The Throat (17 page)

He was using the past tense, I noticed, and I felt a wave of pity
for all he was going through.

"Sometimes," he said. "I get so discouraged."

We walked up the rest of the block and turned right onto Eastern
Shore Drive. Mansions of every conceivable style lined both sides of
the wide road. Huge brick piles with turrets and towers, half-timbered
Tudor structures, Moorish fantasies, giant stone palaces with
stained-glass windows—money expressing itself unselfconsciously and
unfettered by taste. Competing with one another, the people who built
these enormous structures had bought grandeur by the yard.

Eventually, I pointed out Tom Pasmore's house. It was on the west
side of the drive, not the lake side, and dark green vines grew up the
gray stone of its facade. As always in Lamont von Heilitz's day, the
curtains were closed against the light.

We went up the walk to the front door, and I rang the bell. We
waited for what seemed a long time. John Ransom gave me the look he'd
give a student who did not hand in a paper on time. I pressed the bell
again. Maybe twenty seconds passed.

"Are you sure His Lordship is up?"

"Hold on," I said. Inside the house, footsteps came toward the door.

After shooting me another critical glance, John pulled his damp
handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the back of his neck and his
forehead. The lock clicked. He squared his shoulders and worked his
face into a pretty good imitation of a smile. The door swung open, and
Tom Pasmore stood on the other side of the screen, blinking and smiling
back. He was wearing a pale blue suit with a double-breasted vest still
partially unbuttoned over a snowy white shirt and a dark blue silk tie.
Comb marks separated his damp hair. He looked tired and a little out of
focus.

Ransom said, "Hey, big fella!" His voice was too loud. "You had us
worried!"

"Tim and John, what a pleasure," said Tom, He was fumbling with the
buttons of the vest as his eyes traveled back and forth between us.
"Isn't this something?" He pushed the screen door open, and John Ransom
had to step backward to move around it. Still moving around the screen
door on the expanse of the front step, Ransom stuck out his right hand.
Tom took it and said, "Well, just imagine."

"It's been a long time," John Ransom said. "Too long."

"Come on in," Tom said, and dropped backward into the relative
darkness of the house. I could smell traces of the soap and shampoo
from his shower as I stepped into the house. Low lamps glowed here and
there, on tables and on the walls. The familiar clutter filled the
enormous room. I moved away from the door to let John Ransom come in.

"You're very good to agree to—" Ransom stopped talking as he finally
saw what the ground floor of Tom Pasmore's house really looked like. He
stood with his mouth open for a moment, then recovered himself. "To
agree to see me. It means a lot to me, all the more since I gather from
Tim that what you can tell me is, ah, rather on the personal side—"

He was still taking in the interior, which would have matched none
of his expectations. Lamont von Heilitz, the previous owner of Tom's
house, had turned most of the ground floor into a single enormous room
filled with file cases, stacks of books and newspapers, tables strewn
with the details of whatever murder was on his mind at the moment, and
couches and chairs that seemed randomly placed. Tom Pasmore had changed
the room very little. The curtains were still always drawn;
old-fashioned upright lamps and green-shaded library lamps still burned
here and there around the room, shedding warm illumination on the
thousands of books ranged in dark wooden cases along the walls and on
the dining table at the rear of the room. Tall stereo speakers stood
against the walls, connected to shelves of complicated audio equipment.
Compact discs leaned against one another like dominoes on half a dozen
bookshelves, and hundreds of others had been stacked into tilting piles
on the floor.

Tom said, "I know this place looks awfully confusing at first
glance, but there is, I promise you, a comfortable place to sit down at
the other end of the room." He gestured toward the confusion. "Shall
we?"

John Ransom was still taking in the profusion of filing cabinets and
office furniture. Tom struck off through the maze.

"Say, I know I haven't seen you since school," said John Ransom,
"but I've been reading about you in the papers, and that was an amazing
job you did on Whitney Walsh's murder. Amazing. You put it all together
from here, huh?"

"Right in this house," Tom said. He motioned for us to sit on two
couches placed at right angles to a glass coffee table stacked with
books. An ice bucket, three glasses, a jug of water, and various
bottles stood in the middle of the table. "Everything was right there
in the newspapers. Anyone could have seen it, and sooner or later
someone else would have."

"Yeah, but haven't you done the same thing lots of times?" John
Ransom sat facing a paneled wall on which hung half a dozen paintings,
and I took the couch on the left side of the table. Ransom was eyeing
the bottles. Tom seated himself in a matching chair across the table
from me.

"Now and then, I manage to point out something other people missed."
Tom looked extremely uncomfortable. "John, I'm very sorry about what
happened to your wife. What a terrible business. Have the police made
any progress?"

"I wish I could say yes."

"How is your wife doing? Do you see signs of improvement?"

"No," Ransom said, staring at the ice bucket and the bottles.

"I'm so sorry." Tom paused. "You must be in the mood for a drink.
Can I get anything for you?"

Ransom said he would take vodka on the rocks, and Tom leaned over
the table and used silver tongs to drop ice cubes into a thick low
glass before filling the glass nearly to the top with vodka. I was
watching him act as if there was no more on his mind than making John
Ransom comfortable, and I wondered if he would make a drink for
himself. I knew, as Ransom did not, that Tom had been out of bed for no
more than half an hour.

During the course of telephone conversations in the middle of the
night that sometimes lasted for two and three hours, I had sometimes
imagined that Tom Pasmore started drinking when he got out of bed and
stopped only when he managed to get back into it. He was the loneliest
person I had ever met.

Tom's mother had been a weepy drunk all during his childhood, and
his father—Victor Pasmore, the man he had thought was his father—had
been distant and short-tempered. Tom had known Lamont von Heilitz, his
biological father, only a short time before von Heilitz was murdered as
a result of the only investigation the two of them had conducted
together. Tom had found his father's body upstairs in this house. That
investigation had made Tom Pasmore famous at the age of seventeen and
left him with two fortunes, but it froze him into the life he still
had. He lived in his father's house, he wore his father's clothes, he
continued his father's work. He had drifted through the local branch of
the University of Illinois, where he wrote a couple of monographs—one
about the death of the eighteenth-century poet-forger Thomas
Chatterton, the other about the Lindbergh kidnapping—that caused a stir
in academic circles. He began law school at Harvard in the year that an
English graduate student there was arrested for murder after being
found unconscious in a Cambridge motel bedroom with the corpse of his
girlfriend. Tom talked to people, thought about things, and presented
the police with evidence that led to the freeing of the student and the
arrest of a famous English professor. He refused the offer from the
parents of the freed student to pay his tuition through the rest of law
school. When reporters began following him to his classes, he dropped
out and fled back home. He could only be what he was—he was too good at
it to be anything else.

I think that was when he started drinking.

Given this history, he still looked surprisingly like the young man
he had been: he had all his hair, and, unlike John Ransom, he had not
put on a great deal of weight. Despite the old-fashioned, dandyish
elegance of his clothes, Tom Pasmore looked more like a college
professor than Ransom did. The badges of his drinking, the bags under
his eyes, the slight puffiness of his cheeks, and his pallor might have
been the result of nothing more than a few too many late nights in a
library carrel.

He paused with his hands on the vodka bottle and a new glass,
regarding me with his exhausted blue eyes, and I knew that he had seen
exactly what was going through my mind.

"Feel like a drink?" He knew all about my history.

John Ransom looked at me speculatively.

"Any soft drink," I said.

"Ah," Tom said. "We'll have to go into the kitchen for that. Why
don't you come with me, so you can see what I've got in the fridge?"

I followed him to the back of the room and the kitchen door. The
kitchen too had been left as it had been in Lamont von Heilitz's time,
with high wooden cupboards, double copper sinks, wainscoting and weak,
inadequate lighting. The only modern addition was a gleaming white
refrigerator nearly the size of a grand piano. A long length of open
cupboards had been cut away to make room for it. Tom swung open the
wide door of this object —it was like opening the door of a carriage.

The bottom shelf of the otherwise nearly empty refrigerator held at
least a dozen cans each of Coke and Pepsi and a six-pack of club soda
in bottles. I chose club soda. Tom dropped ice into a tall glass and
poured in the club soda.

"Did you ask him about his wife's car?"

"He said he supposes that it'll turn up."

"What does he think happened to it?"

"It might have been stolen from in front of the St. Alwyn."

Tom pursed his lips together. "Sounds plausible."

"Did you know that his father owned the St. Alwyn?" I asked.

Tom raised his eyes to mine, and I saw the glimmer of something like
a sparkle in them. "Did he, now?" he said, in such a way that I could
not tell whether or not he had already known it. Before I was able to
ask, a yelp of pain or astonishment came from the other room,
accompanied by a thud and another yelp, this time clearly one of pain.

I laughed, for I suddenly knew exactly what had happened. "John
finally saw your paintings," I said.

Tom lifted his eyebrows. He gestured ironically toward the door.

When we came out of the kitchen, John Ransom was standing on the
other side of the table, looking at the paintings that hung on that
wall. Ransom was bending down to rub his knee, and his mouth was open.
He turned to stare at us. "Did you hurt yourself?" Tom asked.

"You own a Maurice Denis," John Ransom said, straightening up. "You
own a Paul Ranson, for God's sakes!"

"You're interested in their work?"

"My God, that's a beautiful Bonnard up there," John said. He shook
his head. "I'm just astounded. Yes, well, my wife and I own a lot of
work by the Nabis, but we don't—"
But
we don't have anything as good as
that
, he had been going to say.

"I'm particularly fond of that one," said Tom. "You collect the
Nabis?"

"It's so rare to see them in other people's houses…" For a moment
Ransom gaped at the paintings. The Bonnard was a small oil painting of
a nude woman drying her hair in a shaft of sunlight.

"I don't go into other people's houses very much," Tom said. He
moved around to his chair, sat down, regarded the bottles and the ice
bucket for a moment, and then poured himself a drink of another, less
expensive brand of vodka than the one he had given John Ransom. His
hand was completely steady. He took a small, businesslike sip. Then he
smiled at me. I sat down across from him. A small spot of color like
rouge appeared in both of his cheeks.

"I wonder if you've ever thought about selling anything," John said,
and turned expectantly around.

"No, I've never thought about that," Tom said.

"Would you mind if I asked where you found some of this work?"

"I found them exactly where you found them," Tom said. "On the back
wall of this room."

"How could you—?"

"I inherited them when Lamont von Heilitz left me this house in his
will. I suppose he bought them in Paris, sometime in the twenties." For
a second more he indulged John Ransom, who looked as if he wanted to
pull out a magnifying glass and scrutinize the brush strokes on a
four-foot-square Maurice Denis, and then he said, "I gathered that you
were interested in talking about the Blue Rose murders."

Ransom's head snapped around.

"I read what the
Ledger
had to say about the assault on your wife.
You must want to learn whatever you can about the earlier cases."

"Yes, absolutely," Ransom said, finally leaving the painting and
walking a little tentatively back to his seat.

"Now that Lamont von Heilitz's name has come up, it may be as well
to go into it."

Ransom slid onto the other couch. He cleared his throat, and when
Tom said nothing, swallowed some of his vodka before beginning. "Did
Mr. von Heilitz ever do any work on the Blue Rose murders?"

"It was a matter of timing," Tom said. He glanced at the glass he
had set on the table, but did not reach for it. "He was busy with cases
all over the country. And then, it seemed to come to a neat conclusion.
I think it bothered him, though. Some of the pieces didn't seem to fit,
and by the time I got to know him, he was just beginning to think about
it again. And then I met someone at Eagle Lake who had been connected
to the case."

He bent forward, lifted his glass and took another measured sip. I
had never had the good luck to meet Lamont von Heilitz, but as I looked
at Tom Pasmore, I had the uncanny feeling that I was seeing the old
detective before me. John Ransom might have been seeing him, too, from
the sudden tension in his posture.