Monroe and Wheeler sat on the couch, and I took the other chair.
'I have to see April's father,' John said. 'He still doesn't know what happened.'
Wheeler asked, 'Would you like to call him, Mr. Ransom, tell him you'll be delayed?'
'It doesn't matter,' John said.
Wheeler nodded. 'Well, that's up to you, Mr. Ransom.' He flipped open a notebook.
John squirmed like a schoolboy in need of the bathroom. Wheeler and Monroe both looked at me, and Monroe gave me his frozen smile again and took over.
'I thought you were satisfied with Dragonette's confession.'
Ransom exhaled loudly and slumped back against the couch.
'For the most part, I was, at least then.'
'So was I,' John put in.
'Did you have questions about Dragonette's truthfulness during the interrogation?'
'I did,' I said, 'but even before that I had some doubts.'
Monroe glared at me, and Wheeler said, 'Suppose you tell us about these doubts.'
'My doubts in general?'
He nodded. Monroe rocked back in his chair, jerked his jacket down, and gave me a glare like a blow.
I told them what I had said to John two days earlier, that Dragonette's accounts of the attacks on the unidentified man and Officer Mangelotti had seemed improvised and unreal to me. 'But more than that, I think his whole confession was contaminated. He only started talking about John's wife after he heard a dispatcher say that she had just been killed.'
Monroe said, 'Suppose you tell us where this fairy tale about Dragonette and the dispatcher comes from.'
'I'd like to know the point of this visit,' I said.
For a moment the two detectives said nothing. Finally Monroe smiled at me again. 'Mr. Underhill, do you have any basis for this claim? You weren't in the car with Walter Dragonette.'
John gave me a questioning look. He remembered, all right.
'One of the officers in the car with Dragonette told me what happened,' I said.
'That's incredible,' said Monroe.
'Could you tell me who was in the car with Walter Dragonette when that call from the dispatcher came in?' asked Wheeler.
'Paul Fontaine and a uniformed officer named Sonny sat in the front seat. Dragonette was handcuffed in the back. Sonny heard the dispatcher say that Mrs. Ransom had been murdered in the hospital. Dragonette heard it, too. And then he said, 'If you guys had worked faster, you could have saved her, you know.' And Detective Fontaine asked if he were confessing to the murder of April Ransom, and Dragonette said that he was. At that point, he would have confessed to anything.'
Monroe leaned forward. 'What are you trying to accomplish?'
'I want to see the right man get arrested,' I said.
He sighed. 'How did you ever meet Sonny Berenger?'
'I met him at the hospital, and again after the interrogation.'
'I don't suppose anybody else heard these statements.'
'One other person heard them.' I did not look at John. I waited. The two detectives stared at me. We all sat in silence for what seemed a long time.
'I heard it, too,' John finally said.
'There we go,' said Wheeler.
'There we go,' said Monroe. He stood up. 'Mr. Ransom, we'd like to ask you to come down to Armory Place to go over what happened on the morning of your wife's death.'
'Everybody knows where I was on Thursday morning.' He looked confused and alarmed.
'We'd like to go over that in greater detail,' Monroe said. 'This is normal routine, Mr. Ransom. You'll be back here in an hour or two.'
'Do I need a lawyer?'
'You can have a lawyer present, if you insist.'
'Fontaine changed his mind,' I said. 'He went over the tape, and he didn't like that flimsy confession.'
The two detectives did not bother to answer me. Monroe said, 'We'd appreciate your cooperation, Mr. Ransom.'
Ransom turned to me. 'Do you think I should call a lawyer?'
'I would,' I said.
'I don't have anything to worry about.' He turned from me to Wheeler and Monroe. 'Let's get it over with.'
The three of them stood up, and, a moment later, so did I.
'Oh, my God,' John said. 'We were supposed to see Alan.'
The two cops looked back and forth between us.
'Will you go over there?' John asked. 'Explain everything, and tell him I'll see him as soon as I can.'
'What do you mean, explain everything?'
'About April,' he said.
Monroe smiled slowly.
'Don't you think you ought to do that yourself?'
'I would if I could,' John said. 'Tell him I'll talk to him as soon as I can. It'll be better this way.'
'I doubt that,' I said.
He sighed. 'Then call him up and tell him that I had to go in for questioning, but that I'll come over as soon as I can this afternoon.'
I nodded, and the detectives went outside with John. Geoffrey Bough and his photographer trotted forward, expectant as puppies. The camera began firing with the clanking, heavy noise of a round being chambered. When Monroe and Wheeler assisted Ransom into their car, not neglecting to palm the top of his head and shoehorn him into the backseat, Bough looked back at the house and bawled my name. He started running toward me, and I closed and locked the door.
The bell rang, rang, rang. I said, 'Go away.'
'Is Ransom under arrest?'
When I said nothing, Geoffrey flattened his face against the slit of window beside the door.
Alan Brookner answered after his telephone had rung for two or three minutes. 'Who is this?'
I told him my name. 'We had some drinks in the kitchen.'
'I have you now! Good man! You coming here today?'
'Well, I was going to, but something came up, and John won't be able to make it for a while.'
'What does that mean?' He coughed loudly, alarmingly, making ripping sounds deep in his chest. 'What about the Bloody Marys?' More terrible coughing followed. 'Hang the Bloody Marys, where's John?'
'The police wanted to talk to him some more.'
'You tell me what happened to my daughter, young man. I've been fooled with long enough.'
A fist began thumping against the door. Geoffrey Bough was still gaping at the slit window.
'I'll be over as soon as I can,' I said.
'The front door ain't locked.' He hung up.
I went back through the arch. The telephone began to shrill. The doorbell gonged.
I passed through the kitchen and stepped out onto Ransom's brown lawn. The hedges met a row of arbor vitae like Christmas trees. Above them protruded the peaks and gables of a neighboring roof. A muted babble came from the front of the house. I crossed the lawn and pushed myself into the gap between the hedge and the last arbor vitae. The light disappeared, and the lively, pungent odors of leaves and sap surrounded me in a comfortable pocket of darkness. Then the tree yielded, and I came out into an empty, sun-drenched backyard.
I almost laughed out loud. I could just walk away from it, and I did.
