After they married, April left graduate school and took a job in a brokerage house. Ransom had thought she would quit within six months, but April astounded him by the speed and pleasure with which she had learned the business. Within eighteen months, she knew minute details of hundreds of companies—companies of all sizes. She knew how the division presidents got on with their boards; she knew which factories were falling apart; she knew about new patents and old grudges and unhappy stockholders. "Really, it isn't any harder than learning everything there is to know about sixteenth-century English poetry," she said. "These guys come in drooling with greed, and all I have to do is show them how they can make a little more money. When I do that, they give me a chunk of their pension funds. And when that does well, they fall down and kiss my feet."
"You have corrupted my daughter," Brookner said to him once. "Now she is a money machine. The only consolation is that I will not have to spend my declining years in a room with a neon sign flashing outside the window."
"It's just a game to April," Ransom had said to him. "She says her real master is Jacques Derrida."
"I spawned a postmodern capitalist," Brookner said. "You understand, at Arkham it is an embarrassment suddenly to possess a great deal of money."
The marriage settled into a busy but peaceful partnership. April told him that she was the world's only ironic Yuppie— when she was thirty-five, she was going to quit to have a baby, manage their own investments, learn to be a great cook, and keep up her elaborate research projects into local history. Ransom had wondered if April would ever really leave her job, baby or not. Certainly none of her customers wanted her to abandon them. The Millhaven financial community had given her their annual Association Award at a dinner April had privately ridiculed, and the Ledger had run a photograph of the two of them smiling a little shamefacedly as April cradled the huge cup on which her name was to be inscribed.
Ransom would never know if April would have left her job. Five days after April had won the hideous cup, someone had stabbed her, beaten her, and left her for dead.
He still lived in the duplex he and April had rented when they were first married. Twenty-one Ely Place was three blocks north of Berlin Avenue, a long walk from Shady Mount, but close to the UI-M campus, where April had once been enrolled, and only a ten-minute drive to Millhaven's downtown, where he and April had both had their offices. April's money had allowed them to buy the building and convert it into a single-family house. Now Ransom had a book-lined office on the third floor, April an office filled with glittering computers, stacks of annual reports, and a fax machine that continued to disgorge papers; the second floor had been converted into a giant master bedroom and a smaller guest room, both with bathrooms; the ground floor contained the living room, dining room, and kitchen.
5
"How is your father-in-law handling all this?"
"Alan doesn't really know what happened to April." Ransom hesitated. "He, ah, he's changed quite a bit over the past year or so." He paused again and frowned at the stack of books on his coffee table. All of them were about Vietnam—Fields of Fire, The Thirteenth Valley, 365 Days, The Short Timers, The Things They Carried. "I'll make some coffee," he said.
He went into the kitchen, and I began to take in, with admiration and even a little envy, the house Ransom and his wife had made together. Extraordinary paintings, paintings I could not quite place, covered the wall opposite the long couch that was my vantage point. I closed my eyes. A few minutes later, the clatter of the tray against the table awakened me. Ransom did not notice that I had dozed off.
"I want an explanation," he said. "I want to know what happened to my wife."
"And you don't trust the police," I said.
"I wonder if the police think I did it." He threw out his arms, lifted them, then poured coffee into pottery mugs. "Maybe they think I'm trying to mislead them by bringing up all the old Blue Rose business." He took his own mug to a tufted leather chair.
"But you haven't been charged with anything."
"I get the feeling that the homicide detective, Fontaine, is just waiting to pounce."
"I don't understand why a homicide detective is involved in the first place—your wife is in the hospital."
"My wife is dying in the hospital."
"You can't really be sure of that," I said. He started shaking his head, misery and conflict printed clearly on his face, and I said, "I guess I'm confused. How can a homicide detective investigate a death that hasn't happened?"
He looked up, startled. "Oh. I see what you mean. The reason for that is the other victim."
I had completely forgotten the other victim. "The assault on April falls into an ongoing homicide investigation. When and if she dies, of course, Fontaine will be in charge of that investigation, too."
"Did April know this guy?"
Ransom shook his head again. "Nobody knows who he is."
"He was never identified?"
"He had no identification of any kind, nothing at all, and nobody ever reported him missing. I think he must have been a vagrant, a homeless person, something like that." I asked if he had seen the man's body. He shifted in his chair. "I gather the killer scattered pieces of the guy all over Livermore Avenue." i
Before I could respond, Ransom went on. "The guy who's doing this doesn't care who he kills. I don't even think he needed an actual reason. It was just time to get to work again."
One reason John Ransom had wanted me to come back to Millhaven was that he had been talking nonstop to himself inside his head for weeks, and now he had to let some of these arguments out.
"Tell me about the person who did this," I said. "Tell me who you think he is—the kind of person you see when you think of him."
Ransom looked relieved.
"Well, I have been thinking about that, of course. I've been trying to work out what kind of person would be capable of doing these things." He leaned toward me, ready, even eager, to share his speculations.
I settled back in my own chair, all too conscious of the disparity between what Ransom and I were discussing and our setting. It was one of the most beautiful private rooms I had ever seen, beautiful in a restrained way centered in the paintings that filled the room. I thought that one of these must be a Vuillard, and the others seemed oddly familiar. The soft colors and flowing shapes of the paintings carried themselves right through the room, into the furniture and the few pieces of sculpture visible on low tables.
"I think he's about sixty. He might have had an alcoholic parent, and he was probably an abused child. You might find some kind of head injury in his history—that turns up surprisingly often, with these people. He is very, very controlled. I bet he has a kind of inflexible inner schedule. Every day, he does the same things at the same time. He's still strong, so he might even exercise regularly. He would probably seem to be the last person you'd suspect of these crimes. And he is intelligent."
"What does he look like? What did he do for a living? How does he relax?"
"I think the only thing that distinguishes him physically, apart from his being in excellent condition for his age, is that he looks very respectable. And I think he might live down in that area where the murders took place, because with one exception, he stuck with it."
"You mean, he lives in my old neighborhood?" The exception he had mentioned must have been his wife.
"I think so. People see him, but they don't really notice him. As for relaxing, I don't think he really can relax, so he wouldn't take vacations or anything—probably couldn't really afford that, anyhow—but I bet he was a gardener."