Then she came toward me, and her dark eyes looked huge in her small, competent face. She put the flat of her hand on my chest. "I shouldn't be saying any of this, but if Mrs. Ransom dies, you should go through his medicine chest and hide any prescription tranquilizers. And you shouldn't let him drink too much. He's had a good marriage for a long time, and if he loses it, he's going to become someone he wouldn't even recognize now."
She gave my chest a single, admonitory pat, dropped her hand, and turned around again without saying another word. I followed her back into April Ransom's room. John was leaning over the side of the bed, saying things too soft to be overheard. April looked like a white husk.
It was past five, and Tom Pasmore was probably out of bed. I asked Eliza where to find a pay telephone, and she sent me around the nurses' station and down a hallway to another bank of elevators. A row of six telephones hung opposite the elevators, none of them in use. Swinging doors opened to wide corridors on both sides. Green, red, and blue arrows streaked up and down the floor in lines, indicating the way to various departments.
Tom Pasmore answered after five or six rings. Yes, it would be fine if we came around seven-thirty. I could tell that he was disappointed—on the few occasions Tom welcomed company, he liked it to arrive late and stay until dawn. He seemed intrigued that we would be on foot.
"Does Ransom walk everywhere? Would he walk downtown, say, from Ely Place?"
"He drove me to his house from the airport," I said.
"In his or his wife's car?"
"His. His wife has a Mercedes, I guess."
"Is it parked in front of their house?"
"I didn't notice. Why?"
He laughed. "He has two cars and he's marching you all over the east side."
"I walk everywhere, too. I don't mind."
"Well, I'll have some cold towels and iced lemonade ready for you when you trudge up the driveway at the break of dawn. In the meantime, see if you can find out what happened to his wife's car."
I promised to try. Then I hung up and turned around to find myself facing a huge broad-shouldered guy with a gray ponytail and beard, the gold dot of an earring in one ear, and a four-button double-breasted Armani suit. He sneered at me as he moved toward the phone. I sneered back. I felt like Philip Marlowe.
10
At seven John Ransom and I walked out of the hospital and went down the hedge-lined path to Berlin Avenue. He moved quickly but heedlessly, as if he were all by himself in an empty landscape. The air could have been squeezed like a sponge, and the temperature had cooled off to something like eighty-five. There was still at least an hour and a half of sunlight. Ransom hesitated when we reached the sidewalk. For a second I thought he might wade out into the crowded avenue—I didn't think he could see anything but the room he had just left. Instead of stepping off the curb, he let his head drop so that his chin pressed into the layer of fat beneath it. He wiped his face with his hands. "Okay," he said, more to himself than to me. Then he looked at me. "Well, now you've seen her. What do you think?"
"You must be doing her some good, coming every day," I said.
"I hope so." Ransom shoved his hands into his pockets. For a moment he looked like a balding, overweight version of the Brooks-Lowood student he had been. "I think she's lost some weight in the past few days. And that big bruise seems to have stopped fading. Wouldn't you think that's a bad sign, when a bruise won't fade?"
I asked him what her doctor had said.
"As usual, nothing at all."
"Well, Eliza Morgan will do everything possible for April," I said. "At least you know she's getting good care."
He looked at me sharply. "She sneaks away to smoke cigarettes in the lounge, did you notice? I don't think nurses should smoke, and I don't think April should be left alone."
"Isn't that cop always there?"
Ransom shrugged and began walking back down the way we had come. "He spends most of his time staring out of the window." His hands were still stuffed into his trousers pockets, and he hunched over a little as he walked. He looked over at me and shook his head.
I said, "It can't be easy to see April like that."
He sighed—sighed up from his heels. "Tim, she's dying right in front of me."
We both stopped walking. Ransom covered his face with his hands for a moment. A few people walking past us stared at the unusual sight of a grown man in a handsome gray suit crying in public. When he lowered his hands, moisture shone on his red face. "Now I'm a public embarrassment." He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face.
"Do you still want to see Tom Pasmore? Would you rather just go home?"
"Are you kidding?"
He straightened his spine and began moving down the sidewalk again, past the card shop and the grocery store and the florist with its striped awning and its sidewalk display of flowers. "Whatever happened to April's Mercedes? I don't think I saw it when we left the house."
Ransom frowned at me. "You hardly could have. It's gone. I suppose it'll turn up eventually—I've had other things to think about."
"Where do you think it is?"
"To tell you the truth, I don't care what happened to the car. It was insured. It's just a car."
We walked several more blocks through the heat, not talking. Now and then John Ransom pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and blotted his forehead. We were getting closer to the UI campus, and bookstores and little restaurants had replaced the grocery stores and florists. The Royal, Millhaven's only art film house, was showing a season of thrillers from the forties and fifties—the marquee showed a complicated schedule beginning with a double feature of Double Indemnity and Kiss Me Deadly and ending, sometime in August, with Pickup on South Street and Strangers on a Train. In between they were running From Dangerous Depths, The Big Combo, The Asphalt Jungle, Chicago Deadline, DOA, The Hitchhiker, Laura, Out of the Past, Notorious. These were the movies of my youth, and I remembered the pleasure of slipping into the cool of the Beldame Oriental on a hot day, of buying popcorn and watching a doom-laden film noir in the nearly empty theater.
Suddenly I remembered the nightmare I'd had on the morning of the day John Ransom had called me—the thick hands on the big white plate. Cutting off human flesh, chewing it, spitting it out in revulsion. The heat made me feel dizzy, and the memory of the dream brought with it the gritty taste of depression. I stopped moving and looked up at the marquee.
"You okay?" Ransom said, turning around just ahead of me.
The title of one of the films seemed to float out an inch or two from the others—a trick of vision, or of the light. "Have you ever heard of a movie called From Dangerous Depths?" I asked. "I don't know anything about it."
Ransom walked back to join me. He looked up at the crowded marquee. "Cornball title, isn't it?"
Ransom plunged across Berlin Avenue and walked east on a block lined with three-story frame and redbrick houses separated by thick low hedges. Some of the tiny front lawns were littered with bicycles and children's toys, and all of them bore brown streaks like burn scars. Rock and roll drifted down from an upstairs window, tinny and lifeless.
"I remember Tom Pasmore," Ransom said. "The guy was an absolute loner. He didn't really have any friends. The money was his grandfather's, wasn't it? His father didn't amount to much—I think he ran out on them in Tom's senior year."
That was the sort of detail everyone at Brooks-Lowood would have known.
"And his mother was an alcoholic," Ransom said. "Pretty lady, though. Is she still alive?"