The Throat (34 page)

The first third of the book
would end with Lily Sheehan's murder. The second third of the book
would be the account of Charlie's childhood—and it came to me that the
child-Charlie would have a different name, so that at first you, dear
Reader, would wonder why you were suddenly following the life of a
pathetic child who had no connection to the events of the book's first
two hundred pages! This confusion would end when the child, aged
eighteen, enlisted in the army under the name Charles Carpenter.
Charlie's capture would take up the final third.

The title of this novel
would be
The Kingdom of Heaven
,
and its epigraph would be the verses
from the Thomas gospel I had read in Central Park.

The inner music of
The
Kingdom of Heaven
would be the search for the Minotaur. Charlie
would
have returned to Millhaven (whatever it was called in the book)
because, though he had only the most partial glimpse of this, he wanted
to find the man who had abused him in the Beldame Oriental. Memories of
the Minotaur would haunt his life and the last third of the book, and
once—without quite knowing why—he would visit the shell of the theater
and have an experience similar to mine of yesterday morning.

The Minotaur would be like a
fearsome God hidden at the bottom of a deep cave, his traces and
effects scattered everywhere through the visible world.

Then I had a final insight
before going back downstairs. The movie five-year-old Charlie Carpenter
was watching when a smiling monster slid into the seat next to his was
From Dangerous Depths
. It did
not matter that I had never seen
it—though I
could
see it, if
I stayed in Millhaven long enough—because
all I needed was the title.

Now I needed a reason for a
child so young to be sent to the movies on several days in succession,
and that too arrived as soon as I became aware of its necessity. Young
Charlie's mother lay dying in the Carpenter house. Again the necessary
image surged forward out of the immediate past. I saw April Ransom's
pale, bruised, unconscious body stretched out on white sheets. A fresh
understanding arrived with the image, and I knew that Charlie's father
had beaten his wife into unconsciousness and was letting her die. For a
week or more, the little boy who grew up to be Charlie Carpenter had
lived with his dying mother and the father who killed her, and during
those terrible days he had met the Minotaur and been devoured.

I put down my pen. Now I had
a book,
The Kingdom of Heaven
.
I wanted to wrap it around me like a
blanket. I wanted to vanish into the story as little Charlie (not yet
named Charlie) yearned to melt into the blue roses twining up the paler
blue background of my bedroom wallpaper—to become the twist of an elm
leaf on Livermore Avenue, the cigarette rasp of a warm voice in the
darkness, the gleam of silver light momentarily seen on a smooth dark
male head, the dusty shaft of paler light speeding toward the screen in
a nearly empty theater.

With two exceptions, the
weekend went by in the same fashion as the preceding days. At Ransom's
suggestion, I brought my manuscript and new notes downstairs to the
dining room table, where I happily chopped paragraphs and pages from
what I had written, and using a succession of gliding Blackwing pencils
sharpened to perfect points in a clever little electric mill, wrote the
new pages about Charlie's childhood on a yellow legal pad.

Ransom did not mind sharing
the legal pad, the electric sharpener, and the Blackwings, but the idea
that I might want to spend a couple of hours working every day
alternately irritated and depressed him. This problem appeared almost
as soon as he had helped me establish myself on the dining room table.

He looked suspiciously at
the pad, the electric sharpener, my pile of notes, the stack of pages.
"You had another brainstorm, I suppose?"

"Something like that."

"I suppose that's good news,
for you."

He returned to the living
room so abruptly that I followed him. He dropped onto the couch and
stared at the television.

"John, what's the matter?"

He would not look at me. It
occurred to me that he had probably acted like this with April, too.
After a considerable silence, he said, "If all you're going to do is
work, you might as well be back in New York."

Some people assume that all
writing is done in between drinks, or immediately after long walks
through the Yorkshire dales. John Ransom had just put himself in this
category.

"John," I said, "I know that
this is a terrible time for you, but I don't understand why you're
acting this way."

"What way?"

"Forget it," I said. "Just
try to keep in mind that I am not rejecting you personally."

"Believe me," he said, "I'm
used to being around selfish people."

John didn't speak to me for
the rest of the day. He made dinner for himself, opened a bottle of
Chateau Petrus, and ate the dinner and drank the bottle while watching
television. When the Walter Dragonette show ceased for the day, he
surfed through the news programs; when they were over, he switched to
CNN until "Nightline" came on. The only interruption came immediately
after he finished his meal, when he carried his wineglass to the
telephone, called Arizona, and told his parents that April had been
murdered. I was back in the dining room by that time, eating a sandwich
and revising my manuscript, and was sure that Ransom knew that I could
overhear him tell his parents that an old acquaintance from the
service, the writer Tim Underhill, had come "all the way from New York
to help me deal with things. You know, handling phone calls, dealing
with the press, helping me with the funeral arrangements." He ended the
conversation by making arrangements for picking them up from the
airport. After "Nightline," Ransom switched off the set and went
upstairs.

The next morning I went out
for a quick walk before the reporters arrived. When I came back, Ransom
rushed out of the kitchen and asked if I'd like a cup of coffee. Some
eggs, maybe? He thought we ought to have breakfast before we went to
his father-in-law's house to break the news.

Did he want me to come along
while he told Alan? Sure he did, of course he did—unless I'd rather
stay here and work. Honestly, that would be okay, too.

Either I wasn't selfish
anymore, or he had forgiven me. The sulky, silent Ransom was gone.

"We can leave by the back
door and squeeze through a gap in the hedges. The reporters'll never
know we left the house."

"Is there something I don't
know about?" I asked.

"I called the dean at home
last night," he said. "He finally understood that I couldn't promise to
have everything settled by September. He said he'd try to calm down the
trustees and the board of visitors. He thinks he can get some sort of
vote of confidence in my favor."

"So your job is safe, at
least."

"I guess," he said.

The second exceptional event
of the weekend took place before our visit with Alan Brookner. John
came back into the kitchen while I was eating breakfast to report that
Alan seemed to be having another one of his "good" days and was
expecting us within the next half hour. "He's mixing Bloody Marys, so
at least he's in a good mood."

"Bloody Marys?"

"He made them for April and
me every Sunday—we almost always went to his place for brunch."

"Did you tell him why you
wanted to see him?"

"I want him relaxed enough
to understand things."

The bell buzzed, and fists
struck the door. A dimly audible voice asked that John open up, please.
The hound pack was not usually so polite.

"Let's get out of here,"
John said. "Check the front to make sure they're not sneaking around
the house."

The phone started ringing as
soon as I passed under the arch. A fist banged twice on the door, and a
voice called, "Police, Mr. Ransom, please open up, we want to talk to
you."

The men at the door peered
in through separate windows, and I found myself looking directly into
the face of Detective Wheeler. The smirking, mustached head of
Detective Monroe appeared at the window on the other side of the door.
Monroe said, "Open up, Underhill."

Paul Fontaine's voice spoke
through the answering machine. "Mr. Ransom, I am told that you are
ignoring the presence of the detectives at your door. Don't be bad
boys, now, and let the nice policemen come inside. After all, the
policeman is your—"

I opened the door, beckoned
in Monroe and Wheeler, and snatched up the phone. "This is Tim
Underhill," I said into the receiver. "We thought your men were
reporters. I just let them in."

"The policeman is your
friend
. Be good boys and talk
to them, will you?" He hung up before I
could reply.

John came steaming out from
the hall into the living room, already pointing at our three dark
shapes in the foyer. "I want those people out of here
right now
, you
hear me?" He charged forward and then abruptly stopped moving. "Oh.
Sorry."

"That's fine, Mr. Ransom,"
said Wheeler. Both detectives went about half of the distance across
the living room. When John did not come forward to meet them, they gave
each other a quick look and stopped moving. Monroe put his hands in his
pockets and gave the paintings a long inspection.

John said, "You sat in the
booth with us."

"I'm Detective Wheeler, and
this is Detective Monroe."

Monroe's mouth twitched into
an icy smile.

"I guess I know why you're
here," John said.

"The lieutenant was a little
surprised by your remarks the other day," said Wheeler.

"I didn't say anything,"
John said. "It was him. If you want to be specific about it." He
crossed his arms in front of his chest, propping them on the mound of
his belly.

"Could we all maybe sit
down, please?" asked Wheeler.

"Yeah, sure," said John, and
uncrossed his arms and made a beeline for the nearest chair.

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?"