by Peter Straub
I put down my pen. Now I had a book, The Kingdom of Heaven. I wanted to wrap it around me like a blanket. I wanted to vanish into the story as little Charlie (not yet named Charlie) yearned to melt into the blue roses twining up the paler blue background of my bedroom wallpaper—to become the twist of an elm leaf on Livermore Avenue, the cigarette rasp of a warm voice in the darkness, the gleam of silver light momentarily seen on a smooth dark male head, the dusty shaft of paler light speeding toward the screen in a nearly empty theater.
4
WITH TWO EXCEPTIONS, the weekend went by in the same fashion as the preceding days. At Ransom’s suggestion, I brought my manuscript and new notes downstairs to the dining room table, where I happily chopped paragraphs and pages from what I had written, and using a succession of gliding Blackwing pencils sharpened to perfect points in a clever little electric mill, wrote the new pages about Charlie’s childhood on a yellow legal pad.
Ransom did not mind sharing the legal pad, the electric sharpener, and the Blackwings, but the idea that I might want to spend a couple of hours working every day alternately irritated and depressed him. This problem appeared almost as soon as he had helped me establish myself on the dining room table.
He looked suspiciously at the pad, the electric sharpener, my pile of notes, the stack of pages. “You had another brainstorm, I suppose?”
“Something like that.”
“I suppose that’s good news, for you.”
He returned to the living room so abruptly that I followed him. He dropped onto the couch and stared at the television.
“John, what’s the matter?”
He would not look at me. It occurred to me that he had probably acted like this with April, too. After a considerable silence, he said, “If all you’re going to do is work, you might as well be back in New York.”
Some people assume that all writing is done in between drinks, or immediately after long walks through the Yorkshire dales. John Ransom had just put himself in this category.
“John,” I said, “I know that this is a terrible time for you, but I don’t understand why you’re acting this way.”
“What way?”
“Forget it,” I said. “Just try to keep in mind that I am not rejecting you personally.”
“Believe me,” he said, “I’m used to being around selfish people.”
John didn’t speak to me for the rest of the day. He made dinner for himself, opened a bottle of Chateau Petrus, and ate the dinner and drank the bottle while watching television. When the Walter Dragonette show ceased for the day, he surfed through the news programs; when they were over, he switched to CNN until “Nightline” came on. The only interruption came immediately after he finished his meal, when he carried his wineglass to the telephone, called Arizona, and told his parents that April had been murdered. I was back in the dining room by that time, eating a sandwich and revising my manuscript, and was sure that Ransom knew that I could overhear him tell his parents that an old acquaintance from the service, the writer Tim Underhill, had come “all the way from New York to help me deal with things. You know, handling phone calls, dealing with the press, helping me with the funeral arrangements.” He ended the conversation by making arrangements for picking them up from the airport. After “Nightline,” Ransom switched off the set and went upstairs.
The next morning I went out for a quick walk before the reporters arrived. When I came back, Ransom rushed out of the kitchen and asked if I’d like a cup of coffee. Some eggs, maybe? He thought we ought to have breakfast before we went to his father-in-law’s house to break the news.
Did he want me to come along while he told Alan? Sure he did, of course he did—unless I’d rather stay here and work. Honestly, that would be okay, too.
Either I wasn’t selfish anymore, or he had forgiven me. The sulky, silent Ransom was gone.
“We can leave by the back door and squeeze through a gap in the hedges. The reporters’ll never know we left the house.”
“Is there something I don’t know about?” I asked.
“I called the dean at home last night,” he said. “He finally understood that I couldn’t promise to have everything settled by September. He said he’d try to calm down the trustees and the board of visitors. He thinks he can get some sort of vote of confidence in my favor.”
“So your job is safe, at least.”
“I guess,” he said.
The second exceptional event of the weekend took place before our visit with Alan Brookner. John came back into the kitchen while I was eating breakfast to report that Alan seemed to be having another one of his “good” days and was expecting us within the next half hour. “He’s mixing Bloody Marys, so at least he’s in a good mood.”
“Bloody Marys?”
“He made them for April and me every Sunday—we almost always went to his place for brunch.”
“Did you tell him why you wanted to see him?”
“I want him relaxed enough to understand things.”
The bell buzzed, and fists struck the door. A dimly audible voice asked that John open up, please. The hound pack was not usually so polite.
“Let’s get out of here,” John said. “Check the front to make sure they’re not sneaking around the house.”
The phone started ringing as soon as I passed under the arch. A fist banged twice on the door, and a voice called, “Police, Mr. Ransom, please open up, we want to talk to you.”
The men at the door peered in through separate windows, and I found myself looking directly into the face of Detective Wheeler. The smirking, mustached head of Detective Monroe appeared at the window on the other side of the door. Monroe said, “Open up, Underhill.”
Paul Fontaine’s voice spoke through the answering machine. “Mr. Ransom, I am told that you are ignoring the presence of the detectives at your door. Don’t be bad boys, now, and let the nice policemen come inside. After all, the policeman is your—”
I opened the door, beckoned in Monroe and Wheeler, and snatched up the phone. “This is Tim Underhill,” I said into the receiver. “We thought your men were reporters. I just let them in.”
“The policeman is your friend. Be good boys and talk to them, will you?” He hung up before I could reply.
John came steaming out from the hall into the living room, already pointing at our three dark shapes in the foyer. “I want those people out of here right now, you hear me?” He charged forward and then abruptly stopped moving. “Oh. Sorry.”
“That’s fine, Mr. Ransom,” said Wheeler. Both detectives went about half of the distance across the living room. When John did not come forward to meet them, they gave each other a quick look and stopped moving. Monroe put his hands in his pockets and gave the paintings a long inspection.
John said, “You sat in the booth with us.”
“I’m Detective Wheeler, and this is Detective Monroe.”
Monroe’s mouth twitched into an icy smile.
“I guess I know why you’re here,” John said.
“The lieutenant was a little surprised by your remarks the other day,” said Wheeler.
“I didn’t say anything,” John said. “It was him. If you want to be specific about it.” He crossed his arms in front of his chest, propping them on the mound of his belly.
“Could we all maybe sit down, please?” asked Wheeler.
“Yeah, sure,” said John, and uncrossed his arms and made a beeline for the nearest chair.
Monroe and Wheeler sat on the couch, and I took the other chair.
“I have to see April’s father,” John said. “He still doesn’t know what happened.”
Wheeler asked, “Would you like to call him, Mr. Ransom, tell him you’ll be delayed?”
“It doesn’t matter,” John said.
Wheeler nodded. “Well, that’s up to you, Mr. Ransom.” He flipped open a notebook.
John squirmed like a schoolboy in need of the bathroom. Wheeler and Monroe both looked at me, and Monroe gave me hi
s frozen smile again and took over.
“I thought you were satisfied with Dragonette’s confession.”
Ransom exhaled loudly and slumped back against the couch.
“For the most part, I was, at least then.”
“So was I,” John put in.
“Did you have questions about Dragonette’s truthfulness during the interrogation?”
“I did,” I said, “but even before that I had some doubts.”
Monroe glared at me, and Wheeler said, “Suppose you tell us about these doubts.”
“My doubts in general?”
He nodded. Monroe rocked back in his chair, jerked his jacket down, and gave me a glare like a blow.
I told them what I had said to John two days earlier, that Dragonette’s accounts of the attacks on the unidentified man and Officer Mangelotti had seemed improvised and unreal to me. “But more than that, I think his whole confession was contaminated. He only started talking about John’s wife after he heard a dispatcher say that she had just been killed.”
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, sundrenched 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.
“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.