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."