The Throat (29 page)

Ransom punched a button, and
trumpet music filled the car —Clifford Brown playing "Joy Spring." I
looked at Ransom in surprise, and he said, "The Arkham College radio
station programs four hours of jazz every day." He slumped back into
his seat. He had just wanted to stop hearing about Walter Dragonette.

I turned the corner and
drove past the entrance to Armory Place. Clifford Brown, dead for more
than thirty years, uttered a phrase that obliterated death and time
with a confident, offhand eloquence. The music nearly lifted me out of
the depression Walter Dragonette had evoked. I remembered hearing the
same phrase all those years ago in Camp Crandall.

Ransom turned his head to
look at the big crowd filling half of Armory Place. Three times as many
people as had been there earlier covered the steps of police
headquarters and the plaza. Signs punched up and down. One of them read
VASS MUST GO
. An amplified voice bawled that it was sick
of living in
fear.

I asked John Ransom who Vass
was.

"Police chief," he mumbled.

"Mind if we take a little
detour?" I asked.

Ransom shook his head.

I left the yelling crowd
behind me and continued on to Horatio Street, on the far side of the
Ledger
building and the Center
for the Performing Arts. Horatio Street
led us through a district given over to two-story brick warehouses, gas
stations, liquor stores, and two brave little art galleries that seemed
to be trying to turn the area into another Soho.

Clifford Brown played on,
and the sunlight dazzled off the glass windows and the tops of cars.
Ransom sat back in his seat without speaking, his right hand curled
over his mouth, his eyes open but unseeing. At the entrance to the
bridge, a sign announced that vehicles weighing over one ton were
barred. I rolled across the rumbling old bridge and stopped on its far
side. John Ransom looked as if he were sleeping with his eyes open. I
got out and looked down at the river and its banks. Between high
straight concrete walls, the black river moved sluggishly toward Lake
Michigan. It was about fifteen or twenty feet deep and so dark that it
could have been bottomless. Muddy banks littered with tires and rotting
wooden crates extended from the concrete walls to the water.

Sixty years ago, this had
been an Irish neighborhood, filled with the rowdy, violent men who had
built roads and installed trolley tracks; for a brief time, the
tenements had housed the men who worked in the warehouses across the
river; for an even briefer time, students from Arkham and the local
university campus had taken them over for their cheap rents. The crime
they attracted had driven all the students away, and now these blocks
were inhabited by people who threw their garbage and old furniture out
onto the streets. The Green Woman Taproom had been affected by the same
blight.

The tavern was a small
two-story building with a slanting roof built on a concrete slab that
jutted out over the river's east bank. Asymmetrical additions had been
built onto its back end. Before the construction of Armory Place, the
bar had been a hangout for civil servants and off-duty cops. During
summers, hopeful versions of Irish food had been served at round white
tables overlooking the river—"Mrs. O'Reilly's lamb shanks" and "Paddy
Murphy's Irish Stew." Now the tables were gone, and spray-painted
graffiti drooled across the empty concrete,
SKUZ SUCKS. ROMI
22. KILL
MEE DEATH
. A Pforzheimer beer sign hung crookedly in a window
zigzagged
with strips of tape. On a bitter winter night, people had laughed and
drunk and argued in there while twenty feet away, someone murdered a
woman holding an infant. "Wasn't it a crazy story?" said a voice at my
shoulder. Startled, I jumped and looked around to see John Ransom
standing just behind me. The car gaped open at the side of the road.
The two of us were alone in the sunny desolation. Ransom looked
ghostly, insubstantial, his face bleached by the light and his pale
clothing. For a second I thought he meant that William Damrosch's story
was crazy, and I nodded.

"That lunatic," he said,
looking at the garbage strewn along the baked riverbank. "He saw my
wife in
his broker's office
!"
He moved forward and stared down at the
river. The black water was moving so slowly it seemed to be still. A
shine coated it like a skin of ice.

I looked at Ransom. Some
faint color had come back to his face, but he still looked on the verge
of disappearing. "To tell you the truth, I'm still bothered that he
heard about April's murder before he confessed. And he didn't know that
Mangelotti had been hit on the head with something instead of being
stabbed."

"He forgot. Besides,
Fontaine didn't seem to mind."

"That bothers me, too," I
said. "Fontaine and Hogan want to get a lot of black marker on that
board in the lounge."

Ransom's face went white
again. He moved back toward the car and sat down on the passenger seat.
His hands were shaking. His whole face worked as he tried to swallow.
He glanced up at me sidelong, as if he were checking to see if I were
really taking all of this in. "Could we get back to my house, please?"

He said nothing at all
during the rest of the drive to Ely Place.

Inside, John pushed the
playback button on his answering machine. Out of the harsh, dissolving
sunlight, he looked more substantial, less on the verge of
disappearance.

He straightened up when the
tape had finished rewinding, and his eyes swam up to meet mine. The
true lines of his face— the leaner, more masculine face I had seen
years ago-—rose through the cushion of flesh that had disguised them.

"One of those messages is
from me," I said. "I called you here before going over to the hospital."

He nodded.

I went through the arch into
the living room and sat down on the couch facing the Vuillard painting.
The first caller, I remembered, had left a message yesterday—Ransom had
not been able to check his machine since we had left the house together
yesterday afternoon. A tinny but clearly audible voice said, "John?
Mister Ransom? Are you home?" I leaned over the table and picked up one
of the Vietnam books and opened it at random. "I guess not," the voice
said. "Ah, this is Byron Dorian, and I apologize for calling, but I
really want to find out how April, how Mrs. Ransom is doing. Shady
Mount won't even confirm that she's there. I know how hard this must be
for you, but could you call me when you get back? It's important to me.
Or I'll call you. I just want to hear something—not knowing is so hard.
Okay. Bye."

Another voice. "Hello John,
this is Dick Mueller. Everybody down at Barnett is wondering about
April and hoping that there's been some improvement. We all sympathize
completely with what you're going through, John." Ransom let go of an
enormous sigh. "Please give me a ring here at the office or at home to
let me know the state of play. My home number is 474-0653. Hope to hear
from you soon. Bye now."

I bet the Meat Man's broker
had gone through a queasy morning, once he sat down to his scrambled
eggs with his copy of the
Ledger
.

The next call was mine from
the St. Alwyn, and I tried to block out that thicker, deeper, wheezier
imitation of my real voice by focusing on the paintings in front of me.

Then a voice much deeper and
wheezier than mine erupted through the little speakers. "John? John?
What's going on? I'm supposed to be going on a
trip
. I don't
understand—I don't understand where my daughter is. Can't you tell me
something? Call me back or get over here soon, will you. Where the hell
is
April?
" Loud breathing
blasted through the tape hiss as the caller
seemed to wait for an answer. "Goddamn it anyhow," he said, and
breathed for another ten seconds. The caller banged the receiver on the
body of the telephone a few times before he succeeded in hanging up.

"Oh, God," Ransom said.
"Just what I need. April's father. I told you about him—Alan Brookner?
Can you believe this? He's supposed to be teaching his course on
Eastern Religions next year, as well as the course on the Concept of
the Sacred that we do together." He put his hands on top of his head,
as if he were trying to keep it from exploding upward like a gusher,
and wandered back through the arch.

I put the book back on the
coffee table.

Still holding down the top
of his head, Ransom released an enormous sigh. "I guess I'd better call
him back. We might have to go over there."

I said that was okay with me.

"In fact, maybe I'll let you
call back these other people, too, after we're done with Alan."

"Anything, fine," I said.

"I'd better get back to
Alan," John said. He lowered his hands and returned to the telephone.

He dialed and then fidgeted
impatiently during a long series of rings. Finally he said, "Okay," to
me and turned to face the wall, tilting his head back. "Alan, this is
John. I just got your call… Yes, I can hear that… No, April isn't here,
Alan, she had to go away. Look, do you want me to come over?… Sure, no
problem, I'll be right there. Calm down, Alan, I'll be coming up the
walk in a minute or two."

He hung up and came back
into the living room, looking so harassed that I wanted to order him to
have a drink and go to bed. He had not even had breakfast, and now it
was nearly two o'clock. "I'm sorry about this, but let's get it over
with," he said.

"Aren't you going to drive?"
I asked him when he went past the Pontiac and continued walking east on
Ely Place.

"Alan only lives two blocks
away, and even though we got lucky just now, you can never get a
parking place around here. People are ready to kill each other for
parking places." He glanced back at me, and I sped up and joined him so
that we were striding along together.

"A guy across from the
hospital came out and yelled at me this morning for parking in front of
his house," I said. "I guess I'm lucky he didn't shoot."

Ransom grunted and jerked
his thumb rightward as we got near the next corner. The collar of his
white shirt was dark with moisture, and the front of his shirt stuck to
his chest in amoeba-shaped damp patches.

"He was especially indignant
because someone sat down on his lawn and then got up and headed for the
hospital."

Ransom gave me a startled
look, like a deer spotting a hunter in the forest. "Well." He looked
forward again and plunged along. "I'm sorry to put you through all this
aggravation."

"I thought Alan Brookner was
a hero of yours."

"He's been having a certain
amount of trouble."

"He doesn't even know that
April was injured?"

He nodded and stuffed his
hands in his pockets. "I'd appreciate it if you'd sort of go along with
me on this one. I can't tell him that April is dead."

"Isn't he going to read it
in the newspapers?"

"Not likely," John said.
"This is it."

The first house on the east
side of the block was a substantial three-story red brick Georgian
building with a fanlight over the door and symmetrical windows in
decorative embrasures. Tall oak trees grew on the lawn, and the grass
was wild and long, overgrown with knee-high weeds. "I keep forgetting
to have something done about the grass," John said, sounding as if he
wanted to asphalt the lawn. Rolls of yellowing newspaper in rubber
bands peeked out of the weeds, some of them so weathered they looked
like the artificial logs in gas fireplaces.

"It won't be too clean in
there," he told me. "We hired a maid for him last year, but she quit
just before April went into the hospital, and I haven't been…" He
shrugged.

"Doesn't he ever go
outside?" I asked.

Ransom shook his head and
pounded on the door again, then flattened his hands over his face.
"He's having one of his
days
.
I should have known." He brought a heavy
bunch of keys out of his pocket and searched through them before
finding the one he inserted into the lock. He opened the door. "Alan?
Alan, I'm here, and I brought a friend."

He stepped inside and
motioned for me to follow him.

I waded through the unopened
envelopes that littered the blue elephant-foot Persian rug in the
entry. Untidy heaps of books and magazines covered all but a narrow
footpath going up the bottom steps of a curving staircase. John stooped
to pick up a handful of letters and carried them into the next room.
"Alan?" He shook his head in frustration and tossed the letters onto a
brown leather chesterfield.

Large oil paintings of
families arranged before English country houses hung on the long wall
opposite me. Rows of books filled the other three walls, and unjacketed
books lay over the larger rose-colored Indian carpet that rolled across
the room. Splayed books, torn pages of typing paper, and plates of
congealed fried eggs, curling slices of bread, and charred hot dogs
covered the broad mantel and a wide leather-topped table in front of
the chesterfield. All the lights burned. Something in the room made my
eyes sting as if I'd been swimming in an overchlorinated pool.

"What a mess," John said.
"Everything would be fine if the maid hadn't quit—look, he's been
ripping up a manuscript."

Big fluffy balls of gray
dust fluttered away from his shoes. He pushed open a window set into
the bookshelves on the side of the room.

I caught a faint but
definite smell of excrement.

A big wheezy old man's
baritone boomed out, "John? Is that you, John?"

Ransom turned wearily to me
and raised his voice. "I'm downstairs!"

"Downstairs?" The old man
sounded like he had a built-in megaphone. "Did I call you?"