The Throat (28 page)

PF
: What do
you think she said to her friend Budge?

WD
: She never
told me, but she must have said something.

PF
: Because
Budge acted like she was afraid of you.

WD:
She
should have been afraid of me.

PF
: Walter,
did your mother ever find one of your trophies?

WD
: I said, I
don't want to talk about this.

PF
: But you
said it was time for everything to come out into the open. Tell me what
happened.

WD
: What?

PF:
You told
me about the mother who was dead on the riverbank. Now tell me about
your mother.

WD
:
(Inaudible.)

PF
: I know
this is hard to do, but I also know that you want to do it. You want me
to know everything, even this. Walter, what did your mother find?

WD
: It was a
kind of a diary. I used to hide it in a jacket in my closet—in the
inside pocket. She wasn't snooping or anything, she just wanted to take
the jacket to the cleaners. And she found the diary. It was kind of a
notebook. I had some things in there, and she asked me about them.

PF
: What kind
of things?

WD
: Like
initials. And some words like
tattoo
or
scar
. Stuff like
red hair
. One
of them said
bloody
towel
. She must have talked to
Budge Dewdrop about
it. She shouldn't have!

PF
: Did she
ask you about the diary?

WD
: Sure, of
course. But I never thought she believed me.

PF
: So she
was suspicious before that.

WD
: I don't
know. I just don't know.

PF
: Tell me
how your mother died, Walter

WD
: It
doesn't really matter anymore, does it? With all these other people, I
mean.

PF
: It
matters to you, and it matters to me. Tell me about it, Walter.

WD
: Well,
this is what happened. It was the day after she found my diary. When
she came home from work, she acted a little funny. I knew right away
what it meant. She'd been talking to somebody, and she was guilty about
that. I don't even know what she said, really, but I knew it had to do
with the diary. I made dinner, like I always did, and she went to bed
early instead of staying up and watching television with me. I was very
distressed, but I don't think I showed it. I stayed up late, though I
hardly understood what was going on in the movie, and I had two glasses
of Harvey's Bristol Cream, which is something I never did. Finally the
movie was over, even though I couldn't remember what happened in it. I
only watched it for Ida Lupino, really—I always liked Ida Lupino. I
washed my glass and turned off the lights and went upstairs. I was just
going to look in my mother's room before I went to bed. So I opened the
door and went inside her room. And it was so dark in there I had to go
up next to the bed to see her. I went right up next to her. And I said
to myself, if she wakes up, I'll just say good night and go to bed. And
I stood there next to her for a long time. I thought about everything.
I even thought about Mr. Lancer. If I hadn't had those two glasses of
Harvey's Bristol Cream, I don't think any of this would have happened.

PF
: Go on,
Walter. Do you have a handkerchief?

WD
: Of course
I have a handkerchief. I have a dozen handkerchiefs. It's okay, I mean,
I'm okay. Anyhow, I was standing next to my, ah, my mother. She was
really asleep. I didn't intend to do anything at all. And it didn't
feel like I
was
doing
anything. It was like nothing at all was
happening. I leaned over and pulled the extra pillow over her face. And
she didn't wake up, see? She didn't move at all. So nothing at all was
happening. And then I just pushed down on the pillow. And I closed my
eyes and I held the pillow down. And after a while I took it off and
went to bed. In my own bedroom. The next morning, I made us both
breakfast, but she wouldn't come when I said it was ready, so I went to
her room and found her in her bed, and I knew right away that she was
dead. Well, there it was. I called the police right from the bedroom.
And then I went into the kitchen and threw away the food and waited
until they came.

PF
: And when
the police came, what did you tell them about your mother's death?

WD
: I told
them she died in her sleep. And that was true.

PF:
But not
the whole truth, was it, Walter?

WD:
No. But I
hardly knew what the whole truth was.

PF
: I can see
that. Walter, we're going to take a break now, and I'm going to give
you a couple of minutes to be by yourself. Will you be all right?

WD
: Just let
me be by myself for a while, okay?

Fontaine pushed back his
chair and stood up. He nodded twice and turned away from Dragonette.

"Were you satisfied with
that, Mr. Ransom?" Wheeler asked. "Is there any doubt in your mind as
to the identity of your wife's murderer?"

"How could there be?" John
asked.

Paul Fontaine saved me from
speaking by opening the door and stepping inside the booth. "I think
that's all you'll have to watch, Mr. Ransom. Go home and get some rest.
If anything else turns up, we'll be in touch with you."

"At least," Wheeler said,
"you know why he killed your wife."

"He killed her because he
liked her," Ransom said. "She had the office next door to his
broker's." He sounded dumbfounded, almost stunned.

"That was good work, Paul,"
Wheeler said, standing up.

We all stood up. Fontaine
stepped out of the booth, and the rest of us followed him out into the
light of the corridor.

"You did a number on him,"
Monroe said.

Fontaine gave him a sad
smile. "I figure we'll have our charges ready by the end of the day. We
have to get this one wrapped up with something more than our usual
blinding speed, or the brass is going to have us cleaning toilets. I
hate to admit this, but my getting Walter to admit that he killed his
mother isn't going to mean anything to the lieutenant."

"Well, McCandless didn't
actually have a mother," Monroe said. "He came into the world via the
Big Bang Theory."

Fontaine stepped backward
and regarded Wheeler and Monroe with mock horror. "You two must have a
couple of unsolved murders left to mull over."

"There are no more unsolved
murders in Millhaven," said Monroe. "Haven't you heard?"

He grinned at Ransom and me
and turned away to walk back through the corridors to the Homicide
office. Wheeler went with him.

"Seems you have another fan
in Mr. Dragonette," Fontaine said to me.

"It's too bad he couldn't
tell us who the original Blue Rose was, while he was telling us who he
wasn't."

Out of the interrogation
room, Fontaine's skin appeared to be some shade halfway between yellow
and green, like an old piece of lettuce.

"Did the new cases ever
cause you to look up the records for the old ones?" I asked him.

"Blue Rose was way before my
time."

"Do you think I could look
at those records?" He was staring at me, and I said, "I'm still very
curious about the Blue Rose case."

"You do research for books
after
you write them?"

John Ransom turned
ponderously toward me. "What's the point?"

"Yes, what is the point, Mr.
Underhill?"

"It's a personal matter," I
said.

Fontaine blinked, twice,
very slowly. "Those records are a hot item. Well, since Mike Hogan is
such an admirer of yours, we might be able to permit that breach of our
normally fortresslike confidentiality. Of course, we have to
find
those
records first. I'll let you know. Thank you for giving us your time,
Mr. Ransom. be calling you as things progress."

Ransom waved at him and
began to move away toward the old part of the building.

Something else occurred to
me, and I asked Fontaine another question. "Did you ever find out the
name of the man was who was following John? The gray-haired man driving
the Lexus?"

Fontaine pursed his lips.
The lines around his eyes and mouth deepened, and the soft, saggy parts
of his face seemed to get even more mournful. "I forgot all about
that," he said. "Do you think there's any point in—?"

He smiled and shrugged, and
it seemed to me that part of the meaning of all this courtesy was that,
in some fashion or another, he had just lied to me. A second later, it
seemed impossible that Fontaine would deceive me about such a trivial
matter. I watched him walking back toward the interrogation room,
hunched over in his shapeless suit. What he had done in the
interrogation room had made me free again, but I did not feel free.

Fontaine looked sideways at
a tall policeman who came out into the corridor holding a typed form
and grabbed his elbow before he could get away. I remembered seeing the
younger man at the hospital that morning.

"Sonny, will you see that
these two gentlemen find their way downstairs to the parking lot? I'd
do it myself, but I have to get back to an interrogation."

"Yes, sir," Sonny said.
"There must be a couple hundred people on the steps. How do they get
those signs made so fast?"

"They don't have jobs."

Sonny laughed and advanced
toward us like Paul Bunyan moving in on a pine forest.

As we clanged down the metal
stairs in the old part of the building, Sonny told John that he was
sorry about his wife's death. "The whole department's sorry," he said.
"It was sort of like something you couldn't believe, when we first
heard it in the car this morning. I was with Detective Fontaine,
bringing that guy into the station."

I asked, "You were all in
the car together when the report came in about Mrs. Ransom?"

He turned around on the
stairs and looked up at me. "That's what I just said."

"You were driving, and you
could hear the report."

"Clear as a bell."

"What did it say?"

"For God's sake, Tim," said
John Ransom.

"I just want to know what
the report said."

"Well, the woman who called
it in was pretty excited." Sonny began moving more slowly down the
stairs, gripping the handrail and looking back over his shoulder. "She
said that Mrs. Ransom had been beaten to death in her room, excuse me,
sir."

"And did she say something
about Officer Mangelotti?"

"Yeah, she said he was
injured. She was new, and she must have been excited—she forgot to use
the codes."

"What the hell is this
about, Tim? I don't want to know about this," Ransom said. "What
difference does it make?"

"None, probably," I said.

"Dragonette spilled the
beans right away," Sonny said. "He told Fontaine, he says, If you guys
had worked faster, you could have saved her, too. Fontaine says, Are
you confessing to the murder of April Ransom, and he says, Of course. I
killed her, didn't I?"

He got to the bottom of the
stairs and strode down the corridor that had reminded me of an old
grade school when I had pursued Paul Fontaine into the building. Now
all of it felt tainted by what I had heard upstairs. The announcements
and papers on the bulletin board looked like brutal jokes,
GUNS
FOR
SALE GOOD & CHEAP. NEED A DIVORCE LAWYER WITH 20 YEARS POLICE
EXPERIENCE?
KARATE FOR
COPS.
Someone had already put up a
yellow sheet with these
words printed in block capitals at its top:

PEOPLE WALTER DRAGONETTE
SHOULD HAVE ASKED HOME
. The name of Millhaven's mayor, Merlin
Waterford, was first on the list.

"Here you go." Sonny held
the door to the parking lot open with an outstretched arm and backed
away so that he did not completely fill the frame. John Ransom squeezed
past him, grimacing, and I ducked through the space between the big cop
and the frame. Sonny smiled down at me.

"Take it easy, now," he
said, and let the door close behind us.

All the cops standing around
in the parking lot stared at us as we walked toward Ransom's car. The
sides of the buildings around us, red brick and gray stone, leaned
inward, and the watching policemen looked like caged animals.
Everything was grimy with age and suppressed violence.

Ransom collapsed into the
passenger seat. A few cops with cement faces started moving toward our
car. I got in and started the engine. Before I could put it in gear,
one of the cops appeared beside me and leaned in the open window. His
face was very close to mine. Whiskey blotches burned on his fleshy
cheeks, and his eyes were pale and dead.
Damrosch
, I thought. Two
others stood in back of the car.

"You had business here?" he
said.

"We were with Paul
Fontaine," I said.

"Were you." It was not a
question.

"This is John Ransom. The
husband of April Ransom."

The terrible face recoiled.
"Get out, get going." He stood up and stepped back and waved me away.
The cops behind the car melted away.

I drove through the jolting,
pitted passage between the high municipal buildings and turned back out
onto the street. Somewhere in the distance people were chanting. John
Ransom sighed. I looked at him, and he leaned forward to switch on the
radio. A bland radio voice said, "… accounts still coming in, and some
of these are conflicting, but there seems to be little doubt that
Walter Dragonette was responsible for at least twenty-five deaths.
Cannibalism and torture have been widely rumored. A spontaneous
demonstration is now in progress in front of police head—"