this.'
I pulled up at the light and switched on the turn indicator. 'You went there the night April disappeared?'
'I thought she might have been over at Alan's—we had a little argument. Anyhow, when I got there, all the lights were off, and I didn't want to make a scene. If April wanted to spend the night there, what the hell?'
The light changed, and I turned toward Oscar Writzmann's cheerless little house.
'We have some old stuff in his garage. I thought I might bring some old photographs, blowups of April, back home with me, so I went in and took a look around, but they were too big to carry, and the whole idea seemed crazy, once I actually saw them.' The nerve under his eye was still jittering, and he placed two fingers over it, as if to push it back into place.
'I thought it might have had something to do with her Mercedes,' I said.
'That car is probably in Mexico by now.'
Out of habit, I checked the rearview mirror. Writzmann's car was nowhere behind us on our three lanes of the drive. Nor was it among the few cars trolling through the dazzle of sunlight ahead of us. I pulled over to the curb in front of the yellow concrete jail.
John put his hand on the door handle.
'I think this is a mistake,' I said. 'All you're going to do is rile this guy. He isn't going to say anything you want to hear.'
John tried to give me his all-knowing look again, but the nerve was still pumping under his eye. 'I hate to say this, but you don't know everything.' He leaned toward me. His eyes pinned mine. 'Give me some rope, Tim.'
I said, 'Is this about Franklin Bachelor?'
He froze with his hand against the lump in the jacket. His eyes looked like stones. He slowly moved his hand from the gun handle to the door.
'Last night, you didn't tell me the end of that story.'
John opened his mouth, and his eyes moved wildly. He looked like an animal in a trap. 'You can't talk about this.'
'It doesn't matter if it really happened or not,' I said. 'It was Vietnam. I just want to know the end. Did Bachelor kill his own people?'
John's eyes stopped moving.
'And you knew it,' I said. 'You knew he was already gone. You knew Bennington was the man you were bringing back with you. I'm surprised you didn't shoot him on the way to Camp Crandall, and then say that he got violent and tried to escape.' Then I understood why he had brought Bennington back. 'Oh. Jed Champion didn't understand things the way you did. He thought Bennington was Franklin Bachelor.'
'I got there two days before Jed,' John said in the same small voice. He cleared his throat. 'I was moving that much faster, at the end. I could smell the bodies for hours before I got to the camp. The bodies and a… a smell of cooking. Corpses were lying all over the camp. There were little fires everywhere. Bennington was just sitting on the ground. He had been burning the dead, or trying to.'
'Was he eating them?'
John stared at me for a time. 'Not the people he was burning.'
'What about Bachelor's wife?' I said. 'Her skull was in the back of your jeep.'
'He slit her throat and he gutted her. Her hair was hanging from a pole. He dressed and cleaned her, like a deer.'
'Bachelor did,' I said.
'He sacrificed her. Bennington was still boiling the meat off her bones when I got there.'
'And you ate some of her flesh,' I said.
He did not answer.
'You knew it was what Bachelor would do.'
'He already had.'
'You were in the realm of the gods,' I said.
He looked at me through his flat eyes, not speaking. He didn't have to speak.
'Do you know what happened to Bachelor?'
'Some Marines found his body up near the DMZ.' Now the pebbles in his eyes shone with defiance.
'Somebody found your body, too,' I said. 'I'm just asking.'
'Who have you been talking to?'
'Ever hear of a colonel named Beaufort Runnel?'
He blinked again, and the defiance left his eyes. 'That pompous twerp from the supply depot at Crandall?' He looked at me with something like amazement. 'How did you happen to meet Runnel?'
'It was a long time ago,' I said. 'A veterans' meeting, or something like that.'
'Veterans' groups are for bullshit artists.' Ransom opened his door. When I got out of the car, he was reaching up under the hips of the buttoned jacket to yank at the waist of the jeans. He did a little wiggle to get everything, presumably including Alan's pistol, into place. Then he pulled the jacket firmly down. He was in control again. 'Let me handle this,' he said.
Ransom plunged across Oscar Writzmann's brittle yellow lawn as if in flight from what he had just said to me.
At the doorstep, I came up beside him, and he glared at me until I stepped back. He hitched his shoulders and rang the bell. I felt a premonition of disaster. We were doing the wrong thing, and terrible events would unfold from it.
'Go easy,' I said, and his back twitched again.
From my post one step beneath John, I saw only the top of the front door moving toward John's head.
'You wanted to see me?' Writzmann asked. He sounded a little weary.
'You're Oscar Writzmann?'
The old man did not answer. He shifted sideways and pushed the door fully open, so that John had to move back a step. Writzmann's face was still hidden from me. He was wearing a dark blue sweat suit with a zippered jacket, like the Ransoms' running suits but limp from a thousand trips through the washing machine. His bare feet were heavy, square, and rampant with exploding blue veins.
'We'd like to come in,' John said.
Writzmann looked over John's shoulder and saw me. He lowered his cannonball head like a bull.
'What are you, this guy's keeper?' he said. 'I have nothing to say to you.'
John gripped the door and held it open. 'You want to cooperate with us, Mr. Writzmann. It'll go easier for you.'
Writzmann surprised me by backing away from the door. John stepped inside, and I followed him into the living room of the yellow house. Writzmann moved around a rectangular wooden table and stood beside a reclining chair. There was a cuckoo clock on the wall, but no pictures. A worn green love seat stood in front of the hatch to the kitchen. On the other side of the love seat stood a rocking chair with a seal set into the headpiece above the curved spindles.
'Nobody's here but me,' Writzmann said. 'You don't have to mess the place up, looking.'
'All we want is information,' John said.
'That's why you're carrying a gun. You want information.' His fear had left him, and what I saw was the same distaste, nearly contempt, that he had shown before. John had given him a look at the handle of the revolver. He sat down in the recliner, looking hard at us both.
I looked at the seal on the rocker. Around the number 25 the words
'Tell me about Elvee, Oscar,' John said. He was about four feet from the old man.
