The Throat (16 page)

"It'll be nice for you to have some company," said the nurse. She
looked at me from the other side of the bed, letting me adjust to the
sight of April Ransom.

Ransom said, "You've heard me speak about Tim Underhill, April. He's
here to visit you, too. Are you feeling any better today?" He moved a
section of the sheet aside and closed his hand around hers. I saw a
flash of white bandage pads and even whiter tape around her upper arm.
"Pretty soon you'll be strong enough to come home again."

He looked up at me. "She looked a lot worse last Wednesday, when
they finally let me see her. I really thought she was going to die that
day, but she pulled through, didn't she, Eliza?"

"She sure did," the nurse said. "Been fighting ever since."

Ransom leaned over the bed and began speaking to his wife in a
steady, comforting voice. I moved away from the bed. The policeman
seated beneath the row of bright windows straightened up in his chair
and looked at me brightly and aggressively. His left hand wandered
toward the bulge of the notebook in his shirt pocket.

"The patients' lounge is usually empty around this time," the nurse
said, and smiled at me.

I walked down the curving hallway to the entrance of a large room
lined with green couches and chairs, some of them arranged around plain
polished wooden tables. Two overweight women in T-shirts that adhered
to their bodies smoked and played cards in a litter of splayed
magazines and paper bags at a table in the far corner. They had pulled
one of the curtains across the nearest window. An elderly woman in a
gray suit occupied a chair eight feet from them with her back to an
uncovered window, reading a Barbara Pym novel as if her life depended
on it. I moved toward the windows in the left-hand corner of the room,
and the old woman glanced up from her book and stabbed me with a look
fiercer than anything Officer Mangelotti could have produced.

I heard footsteps behind me and turned around to see April Ransom's
private duty nurse carrying a pouchy black handbag into the lounge. The
old woman glared at her, too. Eliza Morgan plopped her bag onto one of
the tables near the entrance and motioned me toward her. She fished
around in the big handbag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and
looked at me apologetically. "This is the only place in this whole wing
of the hospital where smoking is allowed," she said in a voice not far
above a whisper. She lit the cigarette with a match, tossed the match
into a blackened copper ashtray, blew out a white feather of smoke, and
sat down. "I know it's a filthy habit, but I'm cutting way down. I have
one an hour during my shift here, and one after dinner, and that's it.
Well, that's almost the truth. Right at the start of my shift, I sit in
here and smoke three or four of the darned things; otherwise I'd never
make it through the first hour." She leaned forward and lowered her
voice again. "If Mrs. Rollins gave you a dirty look when you came in,
it's because she was afraid you were going to start polluting the
place. I distress her no end, because she doesn't think nurses should
smoke at all— probably they shouldn't!"

I smiled at her—she was a nice looking woman a few years older than
I was. Her short black hair looked clean and silky, and her brisk
friendliness stopped far short of being intrusive.

"I suppose you've been here ever since Mrs. Ransom was put into the
hospital," I said.

She nodded, exhaling another vigorous plume of smoke. "Mr. Ransom
hired me as soon as he heard."

She put her hand on her bag. "You're staying with him?"

I nodded.

"Just get him to talk—he's an interesting man, but he doesn't know
half of what's going on inside him. It'd be terrible if he started to
fall apart."

"Tell me," I said. "Does his wife have a chance? Do you think she'll
come out of her coma?"

She leaned across the table. "You just be there to help him, if
you're a friend of his." She made sure that I had heard this and then
straightened her back and snubbed out the cigarette, having said all
she intended to say.

"I guess that's an answer," I said, and we both stood up.

"Who ever said there were answers?"

Then she came toward me, and her dark eyes looked huge in her small,
competent face. She put the flat of her hand on my chest. "I shouldn't
be saying any of this, but if Mrs. Ransom dies, you should go through
his medicine chest and hide any prescription tranquilizers. And you
shouldn't let him drink too much. He's had a good marriage for a long
time, and if he loses it, he's going to become someone he wouldn't even
recognize now."

She gave my chest a single, admonitory pat, dropped her hand, and
turned around again without saying another word. I followed her back
into April Ransom's room. John was leaning over the side of the bed,
saying things too soft to be overheard. April looked like a white husk.

It was past five, and Tom Pasmore was probably out of bed. I asked
Eliza where to find a pay telephone, and she sent me around the nurses'
station and down a hallway to another bank of elevators. A row of six
telephones hung opposite the elevators, none of them in use. Swinging
doors opened to wide corridors on both sides. Green, red, and blue
arrows streaked up and down the floor in lines, indicating the way to
various departments.

Tom Pasmore answered after five or six rings. Yes, it would be fine
if we came around seven-thirty. I could tell that he was
disappointed—on the few occasions Tom welcomed company, he liked it to
arrive late and stay until dawn. He seemed intrigued that we would be
on foot.

"Does Ransom walk everywhere? Would he walk downtown, say, from Ely
Place?"

"He drove me to his house from the airport," I said.

"In his or his wife's car?"

"His. His wife has a Mercedes, I guess."

"Is it parked in front of their house?"

"I didn't notice. Why?"

He laughed. "He has two cars and he's marching you all over the east
side."

"I walk everywhere, too. I don't mind."

"Well, I'll have some cold towels and iced lemonade ready for you
when you trudge up the driveway at the break of dawn. In the meantime,
see if you can find out what happened to his wife's car."

I promised to try. Then I hung up and turned around to find myself
facing a huge broad-shouldered guy with a gray ponytail and beard, the
gold dot of an earring in one ear, and a four-button double-breasted
Armani suit. He sneered at me as he moved toward the phone. I sneered
back. I felt like Philip Marlowe.

At seven John Ransom and I walked out of the hospital and went down
the hedge-lined path to Berlin Avenue. He moved quickly but heedlessly,
as if he were all by himself in an empty landscape. The air could have
been squeezed like a sponge, and the temperature had cooled off to
something like eighty-five. There was still at least an hour and a half
of sunlight. Ransom hesitated when we reached the sidewalk. For a
second I thought he might wade out into the crowded avenue—I didn't
think he could see anything but the room he had just left. Instead of
stepping off the curb, he let his head drop so that his chin pressed
into the layer of fat beneath it. He wiped his face with his hands.
"Okay," he said, more to himself than to me. Then he looked at me.
"Well, now you've seen her. What do you think?"

"You must be doing her some good, coming every day," I said.

"I hope so." Ransom shoved his hands into his pockets. For a moment
he looked like a balding, overweight version of the Brooks-Lowood
student he had been. "I think she's lost some weight in the past few
days. And that big bruise seems to have stopped fading. Wouldn't you
think that's a bad sign, when a bruise won't fade?"

I asked him what her doctor had said.

"As usual, nothing at all."

"Well, Eliza Morgan will do everything possible for April," I said.
"At least you know she's getting good care."

He looked at me sharply. "She sneaks away to smoke cigarettes in the
lounge, did you notice? I don't think nurses should smoke, and I don't
think April should be left alone."

"Isn't that cop always there?"

Ransom shrugged and began walking back down the way we had come. "He
spends most of his time staring out of the window." His hands were
still stuffed into his trousers pockets, and he hunched over a little
as he walked. He looked over at me and shook his head.

I said, "It can't be easy to see April like that."

He sighed—sighed up from his heels. "Tim, she's dying right in front
of me."

We both stopped walking. Ransom covered his face with his hands for
a moment. A few people walking past us stared at the unusual sight of a
grown man in a handsome gray suit crying in public. When he lowered his
hands, moisture shone on his red face. "Now I'm a public
embarrassment." He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his
face.

"Do you still want to see Tom Pasmore? Would you rather just go
home?"

"Are you kidding?"

He straightened his spine and began moving down the sidewalk again,
past the card shop and the grocery store and the florist with its
striped awning and its sidewalk display of flowers. "Whatever happened
to April's Mercedes? I don't think I saw it when we left the house."

Ransom frowned at me. "You hardly could have. It's gone. I suppose
it'll turn up eventually—I've had other things to think about."

"Where do you think it is?"

"To tell you the truth, I don't
care
what happened to the car. It
was insured. It's just a car."

We walked several more blocks through the heat, not talking. Now and
then John Ransom pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and blotted
his forehead. We were getting closer to the UI campus, and bookstores
and little restaurants had replaced the grocery stores and florists.
The Royal, Millhaven's only art film house, was showing a season of
thrillers from the forties and fifties—the marquee showed a complicated
schedule beginning with a double feature of
Double Indemnity
and
Kiss
Me Deadly
and ending, sometime in August, with
Pickup on South Street
and
Strangers on a Train
. In
between they were running
From
Dangerous Depths
,
The Big
Combo, The Asphalt Jungle, Chicago
Deadline, DOA, The Hitchhiker, Laura, Out of the Past, Notorious.
These were the movies of my youth, and I remembered the pleasure of
slipping into the cool of the Beldame Oriental on a hot day, of buying
popcorn and watching a doom-laden film noir in the nearly empty theater.

Suddenly I remembered the nightmare I'd had on the morning of the
day John Ransom had called me—the thick hands on the big white plate.
Cutting off human flesh, chewing it, spitting it out in revulsion. The
heat made me feel dizzy, and the memory of the dream brought with it
the gritty taste of depression. I stopped moving and looked up at the
marquee.

"You okay?" Ransom said, turning around just ahead of me.

The title of one of the films seemed to float out an inch or two
from the others—a trick of vision, or of the light. "Have you ever
heard of a movie called
From
Dangerous Depths?"
I asked. "I don't know anything about it."

Ransom walked back to join me. He looked up at the crowded marquee.
"Cornball title, isn't it?"

Ransom plunged across Berlin Avenue and walked east on a block lined
with three-story frame and redbrick houses separated by thick low
hedges. Some of the tiny front lawns were littered with bicycles and
children's toys, and all of them bore brown streaks like burn scars.
Rock and roll drifted down from an upstairs window, tinny and lifeless.

"I remember Tom Pasmore," Ransom said. "The guy was an absolute
loner. He didn't really have any friends. The money was his
grandfather's, wasn't it? His father didn't amount to much—I think he
ran out on them in Tom's senior year."

That was the sort of detail everyone at Brooks-Lowood would have
known.

"And his mother was an alcoholic," Ransom said. "Pretty lady,
though. Is she still alive?"

"She died about ten years ago."

"And now he's retired? He doesn't do anything at all?"

"I suppose just looking after his money is a full-time job."

"April could have done that for him," Ransom said.

We crossed Waterloo Parade and walked another block in silence while
Ransom thought about his wife.

After we crossed Balaclava Lane, the houses began to be slightly
larger, set farther apart on larger lots. Between Berlin Avenue and
Eastern Shore Drive, the value of the property increases with every
block—walking eastward, we were moving toward John Ransom's childhood
neighborhood.

Ransom's silence continued across Omdurman Road, Victoria Terrace,
Salisbury Road. We reached the long street called The Sevens, where
sprawling houses on vast lawns silently asserted that they were just as
good as the houses one block farther east, on Eastern Shore Road. He
stopped walking and wiped his forehead again. "When I was a kid, I
walked all over this neighborhood. Now it seems so foreign to me. It's
as if I never lived here at all."

"Aren't the same people basically still here?"

"Nope—my parents' generation died or moved to the west coast of
Florida, and people my age all moved out to Riverwood. Even
Brooks-Lowood moved, did you know that? Four years ago, they sold the
plant and built a big Georgian campus out in Riverwood."

He looked around, and for a moment he seemed to be considering
buying one of the big showy houses. "Most people like April, people
with new money, they bought places out in Riverwood. She wouldn't hear
of it. April liked being in the city—she liked being able to walk. She
liked that little house of ours, and she liked it just where it is."