventy-six-year-old man into the shower and make sure he cleans off the shit smeared all over his legs." He gulped down vodka and made a face. "I practically had to climb in with him." Another gulp, another grimace, another gulp. "I did have to dry him off. That white hair all over his body—ugh. Sandpaper."

"Maybe you should hire that nurse, Eliza Morgan, to spend at least the daytime with him."

"You don't think my father-in-law seemed capable of caring for himself? I wonder what might have given you that impression." John dropped more ice crescents into his glass and poured in another three inches of icy vodka. "Anyhow, here's the sandwich stuff. Dig in."

I began piling roast beef and swiss cheese on bread. "Have you thought about how you'll tell him the truth about April?"

"The truth about April?" He set down his glass and almost smiled at me. "No. I have not thought about that yet. Come to think of it, I'll have to tell a lot of people about what happened." His eyes narrowed, and he drank again. "Or maybe I won't. They'll read all about it in the paper." Ransom set his glass back on the counter and rather absentmindedly began making a sandwich, laying a slice of roast beef on a piece of bread, then adding two slices of salami and a slice of ham. He peeled a strip from a slice of cheese and shoved it into his mouth. He stuck a spoon into the crock of mustard and stirred it aimlessly.

I put lettuce and mayonnaise on my own sandwich and watched him stir the mustard.

"What about funeral arrangements, a service, things like that?"

"Oh, yes," he said. "The hospital set up an undertaker."

"Do you own gravesites, anything like that?"

"Who thinks about stuff like that, when your wife is thirty-rive?" He drank again. "I guess I'll have her cremated. That's probably what she would have wanted."

"Would you like me to stay on here a few more days? I wouldn't mind, if you wouldn't feel that I was intruding or becoming a burden."

"Please do. I'm going to need someone to talk to. All this hasn't really hit me yet."

"I'd be glad to," I said. For a little while I watched him push the spoon around inside the grainy mustard. Finally he lifted it out and splatted mustard on his strange sandwich. He closed it up with a piece of bread.

"Was there any truth in what you told her father about her company's merger with the other brokerage house?" I asked him. "It sounded so specific."

"Made-up stories ought to be specific." He picked the sandwich up and looked at it as if someone else had handed it to him.

"You made it all up?" It occurred to me that he must have invented the story shortly after April had been taken to the hospital.

"Well, I think something was, as they say, in the wind. Something was wafted here and there and everywhere, like dandelion seeds." He put his sandwich down on the plate and lifted his glass and drank. "You know the worst thing about people who do what April did, people in that kind of work? I don't mean April, of course, because she wasn't like that, but the rest of them? They were all absolutely full of hot air. They gab in their morning meetings, then they gab on the phone, then they gab to the institutional customers during lunch, then they gab some more on the phone—that's it, that's the job. It's all talking. They love rumors, God, do they love rumors. And the second-worst thing about these people is that they all believe every word every one of them says! So unless you are absolutely up-to-the-minute on all of this stupid, worthless gossip and innuendo they trade back and forth all day long, unless you already know what everybody is whispering into those telephones they're on day and night, you're out, boy, you are about to get flushed. People say that academics are unworldly, you know, people, especially these bullshit artists who do the kind of thing April did, they scorn us because we're not supposed to be in the real world? Well, at least we have real subjects, there's some intellectual and ethical content to our lives, it isn't just this big gassy bubble of spreading half-truths and peddling rumors and making money."

He was breathing hard, and his face was a high, mottled pink. He drained the rest of his drink and immediately made another. I knew about Cristal. In just under ten minutes, John had disposed of about fifteen dollars worth of vodka.

"So Barnett and Company wasn't really going to open a San Francisco office?"

"Actually, I have no real idea."

I had another thought. "Did she want to keep this house because it was so near her father's place?"

"That was one reason." John leaned on the counter and lowered his head. He looked as if he wanted to lie down on the counter. "Also, April didn't want to be stuck out in Riverwood with dodos like Dick Mueller and half the other guys in her office. She wanted to be closer to art galleries, restaurants, the, I don't know, the cultural life. You can see that, all you have to do is look at our house. We weren't like those dopes in her office."

"Sounds like she would have enjoyed San Francisco," I said.

"We'll never know, will we?" He gave me a gloomy look and bit into his sandwich. He looked down at it as he chewed, and his forehead wrinkled. He swallowed. "What the hell is in this thing, anyhow?" He ate a little bit more. "Anyhow, she would never have left Alan, you're right." He took another bite. After he swallowed, he tilted his plate over the garbage can and slid most of the sandwich into it. "I'm going to take this drink and go up to bed. That's about all I can face right now." He took another long swallow and topped up his glass. "Look, Tim, please do stay here for a little while. You'd be helping me."

"Good," I said. "There is something I'd sort of like to look into, if I could stay around a couple of days."

"What, some kind of research?"

"Something like that," I said.

He tried to smile. "God, I'm really shot. Maybe you could call Dick Mueller? He'd still be in the office, unless he's out at lunch somewhere. I hate to ask you to do this, but the people who knew April ought to be told what happened before they read it in the papers."

"What about the other man who called? The one who didn't know whether to call you John or Mr. Ransom?"

"Byron? Forget it. He can hear it on the news."

He twirled his free hand in a good-bye and wavered out of the kitchen. I listened to him thudding up the stairs. His bedroom door opened and closed. When I had finished eating, I put my plate into the dishwasher and stowed all the lunch things back in the refrigerator.

In the quiet house, I could hear the cooled air hissing out of the vents. Now that I had agreed to keep John Ransom company, I was not at all certain about what I wanted to do in Millhaven. I went into the living room and sat down on the couch.

For the moment I had absolutely nothing to do. I looked at my watch and saw with more than surprise, almost with disbelief, that since I had staggered off the airplane and found an unrecognizable John Ransom waiting for me at the gate, exactly twenty-four hours had passed.

PART FIVE

ALLEN BROOKNER

1

A trio of reporters from the Ledger arrived about three in the afternoon. I told them that John was sleeping, identified myself as a family friend, and was told in return that they'd be happy to wait until John woke up. An hour later, the doorbell rang again when a Chicago deputation appeared. We had more or less the same exchange. At five, the doorbell rang once again while I was talking on the telephone in the entry. Gripping colorful bags of fried grease, notebooks, pens, and cassette recorders, the same five people stood on and around the steps. I refused to wake John up and eventually had to shake the telephone I was holding in the face of the most obstinate reporter, Geoffrey Bough of the Ledger. "Well, can you help us out?" he asked.

Despite his name, which suggests a bulky middle-aged frame, a tweed jacket, and a tattersall vest, this Bough was a skinny person in his twenties with sagging jeans and a wrinkled chambray shirt. Forlorn black hair drooped over his thick eyeglasses as he looked down to switch on his tape recorder. "Could you give us any information about how Mr. Ransom is reacting to the news of his wife's death? Does he have any knowledge of how Dragonette first met his wife?" I shut the door in his face and went back to Dick Mueller, April Ransom's co-worker at Barnett and Company, who said, "My God, what was that?" He spoke with an almost comically perfect Millhaven accent.

"Reporters."

"They already know that, ah, that, ah, that…"

"They know," I said. "And it's not going to take them long to find out that you were Dragonette's broker, so you'd better start preparing."

"Preparing?"

"Well, they're going to be very interested in you."

"Interested in me?"

"They'll want to talk to everybody who ever had anything to do with Dragonette." Mueller groaned. "So you might want to figure out ways to keep them out of your office, and you might not want to enter or leave by the front door for a week or so."

"Yeah, okay, thanks," he said. He hesitated. "You say you're an old friend of John's?"

I repeated information I had given him before Geoffrey Bough and the others had interrupted us. Through the narrow windows on either side of the front door I saw another car pull . up and double-park in front of the house. Two men, one carrying a cassette recorder and the other a camera, slouched out and began walking toward the door, grinning at Bough and his two colleagues.

"How is John holding up?" asked Mueller.

"He had a couple of drinks and went to bed. He's going to have a lot to do over the next couple of days, so I think I'll stick around to help him out."

Someone metronomically pounded his fist against the door four times.

"Is that John?" Mueller asked. He sounded worried, even alarmed.

"Just a gentleman of the press."

Mueller gasped, imagining a gang bawling his name while pounding at the brokerage doors.

"I'll call you in the next few days."

"When my secretary asks what you're calling about, tell her it's the bridge project. I'll have to start screening my calls, and that'll remind me of who you are."

"The bridge project?" More bawling and banging came through the door.

"I'll explain later."

I hung up, opened the door, and began yelling. By the time I finished explaining that John was asleep in bed, my picture had been taken a number of times. I closed the door without quite slamming it. Through a slit of window I watched them retreat down to the lawn, munch on their goodies, and light up cigarettes while they worked out what to do. The photographers took a few desultory pictures of the house.

A quick check from the bottom of the stairs disclosed no movement upstairs, so John had managed either to sleep through the clamor or to ignore it. I picked up The Nag Hammadi Library, switched on the television, and sat on the couch. I turned to "The Treatise on the Resurrection," a letter to a student named Rheginos, and read only a few words before I realized that, like most of Millhaven, the local television had capitulated to Walter Dragonette.

I had been hoping that a combination of gnostic hugger-mugger and whatever was on the afternoon talk shows would keep me diverted until John surfaced again, but instead of Phil Donahue or Oprah Winfrey there appeared on the screen a news anchorman I remembered from the early sixties. He seemed almost eerily preserved, with the same combed-back blond hair, the same heavy brown eyeglasses, and the same stolid presence and accentless voice. With the air of unswerveable common sense I remembered, he was repeating, probably for the twentieth or thirtieth time, that regular programming had been suspended so that the All-Action News Team could "maintain continuous reportage of this tragic story." Even though I had seen this man read the evening news for years, I could not remember his name—Jimbo Somehow or Jumbo Somebody. He adjusted his glasses. The All-Action News Team would stay with events as they broke in the Walter Dragonette case until evening programming began at seven, giving us advice and commentary by experts in the fields of criminology and psychology, counseling us on how to discuss these events with our children, and trying in every way to serve a grieving community through good reportage by caring reporters. On a panel behind his face a mob of people occupying the middle of North Twentieth Street watched orange-clad technicians from the Fire Department's Hazardous Materials Task Force carry weighty drums out of the little white house.

Rheginos's teacher, the author of "The Treatise on the Resurrection," said "do not think the resurrection is an illusion. It is the truth! Indeed, it is more fitting to say that the world is an illusion, rather than the resurrection."

The news anchor slipped from view as the screen filled with a live shot of the multitude spilling across Armory Place. These people were angry. They wanted their innocence back. Jimbo explained: "Already calls have been heard for the firing of the chief of police, Arden Vass, the dismissal of Roman Novotny, the police commissioner, and the fourth ward's aldermen, Hector Rilk and George Vandenmeter, and the impeachment of the mayor, Merlin Waterford."

I could read the lettering on some of the signs punching up and down in rhythm to the crowd's chants: WHERE ARE YOU MERLIN? and DISMEMBER HECTOR AND GEORGE. At the top of the long flight of marble steps leading to the front of police headquarters, a gray-haired black man in a dark double-breasted suit orated into a bullhorn. "… reclaim for ourselves and our children the safety of these neighborhoods… in the face of official neglect… in the face of official ignorance…" Seedy ghosts with cassette recorders, ghosts with dandruff on the shoulders of hideous purple shirts, with cameras and notebooks, with thick glasses sliding down their noses, prowled through the crowd.

A younger blond male head, as square as Jimbo's but attached to a sweating neck and a torso wrapped in a tan safari jacket, buried the speaker's words under the announcement that the Reverend Clement Moore, a longtime community spokesman and civil rights activist, had called for a full-scale investigation of the Millhaven Police Department and was demanding reparations for the families of Walter Dragonette's victims. Reverend Moore had announced that his "protest prayer meetings" would continue until the resignations of Chief Vass, Commissioner Novotny, and Mayor Waterford. In a matter of days, the Reverend Moore expected that the protest prayer meetings would be joined by his fellow reverend, Al Sharpton, of New York City.

Back to you in the studio, Jimbo.

Jimbo tilted his massive blond head forward and intoned: "And now for our daily commentary from Joe Ruddier. What do you make of all this, Joe?"

I perked up as another gigantic and familiar face crowded the screen. Joe Ruddier, another longtime member of the All-Action News Team, had been instantly celebrated for his absolute self-certainty and his passionate advocacy of the local teams. His face, always verging toward bright red and now a sizzling purple, had swollen to twice its earlier size. Ruddier had evidently been promoted to political commentary.

"What do I make of all this? I'll tell you what I make of this! I think it's a disgrace! What happened to the Millhaven where a guy could go out for a beer an' a bratwurst without stumbling over a severed head? And as for outside agitators—"

I used the remote to mute this tirade when the telephone rang.

As before, I picked it up to keep the ringing from waking John Ransom, and as before, it was necessary to establish my identity as an old friend from out of town before the caller would reveal his own identity. But this time, I thought I knew the caller's name as soon as a hesitant voice asked, "Mr. Ransom? Could I speak to Mr. Ransom?" A name I had heard on the answering machine came immediately into my mind.

I said that John was sleeping and explained why a stranger was answering his telephone.

"Oh, okay," the caller said. "You're staying with them for a while? You're a friend of the Ransoms?"

I explained that, too.

Long pause. "Well, could you answer a question for me? You know what's happening with Mrs. Ransom and everything, and I don't want to keep disturbing Mr. Ransom. He never—I don't know if—…"

I waited for him to begin again.

"I wonder if you could just sort of fill me in, and everything."

"Is your name Byron Dorian?"

He gasped. "You've heard about me?"

"I recognize your style," I said. "You left a message on John's machine this morning."

"Oh! Hah!" He gave a weak chuckle, as if he had caught me trying to amuse him. "So, what's happening with April, with Mrs. Ransom? I'd really like to hear that she's getting better."

"Would you mind telling me your connection to the Ransoms?"

"My connection?"

"Do you work at Barnett?"

There came another uneasy laugh. "Why, is something wrong?"

"Since I'm acting for the family," I said, "I just want to know who I'm talking to."

"Well, sure. I'm a painter, and Mrs. Ransom came to my studio when she found out what sort of work I was doing, and she liked what she saw, so she commissioned me to do two paintings for their bedroom."

"The nudes," I said.

"You've seen them? Mrs. Ransom liked them a lot, and that was really flattering to me, you've probably seen the rest of their collection, all that great work, you know, it was like having a patron, well, a patron who was a friend…"

His voice trailed off. Through one of the glass panels beside the front door I watched the reporters tossing crumpled candy bar wrappers toward the hedge. Five or six elderly people had taken up places on the steps and sidewalk across the street and settled in to enjoy the show.

"Well," I said, "I'm afraid I have bad news for you."

"Oh, no," said Dorian. .

"Mrs. Ransom died this morning."

"Oh, no. Did she ever recover consciousness?"

"No, she didn't. Byron, Mrs. Ransom did not die of her injuries. Walter Dragonette managed to find out that she was in Shady Mount and that her condition was improving, and he got past the guard this morning and killed her."

"On the day he got arrested?"

I agreed that it seemed almost unbelievable.

"Well, what—what kind of world is this? What is going on? Did he know anything about her?"

"He barely knew her," I said.

"Because she was, this was the most amazing woman, I mean there was so much to her, she was incredibly kind and generous and sympathetic…" For a time I listened to him breathing hard. "I'll let you go back to what you were doing. I just never thought—"

"No, of course not," I said.

"It's too much."

The reporters were gathering for another siege of the door, but I could not hang up on Byron Dorian while his grief pummeled him, and I peered out the slit of window while listening to his stifled moans and gasps.

When his voice was under control again, he said, "You must think I'm really strange, carrying on like this, but you never knew April Ransom."

"Why don't you tell me about her sometime?" I asked. "I'd like to come to your studio and just have a talk."

"That would probably help me, too," he said, and gave me his phone number and an address on Varney Street, in the sad part of town, once a Ukrainian settlement, that surrounded the stadium.

I checked on the reporters, who had settled down to enjoy their third or fourth meal of the day under the appreciative eyes of a growing number of neighbors. Every now and then, some resident of Ely Place tottered through the litter to speak to Geoffrey Bough and his colleagues. I watched a bent old woman with a laden silver tray make her way down the steps of the house across the street, mount Ransom's lawn, and present the various lounging men with cups of coffee.

From my post by the door I saw Jimbo too retrace his steps, reminding his viewers of the extent and nature of Walter Dragonette's crimes, the public outcry, Mayor Waterford's assurances that all would continue to be done to ensure the safety of the citizens. At some point I did not quite mark as I kept watch on Bough and the others, April Ransom's murder passed into the public domain—so John too missed the appearance on the television screen of the Ledger photograph, minus himself, of his wife cradling a gigantic trophy. I know approximately when this happened, four o'clock, because at that time the gathering across the street suddenly doubled in size.

All afternoon, I alternated between watching television, poking through the gnostic gospels, and peering out at the crowd and the waiting reporters. The faces of Walter Dragonette's victims paraded across the screen, from cowboy-suited little Wesley Drum on a rocking horse to huge leering Alfonzo Dakins gripping a beer glass. Twenty-two victims had been identified, sixteen of them black males. Hindsight gave their photographs a uniformly doomed quality. The unknown man found in Dead Man's Tunnel was represented by a question mark. April Ransom's Ledger photograph had been cropped down to her brilliant face. For the few seconds in which she filled the screen, I found that I was looking at the same person whose picture I had seen earlier, but that my ideas about her had begun to change: John's wife seemed smart and vibrant, not hard and acquisitive, and so beautiful that her murder was another degree more heartless than the others. Something had happened since the first time I had seen the photograph: I had become, like John, Dick Mueller, and Byron Dorian, one of her survivors.

A little while later, John came charging down the stairs. Wrinkles crisscrossed his shirt and trousers, and a long indentation from a sheet or pillowcase lay across his left cheek like a scar. He was not wearing shoes, and his hair was rumpled.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Some asshole threw stones at my window," he said, and moved toward the door.

"Hold on," I said. "Did you look out the window before you came down? Do you know what's going on out there?"

"I don't care what's going on," he said..

"Look," I said, and pointed at the television. If he had bothered to look at the screen, he would have seen the facade of his own house from the perspective of his front lawn, where a good-looking young reporter with the strikingly literary name of Isobel Archer was doing a stand-up on the career of the Meat Man's most successful victim.

He shoved the door open.

Then for a second he froze, surprised by the camera, the reporters, and the crowd. It must have been like waking up to a bright light shining in his eyes. A low noise of surprise and pleasure came from the people assembled on the sidewalk and porches across the street. Ms. Archer smiled and thrust a microphone into his face. "Mr. Ransom, what was your immediate reaction to the news that Walter Dragonette had made a second, successful attempt on your wife's life?"

"What?"

Geoffrey Bough and the others circled in, snapping pictures and holding their tape recorders in the air.

"Do you feel that Mrs. Ransom was given adequate protection by the Millhaven Police Department?"

He turned around and looked at me in exasperation.

"What are your thoughts about Walter Dragonette?" Geoffrey Bough shouted. "What can you tell us about the man?"

"I'd like you people to pack up and—"

"Would you call him sane?"

Other reporters, including Ms. Archer, shouted other questions.

"Who's the man behind you?" Bough yelled.

"What's it to you?" John yelled back, pushed over the edge at last. "You people throw rocks at my window, you ask these moronic questions—"

I moved alongside him, and cameras made popping gunfire noises. "I'm a family friend," I said. "Mr. Ransom has been through a great deal." I could dimly hear my own voice coming through the television set behind me in the living room. "All we can say now is that the case against Walter Dragonette, at least in regard to Mrs. Ransom, seems weaker than it should be."

A confused tangle of shouted questions came from all the reporters, and Isobel Archer jammed her microphone under my nose and leaned forward so that her cool blue eyes and tawny hair were so close as to be disorienting. It was as if she were leaning forward for a kiss, but if I had kissed anything, it would have been the nubby head of the microphone. Her question was hard-edged and direct. "So it's your position that Walter Dragonette did not murder Mrs. Ransom?"

"No, I don't think he did," I said. "And I think the police will reject that portion of his confession, in time."

"Do you share that view, Mr. Ransom?" The microphone expertly zipped in front of John's mouth. Ms. Archer leaned forward and widened her eyes, coaxing words out of him.

"Get the hell out of here, right now," John said. "Take your cameras and your tape recorders and your sound equipment and get off my lawn. I have nothing more to say."

Isobel Archer said, "Thank you," and then paused to smile at me. And that would have been that, except that something in the moment moved John a crucial step farther over the edge into outrage. The red wrinkle blazed on his cheek, and he started down the steps and went after the nearest male journalists, who happened to be Geoffrey Bough and his photographer. Isobel signaled to her own assistant, already swinging the camera toward John as he stiff-armed Bough exactly as he had stiff-armed me on the football field in the autumn of 1960.

The skinny reporter windmilled backward and went down with a howl of surprise. In the moment of shock that followed, John swung at Bough's photographer, who backed away while firing off a sequence of motor-driven pictures that appeared at the top of the next day's second section. John whirled away from him and rushed at the photographer from Chicago, who had prowled up beside him. John grasped the man's camera with one hand, his neck with the other, and bowled him over, snapping the camera's strap. John wound up like a pitcher and fired the camera toward the street. It struck a car and bounced off onto the concrete. Then he whirled on the man holding the Minicam.

Geoffrey Bough scrambled to his feet, and John turned away from the Minicam operator, who showed signs of a willingness to fight, and pushed Bough back down on the ground.

Reestablished in the middle of Ely Place, Isobel Archer held the microphone up to her American Sweetheart face and said something to the cameras that caused an outbreak of mirth among the assembled neighbors. John dropped his hands and stepped away from the scrambling, sputtering reporter. Bough jumped to his feet and followed the other reporters and camera people to the street. He brushed off his dirty jeans and inspected a grass stain on his right knee, missing the comparable stain on his right elbow. "We'll be back tomorrow," he said.

John raised his fists and began to charge. I grabbed his arm and pulled him back toward the steps—if he had not cooperated with me, I could not have held him. In the second or so that he resisted me, I knew that these days, for all his flab, John Ransom was considerably stronger than I was. We got up the steps and I opened the door. Ransom stormed inside and whirled around to face me.

"What the hell was that shit you were coming up with out there?"

"I don't think Dragonette killed your wife," I said. "I don't think he killed the man behind the St. Alwyn, either."

"Are you crazy?" Ransom stared at me as if I had just betrayed him. "How can you say that? Everybody knows he killed April. We even heard him say he killed April."

"I was thinking about everything while you were upstairs, and I realized that Dragonette didn't know enough about these murders to have done them. He doesn't even know what happened."

He glared at me for a moment and then turned away in frustration and sat down on the couch and took in what the local TV stations were doing. Isobel Archer gloated beautifully into the camera and said, "And so a startling new development in the Dragonette story, as a friend of the Ransom family casts doubt on the police case here." She raised a notebook to just within camera range. "We will have tape on this as soon as possible, but my notes show that the words were: 'I don't think he did it. I think the police will reject that portion of his confession, in time.' " She lowered the notebook, and an audible pop, whisked her into darkness and silence.

Ransom slammed the remote onto the table. "Don't you get it? They're going to start blaming me."

"John," I said, "why would Dragonette interrupt his busy little schedule of murder and dismemberment at home to reenact the Blue Rose murders? Don't they sound like two completely different types of crime? Two different kinds of mind at work?"

He looked sourly at me. "That's why you went out there and threw raw meat to those animals?"

"Not exactly." I went to the couch and sat down beside him. Ransom looked at me suspiciously and moved a few inches away. He began rearranging the Vietnam books into neater, lower stacks. "I want to know the truth," I said.

He grunted. "What actual reasons do you have for thinking that Dragonette isn't guilty? The guy seems perfect to me."

"Tell me why."

"Okay." Ransom, who had been slouching back against the couch, sat up straight. "One. He confessed. Two. He's crazy enough to have done it. Three. He knew April from his visits to the office. Four. He always liked the Blue Rose murders, just like you. Five. Could there really be two people in Millhaven who are crazy enough to do it? Six. Paul Fontaine and Michael Hogan, who happen to be very good cops and who have put away lots of killers, think the guy is guilty. Fontaine might be a little weird sometimes, but Hogan is something else—he's one smart, powerful guy. I mean, he reminds me of the best guys I knew in the service. There's no bullshit about Hogan, none."

I nodded. Like me, John had been impressed by Michael Hogan.

"And last, what is it, seven? Seven. He could find out all about April and her condition from his mother's old pal Betty Grable at the hospital."

"I think it was Mary Graebel, different spelling," I said. "And you're right, he did find out April was at Shady Mount. When I came down in the elevator with Fontaine this morning, an old lady working behind the counter almost passed out when she saw us. I bet that was Mary Graebel."

"She knew she helped kill April," John said. "The cow couldn't keep her mouth shut."

"She thought she helped her old friend's son kill April. That's different."

"What makes you so sure he didn't?"

"Dragonette claimed that he couldn't remember anything he had done to that cop in April's room, Mangelotti. He overheard Fontaine joking that Mangelotti was dead—so he claimed that he had murdered him. Then Fontaine said he was exaggerating, so Dragonette said he was exaggerating, too!"

"He's playing mind games," John said.

"He didn't know what happened to Mangelotti. Also, he had no idea that April had been killed until he heard it over the police radio. That was the point that always bothered me."

"Why would he confess if he didn't do it? That still doesn't make sense."

"Maybe you didn't notice, but Walter Dragonette is not the most sensible man in the world."

Ransom leaned forward and stared down at the floor for a time, considering what I had been saying. "So there's another guy out there."

I saw a mental picture of those drawings where the eye wanders over the leaves of an oak tree until the dagger leaps out of concealment, and the brickwork on the side of a house reveals a running man, a trumpet, an open door.

"You and your brainstorms." He shook his head, now almost smiling. "I'm going to have to live with the repercussions of shoving that reporter around."

"What do you think they'll be?"

He shifted one of the stacks of novels sideways half an inch, back a quarter-inch. "I suppose my neighbors are more convinced than ever that I killed my wife."

"Did you, John?" I asked him. "This is just between you and me."

"You're asking me if I killed April?"

His face heated as before, but without the violence I had seen in him just before he had gone after Geoffrey Bough. He stared at me, trying to look intimidating. "Is this something Tom Pasmore asked you to say?"

I shook my head.

"The answer is no. If you ask me that once more, I'll throw you out of this house. Are you satisfied?"

"I had to ask," I said.

2

For the next two days, John Ransom and I watched the city fall apart on local television. When we were inside his house, we ignored the knot of reporters, varying from a steady core of three to a rumbling mob of fifteen, occupying his front lawn. We also ignored their efforts to lure us outside. They rang the bell at regular intervals, pressed their faces against the windows, yelled his name or mine with doglike repetitiveness… Every hour or so, either John or I would get up from the day's fifth, sixth, or fifteenth contemplation of the names and faces of the victims to check the enemy through the narrow window slits on either side of the door. It felt like a medieval siege, plus telephones.

We ate lunch in front of the set; we ate dinner in front of the set.

Someone banged imperiously on the front door. Someone else fingered open the mail slot and yelled, "Timothy Underhill! Who killed April Ransom?"

"Who killed Laura Palmer?" muttered Ransom, mostly to himself.

This was on the day, Saturday, that Arkham's dean of humanities had left a message on the answering machine that Arkham's trustees, board of visitors, and alumni society had registered separate complaints about the televised language and behavior of the religion department's Professor Ransom. Would Professor Ransom please offer some assurance that all legal matters would be concluded by the beginning of the fall term? And it followed our struggles back and forth through the mob on our way to Trott Brothers Funeral Parlor.

So he wasn't doing too badly, considering everything. The worst aspect of our experience at Trott Brothers had been the manner of Joyce "Just call me Joyce" Trott Brophy, the daughter and only child of the single remaining Mr. Trott. Just Call Me Joyce made the reporters seem genteel. Obese and hugely pregnant, professionally oblivious to grief, she had long ago decided that the best way to meet the stricken people life brought her way was with the resolute self-involvement she would have called "common sense."

"We're doing a beautiful job on your little lady, Mr. Ransom, you're going to say she looks as beautiful as she did on her wedding day. This here coffin is the one I'm recommending to you for display purposes during the service, we can talk about the urn later, we got some real beauties, but look here at this satin, plump and firm and shiny as you can get it—be the perfect frame around a pretty picture, if you don't mind my saying so. You wouldn't believe the pains I get carrying this baby back and forth around this showroom, boy, if Walter Dragonette showed up here he'd get two for the price of one, that'd give my daddy the job of his life, wouldn't it, by golly, that's gas this time. You ever get those real bad gas pains? I better sit down here while you and your friend talk things over, just don't pay any attention to me, Lord, I heard everything anyhow, people hardly know what they're saying when they come in here."

We had at least two hours of Just Call Me Joyce, which demonstrated once again that when endured long enough, even the really horrible can become boring. In that time John rented the "display" coffin, ordered the funeral announcements and the obituary notice, booked time at the crematorium, bought an urn and a slot in a mausoleum, secured the "Chapel of Rest" and the services of a nondenominational minister for the memorial service, hired a car for the procession to the mausoleum, ordered flowers, commissioned makeup and a hairdo for the departed, bought an organist and an organ and ninety minutes' worth of recorded classical music, and wrote a check for something like ten thousand dollars. "Well, I sure do like a man who knows what he wants," said Just Call Me Joyce. "Some of these folks, they come in here and dicker like they thought they could take it with them when they go. Let me tell you, I been there, and they can't."

"You've been there?" I asked.

"Everything that happens to you after you're dead, I been there for it," she said. "And anything you want to know about, I can tell you about it."

"I guess we can go home now," Ransom said.

Early in the evening, Ransom was seated in the darkening room, staring at its one bright spot, the screen, which once again gave a view of the chanting crowd at Armory Place. I thought about Just Call Me Joyce and her baby. Someday the child would take over the funeral home. I saw this child as a man in his mid-forties, grinning broadly and pressing the flesh, slamming widowers on the back, breaking the ice with an anecdote about trout fishing, Lordy that was the biggest ole fish anybody ever pulled out of that river, oof, there goes my sciatica again, just give me a minute here, folks.

A door in my mind clicked open and let in a flood of light, and without saying anything to Ransom, I went back upstairs to my room and filled about fifteen sheets of the legal pad I had remembered at the last minute to slip into my carry-on bag. All by itself, my book had taken another stride forward.

3

What had opened the door into the imaginative space was the collision of Walter Dragonette with the certainty that Just Call Me Joyce's child would be just like his mother. When I had arrived at Shady Mount that morning, I'd had an idea which April Ransom's death had erased—but everything since then had secretly increased the little room of my idea, so that by the time it came back to me through imagination's door, it had grown into an entire wing, with its own hallways, staircases, and windows.

I saw that I could use some of Walter Dragonette's life while writing about Charlie Carpenter's childhood. Charlie had killed other people before he met Lily Sheehan: a small boy, a young mother, and two or three other people in the towns where he had lived before he had come back home. Millhaven would be Charlie's hometown, but it would have another name in the book. Charlie's deeds were like Walter Dragonette's, but the circumstances of his childhood were mine, heightened to a terrible pitch. There would be a figure like Dragonette's Mr. Lancer. My entire being felt a jolt as I saw the huge head of Heinz Stenmitz lower itself toward mine—pale blue eyes and the odor of bloody meat.

During Charlie's early childhood, his father had killed several people for no better motive than revenge, and the five-year-old Charlie had taken his father's secret into himself. If I described everything through Charlie's eyes, I could begin to work out what could make someone turn out like Walter Dragonette. The Ledger had tried to do that, clumsily, by questioning sociologists, priests, and policemen; and it was what I had been doing when I put the photograph of Ted Bundy's mother up on my refrigerator.

For the second time that day, my book bloomed into life within me.

I saw five-year-old Charlie Carpenter in my old bedroom on South Sixth Street, looking at the pattern of dark blue roses climbing the paler blue wallpaper in a swirl of misery and despair as his father beat up his mother. Charlie was trying to go into the wallpaper, to escape into the safe, lifeless perfection of the folded petals and the tangle of stalks.

I saw the child walking along Livermore Avenue to the Beldame Oriental, where in a back row the Minotaur waited to yank him bodily into a movie about treachery and arousal. Reality flattened out under the Minotaur's instruction—the real feelings aroused by the things he did would tear you into bloody rags, so you forgot it all. You cut up the memory, you buried it in a million different holes. The Minotaur was happy with you, he held you close and his hands crushed against you and the world died.

Because columns of numbers were completely emotionless, Charlie was a bookkeeper. He would live in hotel rooms because they were impersonal. He would have recurring dreams and regular habits. He would never sleep with a woman unless he had already killed her, very carefully and thoroughly, in his head. Once every couple of months, he would have quick, impersonal sex with men, and maybe once a year, when he had allowed himself to drink too much, he would annoy some man he picked up in a gay bar by babbling hysterical baby talk while rubbing the stranger's erection over his face.

Charlie had been in the service in Vietnam.

He would kill Lily Sheehan as soon as he got into her lake house. That was why he stole the boat and let it drift into the reeds, and why he showed up at Lily's house so early in the morning.

I had to go back through the first third of the novel and insert the changes necessary to imply the background that I had just invented for Charlie. What the reader saw of him—his bloodless affection for his boring job, his avoidance of intimacy—would have sinister implications. The reader would sense that Lily Sheehan was putting herself in danger when she began her attempts to lure Charlie into the plot that had reminded me of Kent Smith and Gloria Grahame. You, dear heart, dear Reader, you without whom no book exists at all, who had begun reading what appeared to be a novel about an innocent lured into a trap would gradually sense that the woman who was trying to manipulate the innocent was going to get a nasty surprise.

The first third of the book would end with Lily Sheehan's murder. The second third of the book would be the account of Charlie's childhood—and it came to me that the child-Charlie would have a different name, so that at first you, dear Reader, would wonder why you were suddenly following the life of a pathetic child who had no connection to the events of the book's first two hundred pages! This confusion would end when the child, aged eighteen, enlisted in the army under the name Charles Carpenter. Charlie's capture would take up the final third.

The title of this novel would be The Kingdom of Heaven, and its epigraph would be the verses from the Thomas gospel I had read in Central Park.

The inner music of The Kingdom of Heaven would be the search for the Minotaur. Charlie would have returned to Millhaven (whatever it was called in the book) because, though he had only the most partial glimpse of this, he wanted to find the man who had abused him in the Beldame Oriental. Memories of the Minotaur would haunt his life and the last third of the book, and once—without quite knowing why—he would visit the shell of the theater and have an experience similar to mine of yesterday morning.

The Minotaur would be like a fearsome God hidden at the bottom of a deep cave, his traces and effects scattered everywhere through the visible world.

Then I had a final insight before going back downstairs. The movie five-year-old Charlie Carpenter was watching when a smiling monster slid into the seat next to his was From Dangerous Depths. It did not matter that I had never seen it—though I could see it, if I stayed in Millhaven long enough—because all I needed was the title.

Now I needed a reason for a child so young to be sent to the movies on several days in succession, and that too arrived as soon as I became aware of its necessity. Young Charlie's mother lay dying in the Carpenter house. Again the necessary image surged forward out of the immediate past. I saw April Ransom's pale, bruised, unconscious body stretched out on white sheets. A fresh understanding arrived with the image, and I knew that Charlie's father had beaten his wife into unconsciousness and was letting her die. For a week or more, the little boy who grew up to be Charlie Carpenter had lived with his dying mother and the father who killed her, and during those terrible days he had met the Minotaur and been devoured.

I put down my pen. Now I had a book, The Kingdom of Heaven. I wanted to wrap it around me like a blanket. I wanted to vanish into the story as little Charlie (not yet named Charlie) yearned to melt into the blue roses twining up the paler blue background of my bedroom wallpaper—to become the twist of an elm leaf on Livermore Avenue, the cigarette rasp of a warm voice in the darkness, the gleam of silver light momentarily seen on a smooth dark male head, the dusty shaft of paler light speeding toward the screen in a nearly empty theater.

4

With two exceptions, the weekend went by in the same fashion as the preceding days. At Ransom's suggestion, I brought my manuscript and new notes downstairs to the dining room table, where I happily chopped paragraphs and pages from what I had written, and using a succession of gliding Blackwing pencils sharpened to perfect points in a clever little electric mill, wrote the new pages about Charlie's childhood on a yellow legal pad.

Ransom did not mind sharing the legal pad, the electric sharpener, and the Blackwings, but the idea that I might want to spend a couple of hours working every day alternately irritated and depressed him. This problem appeared almost as soon as he had helped me establish myself on the dining room table.

He looked suspiciously at the pad, the electric sharpener, my pile of notes, the stack of pages. "You had another brainstorm, I suppose?"

"Something like that."

"I suppose that's good news, for you."

He returned to the living room so abruptly that I followed him. He dropped onto the couch and stared at the television.

"John, what's the matter?"

He would not look at me. It occurred to me that he had probably acted like this with April, too. After a considerable silence, he said, "If all you're going to do is work, you might as well be back in New York."

Some people assume that all writing is done in between drinks, or immediately after long walks through the Yorkshire dales. John Ransom had just put himself in this category.

"John," I said, "I know that this is a terrible time for you, but I don't understand why you're acting this way."

"What way?"

"Forget it," I said. "Just try to keep in mind that I am not rejecting you personally."

"Believe me," he said, "I'm used to being around selfish people."

John didn't speak to me for the rest of the day. He made dinner for himself, opened a bottle of Chateau Petrus, and ate the dinner and drank the bottle while watching television. When the Walter Dragonette show ceased for the day, he surfed through the news programs; when they were over, he switched to CNN until "Nightline" came on. The only interruption came immediately after he finished his meal, when he carried his wineglass to the telephone, called Arizona, and told his parents that April had been murdered. I was back in the dining room by that time, eating a sandwich and revising my manuscript, and was sure that Ransom knew that I could overhear him tell his parents that an old acquaintance from the service, the writer Tim Underhill, had come "all the way from New York to help me deal with things. You know, handling phone calls, dealing with the press, helping me with the funeral arrangements." He ended the conversation by making arrangements for picking them up from the airport. After "Nightline," Ransom switched off the set and went upstairs.

The next morning I went out for a quick walk before the reporters arrived. When I came back, Ransom rushed out of the kitchen and asked if I'd like a cup of coffee. Some eggs, maybe? He thought we ought to have breakfast before we went to his father-in-law's house to break the news.

Did he want me to come along while he told Alan? Sure he did, of course he did—unless I'd rather stay here and work. Honestly, that would be okay, too.

Either I wasn't selfish anymore, or he had forgiven me. The sulky, silent Ransom was gone.

"We can leave by the back door and squeeze through a gap in the hedges. The reporters'll never know we left the house."

"Is there something I don't know about?" I asked.

"I called the dean at home last night," he said. "He finally understood that I couldn't promise to have everything settled by September. He said he'd try to calm down the trustees and the board of visitors. He thinks he can get some sort of vote of confidence in my favor."

"So your job is safe, at least."

"I guess," he said.

The second exceptional event of the weekend took place before our visit with Alan Brookner. John came back into the kitchen while I was eating breakfast to report that Alan seemed to be having another one of his "good" days and was expecting us within the next half hour. "He's mixing Bloody Marys, so at least he's in a good mood."

"Bloody Marys?"

"He made them for April and me every Sunday—we almost always went to his place for brunch."

"Did you tell him why you wanted to see him?"

"I want him relaxed enough to understand things."

The bell buzzed, and fists struck the door. A dimly audible voice asked that John open up, please. The hound pack was not usually so polite.

"Let's get out of here," John said. "Check the front to make sure they're not sneaking around the house."

The phone started ringing as soon as I passed under the arch. A fist banged twice on the door, and a voice called, "Police, Mr. Ransom, please open up, we want to talk to you."

The men at the door peered in through separate windows, and I found myself looking directly into the face of Detective Wheeler. The smirking, mustached head of Detective Monroe appeared at the window on the other side of the door. Monroe said, "Open up, Underhill."

Paul Fontaine's voice spoke through the answering machine. "Mr. Ransom, I am told that you are ignoring the presence of the detectives at your door. Don't be bad boys, now, and let the nice policemen come inside. After all, the policeman is your—"

I opened the door, beckoned in Monroe and Wheeler, and snatched up the phone. "This is Tim Underhill," I said into the receiver. "We thought your men were reporters. I just let them in."

"The policeman is your friend. Be good boys and talk to them, will you?" He hung up before I could reply.

John came steaming out from the hall into the living room, already pointing at our three dark shapes in the foyer. "I want those people out of here right now, you hear me?" He charged forward and then abruptly stopped moving. "Oh. Sorry."

"That's fine, Mr. Ransom," said Wheeler. Both detectives went about half of the distance across the living room. When John did not come forward to meet them, they gave each other a quick look and stopped moving. Monroe put his hands in his pockets and gave the paintings a long inspection.

John said, "You sat in the booth with us."

"I'm Detective Wheeler, and this is Detective Monroe."

Monroe's mouth twitched into an icy smile.

"I guess I know why you're here," John said.

"The lieutenant was a little surprised by your remarks the other day," said Wheeler.

"I didn't say anything," John said. "It was him. If you want to be specific about it." He crossed his arms in front of his chest, propping them on the mound of his belly.

"Could we all maybe sit down, please?" asked Wheeler.

"Yeah, sure," said John, and uncrossed his arms and made a beeline for the nearest chair.

Monroe and Wheeler sat on the couch, and I took the other chair.

"I have to see April's father," John said. "He still doesn't know what happened."

Wheeler asked, "Would you like to call him, Mr. Ransom, tell him you'll be delayed?"

"It doesn't matter," John said.

Wheeler nodded. "Well, that's up to you, Mr. Ransom." He flipped open a notebook.

John squirmed like a schoolboy in need of the bathroom. Wheeler and Monroe both looked at me, and Monroe gave me his frozen smile again and took over.

"I thought you were satisfied with Dragonette's confession."

Ransom exhaled loudly and slumped back against the couch.

"For the most part, I was, at least then."

"So was I," John put in.

"Did you have questions about Dragonette's truthfulness during the interrogation?"

"I did," I said, "but even before that I had some doubts."

Monroe glared at me, and Wheeler said, "Suppose you tell us about these doubts."

"My doubts in general?"

He nodded. Monroe rocked back in his chair, jerked his jacket down, and gave me a glare like a blow.

I told them what I had said to John two days earlier, that Dragonette's accounts of the attacks on the unidentified man and Officer Mangelotti had seemed improvised and unreal to me. "But more than that, I think his whole confession was contaminated. He only started talking about John's wife after he heard a dispatcher say that she had just been killed."

Monroe said, "Suppose you tell us where this fairy tale about Dragonette and the dispatcher comes from."

"I'd like to know the point of this visit," I said.

For a moment the two detectives said nothing. Finally Monroe smiled at me again. "Mr. Underhill, do you have any basis for this claim? You weren't in the car with Walter Dragonette."

John gave me a questioning look. He remembered, all right.

"One of the officers in the car with Dragonette told me what happened," I said.

"That's incredible," said Monroe.

"Could you tell me who was in the car with Walter Dragonette when that call from the dispatcher came in?" asked Wheeler.

"Paul Fontaine and a uniformed officer named Sonny sat in the front seat. Dragonette was handcuffed in the back. Sonny heard the dispatcher say that Mrs. Ransom had been murdered in the hospital. Dragonette heard it, too. And then he said, 'If you guys had worked faster, you could have saved her, you know.' And Detective Fontaine asked if he were confessing to the murder of April Ransom, and Dragonette said that he was. At that point, he would have confessed to anything."

Monroe leaned forward. "What are you trying to accomplish?"

"I want to see the right man get arrested," I said.

He sighed. "How did you ever meet Sonny Berenger?"

"I met him at the hospital, and again after the interrogation."

"I don't suppose anybody else heard these statements."

"One other person heard them." I did not look at John. I waited. The two detectives stared at me. We all sat in silence for what seemed a long time.

"I heard it, too," John finally said.

"There we go," said Wheeler.

"There we go," said Monroe. He stood up. "Mr. Ransom, we'd like to ask you to come down to Armory Place to go over what happened on the morning of your wife's death."

"Everybody knows where I was on Thursday morning." He looked confused and alarmed.

"We'd like to go over that in greater detail," Monroe said. "This is normal routine, Mr. Ransom. You'll be back here in an hour or two."

"Do I need a lawyer?"

"You can have a lawyer present, if you insist."

"Fontaine changed his mind," I said. "He went over the tape, and he didn't like that flimsy confession."

The two detectives did not bother to answer me. Monroe said, "We'd appreciate your cooperation, Mr. Ransom."

Ransom turned to me. "Do you think I should call a lawyer?"

"I would," I said.

"I don't have anything to worry about." He turned from me to Wheeler and Monroe. "Let's get it over with."

The three of them stood up, and, a moment later, so did I.

"Oh, my God," John said. "We were supposed to see Alan."

The two cops looked back and forth between us.

"Will you go over there?" John asked. "Explain everything, and tell him I'll see him as soon as I can."

"What do you mean, explain everything?"

"About April," he said.

Monroe smiled slowly.

"Don't you think you ought to do that yourself?"

"I would if I could," John said. "Tell him I'll talk to him as soon as I can. It'll be better this way."

"I doubt that," I said.

He sighed. "Then call him up and tell him that I had to go in for questioning, but that I'll come over as soon as I can this afternoon."

I nodded, and the detectives went outside with John. Geoffrey Bough and his photographer trotted forward, expectant as puppies. The camera began firing with the clanking, heavy noise of a round being chambered. When Monroe and Wheeler assisted Ransom into their car, not neglecting to palm the top of his head and shoehorn him into the backseat, Bough looked back at the house and bawled my name. He started running toward me, and I closed and locked the door.

The bell rang, rang, rang. I said, "Go away."

"Is Ransom under arrest?"

When I said nothing, Geoffrey flattened his face against the slit of window beside the door.

Alan Brookner answered after his telephone had rung for two or three minutes. "Who is this?"

I told him my name. "We had some drinks in the kitchen."

"I have you now! Good man! You coming here today?"

"Well, I was going to, but something came up, and John won't be able to make it for a while."

"What does that mean?" He coughed loudly, alarmingly, making ripping sounds deep in his chest. "What about the Bloody Marys?" More terrible coughing followed. "Hang the Bloody Marys, where's John?"

"The police wanted to talk to him some more."

"You tell me what happened to my daughter, young man. I've been fooled with long enough."

A fist began thumping against the door. Geoffrey Bough was still gaping at the slit window.

"I'll be over as soon as I can," I said.

"The front door ain't locked." He hung up.

I went back through the arch. The telephone began to shrill. The doorbell gonged.

I passed through the kitchen and stepped out onto Ransom's brown lawn. The hedges met a row of arbor vitae like Christmas trees. Above them protruded the peaks and gables of a neighboring roof. A muted babble came from the front of the house. I crossed the lawn and pushed myself into the gap between the hedge and the last arbor vitae. The light disappeared, and the lively, pungent odors of leaves and sap surrounded me in a comfortable pocket of darkness. Then the tree yielded, and I came out into an empty, sun-drenched backyard.

I almost laughed out loud. I could just walk away from it, and I did.

5

This sense of escape vanished as soon as I walked up the stone flags that bisected Alan Brookner's overgrown lawn.

I turned the knob and stepped inside. A taint of rotting garbage hung in the air like perfume, along with some other, harsher odor.

"Alan," I called out. "It's Tim Underhill."

I moved forward over a thick layer of mail and passed into the sitting room or library, or whatever it was. The letters John had tossed onto the chesterfield still lay there, only barely visible in the darkness. The lights were off, and the heavy curtains had been drawn. The smell of garbage grew stronger, along with the other stink.

"Alan?"

I groped for a light switch and felt only bare smooth wall, here and there very slightly gummy. Something small and black rocketed across the floor and dodged behind a curtain. A few more plates of half-eaten food lay on the floor.

"Alan!"

A low growl emerged from the walls. I wondered if Alan Brookner were dying somewhere in the house—if he'd had a stroke. The enormously selfish thought occurred to me that I might not have to tell him that his daughter was dead. I went back out into the corridor.

Dusty papers lay heaped on the dining room table. It looked like my own worktable back at John's house. A chair stood at the table before the abandoned work.

"Alan?"

The growl came from farther down the hallway.

In the kitchen, the smell of shit was as loud as an explosion. A few pizza boxes had been stacked up on the kitchen counter. The drawn shades admitted a hovering, faint illumination that seemed to have no single source. The tops of glasses and the edges of plates protruded over the lip of the sink. In front of the stove lay a tangled blanket of bath towels and thinner kitchen towels. A messy, indistinct mound about a foot high and covered with a mat of delirious flies lay on top of the towels.

I groaned and held my right hand to my forehead. I wanted to get out of the house. The stench made me feel sick and dizzy. Then I heard the growl again and saw that another being, a being not of my own species, was watching me.

Beneath the kitchen table crouched a hunched black shape. From it poured a concentrated sense of rage and pain. Two white eyes moved in the midst of the blackness. I was standing in front of the Minotaur. The stench of its droppings swarmed out at me.

"You're in trouble," the Minotaur rumbled. "I'm an old man, but I'm nobody's pushover."

"I know that," I said.

"Lies drive me crazy. Crazy" He shifted beneath the table, and the cloth fell away from his head. A white scurf of his whiskers shone out from beneath the table. The furious eyes floated out toward me. "You are going to tell me the truth. Now."

"Yes," I said.

"My daughter is dead, isn't she?"

"Yes."

A jolt like an electric shock straightened his back and pushed out his chin. "An auto accident? Something like that?"

"She was murdered," I said.

He tilted his head back, and the covering slipped to his shoulders. A grimace spread his features across his face. He looked as if he had been stabbed in the side. In the same terrible whisper, he asked, "How long ago? Who did it?"

"Alan, wouldn't you like to come out from under that table?"

He gave me another look of concentrated rage. I knelt down. The buzzing of the flies suddenly seemed very loud.

"Tell me how my daughter was murdered."

"About a week ago, a maid found her stabbed and beaten in a room at the St. Alwyn Hotel."

Alan let out a terrible groan.

"Nobody knows who did that to her. April was taken to Shady Mount, where she remained in a coma until this Wednesday. She began to show signs of improvement. On Thursday morning, someone came into her room and killed her."

"She never came out of the coma?"

"No."

He opened his Minotaur eyes again. "Has anyone been arrested?"

"There was a false confession. Come out from under the table, Alan."

Tears glittered in the white scurf on his cheeks. Fiercely, he shook his head. "Did John think I was too feeble to hear the truth? Well, I'm not too damn feeble right now, sonny."

"I can see that," I said. "Why are you sitting under the kitchen table, Alan?"

"I got confused. I got a little lost." He glared at me again. "John was supposed to come over. I was finally going to get the truth out of that damned son-in-law of mine." He shook his head, and I got the Minotaur eyes again. "So where is he?"

Even in this terrible condition, Alan Brookner had a powerful dignity I had only glimpsed earlier. His grief had momentarily shocked him out of his dementia. I felt achingly sorry for the old man.

"Two detectives showed up when we were about to leave. They asked John to come down to the station for questioning," I said.

"They didn't arrest him."

"No."

He pulled the cloth up around his shoulders again and held it tight at his neck with one hand. It looked like a tablecloth. I moved a little closer. My eyes stung as if I had squirted soap into them.

"I knew she was dead." He slumped down into himself, and for a moment had the ancient monkey look I had seen on my first visit. He started shaking his head.

I thought he was about to disappear back into his tablecloth. "Would you like to come out from under the table, Alan?"

"Would you like to stop patronizing me?" His eyes burned out at me, but they were no longer the Minotaur's eyes. "Okay. Yes. I want to come out from under the table." He scooted forward and caught his feet in the fabric. Struggling to free his hands, he tightened the section of cloth across his chest. Panic flared in his eyes.

I moved nearer and reached beneath the table. Brookner battled the cloth. "Damn business," he said. "Thought I'd be safe —got scared."

I found an edge of material and yanked at it. Brookner shifted a shoulder, and his right arm flopped out of the cloth. He was holding his revolver. "Got it now," he said. "You bet. Piece of cake." He wriggled his other shoulder out of confinement, and the cloth drooped to his waist. I took the gun away from him and put it on the table. He and I both pulled the length of fabric away from his legs, and Alan got one knee under him, then the other, and crawled forward until he was out from under the table. The tablecloth came with him. Finally, he accepted my hand and levered himself up on one knee until he could get one foot, covered with a powder-blue tube sock, beneath him. Then I pulled him upright, and he got his other foot, in a black tube sock, on the cloth. "There we go," he said. "Right as rain." He tottered forward and let me take his elbow. We shuffled across the kitchen toward a chair. "Old joints stiffened up," he said. He began gingerly extending his arms and gently raising his legs. Glittering tears still hung in his whiskers.

"I'll take care of that mess on the floor," I said.

"Do what you like." The wave of pain and rage came from him once more. "Is there a funeral? There damn well better be, because I'm going to it." His face stiffened with anger and the desire to suppress his tears. The Minotaur eyes flared again. "Come on, tell me."

"There's a funeral tomorrow. One o'clock at Trott Brothers. She'll be cremated."

The fierce grimace flattened his features across his face again. He hid his face behind his knotted hands and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and wept noisily. His shirt was gray with dust and black around the rim of the collar. A sour, unwashed smell came up from him, barely distinguishable in the reek of feces.

He finally stopped crying and wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I knew it," he said, looking up at me. The lids of his eyes were pink and inflamed.

"Yes."

"That's why I wound up here." He wiped most of the tears out of his silken white whiskers. A shadow of pain and confusion nearly as terrible as his grief passed over his face.

"April was going to take me—there was this place—" The sudden anger melted into grief again, and his upper body shook with the effort of trying to look ferocious while he wanted to cry.

"She was going to take you somewhere?"

He waved his big hands in the air, dismissing the whole topic.

"What's the reason for this?" I indicated the buzzing mound on the towels.

"Improvised head. The one down here got blocked up or something, damn thing's useless, and I can't always get upstairs. So I laid down a bunch of towels."

"Do you have a shovel somewhere around the place?"

"Garage, I guess," he said.

I found a flat-bottomed coal shovel in a corner of a garage tucked away under the oak trees. On the concrete slab lay a collection of old stains surrounded by an ancient lawnmower, a long-tined leaf rake, a couple of broken lamps, and a pile of cardboard boxes. Framed pictures leaned back to front against the far wall. I bent down for the shovel. A long stripe of fluid still fresh enough to shine lay on top of the old stains. I touched it with a forefinger: slick, not quite dry. I sniffed my finger and smelled what might have been brake fluid.

When I came back into the kitchen, Alan was leaning against the wall, holding a black garbage bag. He straightened up and brandished the bag. "I know this looks bad, but the toilet wouldn't work."

"I'll take a look at it after we get this mess out of the house."

He held the bag open, and I began to shovel. Then I tied up the bag and put it inside another bag before dropping it into the garbage can. While I mopped the floor, Alan told me twice, in exactly the same words, that he had awakened one morning during his freshman year at Harvard to discover that his roommate had died in the next bed. No more than a five-second pause separated the two accounts.

"Interesting story," I said, afraid that he was going to tell me the whole thing a third time.

"Have you ever seen death close up?"

"Yes," I said.

"How'd you come to do that?"

"My first job in Vietnam was graves registration. We had to check dead soldiers for ID."

"And what was the effect of that on you?"

"It's hard to describe," I said.

"John, now," Alan said. "Didn't something strange happen to him over there?"

"All I really know is that he was trapped underground with a lot of corpses. The army reported him killed in action."

"What did that do to him?"

I mopped the last bit of the floor, poured the dirty water into the sink, filled it with hot soapy water, and began washing the dishes. "When I saw him afterward, the last time I saw him in Vietnam, he said these things to me: Everything on earth is made of fire, and the name of that fire is Time. As long as you know you are standing in the fire, everything is permitted. A seed of death is at the center of every moment."

"Not bad," Alan said.

I put the last dish into the rack. "Let's see if I can fix your toilet."

I opened doors until I found a plunger in the broom closet.

In a lucid moment, Alan had blotted up the overspill from the toilet and done his best to clean the floor. Crushed paper towels filled the wastebasket. I stuck the plunger into the water and pumped. A wad of pulp that had once been typing paper bubbled out of the pipe. I trapped the paper in the plunger and decanted it in the wastebasket. "Just keep this thing in here, Alan, and remember to use it if the same thing happens."

"Okay, okay." He brightened up a little. "Hey, I made a batch of Bloody Marys. How about we have some?"

"One," I said. "For you, not me."

Back in the kitchen, Alan took a big pitcher out of the refrigerator. He got some into a glass without spilling. Then he collapsed into a chair and drank, holding the glass with both hands. "Will you bring me to the funeral?"

"Of course."

"I have trouble getting around outside," Alan said, glowering at me. He meant that he never left the house.

"What happens to you?"

"I lived here forty years, and all of a sudden I can't remember where anything is." He glared at me again and took another big slug of his drink. "Last time I went outside, I actually got lost. Couldn't even remember why I went out in the first place. When I looked around, I couldn't even figure out where I lived." His face clouded over with anger and self-doubt. "Couldn't find my house. I walked around for hours. Finally my head cleared or something, and I realized I was just on the wrong side of the street." He picked up the glass with trembling hands and set it back down on the table. "Hear things, too. People creeping around outside."

I remembered what I had seen in the garage. "Does anyone ever use your garage? Do you let somebody park there?"

"I've heard 'em sneaking around. They think they can fool me, but I know they're out there."

"When did you hear them?"

"That's not a question I can answer." This time he managed to get the glass to his mouth. "But if it happens again, I'm gonna get my gun and blow 'em full of holes." He took two big gulps, banged the glass down on the table, and licked his lips. "Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay," he said. "All the whores are in luck today." A wet sound that was supposed to be a laugh came out of his mouth. He scrabbled a hand over the lower part of his face and uttered soft hiccuping wails. This injury to his dignity outraged him, and his crying turned into long shuddering choked-back sobs.

I stood up and put my arms around him. He fought me for a second, then sagged against me and cried evenly and steadily. When he wound down, both of us were wet.

"Alan, I'm not insulting you if I say that you need a little help."

"I do need a little help," he said.

"Let's get you washed up. And we have to get you a cleaning woman. And I don't think you ought to keep all your money on the kitchen table like that."

He sat up straight and looked at me as sternly as he could.

"We'll figure out a place you'll be able to remember," I said.

We moved toward the stairs. Alan obediently led me to his bathroom and sat on the toilet to pull off his socks and sweatpants while I ran a bath.

After he had succeeded in undoing his last shirt button, he tried to pull the shirt over his head, like a five-year-old. He got snared inside the shirt, and I pulled it over his head and yanked the sleeves off backward.

Brookner stood up. His arms and legs were stringy, and the silvery web of hair clinging to his body concentrated into a tangled mat around his dangling penis. He stepped unselfconsciously over the rim of the tub and lowered himself into the water. "Feels good." He sank into the tub and rested his head against the porcelain.

He began lathering himself. A cloud of soap turned the water opaque. He fixed me with his eyes again. "Isn't there some wonderful private detective, something like that, right here in town? Man who solves cases right in his own house?"

I said there was.

"I have a lot of money salted away. Let's hire him."

"John and I talked to him yesterday."

"Good." He lowered his head under the surface of the water and came up dripping and drying his eyes. "Shampoo." I found the bottle and passed it to him. He began lathering his head. "Do you believe in absolute good and evil?"

"No," I said.

"Me neither. Know what I believe in? Seeing and not seeing. Understanding and ignorance. Imagination and absence of imagination." The cap of shampoo looked like a bulging wig. "There. I've just compressed at least sixty years of reflection. Did it make any sense?"

I said it did.

"Guess again. There's a lot more to it."

Even in his ruined state, Alan Brookner was like Eliza Morgan, a person who could remind you of the magnificence of the human race. He dunked his head under the water and came up sputtering. "Need five seconds of shower." He leaned forward to open the drain. "Let me get myself up." He levered himself upright, pulled the shower curtain across the tub, and turned on the water. After testing the temperature, he diverted the water to the shower and gasped when it exploded down on him. After a few seconds, he turned it off and yanked the shower curtain open. He was pink and white and steaming. "Towel." He pointed at the rack. "I have a plan."

"So do I," I said, handing him the towel.

"You go first."

"You said you have some money?"

He nodded.

"In a checking account?"

"Some of it."

"Let me call a cleaning service. I'll do some of the initial work so they won't run away screaming as soon as they step into the house, but you have to get this place cleaned up, Alan."

"Fine, sure," he said, winding the towel around himself.

"And if you can afford it, someone ought to come in for a couple of hours a day to cook and take care of things for you."

"I'll think about that," he said. "I want you to go downstairs and call Dahlgren Florist on Berlin Avenue and order two wreaths." He spelled Dahlgren for me. "I don't care if they cost a hundred bucks apiece. Have one delivered to Trott Brothers, and the other one here."

"And I'll try the cleaning services."

He tossed the towel toward the rack and walked on stiff legs out of the bathroom, for the moment completely in command of himself. He got into the hall and turned around slowly. I thought he couldn't remember the way to his own bedroom. "By the way," he said. "While you're at it, call a lawn service, too."

I went downstairs and left messages for the cleaning and lawn services to call me at John's house and then got another garbage bag and picked up most of the debris on the living room floor. I phoned the florist on Berlin Avenue and placed Alan's orders for two wreaths, and then called the private duty nursing registry and asked if Eliza Morgan was free to begin work on Monday morning. I dumped the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, swearing to myself that this was the last time I was going to do Alan Brookner's housekeeping.

When I went back upstairs, he was sitting on his bed, trying to wrestle his way into a white dress shirt. His hair swirled around his head.

Like a child, he held out his arms, and I straightened the sleeves and pulled the two halves of the front together. I started buttoning it up. "Get the charcoal gray suit out of the closet," he said.

I got his legs into the trousers and took black silk socks out of a drawer. Alan slammed his feet into a pair of old black wing-tips and tied them neatly and quickly, arguing for the endurance of certain kinds of mechanical memory in the otherwise memory-impaired.

"Have you ever seen a ghost? A spirit? Whatever you call it?"

"Well," I said, and smiled. This is not a subject on which I ever speak.

"When we were small boys, my little brother and I were raised by my grandparents. They were wonderful people, but my grandmother died in bed when I was ten. On the day of her funeral, the house was full of my grandparents' friends, and my aunts and uncles had all come—they had to decide what to do with us. I felt absolutely lost. I wandered upstairs. My grandparents' bedroom door was open, and in the mirror on the back of the door, I could see my grandmother lying in her bed. She was looking at me, and she was smiling."

"Were you scared?"

"Nope. I knew she was telling me that she still loved me and that I would have a good home. And later, we moved in with an aunt and an uncle. But I never believed in orthodox Christianity after that. I knew there wasn't any literal heaven or hell. Sometimes, the boundary between the living and the dead is permeable. And that's how I embarked upon my wonderful career."

He had reminded me of something Walter Dragonette had said to Paul Fontaine.

"Ever since then, I've tried to notice things. To pay attention. So I hate losing my memory. I cannot bear it. And I cherish times like this, when I seem to be pretty much like my old self."

He looked down at himself: white shirt, trousers, socks, shoes. He grunted and zipped his fly. Then he levered himself up out of the chair. "Have to do something about these whiskers. Come back to the bathroom with me, will you?"

"What are you doing, Alan?" I stood up to follow him.

"Getting ready for my daughter's funeral."

"Her funeral isn't until tomorrow."

"Tomorrow, as Scarlett said, is another day." He led me into the bathroom and picked up an electric razor from the top shelf of a marble stand. "Will you do me a favor?"

I laughed out loud. "After all we've been through together?"

He switched on the razor and popped up the little sideburn attachment. "Mow down all that stuff under my chin and on my neck. In fact, run the thing over everything that looks too long to be shaved normally, and then I'll do the rest myself."

He thrust out his chin, and I scythed away long silver wisps that drifted down like angel hair. Some of them adhered to his shirt and trousers. I made a pass over each cheek, and more silver fluff sparkled away from his face. When I was done, I stepped back.

Alan faced the mirror. "Signs of improvement," he said. He scrubbed the electric razor over his face. "Passable. Very passable. Though I could use a haircut." He found a comb on the marble stand and tugged it through the fluffy white cloud on his head. The cloud parted on the left side and fell in neat loose waves to the collar of his shirt. He nodded at himself and turned around for my inspection. "Well?"

He looked like a mixture of Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein. "You'll do," I said.

He nodded. "Necktie."

We marched back into the bedroom. Alan wrenched open the closet door and inspected his ties. "Would this make me look like a chauffeur?" He pulled out a black silk tie and held it up for inspection.

I shook my head.

Alan turned up his collar, wrapped the tie around his neck, and knotted it as easily as he had tied his shoes. Then he buttoned his collar and pushed the knot into place. He took the suit jacket from its hanger and held it out. "Sometimes I have trouble with sleeves," he said.

I held up the jacket, and he slid his arms into the sleeves. I settled the jacket on his shoulders.

"There." He brushed some white fluff from his trousers. "Did you call the florist?"

I nodded. "Why did you want two wreaths?"

"You'll see." From a bedside table he picked up a bunch of keys, a comb, and a fat black fountain pen and distributed these objects into various pockets. "Do you suppose I'd be able to walk around outside without getting lost?"

"I'm sure of it."

"Maybe I'll experiment after John turns up. He's basically a good fellow, you know. If I'd got stuck at Arkham the way he did, I'd be unhappy, too."

"You were at Arkham your whole life," I said.

"But I wasn't stuck." I followed him out of the bedroom. "John got to be known as my man—we collaborated on a few papers, but he never really did anything on his own. Good teacher, but I'm not sure Arkham will keep him on after I go. Don't mention this to him, by the way. I've been trying to figure out a way to bring up the subject without alarming him."

We started down the stairs. Halfway down, he turned around to stare up at me. "I'm going to be all right for my daughter's funeral. I'm going to be all present and accounted for." He reached up and tapped my breastbone. "I know something about you."

I nearly flinched.

"Something happened to you when I was telling you about my grandmother. You thought of something—you saw something. It didn't surprise you that I saw my grandmother because"—here he began tapping his forefinger against my chest—"because—you—have—seen—someone—too."

He nodded at me and moved back down a step. "I never thought there was any point in missing things. You know what I used to tell my students? I used to say there is another world, and it's this world."

We went downstairs and waited for John, who failed to appear. Eventually, I persuaded Alan to salt away the money on the kitchen table in various pockets of his suit. I left him sitting in his living room, went back to the kitchen, and put the revolver in my pocket. Then I left the house.

Back at Ely Place, I put the revolver on the coffee table and then went upstairs to my manuscript. John had left a Post-It note in the kitchen saying that he had been too tired to go to Alan's house and had gone straight to bed. Everything was okay, he said.

PART SIX

RALPH AND MARJORIE RANSOM

1

Just after one o'clock, I parked John's Pontiac in front of the Georgian house on Victoria Terrace. A man on a lawn mower the size of a tractor was expertly swinging his machine around the oak trees on the side of the house. A teenage boy walked a trimmer down the edge of the driveway. Tall black bags stood on the shorn lawn like stooks. John was shaking his head, frowning into the sunlight and literally champing his jaws.

"It'll go faster if you get him," he said. "I'll stay here with my parents."

Ralph and Marjorie Ransom began firing objections from the backseat. In their manner was the taut, automatic politeness present since John and I had met them at the airport that morning.

John had driven to the airport, but after we had collected his parents, tanned and clad in matching black-and-silver running suits, he asked if I would mind driving back. His father had protested. John ought to drive, it was his car, wasn't it?

—I'd like Tim to do it, Dad, John said.

At this point his mother had stepped in perkily to say that John was tired, he wanted to talk, and wasn't it nice that his friend from New York was willing to drive? His mother was short and hourglass-shaped, big in the bust and hips, and her sunglasses hid the top half of her face. Her silver hair exactly matched her husband's.

—John should drive, that's all, said his father. Trimmer than I had expected, Ralph Ransom looked like a retired naval officer deeply involved with golf. His white handsome smile went well with his tan. —Where I come from, a guy drives his own car. Hell, we'll be able to talk just fine, get in there and be our pilot.

John frowned and handed me the keys. —I'm not really supposed to drive for a while. They suspended my license. He looked at me in a way that combined anger and apology.

Ralph stared at his son. —Suspended, huh? What happened?

—Does it matter? asked Marjorie. Let's get in the car.

—Drinking and driving?

—I went through a kind of a bad period, yeah, John said.

It's okay, really. I can walk everywhere I have to go. By the time it gets cold, I'll have my license back.

—Lucky you didn't kill someone, his father said, and his mother said Ralph!

In the morning, John and I had moved my things up to his office, so that his parents could have the guest room. John armored himself in a nice-looking double-breasted gray suit, I pulled out of my hanging bag a black Yohji Yamamoto suit I had bought once in a daring mood, found a gray silk shirt I hadn't remembered packing, and we were both ready to pick up his parents at the airport.

We had taken the Ransoms' bags up to the guest room and left them alone to change. I followed John back down to the kitchen, where he set out the sandwich things again. —Well, I said, now I know why you walk everywhere.

—Twice this spring, I flunked the breathalyzer. It's bullshit, but I have to put up with it. Like a lot of things. You know?

He seemed frazzled, worn so thin his underlying rage burned out at me through his eyes. He realized that I could see it and stuffed it back down inside himself like a burning coal. When his parents came down, they picked at the sandwich fillings and talked about the weather.

In Tucson, the temperature was 110. But it was dry heat. And you had air conditioning wherever you went. Golfing—just get on the course around eight in the morning. John, tell you the truth, you're getting way too heavy, ought to buy a good set of clubs and get out there on the golf course.

—I'll think about it, John said. But you never know. A tub of lard like me, get him out on the golf course in hundred-degree weather, he's liable to drop dead of a coronary right on the spot.

—Hold on, hold on, I didn't mean—

—John, you know your father was only—

—I'm sorry, I've been on-All three Ransoms stopped talking as abruptly as they had begun. Marjorie turned toward the kitchen windows. Ralph gave me a pained, mystified look and opened the freezer section of the refrigerator. He pulled out a pink, unlabeled bottle and showed it to his son.

John glanced at the bottle. —Hyacinth vodka. Smuggled in from the Black Sea.

His father took a glass from a cupboard and poured out about an inch of the pink vodka. He sipped, nodded, and drank the rest.

—Three hundred bucks a bottle, John said.

Ralph Ransom capped the bottle and slid it back into place in the freezer. —Yeah. Well. What time does the train leave?

—It's leaving, John said, and began walking out of the kitchen. His parents looked at each other and then followed him through the living room.

John checked the street through the slender window.

—They're baa-ack.

His parents followed him outside, and Geoffrey Bough, Isobel Archer, and their cameramen darted in on both sides. Marjorie uttered a high-pitched squeal. Ralph put his arm around his wife and moved her toward the car. He slid into the backseat beside her.

John tossed me the car keys. I gunned the engine and sped away.

Ralph asked where they had come from, and John said, They never leave. They bang on the door and toss garbage on the lawn.

—You're under a lot of pressure. Ralph leaned forward to pat his son's shoulder.

John stiffened but did not speak. His father patted him again. In the rearview mirror, I saw Geoffrey Bough's dissolute-looking blue vehicle and Isobel's gaudy van swinging out into the street behind us.

They hung back when I pulled up in front of Alan's. John locked his arms around his chest and worked his jaws as he chewed on his fiery coal.

I got out and left them to it. The man on the tractor-sized lawn mower waved at me, and I waved back. This was the Midwest.

Alan Brookner opened the door and gestured for me to come in. When I closed the door behind me, I heard a vacuum cleaner buzzing and humming on the second floor, another in what sounded like the dining room. "The cleaners are here already?"

"Times are tough," he said. "How do I look?"

I told him he looked wonderful. The black silk tie was perfectly knotted. His trousers were pressed, and the white shirt looked fresh. I smelled a trace of aftershave.

"I wanted to make sure." He stepped back and turned around. The back hem of the suit jacket looked a little crumpled, but I wasn't going to tell him that. He finished turning around and looked at me seriously, even severely. "Okay?"

"You got the jacket on by yourself this time."

"I never took it off," he said. "Wasn't taking any chances."

I had a vision of him leaning back against a wall with his knees locked. "How did you sleep?"

"Very, very carefully." Alan tugged at the jacket of his suit, then buttoned it. We left the house.

"Who are the old geezers with John?"

"His parents. Ralph and Marjorie. They just came in from Arizona."

"Ready when you are, C.B.," he said. (I did not understand this allusion, if that's what it was, at the time, and I still don't.)

John was standing up beside the car, looking at Alan with undisguised astonishment and relief.

"Alan, you look great," he said.

"I thought I'd make an effort," Alan said. "Are you going to get in back with your parents, or would you prefer to keep the front seat?"

John looked uneasily back at Geoffrey's blue disaster and Isobel's declamatory van and slid in next to his father. Alan and I got in at the same time.

"I want to say how much I appreciate your coming all the way from…" He hesitated and then concluded triumphantly, "Alaska."

There was a brief silence.

"We're so sorry about your daughter," Marjorie said. "We loved her, too, very much."

"April was lovable," said Alan.

"It's a crime, all this business about Walter Dragonette," Ralph said. "You wonder how such things could go on."

"You wonder how a person like that can exist," Marjorie said.

John chewed his lip and hugged his chest and looked back at the reporters, who hung one car behind us all the way downtown to the Trott Brothers' building.

Marjorie asked, "Will you be back at the college with John next year, or are you thinking about retiring?"

"I'll be back by popular demand."

"You don't have a mandatory retirement age in your business?" This was Ralph.

"In my case, they made an exception."

"Do yourself a favor," Ralph said. "Walk out and don't look back. I retired ten years ago, and I'm having the time of my life."

"I think I've already had that."

"You have some kind of nest egg, right? I mean, with April and everything."

"It's embarrassing." Alan turned around on his seat. "Did you use April's services, yourself?"

"I had my own guy." Ralph paused. "What do you mean, 'embarrassing'? She was too successful?" He looked at me again in the mirror, trying to work something out. I knew what.

"She was too successful," Alan said.

"My friend, you wound up with a couple hundred thousand dollars, right? Live right, watch your spending, find some good high-yield bonds, you're set."

"Eight hundred," Alan said.

"Pardon?"

"She started out with a pittance and wound up with eight hundred thousand. It's embarrassing."

I checked Ralph in the rearview mirror. His eyes had gone out of focus. I could hear Marjorie breathing in and out.

Finally, Ralph asked, "What are you going to do with it?"

"I think I'll leave it to the public library."

I turned the corner into Hillfield Avenue, and the gray Victorian shape of the Trott Brothers' Funeral Home came into view. Its slate turrets, gothic gingerbread, peaked dormers, and huge front porch made it look like a house from a Charles Addams cartoon.

I pulled up at the foot of the stone steps that led up to the Trott Brothers' lawn.

"What's on the agenda here, John?" his father asked.

"We have some time alone with April." He got out of the car. "After that there's the public reception, or visitation, or whatever they call it."

His father struggled along the seat, trying to get to the door. "Hold on, hold on, I can't hear you." Marjorie pushed herself sideways after her husband.

Alan Brookner sighed, popped open his door, and quietly got out.

John repeated what he had just said. "Then there's a service of some kind. When it's over, we go out to the crematorium."

"Keeping it simple, hey?" his father asked.

John was already moving toward the steps.; "Oh." He turned around, one foot on the first step. "I should warn you in advance, I guess. The first part is open coffin. The director here seemed to think that was what we should do."

I heard Alan breathe in sharply.

"I don't like open coffins," Ralph said. "What are you supposed to do, go up and talk to the person?"

"I wish I could talk to the person," Alan said. For a moment he seemed absolutely forlorn. "Some other cultures, of course, take for granted that you can communicate with the dead."

"Really?" asked Ralph. "Like India, do you mean?"

"Let's go up." John began mounting the steps.

"In Indian religions the situation is a little more complicated," Alan said. He and Ralph went around the front of the car and began going up behind John. Bits of their conversation drifted back.

Marjorie gave me an uneasy glance. I aroused certain misgivings within Marjorie. Maybe it was the ornamental zippers on my Japanese suit. "Here we go," I said, and held out my elbow.

Marjorie closed a hand like a parrot's claw on my elbow.

2

Joyce Brophy held open the giant front door. She was wearing a dark blue dress that looked like a cocktail party maternity outfit, and her hair had been glued into place. "Gosh, we were wondering what was taking you two so long!" She flashed a weirdly exultant smile and motioned us through the door with little whisk-broom gestures.

John was talking to, or being talked at by, a small, bent-over man in his seventies whose gray face was stamped with deep, exhausted-looking lines and wrinkles. I moved toward Alan.

"No, now, no, mister, you have to meet my father," Joyce said. "Let's get the formalities over with before we enter the viewing room, you know, everything in its own time and all that kinda good stuff."

The stooping man in the loose gray suit grinned at me ferociously and extended his hand. When I took it, he squeezed hard, and I squeezed back. "Yessir," he said. "Quite a day for us all."

"Dad," said Joyce Brophy, "you met Professor Ransom and Professor Brookner, and this is Professor Ransom's friend, ah—"

"Tim Underhill," John said.

"Professor Underhill," Joyce said. "And this here is Mrs. Ransom, Professor Ransom's mother. My dad, William Trott."

"Just call me Bill." The little man extended his already carnivorous smile and grasped Marjorie's right hand in his left, so that he could squeeze hands with both of us at once. "Thought it was a good obituary, didn't you? We worked hard on that one, and it was all worth it."

None of us had seen the morning paper.

"Oh, yes," Marjorie said.

"Just want to express our sorrow. From this point on the thing is just to relax and enjoy it, and remember, we're always here to help you." He let go of our hands.

Marjorie rubbed her palms together.

Just Call Me Bill gave a smile intended to be sympathetic and backed away. "My little girl will be taking you into the Chapel of Rest. We'll lead your guests in at the time of the memorial service."

By this time he had moved six paces backward, and on his last word he abruptly turned around and took off with surprising speed down a long dark hallway.

Just Call Me Joyce watched him fondly for a couple of seconds. "He's gonna turn on the first part of the musical program, that's your background for your private meditations and that. We got the chairs all set up, and when your guests and all show up, we'd like you to move to the left-hand side of the front row, that's for immediate family." She blinked at me. "And close friends."

She pressed her right hand against the mound of her belly and with her left gestured toward the hallway. John moved beside her, and together they stepped into the hallway. Organ music oozed from distant speakers. Alan drifted into the hallway like a sleepwalker. Ralph stepped in beside him. "So you keep on getting born over and over? What's the payoff?"

I could not hear Alan's mumbled response, but the question pulled him back into the moment, and he raised his head and began moving more decisively.

"I didn't know you were one of John's professor friends," Marjorie said.

"It was a fairly recent promotion," I said.

"Ralph and I are so proud of you." She patted my arm as we followed the others into a ballroom filled with soft light and the rumble of almost stationary organ music. Rows of folding chairs stood on either side of a central aisle leading to a podium banked with wreaths and flowers in vases. On a raised platform behind the podium, a deeply polished bronze coffin lay on a long table draped in black fabric. The top quarter of the coffin had been folded back like the lid of a piano to reveal plump, tufted white upholstering. April Ransom's profile, at an angle given her head by a firm white satin pillow, pointed beyond the open lid to the pocked acoustic tile of the ceiling.

"Your brochures are right here." Just Call Me Joyce waved at a highly polished rectangular mahogany table set against the wall. Neat stacks of a folded yellow page stood beside a pitcher of water and a stack of plastic cups. At the end of the table was a coffee dispenser.

Everybody in the room but Alan Brookner took their eyes from April Ransom's profile and looked at the yellow leaflets.

"Yay Though I Walk is a real good choice, we always think."

Alan was staring at his daughter's corpse from a spot about five feet inside the door.

Joyce said, "She looks just beautiful, even from way back here you can see that."

She began pulling Alan along with her. After an awkward moment, he fell into step.

John followed after them, his parents close behind. Joyce Brophy brought Alan up to the top of the coffin. John moved beside him. His parents and I took positions further down the side.

Up close, April's coffin seemed as large as a rowboat. She was visible to the waist, where her hands lay folded. Joyce Brophy leaned over and smoothed out a wrinkle in the white jacket. When she straightened up, Alan bent over the coffin and kissed his daughter's forehead.

"I'll be down the hall in the office in case you folks need anything." Joyce took a backward step and turned around and ploughed down the aisle. She was wearing large, dirty running shoes.

Just Call Me Joyce had applied too much lipstick of too bright a shade to April's mouth, and along her cheekbones ran an artificial line of pink. The vibrant cap of blond hair had been arranged to conceal something that had been done at the autopsy. Death had subtracted the lines around April's eyes and mouth. She looked like an empty house.

"Doesn't she look beautiful, John?" asked Marjorie.

"Uh huh," John said.

Alan touched April's powdered cheek. "My poor baby," he said.

"It's just so damn… awful," Ralph said.

Alan moved away toward the first row of seats.

The Ransoms left the coffin and took the two seats on the left-hand aisle of the first row. Ralph crossed his arms over his chest in a gesture his son had learned from him.

John took a chair one space away from his mother and two spaces from me. Alan was sitting on the other side of the aisle, examining a yellow leaflet.

We listened for a time to the motionless organ music.

I remembered the descriptions of my sister's funeral. April's mourners had filled half of Holy Sepulchre. According to my mother, she had looked "peaceful" and "beautiful." My vibrant sister, sometimes vibrantly unhappy, that furious blond blur, that slammer of doors, that demon of boredom, so emptied out that she had become peaceful? In that case, she had left everything to me, passed everything into my hands.

I wanted to tear the past apart, to dismember it on a bloody table.

I stood up and walked to the back of the room. I took the leaflet from my jacket pocket and read the words on the front of the cover.

Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death,

I shall fear no evil.

I sat down in the last row of chairs.

Ralph Ransom whispered to his wife, stood up, patted his son's shoulder, and began wandering down the far left side of the chapel. When he got close enough to be heard if he spoke softly, he said, "Hey," as if he just noticed that I had moved to the last row. He jerked his thumb toward the back of the room. "You suppose they got some coffee in that thing?"

That was not the question he wanted to ask.

We went to the table. The coffee was almost completely without taste. For a few seconds the two of us stood at the back of the room, watching the other three look at or not look at April Ransom in her enormous bronze boat.

"I hear you knew my boy in Vietnam."

"I met him there a couple of times."

Now he could ask me.

He looked at me over the top of his cup, swallowed, and grimaced at the heat of the coffee. "You wouldn't happen to be from Millhaven yourself, would you, Professor Underhill?"

"Please," I said, "just call me Tim."

I smiled at him, and he smiled back.

"Are you a Millhaven boy, Tim?"

"I grew up about a block from the St. Alwyn."

"You're Al Underhill's boy," he said. "By God, I knew you reminded me of somebody, and when we were in the car I finally got it—Al Underhill. You take after him."

"I guess I do, a little bit."

He looked at me as though measuring the distance between my father and myself and shook his head. "Al Underhill. I haven't thought about him in forty years. I guess you know he used to work for me, back in the days when I owned the St. Alwyn."

"After John told me that you used to own the hotel, I did."

"We hated like hell to let him go, you know. I knew he had a family. I knew what he was going through. If he could have stayed off the sauce, everything would have worked out all right."

"He couldn't help himself," I said. Ralph Ransom was being kind—he was not going to mention the thefts that had led to my father's firing. Probably he would not have stolen so much if he had managed to stay sober.

"Your sister, wasn't it? That started him off, I mean."

I nodded.

"Terrible thing. I can remember it just like it was yesterday."

"Me, too," I said.

After a moment, he asked, "How is Al these days?"

I told him that my father had died four years ago.

"That's a shame. I liked Al—if it hadn't been for what happened to your sister, he would have been fine."

"Everything would have been different, anyhow." I fought the annoyance I could feel building in me—when my father was in trouble, this man had fired him. I did not want his worthless reassurances.

"Was that kind of a bond between you and John, that your father worked for me?"

My annoyance with this silver-topped country club Narcissus escalated toward anger. "We had other kinds of bonds."

"Oh, I can see that. Sure."

I expected that Ralph would go back to his seat, but he still had something on his mind. Once I heard what it was, my anger shrank to a pinpoint.

"Those were funny days. Terrible days. You're probably too young to remember, but around then, there was a cop here in town who killed four or five people and wrote these words, BLUE ROSE, near the bodies. One of the victims even lived in my hotel. Shook us all up, I can tell you. Almost ruined our business, too. This lunatic, this Dragonette, I guess he was just imitating the other guy."

I put down my cup. "You know, Ralph, I'm very interested in what happened back then."

"Well, it was like this thing now. The whole town went bananas."

"Could we go out in the hallway for a second?"

"Sure, if you want to." He raised his eyebrows quizzically —this was not in his handbook of behavior—and almost tiptoed out.

3

I closed the door behind me. Two or three yards away, Ralph Ransom leaned against the red-flocked wallpaper, his hands back in his pockets. He still had the quizzical expression on his face. He could not figure out my motives, and that made him uneasy. The unease translated into reflexive aggression. He pushed his shoulders off the wall and faced me.

"I thought it would be better to talk about this out here," I said. "A few years ago, I did some research that indicated that Detective Damrosch had nothing to do with the murders."

"Research?" His shoulders went down as he relaxed. "Oh, I get it. You're a history guy, a whaddayacallit. A historian."

"I write books," I said, trying to salvage as much of the truth as possible.

"The old publish or perish thing."

I smiled—in my case, this was not just a slogan.

"I don't know if I can tell you anything."

"Was there anybody you suspected, someone you thought might have been the killer?"

He shrugged. "I always thought it was a guest, some guy who came and went. That's what we had, mostly, salesmen who showed up for a couple of days, checked out, and then came back again for a few more days."

"Was that because of the prostitute?"

"Well, yeah. A couple girls used to sneak up to the rooms. You try, but you can't keep them out. That Fancy, she was one of them. I figured someone caught her stealing from him, or, you know, just got in a fight with her out in back there. And then I thought he might have known that the piano player saw it happen—his room looked right out onto the back of the hotel."

"Musicians stayed at the St. Alwyn, too?"

"Oh yeah, we used to get some jazz musicians. See, we weren't too far from downtown, our rates were good, and we had all-night room service. The musicians were good guests. To tell you the truth, I think they liked the St. Alwyn because of Glenroy Breakstone."

"He lived in the hotel?"

"Oh, sure. Glenroy was there when I bought it, and he was still there when I sold it. He's probably still there! He was one of the few who didn't move out, once all the trouble started. The reason that piano player lived in the hotel, Glenroy recommended him personally. Never any trouble with Glenroy."

"Who used to cause trouble?"

"Well, sometimes guys, you know, might have a bad day and bust up the furniture at night—anything can happen in a hotel, believe me. The ones who went crazy, they got barred. The day manager took care of that. The man kept things shipshape, as much as he could. A haughty bastard, but he didn't stand for any nonsense. Religious fellow, I think. Dependable."

"Do you remember his name?"

He laughed out loud. "You bet I do. Bob Bandolier. You wouldn't want to go around a golf course with that guy, but he was one hell of a manager."

"Maybe I could talk to him."

"Maybe. Bob stayed on when I sold the place—guy was practically married to the St. Alwyn. And I'll tell you someone else—Glenroy Breakstone. Nothing passed him by, you can bet on that. He pretty much knew everybody that worked at the hotel."

"Were he and Bob Bandolier friends?"

"Bob Bandolier didn't have friends," Ralph said, and laughed again. "And Bob would never get tight with, you know, a black guy."

"Would he talk to me?"

"You never know." He checked his watch and looked at the door to the chapel. "Hey, if you find something out, would you tell me? I'd be interested."

We went back into the enormous room. John looked up at us from beside the table.

Ralph said, "Who's supposed to fill all these chairs?"

John morosely examined the empty chairs. "People from Barnett and clients, I suppose. And the reporters will show up." He scowled down at a plastic cup. "They're hovering out there like blowflies."

There was a moment of silence. Separately, Marjorie Ransom and Alan Brookner came down the center aisle. Marjorie said a few words to Alan. He nodded uncertainly, as if he had not really heard her.

I poured coffee for them. For a moment we all wordlessly regarded the coffin.

"Nice flowers," Ralph said.

"I just said that," said Marjorie. "Didn't I, Alan?"

"Yes, yes," Alan said. "Oh John, I haven't asked you about what happened at police headquarters. How long were you interrogated?"

John closed his eyes. Marjorie whirled toward Alan, sloshing coffee over her right hand. She transferred the cup and waved her hand in the air, trying to dry it. Ralph gave her a handkerchief, but he was looking from John to Alan and back to John.

"You were interrogated?"

"No, Dad. I wasn't interrogated."

"Well, why would the police want to talk to you? They already got the guy."

"It looks as though Dragonette gave a false confession."

"What?" Marjorie said. "Everybody knows he did it."

"It doesn't work out right. He didn't have enough time to go to the hospital for the change of shift, go to the hardware store and buy what he needed, then get back home when he did. The clerk who sold him the hacksaw said they had a long conversation. Dragonette couldn't have made it to the east side and back. He just wanted to take the credit."

"Well, that man must be crazy," Marjoiiie said.

For the first time that day, Alan smiled.

"Johnny, I still don't get why the police wanted to question you," said his father.

"You know how police are. They want to go over and over the same ground. They want me to remember everybody I saw on my way into the hospital, everybody I saw on the way out, anything that might help them."

"They're not trying to—"

"Of course not. I left the hospital and walked straight home. Tim heard me come in around five past eight." John looked at me. "They'll probably want you to verify that."

I said I was glad I could help.

"Are they coming to the funeral?" Ralph asked.

"Oh, yeah," John said. "Our ever-vigilant police force will be in attendance."

"You didn't say a word about any of this. We wouldn't have known anything about it, if Alan hadn't spoken up."

"The important thing is that April is gone," John said. "That's what we should be thinking about."

"Not who killed her?" Alan boomed, turning each word into a cannonball.

"Alan, stop yelling at me," John said.

"The man who did this to my daughter is garbage!" Through some natural extra capacity, Alan's ordinary speaking voice was twice as loud as a normal person's, and when he opened it up, it sounded like a race car on a long straight road. Even now, when he was nearly rattling the windows, he was not really trying to shout. "He does not deserve to live!"

Blushing, John walked away.

Just Call Me Joyce peeked in. "Is anything wrong? My goodness, there's enough noise in here to wake the know you what."

Alan cleared his throat. "Guess I make a lot of noise when I get excited."

"The others will be here in about fifteen minutes." Joyce gave us a thoroughly insincere smile and backed out. Her father must have been hovering in the hallway. Clearly audible through the door, Joyce said, "Didn't these people ever hear of Valium?"

Even Alan grinned, minutely.

He twisted around to look for John, who was winding back toward us, hands in his pockets like his father, his eyes on the pale carpet. "John, is Grant Hoffman coming?"

I remembered Alan asking about Hoffman when he was dressed in filthy shorts and roaches scrambled through the pizza boxes in his sink.

"I have no idea," John said.

"One of our best Ph.D. candidates," Alan said to Marjorie.

"He started off with me, but we moved him over to John two years ago. He dropped out of sight—which is odd, because Grant is an excellent student."

"He was okay," John said.

"Grant usually saw me after his conferences with John, but last time, he never showed up."

"Never showed up for our conference on the sixth, either," John said. "I wasted an hour, not to mention all the time I spent going to and fro on the bus."

"He came to your house?" I asked Alan.

"Absolutely," Alan said. "About once a week. Sometimes, he gave me a hand with cleaning up the kitchen, and we'd gab about the progress of his thesis, all kinds of stuff."

"So call the guy up," Ralph said to his son.

"I've been a little busy," John said. "Anyhow, Hoffman didn't have a telephone. He lived in a single room downtown somewhere, and you had to call him through his landlady. Not that I ever called him." He looked at me. "Hoffman used to teach high school in a little town downstate. He saved up some money, and he came here to do graduate work with Alan. He was at least thirty."

"Do graduate students disappear like that?"

"Now and then they slink away."

"People like Grant Hoffman don't slink away," Alan said.

"I don't want to waste my time worrying about Grant Hoffman. There must be people who would notice if he got hit by a bus, or if he decided to change his name and move to Las Vegas."

The door opened. Just Call Me Joyce led a number of men in conservative gray and blue suits into the chapel. After a moment a few women, also dressed in dark suits but younger than the men, became visible in their midst. These new arrivals moved toward John, who took them to his parents.

I sat down in a chair on the aisle. Ralph and one of the older brokers, a man whose hair was only a slightly darker gray than his own, sidled off to the side of the big room and began talking in low voices.

The door clicked open again. I turned around on my seat and saw Paul Fontaine and Michael Hogan entering the room. Fontaine was carrying a beat-up brown satchel slightly too large to be called a briefcase. He and Hogan went to different sides of the room. That powerful and unaffected natural authority that distinguished Michael Hogan radiated out from him like an aura and caused most of the people in the room, especially the women, to glance at him. I suppose great actors also have this capacity, to automatically draw attention toward themselves. And Hogan had the blessing of looking something like an actor without at all looking theatrical—his kind of utterly male handsomeness, cast in the very lines of reliability, steadiness, honesty, and a tough intelligence, was of the sort that other men found reassuring, not threatening. As I watched Hogan moving to the far side of the room under the approving glances of April's mourners, glances he seemed not to notice, it occurred to me that he actually was the kind of person that an older generation of leading men had impersonated on screen, and I was grateful that he was in charge of April's case.

Less conspicuous, Fontaine poured coffee for himself and sat behind me. He dropped the satchel between his legs.

"The places I run into you," he said.

I did not point out that I could say the same.

"And the things I hear you say." He sighed. "If there's one thing the ordinary policeman hates, it's a mouthy civilian."

"Was I wrong?"

"Don't push your luck." He leaned forward toward me. The bags under his eyes were a little less purple. "What's your best guess as to the time your friend Ransom got home from the hospital on Wednesday morning?"

"You want to check his alibi?"

"I might as well." He smiled. "Hogan and I are representing the department at this municipal extravaganza."

Cops and cop humor.

He noticed my reaction to his joke, and said, "Oh, come on. Don't you know what's going to happen here?"

"If you want to ask me questions, you can take me downtown."

"Now, now. You know that favor you asked me to do?"

"The lost license number?"

"The other favor." He slid the scuffed leather satchel forward and snapped it open to show me a thick wad of typed and handwritten pages.

"The Blue Rose file?"

He nodded, smiling like a big-nosed cat.

I reached for the satchel, and he slid it back between his legs. "You were going to tell me what time your friend got home on Wednesday morning."

"Eight o'clock," I said. "It takes about twenty minutes to walk back from the hospital. I thought you said this was going to be hard to find."

"The whole thing was sitting on top of a file in the basement of the records office. Someone else was curious, and didn't bother putting it back."

"Don't you want to read it first?"

"I copied the whole damn thing," he said. "Get it back to me as soon as you can."

"Why are you doing this for me?"

He smiled at me in his old way, without seeming to move his face. "You wrote that stupid book, which my sergeant adores. And I shall have no other sergeants before him. And maybe there's something to this ridiculous idea after all."

"You think it's ridiculous to think that the new Blue Rose murders are connected to the old ones?"

"Of course it's ridiculous." He leaned forward over the satchel. "By the way, will you please stop trying to be helpful in front of the cameras? As far as the public is concerned, Mrs. Ransom was one of Walter's victims. The man on Livermore Avenue, too."

"He's still unidentified?"

"That's right," Fontaine said. "Why?"

"Have you ever heard of a missing student of John's named Grant Hoffman?"

"No. How long has he been missing?"

"A couple of weeks, I think. He didn't turn up for an appointment with John."

"And you think he could be our victim?"

I shrugged.

"When was the appointment he missed, do you know?"

"On the sixth, I think."

"That's the day after the body was found." Fontaine glanced over at Michael Hogan, who was talking with John's parents. Her face toward the detective, Marjorie was drinking in whatever he was saying. She looked like a girl at a dance.

"Do you happen to know how old this student was?"

"Around thirty," I said, wrenching my attention away from the effect Michael Hogan was making on John's mother. "He was a graduate student."

"After the funeral, maybe we'll—" He stopped talking and stood up. He patted my shoulder. "Get the file back to me in a day or two."

He passed down the row of empty chairs and went up to Michael Hogan. The two detectives parted from the Ransoms and walked a few feet away. Hogan looked quickly, assessingly at me for a long second in which I felt the full weight of his remarkable concentration, then at John. I still felt the impact of his attention. Rapt, Marjorie Ransom continued to stare at the older detective until Ralph tugged her gently back toward the gray-haired broker, and even then she turned her head to catch sight of him over her shoulder. I knew how she felt.

Someone standing beside me said, "Excuse me, are you Tim Underhill?"

I looked up at a stocky man of about thirty-five wearing thick black glasses and a lightweight navy blue suit. He had an expectant expression on his broad, bland face.

I nodded.

"I'm Dick Mueller—from Barnett? We talked on the phone? I wanted to tell you that I'm grateful for your advice—you sure called it. As soon as the press found out about me and, ah, you know, they went crazy. But because you warned me what was going to happen, I could work out how to get in and out of the office."

He sat down in front of me, smiling with the pleasure of the story he was about to tell me. The door clicked open again, and I turned my head to see Tom Pasmore slipping into the chapel behind a young man in jeans and a black jacket. The young man was nearly as pale as Tom, but his thick dark hair and thick black eyebrows made his large eyes blaze. He focused on the coffin as soon as he got into the big room. Tom gave me a little wave and drifted up the side of the room.

"You know what I go through to get to work?" Mueller asked.

I wanted to get rid of Dick Mueller so that I could talk to Tom Pasmore.

"I asked Ross Barnett if he wanted me to—"

I broke into the account of How I Get to My Office. "Was Mr. Barnett going to send April Ransom out to San Francisco to open another office, some kind of joint venture with another brokerage house?"

He blinked at me. His eyes were huge behind the big square lenses. "Did somebody tell you that?"

"Not exactly," I said. "It was more of a rumor."

"Well, there was some talk a while ago about moving into San Francisco." He looked worried now.

"That wasn't what you meant about the 'bridge deal'?"

"Bridge deal?" Then, in a higher tone of voice: "Bridge deal?"

"You told me to tell your secretary—"

He grinned. "Oh, you mean the bridge project. Yeah. To remind me of who you were. And you thought I meant the Golden Gate Bridge?"

"Because of April Ransom."

"Oh, yeah, no, it wasn't anything like that. I was talking about the Horatio Street bridge. In town here. April was nuts about local history."

"She was writing something about the bridge?"

He shook his head. "All I know is, she called it the bridge project. But listen, Ross"—he looked sideways and tilted his head toward the prosperous-looking gray-haired man who had been talking with Ralph Ransom—"worked out this great little plan."

Mueller told me an elaborate story about entering through a hat shop on Palmer Street, going down into the basement, and taking service stairs up to the fourth floor, where he could let himself into the Barnett copy room.

"Clever," I said. I had to say something. Mueller was the sort of person who had to impose what delighted him on anyone who would listen. I tried to picture his encounters with Walter Dragonette, Mueller bubbling away about bond issues and Walter sitting across the desk in a daze, wondering how that big schoolteacher head would look on a shelf in his refrigerator.

"You must miss April Ransom," I said.

He settled back down again. "Oh, sure. She was very important to the office. Sort of a star."

"What was she like, personally? How would you describe her?"

He pursed his lips and glanced at his boss. "April worked harder than anyone on earth. She was smart, she had an amazing memory, and she put in a lot of hours. Tremendous energy."

"Did people like her?"

He shrugged. "Ross, he certainly liked her."

"You sound like you're not saying something."

"Well, I don't know." Mueller looked at his boss again. "This is the kind of a person who's always going ninety miles an hour. If you didn't travel at her speed, too bad for you."

"Did you ever hear that she was thinking of leaving the business to have a baby?"

"Would Patton quit? Would Mike Ditka quit? To have babies?" Mueller clamped a fat hand over his mouth and looked around to see if anyone had noticed his giggle. He wore a pinky ring with a tiny diamond chip and a big college ring with raised letters. Puffy circles of raised fat surrounded both rings.

"You could call her aggressive," he said. "It's not a criticism. We're supposed to be aggressive." He tried to look aggressive as all get-out for a second and succeeded in looking a little bit sneaky.

People had been coming into the room in twos and threes while we talked, filling about three-fourths of the seats. I recognized some of John's neighbors from the local news. When Mueller stood up, I left my seat and carried the heavy satchel to the back of the room, where Tom Pasmore was drinking a cup of coffee.

"I didn't think you'd come," I said.

"I don't usually have the chance to get a look at my murderers," he said.

"You think April's murderer is here?" I looked around at the roomful of brokers and, teachers. Dick Mueller had sidled up to Ross Barnett, who was angrily shaking his head, probably denying that he'd ever had any intention of moving April anywhere at all. Because you never know what you'll be able to use, I stepped sideways and took out my notebook to write down a phrase about a broker so feeble that he used his college ring to get business from other people who had gone to the same college. A combination of letters and numbers was already written on the last page, and it took me a moment to remember what they represented. Tom Pasmore was smiling at me. I put the notebook back in my pocket.

"I'd say there's an excellent chance." He looked down at the case between my legs. "The Blue Rose files wouldn't be in that thing, would they?"

"How did you work that out?"

He bent down and picked up the case to show me the dim, worn gold of the initials stamped just below the clasp: WD.

Fontaine had given me William Damrosch's own satchel— he had probably used it as a suitcase when he went on trips, and as a briefcase in town.

"Would you mind bringing this over to my place tonight, so I can make copies?"

"You have a copy machine?" Like Lamont von Heilitz, Tom often gave the impression of resisting technological progress.

"I even have computers."

I thought he was being playful: I wasn't even sure that he used an electric typewriter.

"They're upstairs. These days, most of my information comes through the modem." The surprise on my face made him smile. He held up his right hand. "Honest. I'm a hacker. I'm tapped in all over the place."

"Can you find out someone's name through their license plate number?"

He nodded. "Sometimes." He gave me a speculative look. "Not in every state."

"I'm thinking of an Illinois plate."

"Easy."

I began to tell him about the license number on the piece of paper I thought I had given to Paul Fontaine. At the front of the room, the young man who had come into the room behind Tom turned away from April Ransom's coffin and made a wide circle around John, who turned his back on him, either by chance or intentionally. The music became much louder. Mr. Trott appeared through a white door I had not noticed earlier and closed the coffin. At the same time, everybody in the room turned around as the big doors at the back of the chapel admitted two men in their early sixties. One of them, a man about as broad as an ox cart, wore a row of medals on the chest of his police uniform, like a Russian general. The other man had a black armband on the sleeve of his dark gray suit. His hair, as silvery as Ralph Ransom's, was thicker, almost shaggy. I assumed that he must have been the minister.

Isobel Archer and her crew pushed themselves into the room, followed by a dozen other reporters. Isobel waved her staff to a point six feet from Tom Pasmore and me, and the other reporters lined up along the sides of the room, already scribbling in notebooks and talking into their tape recorders. The big silver-haired man marched up to Ross Barnett and whispered something.

"Who's that?" I asked Tom.

"You don't know Merlin Waterford? Our mayor?"

The uniformed man who had come in with him pumped John's hand and pulled him toward the first row. Bright lights flashed on and washed color from the room. The music ended. The pale young man in the black jacket bumped against a row of knees as he fought his way toward a seat. Isobel Archer held up a microphone to her face and began speaking into the camera and the floodlights. John leaned forward and covered his face with his hands.

"Ladies and gentlemen, fellow mourners for April Ransom." The mayor had moved behind the podium. The white light made his hair gleam. His teeth shone. His skin was the color of a Caribbean beach. "Some few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the dinner at which a brilliant young woman received the financial community's Association Award. I witnessed the respect she had earned from her peers and shared her well-earned pride in that wonderful honor. April Ransom's profound grasp of business essentials, her integrity, her humanity, and her deep commitment to the greater good of our community inspired us all that night. She stood before us, her friends and colleagues, as a shining example of everything I have tried to encourage and represent during the three terms in which I have been privileged to serve as the mayor of this fine city."

If you cared for that sort of thing, the mayor was a great speaker. He would pledge, in fact he would go so far as to promise, that the memory of April Ransom's character and achievements would never leave him as he worked night and day to bring good government to every citizen of Millhaven. He would dedicate whatever time was left to him to—

This went on for about fifteen minutes, after which the chief of police, Arden Vass, stumped up to the microphone, frowned, and pulled three sheets of folded paper from an inside jacket pocket. The papers crackled as he flattened them onto the podium with his fist. He was not actually frowning, I saw. That was just his normal expression. He tugged a pair of steel-rimmed glasses from a pocket below the rows of medals and rammed them onto his face.

"I can't pontificate like my friend, the mayor," he said. His hoarse, bludgeoning voice slammed each of his short sentences to the ground before picking up the next. We had a great police department. Each man—and woman—in that department was a trained professional. That was why our crime rate was one of the lowest in the nation. Our officers had recently apprehended one of the worst criminals in history. That man was currently safe in custody, awaiting a full statement of charges and eventual trial. The woman whose life we were celebrating today would understand the importance of cooperation between the community and the brave men who risked their lives to protect it. That was the Millhaven represented by April Ransom. I have nothing more to say. Thank you.

Vass pushed himself away from the podium and lumbered toward the first row of seats. For a second everybody sat frozen with uncertainty, staring at the empty podium and the bleached flowers. Then the lights snapped off.

4

April's colleagues were moving in a compact group toward the parking lot. The pale young man in the black jacket had disappeared. Below the crest of the front lawn, Isobel and her crew were pulling away from the curb, and the Boughmobile was already moving toward the stop sign at the end of the street. John's neighbors stood near a long line of cars parked across the street, wistfully watching Isobel and the officials drive away.

Stony with rage, John Ransom stood with his parents at the top of the steps. Fontaine and Hogan stood a few yards from Tom Pasmore and me, taking everything in, like cops. I was sure I could detect in Hogan's face an extra, ironic layer of impassivity, suggesting that he had thought his superiors' speeches ridiculously self-serving. He spoke a few words without seeming to move his lips, like a schoolboy uttering a scathing remark about his teacher, and then I knew I was right. Hogan noticed me looking at him, and amusement and recognition briefly flared in his eyes. He knew what I had seen, and he knew that I agreed with him. Fontaine left him and moved briskly across the dry lawn toward the Ransoms.

"Are you going with us to the crematorium?" I asked Tom.

He shook his head. In the sunlight, his face had that only partially smoothed-out parchment look again, and I wondered if he had ever been to bed. "What is that detective asking John?" he asked me.

"He probably wants him to see if he can identify the victim from Livermore Avenue."

I could almost see his mind working. "Tell me more."

I told Tom about Grant Hoffman, and a little color came into his face.

"Will you go along?"

"I think Alan Brookner might come, too;" I looked around, realizing that I had not yet seen Alan.

"Come over any time you can get away. I want to hear what happens at the morgue."

The front door opened and closed behind us. Leaning on Joyce Brophy's arm, Alan Brookner moved slowly into the sunlight. Joyce signaled to me. "Professor Underhill, maybe you'll see Professor Brookner down to the car, so we can start our procession. There's deadlines here too, just like everywhere else, and we're scheduled in at two-thirty. Maybe you can get Professor Ransom and his folks all set?"

Alan hooked an arm through mine. I asked him how he was doing.

"I'm still on my feet, sonny boy."

We moved toward the Ransoms.

Paul Fontaine came up to us and said, "Four-thirty?"

"Sure," I said. "You want Alan there, too?"

"If he can make it."

"I can make anything you can set up," Alan said, not looking at the detective. "This at the morgue?"

"Yes. It's a block from Armory Place, on—"

"I can find the morgue," Alan said.

The hearse swung around the corner and parked in front of the Pontiac. Two cars filled with people from Ely Place completed the procession.

"I thought the mayor gave a wonderful tribute," Marjorie said.

"Impressive man," Ralph said.

We got to the bottom of the stairs, and Alan wrenched his arm out of mine. "Thirty-five years ago, Merlin was one of my students." Marjorie gave him a grateful smile. "The man was a dolt."

"Oh!" Marjorie squeaked. Ralph grimly opened the back door, and his wife scooted along the seat.

John and I went up to the front of the car. "They turned my wife's funeral into a sound bite," he snarled. "As far as I'm concerned, fifty percent of their goddamned bill is paid for in publicity." I let myself into the silent car and followed the hearse to the crematorium.

5

"Why do we have to go to the morgue? I don't see the point."

"I don't either, Dad."

"The whole idea is ridiculous," said Marjorie.

"The cops at the service must have overheard something," John said.

"Overheard what?"

"About that missing student."

"They didn't overhear it," I said. "I mentioned the student to Paul Fontaine."

After a second of silence, John said, "Well, that's okay."

"But what was the point?" Ralph asked.

"There's an unidentified man in the morgue. It might have something to do with April's case."

Marjorie and Ralph sat in shocked silence.

"The missing student might be the person in the morgue."

"Oh, God," Ralph said.

"Of course he isn't," Marjorie said. "The boy just dropped out, that's all."

"Grant wouldn't do that," Alan said.

"I might as well go to the morgue, if that's what the cops want," John said.

"I'll do it myself," Alan said. "John doesn't have to go."

"Fontaine wants me there. You don't have to come along, Alan."

"Yes, I do," Alan said.

There was no more conversation until I pulled up in front of John's house. The Ransoms got out of the backseat. When Alan remained in the passenger seat, John bent to his window. "Aren't you coming in, Alan?"

"Tim will take me home."

John pushed himself off the car. His mother was zigzagging over the lawn, picking up garbage.

6

Alan pulled himself across the sidewalk on heavy legs. Shorn grass gleamed up from the lawn. We went into the house, and for a moment he turned and looked at me with clouded, uncertain eyes. My heart sank. He had forgotten whatever he had planned to do next. He hid his confusion by turning away again and moving through the entry into his hallway.

He paused just inside the living room. The curtains had been pulled aside. The wood gleamed, and the air smelled of furniture polish. Neat stacks of mail, mostly catalogues and junk mail, sat on the coffee table.

"That's right," Alan said. He sat down on the couch, and leaned against the brown leather. "Cleaning service." He looked around at the sparkling room. "I guess nobody is coming back here." He cleared his throat. "I thought people always came to the house after a funeral."

He had forgotten that his daughter lived in another house. I sat down in an overstuffed chair.

Alan crossed his arms over his chest and gazed at his windows. For a moment, I saw some fugitive emotion flare in his eyes. Then he closed them and fell asleep. His chest rose and fell, and his breathing became regular. After a minute or two, he opened his eyes again. "Tim, yes," he said. "Good."

"Do you still feel like going to the morgue?" He looked confused for only a moment. "You bet I do. I knew the boy better than John." He smiled. "I gave him some of my old clothes—a few suits got too big for me. The boy had saved up enough to be able to pay tuition and rent, but he didn't have much left over."

Heavy footsteps came down the stairs. Whoever was in the house turned into the hall. Alan blinked at me, and I stood up and went to the entrance of the room. A heavy woman in black trousers and a University of Illinois T-shirt was coming toward me, pulling a vacuum cleaner behind her.

"I have to say that this was the biggest job I ever had in my whole entire life. The other girl, she had to go home to her family, so I finished up alone." She looked at me as if I shared some responsibility for the condition of the house. "That's six hours."

"You did a very good job."

"You're telling me." She dropped the vacuum cleaner hose and leaned heavily against the molding to look at Alan. "You're not a very neat man, Mr. Brookner."

"Things got out of hand."

"You're going to have to do better than this if you want me to come back."

"Things are already better," I said. "A private duty nurse will be coming every day, as soon as we can arrange it."

She tilted her head and looked at me speculatively for a moment. "I need a hundred and twenty dollars."

Alan reached into a pocket of his suit and pulled out a flat handful of twenty-dollar bills. He counted out six and stood up to give them to the cleaning woman.

"You're a real humdinger, Mr. Brookner." She slid the twenties into a pocket. "Thursdays are best from now on."

"That's fine," said Alan.

The cleaning woman left the room and picked up the hose of the vacuum cleaner. Then she dragged the vacuum back to the entrance. "Did you want me to do anything with that floral tribute thing?"

Alan looked at her blankly.

"Like, do you water it, or anything?"

Alan opened his mouth. "Where is it?"

"I moved it into the kitchen."

"Wreaths don't need watering."

"Fine with me." The vacuum cleaner bumped down the hall. A door opened and closed. A few minutes later, the woman returned, and I walked her to the door. She kept darting little glances at me. When I opened the door, she said, "He must be like Dr. Jeckel and Mr. Heckel, or something."

Alan was carrying a circular wreath of white carnations and yellow roses into the hallway. "You know Flory Park, don't you?"

"I grew up in another part of town," I said.

"Then I'll tell you how to get there." He carried the wreath to the front door. "I suppose you can find he lake. It is due east."

We went outside. "East is to our right," Alan said.

"Yes, sir," I said.

He marched down the walkway and veered across the sidewalk to the Pontiac. He got into the passenger seat and hugged the big wreath against his chest.

On Alan's instructions, I turned north on Eastern Shore Drive. I asked if he wanted the little community beach down below the bluffs south of us.

"That's Bunch Park. April didn't use it much. Too many people."

He clutched the wreath as we drove north on Eastern Shore Drive. After ten or twelve miles we crossed into Riverwood.

Eastern Shore Road shrank to a two-lane road, and it divided into two branches, one veering west, the other continuing north into a pine forest sprinkled with vast contemporary houses. Alan ordered me to go straight. At the next intersection, we turned right. The car moved forward through deep shadows.

Indented orange lettering on a brown wooden sign said FLORY PARK. The long drive curved into a circular parking lot where a few Jeeps and Range Rovers stood against a bank of trees. Alan said, "One of the most beautiful parks in the county, and nobody knows it exists."

He struggled out of the car. "This way." On the other side of the lot, he stepped over the low concrete barrier and walked across the grass to a narrow trail. "I was here once before. April was in grade school."

I asked him if he'd let me carry the wreath. "No."

The trail led into a stand of mixed pine and birch trees. I moved along in front of Alan, bending occasional branches out of his way. He was breathing easily and moving at a good walker's pace. We came out into a large clearing that led to a little rise. Over the top of the rise I could see the tops of other trees, and over them, the long flat blue line of the lake. It was very hot in the clearing. Sweat soaked through my shirt. I wiped my forehead. "Alan," I said, "I might not be able to go any farther."

"Why not?"

"I have a lot of trouble in places like this." He frowned at me, trying to figure out what I meant. I took a tentative step forward, and instantly pressure mines blew apart the ground in front of us and hurled men into the air. Blood spouted from the places where their legs had been.

"What kind of trouble?"

"Open spaces make me nervous."

"Why don't you close your eyes?" I closed my eyes. Little figures in black clothes flitted through the trees. Others crawled up to the edge of the clearing.

"Can I do anything to help you?"

"I don't think so."

"Then I suppose you'll have to do it yourself."

Two teenage boys in baggy bathing suits came out of the trees and passed us. They glanced over their shoulders as they went across the clearing and up the rise.

"You need me to do this?"

"Yes."

"Here goes." I took another step forward. The little men in black moved toward the treeline. My entire body ran with sweat.

"I'm going to walk in front of you," Alan said. "Watch my feet, and step only where I step. Okay?"

I nodded. My mouth was stuffed with cotton and sand. Alan moved in front of me. "Don't look at anything but my feet."

He stepped forward, leaving the clear imprint of his shoe in the dusty trail. I set my right foot directly on top of it. He took another step. I moved along behind him. My back prickled. The path began to rise beneath my feet. Alan's small, steady footprints carried me forward. He finally stopped moving.

"Can you look up now?" he asked.

We were standing at the top of the hill. In front of us, an almost invisible path went down a long forested slope. The main branch continued down to an iron staircase descending to a bright strip of sand and the still blue water. Far out on the lake, sailboats moved in lazy, erratic loops. "Let's finish this," I said, and went down the other side of the rise toward the safety of the trees.

As soon as I moved onto the main branch of the path, Alan called out, "Where are you going?"

I pointed toward the iron stairs and the beach.

"This way," he said, indicating the lesser branch.

I set off after him. He said, "Could you carry this for a while?"

I held out my arms. The wreath was heavier than I had expected. The stems of the roses dug into my arms.

"When she was a child, April would pack a book and something to eat and spend hours in a little grove down at the end of this path. It was her favorite place."

The path disappeared as it met wide shelves of rock between the dense trees. Spangled light fell on the mottled stone. Birches and maples crowded up through the shale. Alan finally halted in front of a jagged pile of boulders. "I can't get up this thing by myself."

Without the wreath, it would have been easy; the wreath made it no more than difficult. The problem was carrying the wreath and pulling Alan Brookner along with my free hand. Alone and unhindered, I could have done it in about five minutes. Less. Three minutes. Alan and I made it in about twenty. When it was over, I had sweated through my jacket, and a torn zipper dangled away from the fabric.

I knelt down on a flat slab, took the wreath off my shoulder, and looked at Alan grimly reaching up at me. I wrapped a hand around his wrist and pulled him toward me until he could grab the collar of my jacket. He held on like a monkey while I put my arms around his waist and lifted him bodily up onto the slab.

"See why I needed you?" He was breathing hard.

I wiped my forehead and inspected the wreath. A few wires and some stray roses protruded, and a dark green fern hung down like a cat's tail. I pushed the roses back into the wreath and wound the stray wires around them. Then I got to my feet and held out a hand to Alan.

We walked over the irregular surface formed by the juncture of hundreds of large boulders. He asked me for the wreath again. "How far are we going?" I asked.

Alan waved toward the far side of the shelf of rock. A screen of red maples four or five trees thick stood before the long blue expanse of the lake.

On the other side of the maples, the hill dropped off gently for another thirty feet. A shallow groove of a path cut straight down through the trees and rocks to a glen. A flat granite projection lay in a grove of maples like the palm of a hand. Below the ridge of granite, sunlight sparkled on the lake. Alan asked me for the wreath again.

"That's the place." He set off stiffly down the brown path. After another half-dozen steps, he spoke again. "April came here to be alone." Another few steps. "This was dear to her." He drew in a shuddering breath. "I can see her here." He said no more until we stood on the flat shelf of granite that hung out over the lake. I walked up to the edge of the rock. Off to my right, the two boys who had passed us at the beginning of the clearing were bobbing up and down in a deep pool formed by a curve of the shoreline about twenty feet below the jutting surface of the rock. It was a natural diving board. I stepped back from the edge.

"This is April's funeral," Alan said. "Her real funeral." I felt like a trespasser.

"I have to say good-bye to her."

The enormity of his act struck me, and I stepped back toward the shade of the maples.

Alan walked slowly to the center of the shelf of rock. The little white-haired man seemed majestic to me. He had planned this moment almost from the time he had learned of his daughter's death.

"My dear baby," he said. His voice shook. He clutched the wreath close to his chest. "April, I will always be your father, and you will always be my daughter. I will carry you in my heart until the day of my death. I promise you that the person who did this to you will not go free. I don't have much strength left, but it will be enough for both of us. I love you, my child."

He stepped forward to the lip of the rock and looked down. In the softest voice I had ever heard from him, he said, "Your father wishes you peace."

Alan took a step backward and dangled the wreath in his right hand. Then he moved his right foot backward, cocked his arm back, swung his arm forward, and hurled the wreath into the bright air like a discus. It sailed ten or twelve feet out and plummeted toward the water, turning over and over in the air.

The boys pointed and shouted when they saw the wreath falling toward the lake pool. They started swimming toward the spot where it would fall, but stopped when they saw Alan and me standing on the rock shelf. The ring of flowers smacked onto the water. Luminous ripples radiated out from it. The wreath bobbed in the water like a raft, then began drifting down the shoreline. The two boys paddled back toward the little beach at the bottom of the stairs.

"I'm still her father," Alan said.

7

When we pulled up in front of John's house, only the shining gap between Alan's eyelids and his lower lids indicated that he was still awake. "I'll wait," he said.

John opened the door and pulled me inside. "Where were you? Do you know what time it is?"

His parents were standing up in the living room, looking at us anxiously.

"Is Alan all right?" Marjorie asked.

"He's a little tired," I said.

"Look, I have to run," John said. "We should be back in half an hour. This can't take any longer than that."

Ralph Ransom started to say something, but John glared at me and virtually pushed me outside. He banged the door shut and started down the path, buttoning his jacket as he went.

"My God, the old guy's asleep," he said. "First you make us late, and then you drag him out of bed, when he hardly even knows who he is."

"He knows who he is," I said.

We got into the car, and John tapped Alan's shoulder as I pulled away. "Alan? Are you okay?"

"Are you?" Alan asked.

John jerked back his hand.

I decided to take the Horatio Street bridge, and then remembered something Dick Mueller had said to me.

"John," I said, "you didn't tell me that April was interested in local history."

"She did a little research here and there. Nothing special."

"Wasn't she especially interested in the Horatio Street bridge?"

"I don't know anything about it."

The glittering strips at the bottom of Alan's eyelids were closed. He was breathing deeply and steadily.

"What took you so long?"

"Alan wanted to go to Flory Park."

"What did he want to do in Flory Park?"

"April used to go there."

"What are you trying to tell me?" His voice was flat with anger.

"There's a flat rock that overlooks a lake pool, and when April was in high school, she used to sun herself there and dive into the pool."

He relaxed. "Oh. That could be."

"Alan wanted to see it once more."

"What did he do? Moon around and think about April?"

"Something like that."

He grunted in a way that combined irritation and dismissal.

"John," I said, "even after we listened to Walter Dragonette talk about the Horatio Street bridge, even after we went there, you didn't think that April's interest in the bridge was worth bringing up?"

"I didn't know much about it," he said.

"What?" Alan muttered. "What was that about April?" He rubbed his eyes and sat up straight, peering out to see where we were going.

John groaned and turned away from us.

"We were talking about some research April was doing," I said.

"Ah."

"Did she ever talk to you about it?"

"April talked to me about everything." He waited a moment. "I don't remember the matter very well. It was about some bridge."

"Actually, it was that bridge right ahead of us," John said. We were on Horatio Street. A block before us stood the embankment of the Millhaven River and the low walls of the bridge.

"Wasn't there something about a crime?"

"It was a crime, all right," John said.

I looked at the Green Woman Taproom as we went past and, in the second before the bridge walls cut it from view, saw a blue car drawn up onto the cement slab beside the tavern. Two cardboard boxes stood next to the car, and the trunk was open. Then we were rattling across the bridge. The instant after that, I thought that the car had looked like the Lexus that followed John Ransom to Shady Mount. I leaned forward and tried to see it in the rear-view mirror, but the walls of the bridge blocked my view.

"You're hung up on that place. Like Walter Dragonette."

"Like April," I said.

"April had too much going on in her life to spend much time on local history." He sounded bitter about it.

Long before we got close to Armory Place, voices came blasting out of the plaza. "Waterford must go! Vass must go! Waterford must go! Vass must go!"

"Guess the plea for unity didn't work," John said.

"You turn right up here to get to the morgue," Alan said.

8

A ramp led up to the entrance of the Millhaven County Morgue. When I pulled up in front of the ramp, Paul Fontaine got out of an unmarked sedan and waved me into a slot marked FOR OFFICIAL VEHICLES ONLY. He stood slouching with his hands in the pockets of his baggy gray suit. We were ten minutes late.

"I'm sorry, it's my fault," I said.

"I'd rather be here than Armory Place," Fontaine said. He took in Alan's weariness. "Professor Brookner, you could sit it out in the waiting room."

"No, I don't think I could," Alan said.

"Then let's get it over with." At the top of the ramp, Fontaine let us into an entry with two plastic chairs on either side of a tall ashtray crowded with butts. Beyond the next door, a blond young man with taped glasses sat drumming a pencil on a battered desk. Wide acne scars sandblasted the flesh under his chin.

"We're all here now, Teddy," Fontaine said. "I'll take them back."

"Do the thang," Teddy said.

Fontaine gestured toward the interior of the building. Two rows of dusty fluorescent tubes hung from the ceiling. The walls were painted the flat dark green of military vehicles. "I'd better prepare you for what you're going to see. There isn't much left of his face." He stopped in front of the fourth door on the right side of the corridor and looked at Alan. "You might find this disturbing."

"Don't worry about me," Alan said.

Fontaine opened the door into a small room without furniture or windows. Banks of fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling. In the center of the room a body covered with a clean white sheet lay on a wheeled table.

Fontaine went to the far side of the body. "This is the man we found behind the St. Alwyn Hotel." He folded back the sheet to the top of the man's chest.

Alan drew in a sharp breath. Most of the face had been sliced into strips of flesh that looked like uncooked bacon. The teeth were disturbingly healthy and intact beneath the shreds of skin. A cheekbone made a white stripe beneath an empty eye socket. The lower lip dropped over the chin. Long wounds separated the flesh of the neck; wider wounds on the chest continued on beneath the sheet.

Fontaine let us adjust to the spectacle on the table. "Does anything about this man look familiar? I know it's not easy."

John said, "Nobody could identify him—there isn't anything left."

"Professor Brookner?"

"It could be Grant." Alan took his eyes from the table and looked at John. "Grant's hair was that light brown color."

"Alan, this doesn't even look like hair."

"Are you prepared to identify this man, Professor Brookner?"

Alan looked back down at the body and shook his head. "I can't be positive."

Fontaine waited to see if Alan had anything more to say. "Would it help you to see his clothes?"

"I'd like to see the clothing, yes."

Fontaine folded the sheet back up over the body and walked past us toward the door to the corridor.

Then we stood in another tiny windowless room, in the same configuration as before, Fontaine on the far side of a wheeled table, the three of us in front of it. Rumpled, bloodstained clothes lay scattered across the table.

"What we have here is what the deceased was wearing on the night of his death. A seersucker jacket with a label from Hatchett and Hatch, a green polo shirt from Banana Republic, khaki pants from the Gap, Fruit of the Loom briefs, brown cotton socks, cordovan shoes." Fontaine pointed at each item in turn.

Alan raised his eagle's face. "Seersucker jacket? Hatchett and Hatch? That was mine. It's Grant." His face was colorless. "And he told me that he was going to treat himself to some new clothes with the money I gave him."

"You gave money to Grant Hoffman?" John asked. "Besides the clothes?"

"Are you sure this was your jacket?" Fontaine lifted the shredded, rusty-looking jacket by its shoulders.

"I'm sure, yes," Alan said. He stepped back from the table. "I gave it to him last August—we were sorting out some clothes. He tried it on, and it fit him." He pressed a hand to his mouth and stared at the ruined jacket.

"You're positive." Fontaine laid the jacket down on the table.

Alan nodded.

"In that case, sir, would you please look at the deceased once more?"

"He already looked at the body," John said in a voice too loud for the small room. "I don't see any point in subjecting my father-in-law to this torture all over again."

"Sir," Fontaine said, speaking only to Alan, "you are certain that this was the jacket you gave to Mr. Hoffman?"

"I wish I weren't," Alan said.

John exploded. "This man just lost his daughter! How can you think of subjecting him to—"

"Enough, John," Alan said. He looked ten years older than when he had hurled the wreath into the lake.

"You two gentlemen can wait in the hall," Fontaine said. He came around the table and put his hand high on Alan's back, just below the nape of his neck. This gentleness, his whole tone when dealing with Alan, surprised me. "You can wait for us in the hall."

A technician in a white T-shirt and white pants came through the adjoining door and crossed to the table. Without looking at us, he began folding the bloody clothes and placing them in transparent evidence bags. John rolled his eyes, and we went into the hall.

"What a setup," John said. He was spinning around and around in the hallway. I leaned my back against a wall. Low voices came from inside the other room.

At the sound of footsteps, John stopped spinning. Paul Fontaine stayed inside the room while Alan marched out.

"I'll be in touch soon," Fontaine said.

Alan walked down the hallway without speaking or looking back.

"Alan?" John called.

He kept on walking.

"It was someone else, right?"

Alan walked past Teddy and opened the door to the entry. "Tim, will you drop me off?"

"Of course," I said.

Alan moved through the door and let it close behind him. "What the hell," John said. By the time we got into the entry, the outside door had already closed behind Alan. When we got outside, he was on his way down the ramp.

We caught up with him on the ramp. John put his arm through Alan's, and Alan shook him off.

"I'm sorry you had to see that," John said.

"I want to go home."

"Sure," John said. When we got to the car, he opened the door for the old man, closed it behind him, and got into the backseat. I started the engine. "At least that's over," John said.

"Is it?" Alan asked.

I backed out of the space and turned toward Armory Place. John leaned forward and patted Alan's shoulder.

"You've been great all day long," John said. "Is there anything I can do for you now?"

"You could stop talking," Alan said.

"It was Grant Hoffman, wasn't it?" I asked.

"Oh, God," John said.

"Of course it was," Alan said.

9

I slowed down as we drove past the Green Woman Taproom, but the blue car was gone.

"Why would anybody kill Grant Hoffman?" John asked.

No one responded. We drove back to his house in a silence deepened rather than broken by the sounds of the other cars and the slight breeze that blew in through the open windows. At Ely Place John told me to come back when I could and got out of the car. Then he paused for a second and put his face up to the passenger window and looked past Alan at me. A hard, transparent film covered his eyes like a shield. "Do you think I should tell my parents about Grant?"

Alan did not move.

"I'll follow your lead," I said.

He said he would leave the door unlocked for me and turned away.

When I followed Alan inside his house, he went upstairs and sat on his bed and held out his arms like a child so that I could remove his jacket. "Shoes," he said, and I untied his shoes and slipped them off while he fumbled with his necktie. He tried unbuttoning his shirt, but his fingers couldn't manage it, and I undid the buttons for him.

He cleared his throat with an explosive sound, and his huge, commanding voice filled the room. "Was April as bad as Grant? I have to know."

It took me a moment to understand what he meant. "Not at all. You saw her at the funeral parlor."

He sighed. "Ah. Yes."

I slid the shirt down his arms and laid it on his bed.

"Poor Grant."

I didn't say anything. Alan undid his belt and stood up to push his trousers down over his hips. He sat again on the bed, and I pulled the trousers off his legs.

Dazed and unfocused, he watched me pull a handkerchief, keys, and bills from his trouser pockets and put them on his bedside table.

"Alan, do you know why April was interested in the Horatio Street bridge?"

"It had something to do with the Vuillard in their living room. You've seen it?"

I said that I had.

"She said one of the figures in the painting reminded her of a man she had heard about. A policeman—some policeman who killed himself in the fifties. She couldn't look at the painting without thinking about him. She did some research on it—April was a great researcher, you know." He wrenched the pillow beneath his head. "I need to get some sleep, Tim."

I went to the bedroom door and said that I'd call him later that evening, if he liked.

"Come here tomorrow."

I think he was asleep before I got down the stairs.

10

Ralph and Marjorie Ransom, back in their black-and-silver running suits, sat side by side on one of the couches.

"I agree with John," Ralph said. "Thin stripes and puckered cotton, that's a seersucker jacket. That's the point. All seersucker jackets look alike. Hatchett and Hatch probably unloaded ten thousand of the things."