The uniformed officers moving back and forth between April Ransom's room slowed down as they passed us.
'You could meet your friend Ransom down on Armory Place,' Hogan said. 'He's waiting for Paul to begin Dragonette's interrogation. And Paul, I think you could usefully start matters down there.'
He turned back to me. 'You know where Armory Place is?'
I nodded.
'Follow Paul and park in the police lot. You and Mister Ransom could watch some of the interrogation.' He asked Fontaine, 'Is that okay with you?'
Fontaine nodded.
Downstairs, an elderly woman seated at a computer on one of the desks behind the counter looked up at us and twitched as if her chair had just given her an electric shock. April Ransom's murder had unsettled the entire hospital. Fontaine said he would wait for me at the entrance to the hospital parking lot.
'I know how to get to police headquarters,' I reminded him.
'Yeah, but if you try to get into the lot without me, somebody might mistake you for a reporter,' he said.
I trotted across the street and went up the block. Before I could put the key into the Pontiac's door, a heavyset man in Bermuda shorts and a blue button-down shirt came rushing out of the front door of the house with the flag and the yellow ribbon. 'Just hold it right there,' he shouted. 'I got something to say to you.'
I unlocked the door and waited for him to cross his lawn. He had a big belly and thin hairy legs, and his bulldog face was flushed pink. He came within ten feet of me and jabbed his finger at me. 'Do you see any signs saying hospital parking on this street? The parking places on this street are not for you people —you can park at the meters, or go around to the hospital lot. I am sick and tired of being abused.'
'Abused? You don't know what the word means.' I opened the car door.
'Wait up there.' He circled around the front of my car, still pointing at my chest. 'These—are—our—spaces. I paid a lot of money to live in this neighborhood, and people like you treat it like a public park. This morning, some guy was sitting on my lawn—on my lawn! He got out of his car and he sat down on my lawn, like he owned it, and then he went over to the hospital!'
'Your yellow ribbon made him feel at home,' I said, and got into the car.
'What the hell is that supposed to mean?'
'He thought it was a free country.' I started the car while he told me all about freedom. He was a patriot, and he had a lot of thoughts on the subject that people like me wouldn't understand.
Fontaine's blue sedan led me downtown through a city that seemed deserted. The illusion of emptiness vanished as soon as we drove past the entrance to Armory Place. The newspaper articles had already brought perhaps a hundred people to the front of police headquarters. Signs bristled up over their heads. The crowd spilled down the wide steps of the huge gray building and flowed out onto the wide plaza between it and city hall. At the top of the steps, a man diminished by distance shouted into a bullhorn. Camera crews wound through his audience, recording it all for the evening news.
The blue sedan turned right at the end of the plaza, and a block later turned right again into an unmarked lane. A sign announced NO ACCESS POLICE VEHICLES ONLY.
Red brick walls hemmed in the narrow lane. I followed Fontaine's car into a wide rectangular parking lot crowded with police cars. Uniformed officers dwarfed by the high walls leaned against the cars, talking. The back of the police headquarters loomed on the opposite side of the lot. A few policemen turned their heads when the Pontiac came in. When I pulled into an empty space alongside Fontaine, two of them appeared at my door.
Fontaine got out of his car and said, 'Don't shoot him, he's with me.'
Without looking back, he took off toward a black metal door in the rear of the headquarters building. The two cops stepped aside, and I hurried after him.
Like an old grade school, the police building was a warren of dark corridors with scuffed wooden floors, rows of doors with pebbled glass windows, and clanging staircases. Fontaine charged ahead past a crowded bulletin board and the open door to a locker room. A half-naked man sitting on a bench called out, 'How's Mangelotti?'
'Dead,' Fontaine said.
He double-jumped up a staircase and banged open a door marked homicide. I followed him into a room where half a dozen men seated at desks froze at the sight of me. 'He's with me,' Fontaine said. 'Let's get down to business and interrogate that piece of batshit right now.' The men had already stopped paying attention to me. 'Let's give him the chance to explain himself.' Fontaine took off his suit jacket and put it over the back of a chair. Files and loose papers lay stacked on his desk. 'Let's wrap up every unsolved murder on our books and start all over again with a clean slate. And then everybody will go home happy.'
He rolled up his sleeves. The room smelled of sweat and stale cigarette smoke. It was a little bit hotter than the street. 'Now don't lose your head,' said a man at the back of the room.
'That's good,' Fontaine said.
'Say, Paul,' said a detective with a round, chubby face who looked up at him from the next desk, 'did it ever occur to you, and I'm sure it did, that your prisoner in there gave a whole new meaning to the expression, to give good head?'
'I'm grateful to you for that insight,' Fontaine said. 'When he starts to get hungry, I'll send one of you in to work things out with him.'
'Paul, is it my imagination, or is there a strange smell in here?' He sniffed the air.
'Ah, the smell,' Fontaine said. 'Do you know what our friend said when this odor was pointed out to him?'
'If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem?' said the other policeman.
'Not quite. He said, and I quote,
Every man in the room cracked up. Fontaine regarded them stoically, as if he were resigned to their childishness. 'Gentlemen, gentlemen. I am using the suspect's exact words. He is a person of good intentions. The man fully intended to do something about the smell, which was as offensive to him as it was to his neighbors.' He raised his arms in mock appeal and slowly turned around in a complete circle.
A hidden connection that had struck me almost since I had walked into the detectives' office finally surfaced: these men reminded me of the body squad. The homicide detectives were as caustic and exclusionary as Scoot and Ratman and the others, and their humor was as corrosive. Because they handled death all day long, they had to make it funny.
'Are we set up for taping in Number One?' Fontaine asked.
'Are you kidding?' asked the detective with the chubby face. Short blond hair like feathers stuck flat to his head, and his peaceful blue eyes were set as far apart as an ox's. 'That baby is set to go.'
'Good,' Fontaine said.
'Can we, uh, watch this, if we want to?' asked the blond detective.
'I like to watch,' intoned a broad-shouldered detective with a heavy mustache that frothed over his upper lip. 'I want to watch.'
'You are free to join Mr. Underhill and Mr. Ransom in the booth,' Fontaine said, with as much dignity as possible.
'Show time,' said the detective across the room who had advised Fontaine not to lose his head. He was a slim man with skin the color of light coffee and an almost delicate, ironic face. Alone of all the men in the room, he still had on his suit jacket.
'My colleagues, the ghouls,' Fontaine said to me.
'These guys remind me of Vietnam.'
Something within Fontaine slowed down by an almost imperceptible degree. 'You were there? That's how you know Ransom?'
'I met him there,' I said. 'But I knew him from Millhaven.' ,
