The Throat (33 page)

"Are you
crazy
?" Ransom
stared at me as if I had just betrayed him. "How can you say that?
Everybody knows he killed April. We even heard him
say
he killed April."

"I was thinking about
everything while you were upstairs, and I realized that Dragonette
didn't know enough about these murders to have done them. He doesn't
even know what happened."

He glared at me for a moment
and then turned away in frustration and sat down on the couch and took
in what the local TV stations were doing. Isobel Archer gloated
beautifully into the camera and said, "And so a startling new
development in the Dragonette story, as a friend of the Ransom family
casts doubt on the police case here." She raised a notebook to just
within camera range. "We will have tape on this as soon as possible,
but my notes show that the words were: 'I don't think he did it. I
think the police will reject that portion of his confession, in time.'
" She lowered the notebook, and an audible pop, whisked her into
darkness and silence.

Ransom slammed the remote
onto the table. "Don't you get it? They're going to start blaming me."

"John," I said, "why would
Dragonette interrupt his busy little schedule of murder and
dismemberment at home to reenact the Blue Rose murders? Don't they
sound like two completely different types of crime? Two different kinds
of mind at work?"

He looked sourly at me.
"That's why you went out there and threw raw meat to those animals?"

"Not exactly." I went to the
couch and sat down beside him. Ransom looked at me suspiciously and
moved a few inches away. He began rearranging the Vietnam books into
neater, lower stacks. "I want to know the truth," I said.

He grunted. "What actual
reasons do you have for thinking that Dragonette isn't guilty? The guy
seems perfect to me."

"Tell me why."

"Okay." Ransom, who had been
slouching back against the couch, sat up straight. "One. He confessed.
Two. He's crazy enough to have done it. Three. He knew April from his
visits to the office. Four. He always liked the Blue Rose murders, just
like you. Five. Could there really be two people in Millhaven who are
crazy enough to do it? Six. Paul Fontaine and Michael Hogan, who happen
to be very good cops and who have put away lots of killers, think the
guy is guilty. Fontaine might be a little weird sometimes, but Hogan is
something else—he's one smart, powerful guy. I mean, he reminds me of
the best guys I knew in the service. There's no bullshit about Hogan,
none."

I nodded. Like me, John had
been impressed by Michael Hogan.

"And last, what is it,
seven? Seven. He could find out all about April and her condition from
his mother's old pal Betty Grable at the hospital."

"I think it was Mary
Graebel, different spelling," I said. "And you're right, he did find
out April was at Shady Mount. When I came down in the elevator with
Fontaine this morning, an old lady working behind the counter almost
passed out when she saw us. I bet that was Mary Graebel."

"She knew she helped kill
April," John said. "The cow couldn't keep her mouth shut."

"She thought she helped her
old friend's son kill April. That's different."

"What makes you so sure he
didn't?"

"Dragonette claimed that he
couldn't remember anything he had done to that cop in April's room,
Mangelotti. He overheard Fontaine joking that Mangelotti was dead—so he
claimed that he had murdered him. Then Fontaine said he was
exaggerating, so Dragonette said he was exaggerating, too!"

"He's playing mind games,"
John said.

"He didn't know what
happened to Mangelotti. Also, he had no idea that April had been killed
until he heard it over the police radio. That was the point that always
bothered me."

"Why would he confess if he
didn't do it? That still doesn't make sense."

"Maybe you didn't notice,
but Walter Dragonette is not the most sensible man in the world."

Ransom leaned forward and
stared down at the floor for a time, considering what I had been
saying. "So there's another guy out there."

I saw a mental picture of
those drawings where the eye wanders over the leaves of an oak tree
until the dagger leaps out of concealment, and the brickwork on the
side of a house reveals a running man, a trumpet, an open door.

"You and your brainstorms."
He shook his head, now almost smiling. "I'm going to have to live with
the repercussions of shoving that reporter around."

"What do you think they'll
be?"

He shifted one of the stacks
of novels sideways half an inch, back a quarter-inch. "I suppose my
neighbors are more convinced than ever that I killed my wife."

"Did you, John?" I asked
him. "This is just between you and me."

"You're asking me if I
killed April?"

His face heated as before,
but without the violence I had seen in him just before he had gone
after Geoffrey Bough. He stared at me, trying to look intimidating. "Is
this something Tom Pasmore asked you to say?"

I shook my head.

"The answer is no. If you
ask me that once more, I'll throw you out of this house. Are you
satisfied?"

"I had to ask," I said.

For the next two days, John
Ransom and I watched the city fall apart on local television. When we
were inside his house, we ignored the knot of reporters, varying from a
steady core of three to a rumbling mob of fifteen, occupying his front
lawn. We also ignored their efforts to lure us outside. They rang the
bell at regular intervals, pressed their faces against the windows,
yelled his name or mine with doglike repetitiveness… Every hour or so,
either John or I would get up from the day's fifth, sixth, or fifteenth
contemplation of the names and faces of the victims to check the enemy
through the narrow window slits on either side of the door. It felt
like a medieval siege, plus telephones.

We ate lunch in front of the
set; we ate dinner in front of the set.

Someone banged imperiously
on the front door. Someone else fingered open the mail slot and yelled,
"Timothy Underhill! Who killed April Ransom?"

"Who killed Laura Palmer?"
muttered Ransom, mostly to himself.

This was on the day,
Saturday, that Arkham's dean of humanities had left a message on the
answering machine that Arkham's trustees, board of visitors, and alumni
society had registered separate complaints about the televised language
and behavior of the religion department's Professor Ransom. Would
Professor Ransom please offer some assurance that all legal matters
would be concluded by the beginning of the fall term? And it followed
our struggles back and forth through the mob on our way to Trott
Brothers Funeral Parlor.

So he wasn't doing too
badly, considering everything. The worst aspect of our experience at
Trott Brothers had been the manner of Joyce "Just call me Joyce" Trott
Brophy, the daughter and only child of the single remaining Mr. Trott.
Just Call Me Joyce made the reporters seem genteel. Obese and hugely
pregnant, professionally oblivious to grief, she had long ago decided
that the best way to meet the stricken people life brought her way was
with the resolute self-involvement she would have called "common sense."

"We're doing a beautiful job
on your little lady, Mr. Ransom, you're going to say she looks as
beautiful as she did on her wedding day. This here coffin is the one
I'm recommending to you for display purposes during the service, we can
talk about the urn later, we got some real beauties, but look here at
this satin, plump and firm and shiny as you can get it—be the perfect
frame around a pretty picture, if you don't mind my saying so. You
wouldn't believe the pains I get carrying this baby back and forth
around this showroom, boy, if Walter Dragonette showed up here he'd get
two for the price of one, that'd give my daddy the job of his life,
wouldn't it, by golly, that's gas this time. You ever get those real
bad gas pains? I better sit down here while you and your friend talk
things over, just don't pay any attention to me, Lord, I heard
everything anyhow, people hardly know what they're saying when they
come in here."

We had at least two hours of
Just Call Me Joyce, which demonstrated once again that when endured
long enough, even the really horrible can become boring. In that time
John rented the "display" coffin, ordered the funeral announcements and
the obituary notice, booked time at the crematorium, bought an urn and
a slot in a mausoleum, secured the "Chapel of Rest" and the services of
a nondenominational minister for the memorial service, hired a car for
the procession to the mausoleum, ordered flowers, commissioned makeup
and a hairdo for the departed, bought an organist and an organ and
ninety minutes' worth of recorded classical music, and wrote a check
for something like ten thousand dollars. "Well, I sure do like a man
who knows what he wants," said Just Call Me Joyce. "Some of these
folks, they come in here and dicker like they thought they could take
it with them when they go. Let me tell you, I been there, and they
can't."

"You've been there?" I asked.

"Everything that happens to
you after you're dead, I been there for it," she said. "And anything
you want to know about, I can tell you about it."

"I guess we can go home
now," Ransom said.

Early in the evening, Ransom
was seated in the darkening room, staring at its one bright spot, the
screen, which once again gave a view of the chanting crowd at Armory
Place. I thought about Just Call Me Joyce and her baby. Someday the
child would take over the funeral home. I saw this child as a man in
his mid-forties, grinning broadly and pressing the flesh, slamming
widowers on the back, breaking the ice with an anecdote about trout
fishing, Lordy that was the biggest ole fish anybody ever pulled out of
that river, oof, there goes my sciatica again, just give me a minute
here, folks.

A door in my mind clicked
open and let in a flood of light, and without saying anything to
Ransom, I went back upstairs to my room and filled about fifteen sheets
of the legal pad I had remembered at the last minute to slip into my
carry-on bag. All by itself, my book had taken another stride forward.

What had opened the door
into the imaginative space was the collision of Walter Dragonette with
the certainty that Just Call Me Joyce's child would be just like his
mother. When I had arrived at Shady Mount that morning, I'd had an idea
which April Ransom's death had erased—but everything since then had
secretly increased the little room of my idea, so that by the time it
came back to me through imagination's door, it had grown into an entire
wing, with its own hallways, staircases, and windows.

     I saw that I
could use some of Walter Dragonette's life while writing about Charlie
Carpenter's childhood. Charlie had killed other people before he met
Lily Sheehan: a small boy, a young mother, and two or three other
people in the towns where he had lived before he had come back home.
Millhaven would be Charlie's hometown, but it would have another name
in the book. Charlie's deeds were like Walter Dragonette's, but the
circumstances of his childhood were mine, heightened to a terrible
pitch. There would be a figure like Dragonette's Mr. Lancer. My entire
being felt a jolt as I saw the huge head of Heinz Stenmitz lower itself
toward mine—pale blue eyes and the odor of bloody meat.

During Charlie's early
childhood, his father had killed several people for no better motive
than revenge, and the five-year-old Charlie had taken his father's
secret into himself. If I described everything through Charlie's eyes,
I could begin to work out what could make someone turn out like Walter
Dragonette. The
Ledger
had
tried to do that, clumsily, by questioning
sociologists, priests, and policemen; and it was what I had been doing
when I put the photograph of Ted Bundy's mother up on my refrigerator.

For the second time that
day, my book bloomed into life within me.

I saw five-year-old Charlie
Carpenter in my old bedroom on South Sixth Street, looking at the
pattern of dark blue roses climbing the paler blue wallpaper in a swirl
of misery and despair as his father beat up his mother. Charlie was
trying to
go into
the
wallpaper, to escape into the safe, lifeless
perfection of the folded petals and the tangle of stalks.

I saw the child walking
along Livermore Avenue to the Beldame Oriental, where in a back row the
Minotaur waited to yank him bodily into a movie about treachery and
arousal. Reality flattened out under the Minotaur's instruction—the
real feelings aroused by the things he did would tear you into bloody
rags, so you forgot it all. You cut up the memory, you buried it in a
million different holes. The Minotaur was happy with you, he held you
close and his hands crushed against you and the world died.

Because columns of numbers
were completely emotionless, Charlie was a bookkeeper. He would live in
hotel rooms because they were impersonal. He would have recurring
dreams and regular habits. He would never sleep with a woman unless he
had already killed her, very carefully and thoroughly, in his head.
Once every couple of months, he would have quick, impersonal sex with
men, and maybe once a year, when he had allowed himself to drink too
much, he would annoy some man he picked up in a gay bar by babbling
hysterical baby talk while rubbing the stranger's erection over his
face.

Charlie had been in the
service in Vietnam.

He would kill Lily Sheehan
as soon as he got into her lake house. That was why he stole the boat
and let it drift into the reeds, and why he showed up at Lily's house
so early in the morning.

I had to go back through the
first third of the novel and insert the changes necessary to imply the
background that I had just invented for Charlie. What the reader saw of
him—his bloodless affection for his boring job, his avoidance of
intimacy—would have sinister implications. The reader would sense that
Lily Sheehan was putting herself in danger when she began her attempts
to lure Charlie into the plot that had reminded me of Kent Smith and
Gloria Grahame. You, dear heart, dear Reader, you without whom no book
exists at all, who had begun reading what appeared to be a novel about
an innocent lured into a trap would gradually sense that the woman who
was trying to manipulate the innocent was going to get a nasty surprise.