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.

A younger blond male head, as square as Jimbo's but attached to a sweating neck and a torso wrapped in a tan safari jacket, buried the speaker's words under the announcement that the Reverend Clement Moore, a longtime community spokesman and civil rights activist, had called for a full-scale investigation of the Millhaven Police Department and was demanding reparations for the families of Walter Dragonette's victims. Reverend Moore had announced that his "protest prayer meetings" would continue until the resignations of Chief Vass, Commissioner Novotny, and Mayor Waterford. In a matter of days, the Reverend Moore expected that the protest prayer meetings would be joined by his fellow reverend, Al Sharpton, of New York City.

Back to you in the studio, Jimbo.

Jimbo tilted his massive blond head forward and intoned: "And now for our daily commentary from Joe Ruddier. What do you make of all this, Joe?"

I perked up as another gigantic and familiar face crowded the screen. Joe Ruddier, another longtime member of the All-Action News Team, had been instantly celebrated for his absolute self-certainty and his passionate advocacy of the local teams. His face, always verging toward bright red and now a sizzling purple, had swollen to twice its earlier size. Ruddier had evidently been promoted to political commentary.

"What do I make of all this? I'll tell you what I make of this! I think it's a disgrace! What happened to the Millhaven where a guy could go out for a beer an' a bratwurst without stumbling over a severed head? And as for outside agitators—"

I used the remote to mute this tirade when the telephone rang.

As before, I picked it up to keep the ringing from waking John Ransom, and as before, it was necessary to establish my identity as an old friend from out of town before the caller would reveal his own identity. But this time, I thought I knew the caller's name as soon as a hesitant voice asked, "Mr. Ransom? Could I speak to Mr. Ransom?" A name I had heard on the answering machine came immediately into my mind.

I said that John was sleeping and explained why a stranger was answering his telephone.

"Oh, okay," the caller said. "You're staying with them for a while? You're a friend of the Ransoms?"

I explained that, too.

Long pause. "Well, could you answer a question for me? You know what's happening with Mrs. Ransom and everything, and I don't want to keep disturbing Mr. Ransom. He never—I don't know if—…"

I waited for him to begin again.

"I wonder if you could just sort of fill me in, and everything."

"Is your name Byron Dorian?"

He gasped. "You've heard about me?"

"I recognize your style," I said. "You left a message on John's machine this morning."

"Oh! Hah!" He gave a weak chuckle, as if he had caught me trying to amuse him. "So, what's happening with April, with Mrs. Ransom? I'd really like to hear that she's getting better."

"Would you mind telling me your connection to the Ransoms?"

"My connection?"

"Do you work at Barnett?"

There came another uneasy laugh. "Why, is something wrong?"

"Since I'm acting for the family," I said, "I just want to know who I'm talking to."

"Well, sure. I'm a painter, and Mrs. Ransom came to my studio when she found out what sort of work I was doing, and she liked what she saw, so she commissioned me to do two paintings for their bedroom."

"The nudes," I said.

"You've seen them? Mrs. Ransom liked them a lot, and that was really flattering to me, you've probably seen the rest of their collection, all that great work, you know, it was like having a patron, well, a patron who was a friend…"

His voice trailed off. Through one of the glass panels beside the front door I watched the reporters tossing crumpled candy bar wrappers toward the hedge. Five or six elderly people had taken up places on the steps and sidewalk across the street and settled in to enjoy the show.

"Well," I said, "I'm afraid I have bad news for you."

"Oh, no," said Dorian. .

"Mrs. Ransom died this morning."

"Oh, no. Did she ever recover consciousness?"

"No, she didn't. Byron, Mrs. Ransom did not die of her injuries. Walter Dragonette managed to find out that she was in Shady Mount and that her condition was improving, and he got past the guard this morning and killed her."

"On the day he got arrested?"

I agreed that it seemed almost unbelievable.

"Well, what—what kind of world is this? What is going on? Did he know anything about her?"

"He barely knew her," I said.

"Because she was, this was the most amazing woman, I mean there was so much to her, she was incredibly kind and generous and sympathetic…" For a time I listened to him breathing hard. "I'll let you go back to what you were doing. I just never thought—"

"No, of course not," I said.

"It's too much."

The reporters were gathering for another siege of the door, but I could not hang up on Byron Dorian while his grief pummeled him, and I peered out the slit of window while listening to his stifled moans and gasps.

When his voice was under control again, he said, "You must think I'm really strange, carrying on like this, but you never knew April Ransom."

"Why don't you tell me about her sometime?" I asked. "I'd like to come to your studio and just have a talk."

"That would probably help me, too," he said, and gave me his phone number and an address on Varney Street, in the sad part of town, once a Ukrainian settlement, that surrounded the stadium.

I checked on the reporters, who had settled down to enjoy their third or fourth meal of the day under the appreciative eyes of a growing number of neighbors. Every now and then, some resident of Ely Place tottered through the litter to speak to Geoffrey Bough and his colleagues. I watched a bent old woman with a laden silver tray make her way down the steps of the house across the street, mount Ransom's lawn, and present the various lounging men with cups of coffee.

From my post by the door I saw Jimbo too retrace his steps, reminding his viewers of the extent and nature of Walter Dragonette's crimes, the public outcry, Mayor Waterford's assurances that all would continue to be done to ensure the safety of the citizens. At some point I did not quite mark as I kept watch on Bough and the others, April Ransom's murder passed into the public domain—so John too missed the appearance on the television screen of the Ledger photograph, minus himself, of his wife cradling a gigantic trophy. I know approximately when this happened, four o'clock, because at that time the gathering across the street suddenly doubled in size.

All afternoon, I alternated between watching television, poking through the gnostic gospels, and peering out at the crowd and the waiting reporters. The faces of Walter Dragonette's victims paraded across the screen, from cowboy-suited little Wesley Drum on a rocking horse to huge leering Alfonzo Dakins gripping a beer glass. Twenty-two victims had been identified, sixteen of them black males. Hindsight gave their photographs a uniformly doomed quality. The unknown man found in Dead Man's Tunnel was represented by a question mark. April Ransom's Ledger photograph had been cropped down to her brilliant face. For the few seconds in which she filled the screen, I found that I was looking at the same person whose picture I had seen earlier, but that my ideas about her had begun to change: John's wife seemed smart and vibrant, not hard and acquisitive, and so beautiful that her murder was another degree more heartless than the others. Something had happened since the first time I had seen the photograph: I had become, like John, Dick Mueller, and Byron Dorian, one of her survivors.

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."

I nodded. Like me, John had been impressed by Michael Hogan.

"And last, what is it, seven? Seven. He could find out all about April and her condition from his mother's old pal Betty Grable at the hospital."

"I think it was Mary Graebel, different spelling," I said. "And you're right, he did find out April was at Shady Mount. When I came down in the elevator with Fontaine this morning, an old lady working behind the counter almost passed out when she saw us. I bet that was Mary Graebel."

"She knew she helped kill April," John said. "The cow couldn't keep her mouth shut."

"She thought she helped her old friend's son kill April. That's different."

"What makes you so sure he didn't?"

"Dragonette claimed that he couldn't remember anything he had done to that cop in April's room, Mangelotti. He overheard Fontaine joking that Mangelotti was dead—so he claimed that he had murdered him. Then Fontaine said he was exaggerating, so Dragonette said he was exaggerating, too!"

"He's playing mind games," John said.

"He didn't know what happened to Mangelotti. Also, he had no idea that April had been killed until he heard it over the police radio. That was the point that always bothered me."

"Why would he confess if he didn't do it? That still doesn't make sense."

"Maybe you didn't notice, but Walter Dragonette is not the most sensible man in the world."

Ransom leaned forward and stared down at the floor for a time, considering what I had been saying. "So there's another guy out there."

I saw a mental picture of those drawings where the eye wanders over the leaves of an oak tree until the dagger leaps out of concealment, and the brickwork on the side of a house reveals a running man, a trumpet, an open door.

"You and your brainstorms." He shook his head, now almost smiling. "I'm going to have to live with the repercussions of shoving that reporter around."

"What do you think they'll be?"

He shifted one of the stacks of novels sideways half an inch, back a quarter-inch. "I suppose my neighbors are more convinced than ever that I killed my wife."

"Did you, John?" I asked him. "This is just between you and me."

"You're asking me if I killed April?"

His face heated as before, but without the violence I had seen in him just before he had gone after Geoffrey Bough. He stared at me, trying to look intimidating. "Is this something Tom Pasmore asked you to say?"

I shook my head.

"The answer is no. If you ask me that once more, I'll throw you out of this house. Are you satisfied?"

"I had to ask," I said.