pale and dead.
'You had business here?' he said.
'We were with Paul Fontaine,' I said.
'Were you.' It was not a question.
'This is John Ransom. The husband of April Ransom.'
The terrible face recoiled. 'Get out, get going.' He stood up and stepped back and waved me away. The cops behind the car melted away.
I drove through the jolting, pitted passage between the high municipal buildings and turned back out onto the street. Somewhere in the distance people were chanting. John Ransom sighed. I looked at him, and he leaned forward to switch on the radio. A bland radio voice said, '… accounts still coming in, and some of these are conflicting, but there seems to be little doubt that Walter Dragonette was responsible for at least twenty-five deaths. Cannibalism and torture have been widely rumored. A spontaneous demonstration is now in progress in front of police head—'
Ransom punched a button, and trumpet music filled the car —Clifford Brown playing 'Joy Spring.' I looked at Ransom in surprise, and he said, 'The Arkham College radio station programs four hours of jazz every day.' He slumped back into his seat. He had just wanted to stop hearing about Walter Dragonette.
I turned the corner and drove past the entrance to Armory Place. Clifford Brown, dead for more than thirty years, uttered a phrase that obliterated death and time with a confident, offhand eloquence. The music nearly lifted me out of the depression Walter Dragonette had evoked. I remembered hearing the same phrase all those years ago in Camp Crandall.
Ransom turned his head to look at the big crowd filling half of Armory Place. Three times as many people as had been there earlier covered the steps of police headquarters and the plaza. Signs punched up and down. One of them read VASS MUST GO. An amplified voice bawled that it was sick of living in fear.
I asked John Ransom who Vass was.
'Police chief,' he mumbled.
'Mind if we take a little detour?' I asked.
Ransom shook his head.
I left the yelling crowd behind me and continued on to Horatio Street, on the far side of the
Clifford Brown played on, and the sunlight dazzled off the glass windows and the tops of cars. Ransom sat back in his seat without speaking, his right hand curled over his mouth, his eyes open but unseeing. At the entrance to the bridge, a sign announced that vehicles weighing over one ton were barred. I rolled across the rumbling old bridge and stopped on its far side. John Ransom looked as if he were sleeping with his eyes open. I got out and looked down at the river and its banks. Between high straight concrete walls, the black river moved sluggishly toward Lake Michigan. It was about fifteen or twenty feet deep and so dark that it could have been bottomless. Muddy banks littered with tires and rotting wooden crates extended from the concrete walls to the water.
Sixty years ago, this had been an Irish neighborhood, filled with the rowdy, violent men who had built roads and installed trolley tracks; for a brief time, the tenements had housed the men who worked in the warehouses across the river; for an even briefer time, students from Arkham and the local university campus had taken them over for their cheap rents. The crime they attracted had driven all the students away, and now these blocks were inhabited by people who threw their garbage and old furniture out onto the streets. The Green Woman Taproom had been affected by the same blight.
The tavern was a small two-story building with a slanting roof built on a concrete slab that jutted out over the river's east bank. Asymmetrical additions had been built onto its back end. Before the construction of Armory Place, the bar had been a hangout for civil servants and off-duty cops. During summers, hopeful versions of Irish food had been served at round white tables overlooking the river—'Mrs. O'Reilly's lamb shanks' and 'Paddy Murphy's Irish Stew.' Now the tables were gone, and spray-painted graffiti drooled across the empty concrete, SKUZ SUCKS. ROMI 22. KILL MEE DEATH. A Pforzheimer beer sign hung crookedly in a window zigzagged with strips of tape. On a bitter winter night, people had laughed and drunk and argued in there while twenty feet away, someone murdered a woman holding an infant. 'Wasn't it a crazy story?' said a voice at my shoulder. Startled, I jumped and looked around to see John Ransom standing just behind me. The car gaped open at the side of the road. The two of us were alone in the sunny desolation. Ransom looked ghostly, insubstantial, his face bleached by the light and his pale clothing. For a second I thought he meant that William Damrosch's story was crazy, and I nodded.
'That lunatic,' he said, looking at the garbage strewn along the baked riverbank. 'He saw my wife in
I looked at Ransom. Some faint color had come back to his face, but he still looked on the verge of disappearing. 'To tell you the truth, I'm still bothered that he heard about April's murder before he confessed. And he didn't know that Mangelotti had been hit on the head with something instead of being stabbed.'
'He forgot. Besides, Fontaine didn't seem to mind.'
'That bothers me, too,' I said. 'Fontaine and Hogan want to get a lot of black marker on that board in the lounge.'
Ransom's face went white again. He moved back toward the car and sat down on the passenger seat. His hands were shaking. His whole face worked as he tried to swallow. He glanced up at me sidelong, as if he were checking to see if I were really taking all of this in. 'Could we get back to my house, please?'
He said nothing at all during the rest of the drive to Ely Place.
Inside, John pushed the playback button on his answering machine. Out of the harsh, dissolving sunlight, he looked more substantial, less on the verge of disappearance.
He straightened up when the tape had finished rewinding, and his eyes swam up to meet mine. The true lines of his face— the leaner, more masculine face I had seen years ago-—rose through the cushion of flesh that had disguised them.
'One of those messages is from me,' I said. 'I called you here before going over to the hospital.'
He nodded.
I went through the arch into the living room and sat down on the couch facing the Vuillard painting. The first caller, I remembered, had left a message yesterday—Ransom had not been able to check his machine since we had left the house together yesterday afternoon. A tinny but clearly audible voice said, 'John? Mister Ransom? Are you home?' I leaned over the table and picked up one of the Vietnam books and opened it at random. 'I guess not,' the voice said. 'Ah, this is Byron Dorian, and I apologize for calling, but I really want to find out how April, how Mrs. Ransom is doing. Shady Mount won't even confirm that she's there. I know how hard this must be for you, but could you call me when you get back? It's important to me. Or I'll call you. I just want to hear something—not knowing is so hard. Okay. Bye.'
Another voice. 'Hello John, this is Dick Mueller. Everybody down at Barnett is wondering about April and hoping that there's been some improvement. We all sympathize completely with what you're going through, John.' Ransom let go of an enormous sigh. 'Please give me a ring here at the office or at home to let me know the state of play. My home number is 474-0653. Hope to hear from you soon. Bye now.'
I bet the Meat Man's broker had gone through a queasy morning, once he sat down to his scrambled eggs with his copy of the
The next call was mine from the St. Alwyn, and I tried to block out that thicker, deeper, wheezier imitation of my real voice by focusing on the paintings in front of me.
Then a voice much deeper and wheezier than mine erupted through the little speakers. 'John? John? What's going on? I'm supposed to be going on a
