Fontaine pushed back his chair and stood up. He nodded twice and turned away from Dragonette.
'Were you satisfied with that, Mr. Ransom?' Wheeler asked. 'Is there any doubt in your mind as to the identity of your wife's murderer?'
'How could there be?' John asked.
Paul Fontaine saved me from speaking by opening the door and stepping inside the booth. 'I think that's all you'll have to watch, Mr. Ransom. Go home and get some rest. If anything else turns up, we'll be in touch with you.'
'At least,' Wheeler said, 'you know why he killed your wife.'
'He killed her because he liked her,' Ransom said. 'She had the office next door to his broker's.' He sounded dumbfounded, almost stunned.
'That was good work, Paul,' Wheeler said, standing up.
We all stood up. Fontaine stepped out of the booth, and the rest of us followed him out into the light of the corridor.
'You did a number on him,' Monroe said.
Fontaine gave him a sad smile. 'I figure we'll have our charges ready by the end of the day. We have to get this one wrapped up with something more than our usual blinding speed, or the brass is going to have us cleaning toilets. I hate to admit this, but my getting Walter to admit that he killed his mother isn't going to mean anything to the lieutenant.'
'Well, McCandless didn't actually have a mother,' Monroe said. 'He came into the world via the Big Bang Theory.'
Fontaine stepped backward and regarded Wheeler and Monroe with mock horror. 'You two must have a couple of unsolved murders left to mull over.'
'There are no more unsolved murders in Millhaven,' said Monroe. 'Haven't you heard?'
He grinned at Ransom and me and turned away to walk back through the corridors to the Homicide office. Wheeler went with him.
'Seems you have another fan in Mr. Dragonette,' Fontaine said to me.
'It's too bad he couldn't tell us who the original Blue Rose was, while he was telling us who he wasn't.'
Out of the interrogation room, Fontaine's skin appeared to be some shade halfway between yellow and green, like an old piece of lettuce.
'Did the new cases ever cause you to look up the records for the old ones?' I asked him.
'Blue Rose was way before my time.'
'Do you think I could look at those records?' He was staring at me, and I said, 'I'm still very curious about the Blue Rose case.'
'You do research for books
John Ransom turned ponderously toward me. 'What's the point?'
'Yes, what is the point, Mr. Underhill?'
'It's a personal matter,' I said.
Fontaine blinked, twice, very slowly. 'Those records are a hot item. Well, since Mike Hogan is such an admirer of yours, we might be able to permit that breach of our normally fortresslike confidentiality. Of course, we have to
Ransom waved at him and began to move away toward the old part of the building.
Something else occurred to me, and I asked Fontaine another question. 'Did you ever find out the name of the man was who was following John? The gray-haired man driving the Lexus?'
Fontaine pursed his lips. The lines around his eyes and mouth deepened, and the soft, saggy parts of his face seemed to get even more mournful. 'I forgot all about that,' he said. 'Do you think there's any point in—?'
He smiled and shrugged, and it seemed to me that part of the meaning of all this courtesy was that, in some fashion or another, he had just lied to me. A second later, it seemed impossible that Fontaine would deceive me about such a trivial matter. I watched him walking back toward the interrogation room, hunched over in his shapeless suit. What he had done in the interrogation room had made me free again, but I did not feel free.
Fontaine looked sideways at a tall policeman who came out into the corridor holding a typed form and grabbed his elbow before he could get away. I remembered seeing the younger man at the hospital that morning.
'Sonny, will you see that these two gentlemen find their way downstairs to the parking lot? I'd do it myself, but I have to get back to an interrogation.'
'Yes, sir,' Sonny said. 'There must be a couple hundred people on the steps. How do they get those signs made so fast?'
'They don't have jobs.'
Sonny laughed and advanced toward us like Paul Bunyan moving in on a pine forest.
As we clanged down the metal stairs in the old part of the building, Sonny told John that he was sorry about his wife's death. 'The whole department's sorry,' he said. 'It was sort of like something you couldn't believe, when we first heard it in the car this morning. I was with Detective Fontaine, bringing that guy into the station.'
I asked, 'You were all in the car together when the report came in about Mrs. Ransom?'
He turned around on the stairs and looked up at me. 'That's what I just said.'
'You were driving, and you could hear the report.'
'Clear as a bell.'
'What did it say?'
'For God's sake, Tim,' said John Ransom.
'I just want to know what the report said.'
'Well, the woman who called it in was pretty excited.' Sonny began moving more slowly down the stairs, gripping the handrail and looking back over his shoulder. 'She said that Mrs. Ransom had been beaten to death in her room, excuse me, sir.'
'And did she say something about Officer Mangelotti?'
'Yeah, she said he was injured. She was new, and she must have been excited—she forgot to use the codes.'
'What the hell is this about, Tim? I don't want to know about this,' Ransom said. 'What difference does it make?'
'None, probably,' I said.
'Dragonette spilled the beans right away,' Sonny said. 'He told Fontaine, he says, If you guys had worked faster, you could have saved her, too. Fontaine says, Are you confessing to the murder of April Ransom, and he says, Of course. I killed her, didn't I?'
He got to the bottom of the stairs and strode down the corridor that had reminded me of an old grade school when I had pursued Paul Fontaine into the building. Now all of it felt tainted by what I had heard upstairs. The announcements and papers on the bulletin board looked like brutal jokes, GUNS FOR SALE GOOD & CHEAP. NEED A DIVORCE LAWYER WITH 20 YEARS POLICE EXPERIENCE? KARATE FOR COPS. Someone had already put up a yellow sheet with these words printed in block capitals at its top:
PEOPLE WALTER DRAGONETTE SHOULD HAVE ASKED HOME. The name of Millhaven's mayor, Merlin Waterford, was first on the list.
'Here you go.' Sonny held the door to the parking lot open with an outstretched arm and backed away so that he did not completely fill the frame. John Ransom squeezed past him, grimacing, and I ducked through the space between the big cop and the frame. Sonny smiled down at me.
'Take it easy, now,' he said, and let the door close behind us.
All the cops standing around in the parking lot stared at us as we walked toward Ransom's car. The sides of the buildings around us, red brick and gray stone, leaned inward, and the watching policemen looked like caged animals. Everything was grimy with age and suppressed violence.
Ransom collapsed into the passenger seat. A few cops with cement faces started moving toward our car. I got in and started the engine. Before I could put it in gear, one of the cops appeared beside me and leaned in the open window. His face was very close to mine. Whiskey blotches burned on his fleshy cheeks, and his eyes were
