Monroe said, "Suppose you tell us where this fairy tale about Dragonette and the dispatcher comes from."
"I'd like to know the point of this visit," I said.
For a moment the two detectives said nothing. Finally Monroe smiled at me again. "Mr. Underhill, do you have any basis for this claim? You weren't in the car with Walter Dragonette."
John gave me a questioning look. He remembered, all right.
"One of the officers in the car with Dragonette told me what happened," I said.
"That's incredible," said Monroe.
"Could you tell me who was in the car with Walter Dragonette when that call from the dispatcher came in?" asked Wheeler.
"Paul Fontaine and a uniformed officer named Sonny sat in the front seat. Dragonette was handcuffed in the back. Sonny heard the dispatcher say that Mrs. Ransom had been murdered in the hospital. Dragonette heard it, too. And then he said, 'If you guys had worked faster, you could have saved her, you know.' And Detective Fontaine asked if he were confessing to the murder of April Ransom, and Dragonette said that he was. At that point, he would have confessed to anything."
Monroe leaned forward. "What are you trying to accomplish?"
"I want to see the right man get arrested," I said.
He sighed. "How did you ever meet Sonny Berenger?"
"I met him at the hospital, and again after the interrogation."
"I don't suppose anybody else heard these statements."
"One other person heard them." I did not look at John. I waited. The two detectives stared at me. We all sat in silence for what seemed a long time.
"I heard it, too," John finally said.
"There we go," said Wheeler.
"There we go," said Monroe. He stood up. "Mr. Ransom, we'd like to ask you to come down to Armory Place to go over what happened on the morning of your wife's death."
"Everybody knows where I was on Thursday morning." He looked confused and alarmed.
"We'd like to go over that in greater detail," Monroe said. "This is normal routine, Mr. Ransom. You'll be back here in an hour or two."
"Do I need a lawyer?"
"You can have a lawyer present, if you insist."
"Fontaine changed his mind," I said. "He went over the tape, and he didn't like that flimsy confession."
The two detectives did not bother to answer me. Monroe said, "We'd appreciate your cooperation, Mr. Ransom."
Ransom turned to me. "Do you think I should call a lawyer?"
"I would," I said.
"I don't have anything to worry about." He turned from me to Wheeler and Monroe. "Let's get it over with."
The three of them stood up, and, a moment later, so did I.
"Oh, my God," John said. "We were supposed to see Alan."
The two cops looked back and forth between us.
"Will you go over there?" John asked. "Explain everything, and tell him I'll see him as soon as I can."
"What do you mean, explain everything?"
"About April," he said.
Monroe smiled slowly.
"Don't you think you ought to do that yourself?"
"I would if I could," John said. "Tell him I'll talk to him as soon as I can. It'll be better this way."
"I doubt that," I said.
He sighed. "Then call him up and tell him that I had to go in for questioning, but that I'll come over as soon as I can this afternoon."
I nodded, and the detectives went outside with John. Geoffrey Bough and his photographer trotted forward, expectant as puppies. The camera began firing with the clanking, heavy noise of a round being chambered. When Monroe and Wheeler assisted Ransom into their car, not neglecting to palm the top of his head and shoehorn him into the backseat, Bough looked back at the house and bawled my name. He started running toward me, and I closed and locked the door.
The bell rang, rang, rang. I said, "Go away."
"Is Ransom under arrest?"
When I said nothing, Geoffrey flattened his face against the slit of window beside the door.
Alan Brookner answered after his telephone had rung for two or three minutes. "Who is this?"
I told him my name. "We had some drinks in the kitchen."
"I have you now! Good man! You coming here today?"
"Well, I was going to, but something came up, and John won't be able to make it for a while."
"What does that mean?" He coughed loudly, alarmingly, making ripping sounds deep in his chest. "What about the Bloody Marys?" More terrible coughing followed. "Hang the Bloody Marys, where's John?"
"The police wanted to talk to him some more."
"You tell me what happened to my daughter, young man. I've been fooled with long enough."
A fist began thumping against the door. Geoffrey Bough was still gaping at the slit window.
"I'll be over as soon as I can," I said.
"The front door ain't locked." He hung up.
I went back through the arch. The telephone began to shrill. The doorbell gonged.
I passed through the kitchen and stepped out onto Ransom's brown lawn. The hedges met a row of arbor vitae like Christmas trees. Above them protruded the peaks and gables of a neighboring roof. A muted babble came from the front of the house. I crossed the lawn and pushed myself into the gap between the hedge and the last arbor vitae. The light disappeared, and the lively, pungent odors of leaves and sap surrounded me in a comfortable pocket of darkness. Then the tree yielded, and I came out into an empty, sun-drenched backyard.
I almost laughed out loud. I could just walk away from it, and I did.
5
This sense of escape vanished as soon as I walked up the stone flags that bisected Alan Brookner's overgrown lawn.
I turned the knob and stepped inside. A taint of rotting garbage hung in the air like perfume, along with some other, harsher odor.
"Alan," I called out. "It's Tim Underhill."
I moved forward over a thick layer of mail and passed into the sitting room or library, or whatever it was. The letters John had tossed onto the chesterfield still lay there, only barely visible in the darkness. The lights were off, and the heavy curtains had been drawn. The smell of garbage grew stronger, along with the other stink.
"Alan?"
I groped for a light switch and felt only bare smooth wall, here and there very slightly gummy. Something small and black rocketed across the floor and dodged behind a curtain. A few more plates of half-eaten food lay on the floor.
"Alan!"
A low growl emerged from the walls. I wondered if Alan Brookner were dying somewhere in the house—if he'd had a stroke. The enormously selfish thought occurred to me that I might not have to tell him that his daughter was dead. I went back out into the corridor.
Dusty papers lay heaped on the dining room table. It looked like my own worktable back at John's house. A chair stood at the table before the abandoned work.
"Alan?"
The growl came from farther down the hallway.
In the kitchen, the smell of shit was as loud as an explosion. A few pizza boxes had been stacked up on the kitchen counter. The drawn shades admitted a hovering, faint illumination that seemed to have no single source. The tops of glasses and the edges of plates protruded over the lip of the sink. In front of the stove lay a tangled blanket of bath towels and thinner kitchen towels. A messy, indistinct mound about a foot high and covered with a mat of delirious flies lay on top of the towels.
I groaned and held my right hand to my forehead. I wanted to get out of the house. The stench made me feel sick and dizzy. Then I heard the growl again and saw that another being, a being not of my own species, was watching me.
Beneath the kitchen table crouched a hunched black shape. From it poured a concentrated sense of rage and pain. Two white eyes moved in the midst of the blackness. I was standing in front of the Minotaur. The stench of its droppings swarmed out at me.