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.