by Peter Straub
“And you might think about booking your ticket home for the day of your release. You’ll be taken to the airport in a patrol car, so after you arrange the ticket, give the officer your flight information.”
“All in the interest of my security,” I said.
“Take care of yourself,” McCandless said. “You look lousy, if you want to know the truth.”
“Glad to help you out,” I said. They were already moving toward the door.
I opened the magazine and tried to revive my interest in menopause. Some of the symptoms had an ironic familiarity—heavy bleeding, increased pain, depression. The columnist had nothing to say about sudden flare-ups of anger against authority figures who looked like retired circus performers. I understood some of what McCandless had been after, but his insistence on there having been more than three gunshots puzzled me. Whatever I had said had satisfied him, but I couldn’t figure out why. Then I started worrying about Alan. I reached across my chest to get the telephone and call County Hospital, but the operator almost apologetically told me that I was restricted by police order to incoming calls. I picked up Modern Bride and discovered that today’s young woman got married in pretty much the same kind of thing as yesterday’s. I was just getting into Longevity and ‘Exercises for the Recently Bereaved’ when a short, pudgy young policeman stuck his head in the door and said, “I’ll be right out here, okay?” We recognized each other at the same moment. It was Officer Mangelotti, minus the white head bandage he’d been wearing when I last saw him. “Nobody said I had to talk to you, though,” he said, and gave me what he thought was a truly evil scowl. His folding chair squeaked when he sat down.
4
GEOFFREY BOUGH conned his way past the receptionist and turned up outside my door about an hour after Ross McCandless left. I was playing with the cold oatmeal the kitchen had sent up, coaxing it into a mound and then mushing it flat. The first indication I had of the reporter’s arrival was the sound of Mangelotti saying, “No. No way. Get out of here.” I thought he was ordering John Ransom away from my room, and I shoved away the oatmeal and called out, “Come on, Mangelotti, let him in.”
“No way,” Mangelotti said.
“You heard him,” said a voice I knew. Bough squeezed his skinny chest past Mangelotti and leaned into the room. “Hi, Tim,” he said, as if we were old friends. Maybe we were, by now—I realized that I was glad to see him.
“Hello, Geoffrey,” I said.
“Tell this officer to give me five minutes, will you?”
Mangelotti planted his hand on Bough’s chest and pushed him part of the way into the hall. Geoffrey gesticulated at me over the cop’s head, but Mangelotti gave him another push, and the reporter disappeared.
I heard him protesting all the way down the hallway to the elevator. Mangelotti was so angry with me that he closed the door when he came back.
The next time the door opened, I was beginning to wish that I had eaten the oatmeal. Sonny Berenger came in with a single sheet of paper on a clipboard. “Your statement’s ready,” he said, and handed it to me. He pulled a ballpoint out of his pocket. “Sign it anywhere on the bottom.”
Most of the sentences in the statement began with “I” and contained fewer than six words. There was at least one typing mistake in every sentence, and the grammar was casual. It was a bare-bones account of what had happened outside Bob Bandolier’s old house. The last two sentences were: “Professor Brookner fired two shots, striking me. I heard the shooting to continue.” McCandless had probably made him rewrite it three times, taking new details out each time.
“I have to make some changes in this before I sign it,” I said.
“What do you mean, changes?” Berenger asked.
I began writing in “with one of them” after “striking me,” and Berenger leaned over the clipboard to see what I was doing. He wanted to grab the pen out of my hand, but he relaxed when he saw what I was doing. I crossed out the “to” in the last sentence, and then wrote my name under the statement.
He took back the clipboard and the pen, puzzled but relieved.
“Just editing,” I said. “I can’t help myself.”
“The lieutenant’s a big believer in editing.”
“I got that part.”
Sonny stepped back from the bed and glanced toward the door to make sure it was closed. “Thanks for not saying that you told me about the photographs.”
“Will Monroe let John go home after you get back with that statement?”
“Probably. Ransom’s just sitting at his desk, trading Vietnam stories.” He still did not want to go, towering near the bed with his clipboard like Officer Friendly in a high school auditorium.
For the first time, he looked openly at the pad of gauze taped to my shoulder. I saw him decide not to say anything about it, and then he took a step backward toward the door. “Should I tell Ransom you’d like to see him?”
“I’d like to see anybody except Mangelotti,” I said.
After Sonny left, a black-haired, energetic young doctor bounced in to tape fresh gauze over the bloody hole. “You’re going to have to run around your backhand for a month or so, but otherwise, you’ll be fine.” He pressed the last of the tape into place and straightened up. Curiosity was fairly boiling out of him. “The police seem to feel you’ll be safer in here.”
“I think it’s the other way around,” I said.
After that, I read Modern Maturity. Cover to cover, every word of it, including the advertisements. I had to change my running shoes and do something about my IRA account. For lunch, I had a piece of chicken so pale that it nearly disappeared into the plate. I ate every scrap, even the gristly little bits that clung to the bones.
When John turned up several hours later, Mangelotti refused to let him in until he got permission from the department. Permission took a long time to get, and while they were at the desk, I got out of bed and hauled my glucose pole across the room to the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. I had a little more color than the chicken, and I needed a shave. As revenge for the magazines, I peed into the sink. By the time Mangelotti learned he would not be suspended for letting John into my room, I had hobbled back to bed, feeling as though I had just climbed one of the minor Alps.
John came in carrying a beat-up white canvas bag, closed the door, and leaned back against it, shaking his head from side to side in frustration. “Can you believe that guy is still on the force? What’s he doing here anyhow?”
“Defending me from the press.” John snickered and pushed himself off the door. I looked greedily at the canvas bag. ARKHAM COLLEGE was printed on its side in big red letters.
“Funny thing, you look like a guy who just got shot. I stopped off at the house and picked up some books. Nobody was willing to tell me how long you’d be in here, so I got a lot of them.” He set the bag next to me and began piling books on the table. The Nag Hammadi Library, Sue Grafton, Ross Macdonald, Donald Westlake, John Irving, A. S. Byatt, Martin Amis. “Some of these belonged to April. And I thought you’d be interested in seeing this.” He took a thick, green-jacketed book out of the bag and held it up so that I could see the cover. The Concept of the Sacred, Alan Brookner. “Probably his best book.”
I took it from him. As battered as an old suitcase, smudged, soft with use, it looked as if it had been read a hundred times. “I’m really grateful,” I said.
“Keep it.” He reared back in the chair and shook out his arms. “What a night.”
I asked what happened to him after I’d been taken away.
“They jammed Alan and me into a police car and hauled us off to Armory Place. Then they locked us up in a little room and asked the same questions over and over.” After a couple of hours, they had driven him home and let him get some sleep, and then picked him up again and started the questioning all over again. Eventually, McCandless had taken a statement and then let him go. He had not been charged with anything.
He took hold of my wrist. “You didn’t say a
nything about the car, did you? Or about that other stuff?” He meant Byron Dorian.
“No. I stuck to Elvee and Franklin Bachelor and the Blue Rose business.”
“Ah.” He leaned back in the chair and looked up, giving thanks. “I didn’t know what shape you were in. Good. I had a few worried moments there.”
“What about Alan? I heard he was at County Hospital.”
John groaned. “Alan fell apart. For a long time, he kept quoting one of those damned gnostic verses. Then he started on baby talk. I don’t know what he did when they interrogated him, but Monroe finally told me that he was under sedation at County. I guess they have to charge him with reckless use of a weapon, or reckless endangerment, or something like that, but Monroe told me that he would probably never have to go to trial or anything. I mean, he won’t end up in jail. But God, you should see him.”
“You visited him?”
“I feel like he’s taken over my life. I went to County and there’s Alan, lying in a bed and saying things like ‘I live in a little white house. Is my daddy home yet? My brother made pee-pee off the bridge.’ Literally. He’s about four years old. To tell you the truth, I don’t think he’s ever going to be anything else.”
“Oh, my God,” I said.
“So then his lawyer gets ahold of me and tells me that since he appointed April the trustee of his estate a couple of years ago, now I’m his trustee by default, unless I elect to turn the job over to him. Fat chance. He’s about eighty years old, a lawyer straight out of Dickens. So I have to deal with the bank, I have to sign a million papers, I have to see his case through the court, I have to sell his house.”
“Sell his house?”
“He can’t live there anymore, he’s gone. I have to find a home that’ll take him, which is a good trick, given his condition.”
I pictured Alan babbling about a little white house and felt a wave of pity and sorrow that nearly made me dizzy. “What’s happening out in the world? Is it on the news?”
“Are we on the news, do you mean? I put on the radio when I got home, and all I heard about us was that Detective Paul Fontaine had been killed in an incident that took place in the Livermore Avenue area. I’ll tell you one thing—Armory Place is keeping a very tight lid on things.”
“I guessed,” I said.
“Tim, I have to get moving. All this business about Alan—you know.” He stood up and looked benignly down. “I’m glad you’re on the mend. Man, I couldn’t tell what happened to you last night.”
“Alan hit me in the shoulder.” Of course, John knew that, but I felt that it deserved a little more attention.
“You nearly flipped over. I’m not kidding. Your feet flew straight out in front of you. Wham, you’re down.”
My hand moved automatically to the gauze pad. “You know what’s funny about all this? Nobody seems to doubt that Fontaine killed April and Grant Hoffman. They don’t have the notes, or they claim they don’t, and they don’t have any evidence. All they have is what we gave them, and they knew him for better than ten years. His own department, people who thought he was God yesterday morning, did a 360-degree turn twelve hours later.”
“Of course they did.” John smiled and shook his head, looking at me as if I’d flunked an easy test. “McCandless and Hogan found out that they never really knew the guy at all. They might not be showing it to us, but they’re feeling betrayed and angry. Just when they have to convince this entire city that their cops are hot shit after all, their best detective turns out to be very, very dirty.”
John came forward, buttoning his suit, his eyes alight with a private understanding. “And Monroe searched his apartment, right? He found the discharge papers, but who knows what else he found? Just the fact they’re not telling us that they came up with knives or bloodstains on his shoes means that they did.”
When he saw I took the point that they would have been much tougher on us if they had not, he glanced toward the door and then lowered his voice. “What I think is, I bet Monroe found those notes we were looking for, took them straight to McCandless, and after McCandless read them, he put them through a shredder. Case closed.”
“So they’ll never officially clear April’s murder?”
“McCandless told me he’d get me for breaking and entering if he ever heard that I was talking to the press.” He shrugged. “Why is that fat little shit sitting outside your door? He’s useless at saving lives, but he’s good enough to keep Geoffrey Bough out of your room.”
“You can live with that?” I asked, but the answer had been present since he had walked into the room.
“I know who murdered my wife, and the son of a bitch is dead. Can I live with that? You bet I can.” John looked at his watch. “Hey, I’m already late for a meeting at the bank. You’re okay? Need anything else?”
I asked him to arrange airline tickets for the day after tomorrow and to give the flight information to McCandless.
5
ALAN BROOKNER’S BOOK made two or three hours zoom by in happy concentration, even though I probably understood about one-fourth of what I was reading. The book was as dense and elegant as an Elliot Carter string quartet, and about as easy to grasp on first exposure. After a bright-faced little nurse rolled in the magic tray and injected me, the book began speaking with perfect clarity, but that may have been illusory.
I heard the door close and looked up to see Michael Hogan coming toward me. His long face seemed about as expressive as Ross McCandless’s rusty iron mask, but as he got closer I saw that the effect was due to exhaustion not disdain. “I thought I’d check up on you before I went home,” he said. “Mind if I sit down?”
“No, please do,” I said, and he slipped into the chair sideways, almost languidly. A stench of smoke and gunpowder floated toward me from his wrinkled pinstripe suit. I looked at Hogan’s weary, distinguished face, still distinguished in spite of the marks of deep exhaustion, and realized that the odor was nothing more than the same smell of ashes that I had caught at the Sunchanas’ burned-out house. Along with Fontaine, Hogan had spent a lot of the night near burning buildings, and he had not been home since then.
“You look better than I do,” he said. “How are things going? In much pain?”
“Ask me again in about an hour and a half.”
He managed to smile through the tangle of emotions visible in his weary face.
“I guess the riot is over,” I said, but he sent the riot into oblivion with a wave of his hand and an impatient, bitter glance that touched me like an electric shock.
Hogan sighed and slumped into the chair. “What you and Ransom were trying to do was incredibly stupid, you know.”
“We didn’t know who to trust. We didn’t think anybody would believe us unless we caught him in his old house and made him talk.”
“How did you think you were going to get him to talk?”
He was avoiding the use of the name—the process John had predicted was already beginning.
“Once we had him tied up”—this was the image I’d had of the conclusion of our attack on Fontaine—“I was going to tell him that I knew who he really was. I could prove it. There wouldn’t be any way out for him—he’d have to know he was trapped.”
“The proof would be this man Hubbel?”
“That’s right. Hubbel identified him immediately.”
“Imagine that,” Hogan said, meaning that it was still almost too much to imagine. “Well, we’ll be sending someone out there tomorrow, but don’t expect to be reading much about Franklin Bachelor in the New York Times. Or the Ledger, for that matter.” The look in his eyes got even smokier. “When we got in touch with the army, they stonewalled for most of the day, and finally some character in the CIA passed down the word that Major Bachelor’s file is not only closed, it can’t be opened for fifty years. Officially, the man is dead. And anything printed about him that isn’t already a matter of public record must be approved first by the CIA. So there you are.”
“The
re we all are,” I said. “But thanks for telling me.”
“Oh, I’m not done yet. I understand you met Ross McCandless.”
I nodded. “I understand what he wants.”
“He doesn’t tend to leave much doubt about that. But probably he didn’t tell you a couple of things you ought to know.”
I waited, fearing that he was going to say something about Tom Pasmore.
“The old man’s gun is at ballistics. They move slow, over there. The report won’t come back for about a week. But the bullet that killed our detective couldn’t have come from the same gun as the one that hit you.”
“You’re going too far,” I said. “I was there. I saw Alan fire, twice. What’s the point of this, anyhow?” And then I saw the point—if Allen had not killed Fontaine, then our whole story disappeared into a fiction about the riot.
“It’s the truth. You saw Brookner fire twice because his first shot went wild. The second one hit you—if the first one had hit you, you’d never have seen him fire the second one.”
“So the first one hit Fontaine.”
“Do you know what happened to him? His whole chest blew apart. If you’d been hit by the same kind of round, you wouldn’t have anything left on your right side below the collarbone. You wouldn’t even be alive.”
“So who shot him?” As soon as I had spoken, I knew.
“You told McCandless that you saw a man between the houses across the street.”
Well, I had—I thought I had, anyhow. Even if I hadn’t, McCandless would have suggested that I probably had. I’d conveniently given him exactly what he wanted.
“We still have a police department in this town,” Hogan said. “We’ll get him, sooner or later.”
I saw a loose end and seized it. “McCandless mentioned someone named Ventura, I think. Nicholas Ventura.”
“That’s the other thing I wanted you to know. Ventura was operated on, put into a cast, and given a bed at County. Not long after the riot started, he disappeared. Nobody’s seen him since. Somehow, I don’t think anybody ever will.”