crazy, either.'
I had that twinge of pain you feel when someone confronts you with the young idiot you used to be. 'Well, I was a soldier then.'
'You were a circus bear,' Vinh said, and laughed. '
After a little more conversation, Vinh gave the phone to Maggie, and she gave me a little more trouble, and then we hung up. It was nearly twelve. I left one of the lights burning and took the Sue Grafton novel upstairs with me.
The front door slammed shut and woke me up. I sat up in an unfamiliar bed. What hotel was this, in what city? I could hear someone climbing the stairs. The sneering face of the gray-haired man with the ponytail swam onto my inner screen. I could identify him, and he was going to try to kill me as he had tried to kill April Ransom. The heavy footsteps reached the landing. I rolled off the bed. My mouth was dry and my head pounded. Adrenaline sparkled through my body. I stationed myself behind the door and braced myself.
The footsteps thudded toward my door and went past it without even hesitating. A second later, another door opened and closed.
And then I remembered where I was. I heard John Ransom groan as he fell onto his bed. I unpeeled myself from the wall.
It was a few minutes past eight o'clock in the morning.
I knocked on Ransom's bedroom door. A barely audible voice told me to come in.
I pushed open the door and stepped inside the dark room. It was more than three times the size of the guest room. Beyond the bed, on the opposite side of the room, a wall of mirrors on closet doors dimly reflected the opening door and my shadowy face. His suit jacket lay crumpled on the floor next to the bed. Ransom lay face-down across the mattress. Garish suspenders made a bright Y across his back.
'How is she doing?' I asked. 'Is she out of the coma?'
Ransom rolled onto his side and blinked at me as if he were not quite sure who I was. He pursed his lips and exhaled, then pushed himself upright. 'God, what a night.' He bent forward and pulled off his soft brown wingtips. He tossed them toward the closet, and they thudded onto the carpet. 'April's doing a lot better, but she's not out of the woods yet.' He shrugged his shoulders from beneath his suspenders and let them droop to his sides.
Ransom smiled up at me, and I realized how tired he looked when he was not smiling. 'But things look good, according to the doctor.' He untied his tie and threw it toward a sofa. The tie fell short and fluttered onto the rose- colored carpet. 'I'm going to get a few hours' sleep and then go back to Shady Mount.' He grunted and pushed himself to the bottom end of the bed.
Two enormous paintings hung on facing walls, a male nude lying on lush grass, a female nude leaning forward against a tree on outstretched arms, both figures outlined in the Nabis manner. They were the most sensual Nabis paintings I had ever seen. John Ransom saw me looking back and forth from one to the other, and he cleared his throat as he unbuttoned his shirt.
'You like those?'
I nodded.
'April bought them from a local kid last year. I thought he was kind of a hustler.' He threw his shirt onto the floor, dropped his keys, change, and bills onto an end table, unbuckled his belt, undid his trousers and pushed them down. He pulled his legs out of them, yanked off his socks, and half-scooted, half-crawled up the bed. A sour, sweaty odor came from his body. 'I'm sorry, but I'm really out.'
He began to scoot under the light blanket and the top sheet. Then he stopped moving, kneeling on the bed and holding up the covers. His belly bulged over the top of his boxer shorts. 'You want to use the car? You could look around in Pigtown, see if it looks any—'
He flopped onto his sheets and smacked his hand on his forehead. 'I'm sorry, Tim. I'm even more tired than I thought.'
'It's okay,' I said. 'Even the people who live there call it Pigtown.'
This was not strictly true—the people who lived in my old neighborhood had always resented the name—but it seemed to help him. 'Good for them,' he said. He groped for the pulled-back sheet and tugged it up. Then he rolled his head on the pillow and looked at me with bloodshot eyes. 'White Pontiac.'
'I guess I will take a look around,' I said.
Ransom closed his eyes, shuddered, and fell asleep.
PART FOUR
On the way to my old neighborhood, I realized that I wanted to go somewhere else first and turned Ransom's white Pontiac onto Redwing Avenue and drove past traces of the old Millhaven—neighborhood bars in places that were not real neighborhoods anymore. Blistering morning sun seemed to wish to push the low wood and stone buildings down into the baking sidewalks. Millhaven, my Millhaven, was thinning out all around me, disappearing into a generic midwestern cityscape.
I would have been less convinced of the disappearance of the old Millhaven if I had turned on the radio and heard Paul Fontaine and Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan announcing the arrest of the soon-to-be-notorious serial killer Walter Dragonette, the Meat Man, but I left the radio off and remained ignorant of his name for another few hours.
Two or three miles went by in a blur of traffic and concrete on the east-west expressway. Ahead of me, the enormous wedding cake of the baseball stadium grew larger and larger, and I turned off on the exit just before it. This early in the morning, only the groundskeepers' cars stood in the vast parking lot. Two blocks past the stadium, I turned in through the open gates of Pine Knoll Cemetery and parked near the gray stone guardhouse. When I got out, the heat struck me like a lion's breath. Rows of differently sized headstones stretched off behind the guard's office like a messy Arlington. Furry hemlock trees ranged along the far end. White gravel paths divided the perfect grass. Sprinklers whirled glittering sprays of water in the distance. Thirty feet away, an angular old man in a white shirt, black tie, black trousers, and black military hat puttered through the rows of headstones, picking up beer cans and candy wrappers left behind by teenagers who had climbed into the cemetery after the baseball game last night.
The graves I wanted lay in the older section of Pine Knoll, near the high stone wall that borders the left side of the cemetery. The three headstones stood in a row: Albert Hoover Underhill, Louise Shade Underhill, April Shade Underhill. The first two headstones, newer than April's, still looked new, bone-dry in the drenching sun. All three would have been warm to the touch. The grass was kept very short, and individual green blades glistened in the sun.
If I had anything to say to these graves, or they to me, now was the time to say it. I waited, standing in the sun, holding my hands before me. A few bright moments came forward from a swirling darkness: sitting safe and warm on the davenport with my mother, watching drivers wading through waist-high snow after abandoning their cars; April skipping rope on the sidewalk; lying in bed with a fever on St. Patrick's Day while my mother cleaned the house, singing along with the Irish songs on the radio. Even these were tinged with regret, pain, sorrow.
It was as if some terrible secret lay buried beneath the headstones, in the way a more vibrant, more real Millhaven burned and glowed beneath the surface of everything I saw.
