Out of the interrogation room, Fontaine's skin appeared to be some shade halfway between yellow and green, like an old piece of lettuce.
"Did the new cases ever cause you to look up the records for the old ones?" I asked him.
"Blue Rose was way before my time."
"Do you think I could look at those records?" He was staring at me, and I said, "I'm still very curious about the Blue Rose case."
"You do research for books after you write them?"
John Ransom turned ponderously toward me. "What's the point?"
"Yes, what is the point, Mr. Underhill?"
"It's a personal matter," I said.
Fontaine blinked, twice, very slowly. "Those records are a hot item. Well, since Mike Hogan is such an admirer of yours, we might be able to permit that breach of our normally fortresslike confidentiality. Of course, we have to find those records first. I'll let you know. Thank you for giving us your time, Mr. Ransom. be calling you as things progress."
Ransom waved at him and began to move away toward the old part of the building.
Something else occurred to me, and I asked Fontaine another question. "Did you ever find out the name of the man was who was following John? The gray-haired man driving the Lexus?"
Fontaine pursed his lips. The lines around his eyes and mouth deepened, and the soft, saggy parts of his face seemed to get even more mournful. "I forgot all about that," he said. "Do you think there's any point in—?"
He smiled and shrugged, and it seemed to me that part of the meaning of all this courtesy was that, in some fashion or another, he had just lied to me. A second later, it seemed impossible that Fontaine would deceive me about such a trivial matter. I watched him walking back toward the interrogation room, hunched over in his shapeless suit. What he had done in the interrogation room had made me free again, but I did not feel free.
Fontaine looked sideways at a tall policeman who came out into the corridor holding a typed form and grabbed his elbow before he could get away. I remembered seeing the younger man at the hospital that morning.
"Sonny, will you see that these two gentlemen find their way downstairs to the parking lot? I'd do it myself, but I have to get back to an interrogation."
"Yes, sir," Sonny said. "There must be a couple hundred people on the steps. How do they get those signs made so fast?"
"They don't have jobs."
Sonny laughed and advanced toward us like Paul Bunyan moving in on a pine forest.
As we clanged down the metal stairs in the old part of the building, Sonny told John that he was sorry about his wife's death. "The whole department's sorry," he said. "It was sort of like something you couldn't believe, when we first heard it in the car this morning. I was with Detective Fontaine, bringing that guy into the station."
I asked, "You were all in the car together when the report came in about Mrs. Ransom?"
He turned around on the stairs and looked up at me. "That's what I just said."
"You were driving, and you could hear the report."
"Clear as a bell."
"What did it say?"
"For God's sake, Tim," said John Ransom.
"I just want to know what the report said."
"Well, the woman who called it in was pretty excited." Sonny began moving more slowly down the stairs, gripping the handrail and looking back over his shoulder. "She said that Mrs. Ransom had been beaten to death in her room, excuse me, sir."
"And did she say something about Officer Mangelotti?"
"Yeah, she said he was injured. She was new, and she must have been excited—she forgot to use the codes."
"What the hell is this about, Tim? I don't want to know about this," Ransom said. "What difference does it make?"
"None, probably," I said.
"Dragonette spilled the beans right away," Sonny said. "He told Fontaine, he says, If you guys had worked faster, you could have saved her, too. Fontaine says, Are you confessing to the murder of April Ransom, and he says, Of course. I killed her, didn't I?"
He got to the bottom of the stairs and strode down the corridor that had reminded me of an old grade school when I had pursued Paul Fontaine into the building. Now all of it felt tainted by what I had heard upstairs. The announcements and papers on the bulletin board looked like brutal jokes, GUNS FOR SALE GOOD & CHEAP. NEED A DIVORCE LAWYER WITH 20 YEARS POLICE EXPERIENCE? KARATE FOR COPS. Someone had already put up a yellow sheet with these words printed in block capitals at its top:
PEOPLE WALTER DRAGONETTE SHOULD HAVE ASKED HOME. The name of Millhaven's mayor, Merlin Waterford, was first on the list.
"Here you go." Sonny held the door to the parking lot open with an outstretched arm and backed away so that he did not completely fill the frame. John Ransom squeezed past him, grimacing, and I ducked through the space between the big cop and the frame. Sonny smiled down at me.
"Take it easy, now," he said, and let the door close behind us.
All the cops standing around in the parking lot stared at us as we walked toward Ransom's car. The sides of the buildings around us, red brick and gray stone, leaned inward, and the watching policemen looked like caged animals. Everything was grimy with age and suppressed violence.
Ransom collapsed into the passenger seat. A few cops with cement faces started moving toward our car. I got in and started the engine. Before I could put it in gear, one of the cops appeared beside me and leaned in the open window. His face was very close to mine. Whiskey blotches burned on his fleshy cheeks, and his eyes were pale and dead. Damrosch, I thought. Two others stood in back of the car.
"You had business here?" he said.
"We were with Paul Fontaine," I said.
"Were you." It was not a question.
"This is John Ransom. The husband of April Ransom."
The terrible face recoiled. "Get out, get going." He stood up and stepped back and waved me away. The cops behind the car melted away.
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.