The Throat (32 page)

A younger blond male head,
as square as Jimbo's but attached to a sweating neck and a torso
wrapped in a tan safari jacket, buried the speaker's words under the
announcement that the Reverend Clement Moore, a longtime community
spokesman and civil rights activist, had called for a full-scale
investigation of the Millhaven Police Department and was demanding
reparations for the families of Walter Dragonette's victims. Reverend
Moore had announced that his "protest prayer meetings" would continue
until the resignations of Chief Vass, Commissioner Novotny, and Mayor
Waterford. In a matter of days, the Reverend Moore expected
that the protest prayer meetings would be joined by his fellow
reverend, Al Sharpton, of New York City.

Back to you in the
studio, Jimbo.

Jimbo tilted his massive
blond head forward and intoned: "And now for our daily commentary from
Joe Ruddier. What do you make of all this, Joe?"

I perked up as another
gigantic and familiar face crowded the screen. Joe Ruddier, another
longtime member of the All-Action News Team, had been instantly
celebrated for his absolute self-certainty and his passionate advocacy
of the local teams. His face, always verging toward bright red and now
a sizzling purple, had swollen to twice its earlier size. Ruddier had
evidently been promoted to political commentary.

"What do I make of all this?
I'll tell you what I make of this! I think it's a disgrace! What
happened to the Millhaven where a guy could go out for a beer an' a
bratwurst without stumbling over a severed head? And as for outside
agitators—"

I used the remote to mute
this tirade when the telephone rang.

As before, I picked it up to
keep the ringing from waking John Ransom, and as before, it was
necessary to establish my identity as an old friend from out of town
before the caller would reveal his own identity. But this time, I
thought I knew the caller's name as soon as a hesitant voice asked,
"Mr. Ransom? Could I speak to Mr. Ransom?" A name I had heard on the
answering machine came immediately into my mind.

I said that John was
sleeping and explained why a stranger was answering his telephone.

"Oh, okay," the caller said.
"You're staying with them for a while? You're a friend of the Ransoms?"

I explained that, too.

Long pause. "Well, could you
answer a question for me? You know what's happening with Mrs. Ransom
and everything, and I don't want to keep disturbing Mr. Ransom. He
never—I don't know if—…"

I waited for him to begin
again.

"I wonder if you could just
sort of fill me in, and everything."

"Is your name Byron Dorian?"

He gasped. "You've heard
about me?"

"I recognize your style," I
said. "You left a message on John's machine this morning."

"Oh! Hah!" He gave a weak
chuckle, as if he had caught me trying to amuse him. "So, what's
happening with April, with Mrs. Ransom? I'd really like to hear that
she's getting better."

"Would you mind telling me
your connection to the Ransoms?"

"My connection?"

"Do you work at Barnett?"

There came another uneasy
laugh. "Why, is something wrong?"

"Since I'm acting for the
family," I said, "I just want to know who I'm talking to."

"Well, sure. I'm a painter,
and Mrs. Ransom came to my studio when she found out what sort of work
I was doing, and she liked what she saw, so she commissioned me to do
two paintings for their bedroom."

"The nudes," I said.

"You've seen them? Mrs.
Ransom liked them a lot, and that was really flattering to me, you've
probably seen the rest of their collection, all that great work, you
know, it was like having a patron, well, a patron who was a friend…"

His voice trailed off.
Through one of the glass panels beside the front door I watched the
reporters tossing crumpled candy bar wrappers toward the hedge. Five or
six elderly people had taken up places on the steps and sidewalk across
the street and settled in to enjoy the show.

"Well," I said, "I'm afraid
I have bad news for you."

"Oh, no," said Dorian. .

"Mrs. Ransom died this
morning."

"Oh, no. Did she ever
recover consciousness?"

"No, she didn't. Byron, Mrs.
Ransom did not die of her injuries. Walter Dragonette managed to find
out that she was in Shady Mount and that her condition was improving,
and he got past the guard this morning and killed her."

"On the day he got arrested?"

I agreed that it seemed
almost unbelievable.

"Well, what—what kind of
world
is this? What is going
on? Did he know anything about her?"

"He barely knew her," I said.

"Because she was, this was
the most amazing woman, I mean there was so much
to
her, she was
incredibly kind and generous and sympathetic…" For a time I listened to
him breathing hard. "I'll let you go back to what you were doing. I
just never thought—"

"No, of course not," I said.

"It's too much."

The reporters were gathering
for another siege of the door, but I could not hang up on Byron Dorian
while his grief pummeled him, and I peered out the slit of window while
listening to his stifled moans and gasps.

When his voice was under
control again, he said, "You must think I'm really strange, carrying on
like this, but you never knew April Ransom."

"Why don't you tell me about
her sometime?" I asked. "I'd like to come to your studio and just have
a talk."

"That would probably help
me, too," he said, and gave me his phone number and an address on
Varney Street, in the sad part of town, once a Ukrainian settlement,
that surrounded the stadium.

I checked on the reporters,
who had settled down to enjoy their third or fourth meal of the day
under the appreciative eyes of a growing number of neighbors. Every now
and then, some resident of Ely Place tottered through the litter to
speak to Geoffrey Bough and his colleagues. I watched a bent old woman
with a laden silver tray make her way down the steps of the house
across the street, mount Ransom's lawn, and present the various
lounging men with cups of coffee.

From my post by the door I
saw Jimbo too retrace his steps, reminding his viewers of the extent
and nature of Walter Dragonette's crimes, the public outcry, Mayor
Waterford's assurances that all would continue to be done to ensure the
safety of the citizens. At some point I did not quite mark as I kept
watch on Bough and the others, April Ransom's murder passed into the
public domain—so John too missed the appearance on the television
screen of the
Ledger
photograph, minus himself, of his wife cradling a
gigantic trophy. I know approximately when this happened, four o'clock,
because at that time the gathering across the street suddenly doubled
in size.

All afternoon, I alternated
between watching television, poking through the gnostic gospels, and
peering out at the crowd and the waiting reporters. The faces of Walter
Dragonette's victims paraded across the screen, from cowboy-suited
little Wesley Drum on a rocking horse to huge leering Alfonzo Dakins
gripping a beer glass. Twenty-two victims had been identified, sixteen
of them black males. Hindsight gave their photographs a uniformly
doomed quality. The unknown man found in Dead Man's Tunnel was
represented by a question mark. April Ransom's
Ledger
photograph had
been cropped down to her brilliant face. For the few seconds in which
she filled the screen, I found that I was looking at the same person
whose picture I had seen earlier, but that my ideas about her had begun
to change: John's wife seemed smart and vibrant, not hard and
acquisitive, and so beautiful that her murder was another degree more
heartless than the others. Something had happened since the first time
I had seen the photograph: I had become, like John, Dick Mueller, and
Byron Dorian, one of her survivors.

A little while later, John
came charging down the stairs. Wrinkles crisscrossed his shirt and
trousers, and a long indentation from a sheet or pillowcase lay across
his left cheek like a scar. He was not wearing shoes, and his hair was
rumpled.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Some asshole threw stones
at my window," he said, and moved toward the door.

"Hold on," I said. "Did you
look out the window before you came down? Do you know what's going on
out there?"

"I don't care what's going
on," he said..

"Look," I said, and pointed
at the television. If he had bothered to look at the screen, he would
have seen the facade of his own house from the perspective of his front
lawn, where a good-looking young reporter with the strikingly literary
name of Isobel Archer was doing a stand-up on the career of the Meat
Man's most successful victim.

He shoved the door open.

Then for a second he froze,
surprised by the camera, the reporters, and the crowd. It must have
been like waking up to a bright light shining in his eyes. A low noise
of surprise and pleasure came from the people assembled on the sidewalk
and porches across the street. Ms. Archer smiled and thrust a
microphone into his face. "Mr. Ransom, what was your immediate reaction
to the news that Walter Dragonette had made a second, successful
attempt on your wife's life?"

"What?"

Geoffrey Bough and the
others circled in, snapping pictures and holding their tape recorders
in the air.

"Do you feel that Mrs.
Ransom was given adequate protection by the Millhaven Police
Department?"

He turned around and looked
at me in exasperation.

"What are your thoughts
about Walter Dragonette?" Geoffrey Bough shouted. "What can you tell us
about the man?"

"I'd like you people to pack
up and—"

"Would you call him sane?"

Other reporters, including
Ms. Archer, shouted other questions.

"Who's the man behind you?"
Bough yelled.

"What's it to you?" John
yelled back, pushed over the edge at last. "You people throw rocks at
my window, you ask these moronic questions—"

I moved alongside him, and
cameras made popping gunfire noises. "I'm a family friend," I said.
"Mr. Ransom has been through a great deal." I could dimly hear my own
voice coming through the television set behind me in the living room.
"All we can say now is that the case against Walter Dragonette, at
least in regard to Mrs. Ransom, seems weaker than it should be."

A confused tangle of shouted
questions came from all the reporters, and Isobel Archer jammed her
microphone under my nose and leaned forward so that her cool blue eyes
and tawny hair were so close as to be disorienting. It was as if she
were leaning forward for a kiss, but if I had kissed anything, it would
have been the nubby head of the microphone. Her question was hard-edged
and direct. "So it's your position that Walter Dragonette did not
murder Mrs. Ransom?"

"No, I don't think he did,"
I said. "And I think the police will reject that portion of his
confession, in time."

"Do you share that view, Mr.
Ransom?" The microphone expertly zipped in front of John's mouth. Ms.
Archer leaned forward and widened her eyes, coaxing words out of him.

"Get the hell out of here,
right now," John said. "Take your cameras and your tape recorders and
your sound equipment and get off my lawn. I have nothing more to say."

Isobel Archer said, "Thank
you," and then paused to smile at me. And that would have been that,
except that something in the moment moved John a crucial step farther
over the edge into outrage. The red wrinkle blazed on his cheek, and he
started down the steps and went after the nearest male journalists, who
happened to be Geoffrey Bough and his photographer. Isobel signaled to
her own assistant, already swinging the camera toward John as he
stiff-armed Bough exactly as he had stiff-armed me on the football
field in the autumn of 1960.

The skinny reporter
windmilled backward and went down with a howl of surprise. In the
moment of shock that followed, John swung at Bough's photographer, who
backed away while firing off a sequence of motor-driven pictures that
appeared at the top of the next day's second section. John whirled away
from him and rushed at the photographer from Chicago, who had prowled
up beside him. John grasped the man's camera with one hand, his neck
with the other, and bowled him over, snapping the camera's strap. John
wound up like a pitcher and fired the camera toward the street. It
struck a car and bounced off onto the concrete. Then he whirled on the
man holding the Minicam.

Geoffrey Bough scrambled to
his feet, and John turned away from the Minicam operator, who showed
signs of a willingness to fight, and pushed Bough back down on the
ground.

Reestablished in the middle
of Ely Place, Isobel Archer held the microphone up to her American
Sweetheart face and said something to the cameras that caused an
outbreak of mirth among the assembled neighbors. John dropped his hands
and stepped away from the scrambling, sputtering reporter. Bough jumped
to his feet and followed the other reporters and camera people to the
street. He brushed off his dirty jeans and inspected a grass stain on
his right knee, missing the comparable stain on his right elbow. "We'll
be back tomorrow," he said.

John raised his fists and
began to charge. I grabbed his arm and pulled him back toward the
steps—if he had not cooperated with me, I could not have held him. In
the second or so that he resisted me, I knew that these days, for all
his flab, John Ransom was considerably stronger than I was. We got up
the steps and I opened the door. Ransom stormed inside and whirled
around to face me.

"What the hell was that shit
you were coming up with out there?"

"I don't think Dragonette
killed your wife," I said. "I don't think he killed the man behind the
St. Alwyn, either."