by Peter Straub
“Anything else?”
I felt an unreasonable reluctance to share William Writzmann’s name with him. “I guess not.”
“Propane tanks aren’t the safest things in the world,” he said. “Leave the Sunchanas alone from now on, and I’ll get back to you if I find out anything you ought to know.”
In a bright pink running suit, Ralph came down with the other, smaller suitcase, and carried it to the door, where he set it beside the wheeled case. He came back toward the kitchen and stood in the door. “Are you talking to John?”
“Is John back?” Marjorie said. She came down in pink Reeboks and a running suit that matched her husband’s. Maybe that was what the Ransoms had been arguing about. They looked like a pair of Easter Bunnies.
“No,” Ralph said. “No, no, no.”
“As you could probably guess, things are a little crazy down here,” Fontaine was saying. “Enjoy our beautiful city. Join a protest march.” He hung up.
Marjorie pushed past Ralph and stood scowling at me through her sunglasses. She put her hands on her pink, flaring hips. “That’s not John, is it?” she asked in a loud voice. “If it is, you might remind him that we have to get to the airport.”
“I told you,” Ralph said. “He’s not talking to John.”
“You told me John wasn’t back,” Marjorie said. Her voice was even louder. “That’s what you told me.” She zoomed out of the kitchen so quickly she nearly left a vapor trail.
Ralph went to the sink for a glass of water, raised the glass, and looked at me with a mixture of bravado and uncertainty. “She’s a little on edge. Getting to the airport, getting on the plane, you know.”
“It wasn’t me,” Marjorie called from the living room. “If my son isn’t back here in ten minutes, we’re going to the airport in a cab.”
“I’ll drive you,” I said. Both of them began refusing before I had finished making the offer.
Ralph glanced toward the living room and then sat at the other end of the kitchen table from me.
“It’s about this driving business—John isn’t the kind of person who ought to have his license suspended. I asked him what kind of troubles he had that made him get picked up three times for drunken driving. It does you good to talk about these things, get them out in the open.”
“He’s home,” Marjorie announced in a thunderous stage whisper. Ralph and I heard the sound of the front door opening.
“I hope he can put it all behind him,” Ralph said.
John’s voice, full of loud false cheer, called out, “Is everybody okay? Everything all set?”
Ralph wiped his hand across his mouth and shouted back, “Have a nice walk?”
“Hot out there,” John said. He walked into the kitchen, and Marjorie came trailing behind him, smiling and showing all her teeth. John was wearing loose, faded jeans and a dark green linen sports coat buttoned over his belly. His face shone with perspiration. He glanced at me, twisting his mouth to demonstrate his exasperation, and said, “Those two the only bags?”
“That and your mother’s canyon,” Ralph said. “We’re all set, think we ought to get moving?”
“Plenty of time,” John said. “If we leave in twenty minutes, you’ll still have about an hour before they call your flight.”
He sat down between Ralph and myself at the table. Marjorie stood behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. “It’s good for you to walk so much,” she said. “But, honey, you could sure use a little loosening up. Your shoulders are so tight!” She stood behind him and kneaded his shoulders. “Why don’t you take off that jacket? You’re all wet!” John grunted and twitched her off.
6
AT THE AIRPORT, Ralph insisted that we not walk them to the gate. “Too much trouble to park—we’ll say good-bye here.” Marjorie tilted her head for a kiss beside the suitcases. “Just take it easy until your teaching starts again,” she said.
Ralph hugged his stiff, resisting son, and said, “You’re quite a guy.” We watched them go through the automatic doors in their Easter Bunny suits. When the glass doors closed, John got in the passenger seat and cranked down the window. “I want to break something,” he said. “Preferably something nice and big.” Ralph and Marjorie were moving uncertainly toward the lines of people at the airline desks. Ralph groped in a zippered pocket of the running suit, brought out their tickets, and stooped over to pull his suitcase toward the end of the line. “I guess they’ll get there,” John said. He leaned back against the seat.
I pulled away from the curb and circled around the terminals back to the access road.
“I have to tell you what happened last night,” I said. “The people I went out to see in Elm Hill were nearly killed in a fire.”
“Oh, Jesus.” John turned to look behind us. “I saw you checking the mirror on the way out here. Did anyone follow us out here?”
“I don’t think so.”
He was almost kneeling on the seat, scanning the cars behind us. “I don’t see any blue Lexus, but probably he’s got more than one car, don’t you think?”
“I don’t even know who he is,” I said.
“William Writzmann. Wasn’t that the name you said last night?”
“Yes, but who is he?”
He waved the question away. “Tell me about the fire.”
I described what I had read in the newspaper and told him about my conversation with Fontaine.
“I’m fed up with these cops.” John hoisted himself around, pulled his left leg up onto the seat, and twitched down the hem of the green jacket. “After it turned out that Walter Dragonette’s confession was false, all they think of is hauling me down to the station. Whose negligence got her killed in the first place?”
He twitched his jacket down over his belly again and put his left arm up on the back of the seat. He kept an eye on the traffic behind us. “I’m not letting Fontaine stand in my way.” He turned his head to give me a hard look. “Still willing to stay and help me?”
“I want to find Bob Bandolier.”
“William Writzmann is the one I want to find,” John said.
“We’re going to have to be careful,” I said, meaning no more than that we would have to keep out of Fontaine’s way.
“You want to see careful?” John tapped my shoulder. “Look.” I turned my head, and he unbuttoned the linen jacket and held it out from his side. The curved handle of a handgun stuck up out of the waistband of his trousers. “After you took it away from Alan, I put it in my safety deposit box. This morning, I went down to the bank and got it out.”
“This is a bad idea,” I said. “In fact, it’s a really terrible idea.”
“I know how to handle a firearm, for God’s sake. So do you, so stop looking so disapproving.”
My effort to stop looking as disapproving as I felt was at least good enough to make him stop smirking at me.
“What were you going to do next?” he asked me.
“If I can find the Sunchanas, I’d like to talk to them. Maybe I could learn something if I knocked on a few more doors on South Seventh Street.”
“There’s no reason to go back to Pigtown,” John said.
“Do you remember my telling you about the old couple I talked to, the ones who lived next to the Bandolier house? The woman, Hannah Belknap, told me that late at night she sometimes sees a man sitting alone in the living room.” I then went through Frank Belknap’s response to his wife’s story and his private words to me on the sidewalk.
“It’s Writzmann,” John said. “He burns down houses.”
“Hold on. This soldier threatened Belknap twenty years ago. Fontaine says propane tanks aren’t the safest things in the world.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“No,” I confessed. “I think somebody followed me to the Sunchanas and decided to stop them from talking to me. That means we’re not supposed to learn something about Bob Bandolier.”
“I’d like to pay a call on Oscar Writzmann before we do
anything else. Maybe I can get something out of him. Will you let me try?”
“Not if you’re going to pull that gun on him.”
“I’m going to ask him if he has a son named William.”
7
AGAINST MY BETTER JUDGMENT, I left the north-south expressway at the point in downtown Millhaven where it connects with the east-west expressway. Once again I turned west. From the loop of the interchange, the tall square shapes of the Pforzheimer and the Hepton hotels stood like ancient monuments among the scoops and angles, the peaks and slabs of the new buildings east of the Millhaven River.
John watched the skyline as we curved down the ramp into the sparse traffic moving west.
“Every cop in town is going to be watching the marchers this afternoon. I think we could take the Green Woman to pieces and put it back together again without anybody noticing.”
At Teutonia, I began the long diagonal north through the strip of Piggly Wiggly supermarkets, bowling alleys, and fast-food franchises. “Do you know if Alan lets anyone use his garage?”
“He might have let Grant use it for storage.” John looked at me as if I were playing some game he did not understand yet. “Why?”
“The woman who lives across the street saw someone in his garage on the night April was attacked.”
Unconsciously, he touched the butt of the gun through his jacket. His face looked blander than ever, but a nerve under his right eye started jumping. “What did she see, exactly?”
“Only the door going down. She thought it might have been Grant, because she’d seen him around. But Grant was already dead.”
“Well, actually, that was me,” John said. “I didn’t know anybody saw me, or I would have mentioned it before this.”
I pulled up at the light and switched on the turn indicator. “You went there the night April disappeared?”
“I thought she might have been over at Alan’s—we had a little argument. Anyhow, when I got there, all the lights were off, and I didn’t want to make a scene. If April wanted to spend the night there, what the hell?”
The light changed, and I turned toward Oscar Writzmann’s cheerless little house.
“We have some old stuff in his garage. I thought I might bring some old photographs, blowups of April, back home with me, so I went in and took a look around, but they were too big to carry, and the whole idea seemed crazy, once I actually saw them.” The nerve under his eye was still jittering, and he placed two fingers over it, as if to push it back into place.
“I thought it might have had something to do with her Mercedes,” I said.
“That car is probably in Mexico by now.”
Out of habit, I checked the rearview mirror. Writzmann’s car was nowhere behind us on our three lanes of the drive. Nor was it among the few cars trolling through the dazzle of sunlight ahead of us. I pulled over to the curb in front of the yellow concrete jail.
John put his hand on the door handle.
“I think this is a mistake,” I said. “All you’re going to do is rile this guy. He isn’t going to say anything you want to hear.”
John tried to give me his all-knowing look again, but the nerve was still pumping under his eye. “I hate to say this, but you don’t know everything.” He leaned toward me. His eyes pinned mine. “Give me some rope, Tim.”
I said, “Is this about Franklin Bachelor?”
He froze with his hand against the lump in the jacket. His eyes looked like stones. He slowly moved his hand from the gun handle to the door.
“Last night, you didn’t tell me the end of that story.”
John opened his mouth, and his eyes moved wildly. He looked like an animal in a trap. “You can’t talk about this.”
“It doesn’t matter if it really happened or not,” I said. “It was Vietnam. I just want to know the end. Did Bachelor kill his own people?”
John’s eyes stopped moving.
“And you knew it,” I said. “You knew he was already gone. You knew Bennington was the man you were bringing back with you. I’m surprised you didn’t shoot him on the way to Camp Crandall, and then say that he got violent and tried to escape.” Then I understood why he had brought Bennington back. “Oh. Jed Champion didn’t understand things the way you did. He thought Bennington was Franklin Bachelor.”
“I got there two days before Jed,” John said in the same small voice. He cleared his throat. “I was moving that much faster, at the end. I could smell the bodies for hours before I got to the camp. The bodies and a … a smell of cooking. Corpses were lying all over the camp. There were little fires everywhere. Bennington was just sitting on the ground. He had been burning the dead, or trying to.”
“Was he eating them?”
John stared at me for a time. “Not the people he was burning.”
“What about Bachelor’s wife?” I said. “Her skull was in the back of your jeep.”
“He slit her throat and he gutted her. Her hair was hanging from a pole. He dressed and cleaned her, like a deer.”
“Bachelor did,” I said.
“He sacrificed her. Bennington was still boiling the meat off her bones when I got there.”
“And you ate some of her flesh,” I said.
He did not answer.
“You knew it was what Bachelor would do.”
“He already had.”
“You were in the realm of the gods,” I said.
He looked at me through his flat eyes, not speaking. He didn’t have to speak.
“Do you know what happened to Bachelor?”
“Some Marines found his body up near the DMZ.” Now the pebbles in his eyes shone with defiance.
“Somebody found your body, too,” I said. “I’m just asking.”
“Who have you been talking to?”
“Ever hear of a colonel named Beaufort Runnel?”
He blinked again, and the defiance left his eyes. “That pompous twerp from the supply depot at Crandall?” He looked at me with something like amazement. “How did you happen to meet Runnel?”
“It was a long time ago,” I said. “A veterans’ meeting, or something like that.”
“Veterans’ groups are for bullshit artists.” Ransom opened his door. When I got out of the car, he was reaching up under the hips of the buttoned jacket to yank at the waist of the jeans. He did a little wiggle to get everything, presumably including Alan’s pistol, into place. Then he pulled the jacket firmly down. He was in control again. “Let me handle this,” he said.
8
RANSOM PLUNGED ACROSS Oscar Writzmann’s brittle yellow lawn as if in flight from what he had just said to me.
At the doorstep, I came up beside him, and he glared at me until I stepped back. He hitched his shoulders and rang the bell. I felt a premonition of disaster. We were doing the wrong thing, and terrible events would unfold from it.
“Go easy,” I said, and his back twitched again.
From my post one step beneath John, I saw only the top of the front door moving toward John’s head.
“You wanted to see me?” Writzmann asked. He sounded a little weary.
“You’re Oscar Writzmann?”
The old man did not answer. He shifted sideways and pushed the door fully open, so that John had to move back a step. Writzmann’s face was still hidden from me. He was wearing a dark blue sweat suit with a zippered jacket, like the Ransoms’ running suits but limp from a thousand trips through the washing machine. His bare feet were heavy, square, and rampant with exploding blue veins.
“We’d like to come in,” John said.
Writzmann looked over John’s shoulder and saw me. He lowered his cannonball head like a bull.
“What are you, this guy’s keeper?” he said. “I have nothing to say to you.”
John gripped the door and held it open. “You want to cooperate with us, Mr. Writzmann. It’ll go easier for you.”
Writzmann surprised me by backing away from the door. John stepped inside, and I followed him into the liv
ing room of the yellow house. Writzmann moved around a rectangular wooden table and stood beside a reclining chair. There was a cuckoo clock on the wall, but no pictures. A worn green love seat stood in front of the hatch to the kitchen. On the other side of the love seat stood a rocking chair with a seal set into the headpiece above the curved spindles.
“Nobody’s here but me,” Writzmann said. “You don’t have to mess the place up, looking.”
“All we want is information,” John said.
“That’s why you’re carrying a gun. You want information.” His fear had left him, and what I saw was the same distaste, nearly contempt, that he had shown before. John had given him a look at the handle of the revolver. He sat down in the recliner, looking hard at us both.
I looked at the seal on the rocker. Around the number 25 the words Sawmill Paper Company were described in an ornate circle full of flourishes and ornamentation.
“Tell me about Elvee, Oscar,” John said. He was about four feet from the old man.
“Good luck.”
“Who runs it? What do they do?”
“No idea.”
“Tell me about William Writzmann. Tell me about the Green Woman Taproom.”
I saw something flicker in the old man’s eyes. “There is no William Writzmann,” he said. He leaned forward and put his hands together. His shoulders bunched. The heavy blue feet slid back under his knees.
John took a step backward, reached into his jacket, and yanked out the pistol. He didn’t look much like a gunfighter. He pointed it at the old man’s chest. Writzmann exhaled and bit down, pouching out his upper lip.
“That’s interesting,” John said. “Explain that to me.”
“What’s to explain? If there ever was a person by that name, he’s dead.” Writzmann looked straight at the barrel of the pistol. He slid his feet forward slowly and carefully, until only the thick blue-spattered heels touched the floor and the stubby, crooked toes pointed up.
“He’s dead,” John said.
Writzmann took his eyes from the gun and looked at John’s face. He did not seem angry or frightened anymore. “People like you should stay down there on Livermore, where you belong.”