The Throat (24 page)

A college professor in
Boston who had written a book about mass murderers and serial killers
said—presumably via telephone to the offices of the
Ledger
—that serial
killers "tended to be either of the disorganized or the organized
type," and that Walter Dragonette seemed to him "a perfect example of
the disorganized type." Disorganized serial killers, said the
professor, acted on impulse, were usually white male loners in their
thirties with blue-collar jobs and a history of failed relationships.
(Walter Dragonette, in spite of the professor's confidence, had a
white-collar job and had known exactly one supremely successful
relationship in all his life, that with his mother.) Disorganized
serial killers liked to keep the evidence around the house. They were
easier to catch than the organized killers, who chose their victims
carefully and covered their tracks.

And how, the
Ledger
asked,
could anyone do what Walter Dragonette had done? How could Lizzy Borden
have done it? How could Jack the Ripper have done it? And how, for the
Ledger
writers did remember
this name, could Ed Gein have dug those
women out of their graves and skinned their bodies? If the professor in
Boston could not answer this question—for wasn't this question the
essential question?—then the
Ledger
needed more experts. It had no
trouble finding them.

A psychologist at a state
mental hospital in Chicago offered the suggestion that "none of these
people will win any mental health awards," and that they cut up their
victims' bodies to conceal what they had done. He blamed "violent
pornography" for their actions.

A criminologist in San
Francisco who had written a "true crime" book about a serial killer in
California blamed the anonymity of modern life. A Millhaven priest
blamed the loss of traditional religious values. A University of
Chicago sociologist blamed the disappearance of the traditional family.
The clinical director of the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital told the
Ledger
that serial killers
"confused sex and aggression." The head of a
crime task force in New York blamed the relaxation of sexual mores
which had made homosexuality and "perversion in general" more
acceptable. Someone blamed sunspots, and someone else blamed "the
climate of economic despair that is all around us now."

A woman holding her
two-year-old daughter on her shoulders in the crowd that had already
collected in front of the white house on North Twentieth Street thought
that Walter Dragonette did it because he wanted to be famous, and that
the plan was going to work out just fine: "Well, take me, I came down
here, didn't I? This is history, right here. In six months, everything
you see in front of you is going to be a miniseries on Channel Two."

These were the
Ledger's
answers to the question of how anyone could do the things Walter
Dragonette had confessed to doing.

One article claimed that
"the eyes of the world, from Akron to Australia, from Boise to Britain,
from Cleveland to Canton" had "turned toward a white, one-story house
in Millhaven." Neighbors were talking to reporters from the BBC and
news teams from three networks. One Philadelphia reporter was heard
asking a resident of North Twentieth Street to describe what he called
"the stench of death." And here came the answer, written down by two
reporters: "A real bad stink, real bad."

Another article reported
that 961 men, women, and children were missing in the state of
Illinois. A spokesman for the FBI said that if you were over
twenty-one, you had the right to be missing.

Arkham College officials
warned their students to be careful about crime on campus, although
students interviewed felt little concern for their own safety. "It's
just too strange to worry about," said Shelley Manigault of Ladysmith,
Wisconsin. "To me, it's a lot more frightening to think about the
position of women in society than about what one twisted white guy does
when he's inside his house."

The
Ledger
reported that
Walter Dragonette had been friendless in high school, where his grades
had varied from A to F. Classmates recalled that his sense of humor had
been "weird." He had been fascinated with the Blue Rose murders and had
once run for class treasurer under the name Blue Rose, earning a
schoolwide total of two votes. In the sixth grade, he had collected the
corpses of small animals from the streets and empty lots and
experimented with ways of cleaning their skeletons. In the eighth
grade, he had privately exhibited in a plush-lined cigar box an object
he had claimed to be the skeletal hand of a five-year-old boy. Those
who had seen the object declared that it had been a monkey's paw. For
several days on end, he had pretended to be blind, coming to school
with dark glasses and a white cane, and once he had nearly managed to
persuade his homeroom teacher that he had amnesia. Twice during the
time that he attended Carl Sandburg High School, Dragonette had used
chalk to draw the outlines of bodies on the floor of the gymnasium. He
told Detective Fontaine and Sergeant Hogan that the outlines were of
the bodies of people he had actually killed—killed while he was in high
school.

For Dragonette claimed to
have killed a small child named Wesley Drum in 1979, after having sex
with him in a vacant lot. He said that when he was a sophomore at Carl
Sandburg, the year he ran for class treasurer under the name Blue Rose,
he had killed a woman who picked him up while he was
hitchhiking—stabbed her with an army surplus knife while she stopped at
a red light. He could not remember her name, but he knew that he had
stuck her right in the chest, and then stuck her a couple more times
while she was still getting used to the idea. He grabbed her purse and
jumped out of the car a couple of seconds after the light changed. He
was sorry that he had stolen the lady's purse, and he wanted it known
that he would be happy to return the $14.78 it had contained to her
family, if someone would give him the right name and address.

Both of these stories
matched unsolved murders in Millhaven. Five-year-old Wesley Drum had
been found dead and mutilated (though still in possession of both
hands) in an empty lot behind Arkham College in 1979, and in 1980,
Walter Dragonette's fifteenth year, Annette Bulmer, a
thirty-four-year-old mother of two dying from numerous deep stab
wounds, had been pulled from a stalled car at the intersection of
Twelfth Street and Arkham Boulevard.

Walter readily gave the
police what the
Ledger
called
"assistance" on "several prominent recent
cases."

I continued to leaf through
the paper as I finished my breakfast, realizing that now I was free to
do whatever I liked. April Ransom was recovering, and her confessed
attacker had been arrested. A sick little monster who called himself
the Meat Man had diverted himself from his amusements (or whatever it
was when you killed people and had sex with their corpses) long enough
to reenact the Blue Rose murders. No retired soldier in his sixties,
back from Korea and Germany, patrolled Livermore Avenue in search of
fresh victims: no murderer's rose garden grew in the backyard of a
well-kept little house in Pigtown. The past was still buried with the
rest of my family in Pine Knoll.

I folded the paper and waved
to the waitress. When she came over to my booth, I told her that I
could see why she'd been having trouble concentrating on her work this
morning.

"Well, yeah," she said,
warming up. "Things like that don't happen in Millhaven—they're not
supposed
to."

The machine answered when I
called Ransom from the St. Alwyn's lobby, so he was either still asleep
or already back at the hospital.

I walked back to the
Pontiac, made a U-turn on Livermore Avenue, and drove back beneath the
viaduct toward Shady Mount.

Because I didn't want to be
bothered with a meter, I turned into one of the side streets on the
other side of Berlin Avenue and parked in front of a small redbrick
house. A big flag hung from an upstairs window and a yellow ribbon had
been tied into a grandiose bow on the front door. I walked across the
empty street in the middle of the block, wondering if April Ransom had
already opened her eyes and asked what had happened to her.

It was my last afternoon in
Millhaven, I realized.

For a moment, opening the
visitors' door, I wondered what name I would give to my unfinished
book; and then, for the first time in a long dry time, the book jumped
into life within me—I wanted to write a chapter about Charlie
Carpenter's childhood. It would be a lengthy tour of hell. For the
first time in months, I saw my characters in color and three
dimensions, breathing city-flavored air and scheming for the things
they thought they needed.

These fantasies occupied me
pleasantly as I waited for, and then rode up in, the elevator. I barely
noticed the two policemen who stepped inside the elevator behind me.
The radios on their belts crackled as we ascended and stepped out of
the elevator on the third floor. It was like having an escort. As burly
and contained as a pair of Clydesdales, the two policemen moved around
me and then turned the corner toward the nurses' station.

I rounded the corner a few
seconds behind them. The policemen turned right at the nurses' station
and went toward April Ransom's room through a surprising number of
people. Uniformed police, plainclothes detectives, and what looked like
a few civilians formed a disorganized crowd that extended from the
station all the way around the curve to Mrs. Ransom's room. The scene
reminded me uncomfortably of the photograph of Walter Dragonette's
front lawn. All these men seemed to be talking to one another in little
groups. An air of exhaustion and frustration, distinct as cigar smoke,
hung over all of them.

One or two cops glanced at
me as I came nearer to the nurses' station. Officer Mangelotti was
seated in a wheelchair before the counter. A white bandage stained red
over his ear wrapped around his head, leaving his face so exposed it
looked peeled. A man with a monkish hairline knelt in front of the
wheelchair, speaking quietly. Mangelotti looked up and saw me. The man
in front of him stood up and turned around to show me his saggy clown's
face and drooping nose. It was Detective Fontaine.

His face twitched in a
sorrowful smile. "Someone I know wants to meet you," he said. Plummy
pouches hung underneath his eyes.

A uniformed policeman nearly
seven feet tall moved toward me out of the corridor leading to April
Ransom's room. "Sir, unless you are on the medical staff of this
hospital you will have to vacate this area." He began shooing me away,
blocking me from seeing whatever was going on behind him. "Immediately,
sir."

"Leave him be, Sonny,"
Fontaine said.

The enormous cop turned to
make sure he had heard correctly. It was like watching the movement of
a large blue tree. Behind him two men pushed a gurney out of one of the
rooms along the curve of the corridor. A body covered with a white
sheet lay on the gurney. Three other policemen, two men in white coats,
and a mustached man in a lightweight blue pinstriped suit followed the
gurney out of the room. The last man looked familiar. Before the blue
tree cut off my view, I caught a glimpse of Eliza Morgan leaning
against the inner wall of the circular corridor. She moved away from
the wall as the men pushed the gurney past her.

Paul Fontaine came up beside
the big officer. He looked like the other man's monkey. "Leave us
alone, Sonny."

The big cop cleared his
throat with a noise that sounded like a drain unblocking. He said,
"Yes, sir," and walked away.

"I told you police should
never go to hospitals, didn't I?" His eyes looked poached above the
purple bags, and I remembered that he had been up all night long, first
here, then at North Twentieth Street, and then back here again. "Do you
know what happened?" A kind of animation moved in his face, but at a
level beneath the skin, so that whatever he was feeling showed only as
a momentary flash in his sagging eyes.

"I thought I'd find John
Ransom here."

"We got him at home. I
thought you were staying with him."

"My God," I said. "Tell me
what happened."

His eyes widened, and his
face went still. "You don't know?" The men in white coats pushed the
gurney past us, and three policemen came along behind them. Fontaine
and I looked down at the small covered body. I remembered Eliza Morgan
leaning against the wall, and suddenly I understood whose body it was.
For a moment my stomach turned
gray
—it
felt as though everything from
the bottom of my rib cage to my bowels had gone flat and dead, mushy.

"Somebody—?" I tried again.
"Somebody killed April Ransom?"

Fontaine nodded. "Have you
seen the newspaper this morning? Watch any morning news? Listen to the
radio?"

"I read the paper," I said.
"I know about that man, ah, Walter Dragonette. You arrested him."

"We arrested him," Fontaine
said. He made it sound like a sad joke. "We did. We just didn't do it
soon enough."

"But he confessed to
attacking Mrs. Ransom. In the
Ledger
—"

"He didn't confess to
attacking her," Fontaine said. "He confessed to killing her."

"But Mangelotti and Eliza
Morgan were in that room."

"The nurse went for a
cigarette right after she came on duty."

"What happened to
Mangelotti?"

"While Mrs. Morgan was out
of the room, our friend Walter sauntered past the nurses' station
without anybody seeing him, ducked into the room, and clobbered
Mangelotti on the side of the head with a hammer. Or something
resembling a hammer. Our stalwart officer was seated beside the bed at
the time, reading entries in his notebook. Then our friend beat Mrs.
Ransom to death with the same hammer." He looked up at me and then over
at Mangelotti. He looked as if he had bitten into something sour. "This
time, he didn't bother signing the wall. And then he walked away past
the patients' lounge and went downstairs and got into his car to go to
the hardware store for a hacksaw blade." He looked at me again. Anger
and disgust burned in his tired eyes. "
He
had to wait for the hardware
store to open, so
we
had to
wait. In the meantime, the nurse left the
patients' lounge and found the body. She yelled for the doctors, but it
was too late."