"You're in trouble," the Minotaur rumbled. "I'm an old man, but I'm nobody's pushover."
"I know that," I said.
"Lies drive me crazy. Crazy" He shifted beneath the table, and the cloth fell away from his head. A white scurf of his whiskers shone out from beneath the table. The furious eyes floated out toward me. "You are going to tell me the truth. Now."
"Yes," I said.
"My daughter is dead, isn't she?"
"Yes."
A jolt like an electric shock straightened his back and pushed out his chin. "An auto accident? Something like that?"
"She was murdered," I said.
He tilted his head back, and the covering slipped to his shoulders. A grimace spread his features across his face. He looked as if he had been stabbed in the side. In the same terrible whisper, he asked, "How long ago? Who did it?"
"Alan, wouldn't you like to come out from under that table?"
He gave me another look of concentrated rage. I knelt down. The buzzing of the flies suddenly seemed very loud.
"Tell me how my daughter was murdered."
"About a week ago, a maid found her stabbed and beaten in a room at the St. Alwyn Hotel."
Alan let out a terrible groan.
"Nobody knows who did that to her. April was taken to Shady Mount, where she remained in a coma until this Wednesday. She began to show signs of improvement. On Thursday morning, someone came into her room and killed her."
"She never came out of the coma?"
"No."
He opened his Minotaur eyes again. "Has anyone been arrested?"
"There was a false confession. Come out from under the table, Alan."
Tears glittered in the white scurf on his cheeks. Fiercely, he shook his head. "Did John think I was too feeble to hear the truth? Well, I'm not too damn feeble right now, sonny."
"I can see that," I said. "Why are you sitting under the kitchen table, Alan?"
"I got confused. I got a little lost." He glared at me again. "John was supposed to come over. I was finally going to get the truth out of that damned son-in-law of mine." He shook his head, and I got the Minotaur eyes again. "So where is he?"
Even in this terrible condition, Alan Brookner had a powerful dignity I had only glimpsed earlier. His grief had momentarily shocked him out of his dementia. I felt achingly sorry for the old man.
"Two detectives showed up when we were about to leave. They asked John to come down to the station for questioning," I said.
"They didn't arrest him."
"No."
He pulled the cloth up around his shoulders again and held it tight at his neck with one hand. It looked like a tablecloth. I moved a little closer. My eyes stung as if I had squirted soap into them.
"I knew she was dead." He slumped down into himself, and for a moment had the ancient monkey look I had seen on my first visit. He started shaking his head.
I thought he was about to disappear back into his tablecloth. "Would you like to come out from under the table, Alan?"
"Would you like to stop patronizing me?" His eyes burned out at me, but they were no longer the Minotaur's eyes. "Okay. Yes. I want to come out from under the table." He scooted forward and caught his feet in the fabric. Struggling to free his hands, he tightened the section of cloth across his chest. Panic flared in his eyes.
I moved nearer and reached beneath the table. Brookner battled the cloth. "Damn business," he said. "Thought I'd be safe —got scared."
I found an edge of material and yanked at it. Brookner shifted a shoulder, and his right arm flopped out of the cloth. He was holding his revolver. "Got it now," he said. "You bet. Piece of cake." He wriggled his other shoulder out of confinement, and the cloth drooped to his waist. I took the gun away from him and put it on the table. He and I both pulled the length of fabric away from his legs, and Alan got one knee under him, then the other, and crawled forward until he was out from under the table. The tablecloth came with him. Finally, he accepted my hand and levered himself up on one knee until he could get one foot, covered with a powder-blue tube sock, beneath him. Then I pulled him upright, and he got his other foot, in a black tube sock, on the cloth. "There we go," he said. "Right as rain." He tottered forward and let me take his elbow. We shuffled across the kitchen toward a chair. "Old joints stiffened up," he said. He began gingerly extending his arms and gently raising his legs. Glittering tears still hung in his whiskers.
"I'll take care of that mess on the floor," I said.
"Do what you like." The wave of pain and rage came from him once more. "Is there a funeral? There damn well better be, because I'm going to it." His face stiffened with anger and the desire to suppress his tears. The Minotaur eyes flared again. "Come on, tell me."
"There's a funeral tomorrow. One o'clock at Trott Brothers. She'll be cremated."
The fierce grimace flattened his features across his face again. He hid his face behind his knotted hands and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and wept noisily. His shirt was gray with dust and black around the rim of the collar. A sour, unwashed smell came up from him, barely distinguishable in the reek of feces.
He finally stopped crying and wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I knew it," he said, looking up at me. The lids of his eyes were pink and inflamed.
"Yes."
"That's why I wound up here." He wiped most of the tears out of his silken white whiskers. A shadow of pain and confusion nearly as terrible as his grief passed over his face.
"April was going to take me—there was this place—" The sudden anger melted into grief again, and his upper body shook with the effort of trying to look ferocious while he wanted to cry.
"She was going to take you somewhere?"
He waved his big hands in the air, dismissing the whole topic.
"What's the reason for this?" I indicated the buzzing mound on the towels.
"Improvised head. The one down here got blocked up or something, damn thing's useless, and I can't always get upstairs. So I laid down a bunch of towels."
"Do you have a shovel somewhere around the place?"
"Garage, I guess," he said.
I found a flat-bottomed coal shovel in a corner of a garage tucked away under the oak trees. On the concrete slab lay a collection of old stains surrounded by an ancient lawnmower, a long-tined leaf rake, a couple of broken lamps, and a pile of cardboard boxes. Framed pictures leaned back to front against the far wall. I bent down for the shovel. A long stripe of fluid still fresh enough to shine lay on top of the old stains. I touched it with a forefinger: slick, not quite dry. I sniffed my finger and smelled what might have been brake fluid.
When I came back into the kitchen, Alan was leaning against the wall, holding a black garbage bag. He straightened up and brandished the bag. "I know this looks bad, but the toilet wouldn't work."
"I'll take a look at it after we get this mess out of the house."
He held the bag open, and I began to shovel. Then I tied up the bag and put it inside another bag before dropping it into the garbage can. While I mopped the floor, Alan told me twice, in exactly the same words, that he had awakened one morning during his freshman year at Harvard to discover that his roommate had died in the next bed. No more than a five-second pause separated the two accounts.
"Interesting story," I said, afraid that he was going to tell me the whole thing a third time.
"Have you ever seen death close up?"
"Yes," I said.
"How'd you come to do that?"
"My first job in Vietnam was graves registration. We had to check dead soldiers for ID."
"And what was the effect of that on you?"