The Throat (43 page)

Ralph
broke in before I could respond. "At this stage of the game, Alan
Brookner couldn't tell Frank Sinatra from Gabby Hayes."

"Well, I
don't know," I said.

"Mom,"
John said loudly, carrying a fresh drink in from the kitchen, "Tim has
no idea what Grant Hoffman looked like."

"Right,"
I said. "I'm a stranger here myself."

"Get
yourself a drink, son," Ralph said. "It's the Attitude Adjustment Hour."

"That's
what they call it at our center," Marjorie said. "Attitude Adjustment
Hour. Isn't that cute?"

"I'll
get myself something in the kitchen," I said, and went around the back
of the couch and looked at the Vuillard over the tops of the Ransoms'
heads.

Only one
figure on the canvas, a child, looked forward and out of the painting,
as if returning the viewer's gaze. Everyone else, the women and the
servants and the other children, was caught in the shimmer of light and
the circumstances of their gathering. The child who faced forward sat
by himself on the lush grass, a few inches from a brilliant smear of
golden light. He was perhaps an inch from the actual center of the
painting itself, where the shape of a woman turning toward a tea
service intersected one of the boughs of the juniper tree. As soon as I
had seen him, he became the actual center of the painting, a sober,
dark-haired boy of seven or eight looking unhappily but intently out of
both the scene and the frame—right at me, it seemed. He knew he was in
a painting, the meaning of which he contained within himself.

"Tim
only came here to admire my art," John said.

"Oh,
it's just lovely," Marjorie said. "That big red one?"

I went
into the kitchen and poured a glass of club soda. When I returned,
Ralph and Marjorie were talking about something the day had brought
back to them, a period that must have been the unhappiest of their
lives.

"I'll
never forget it," Marjorie said. "I thought I was going to faint."

"That
guy at the door," Ralph said. "God, I knew what it was as soon as the
car pulled up in front of the house. He got out and stood there, making
sure the address was right. Then the other one, the sergeant, got out,
and handed him the flag. I didn't know whether to cry or punch him in
the mouth."

"And
then we got that telegram, and there it was in black and white. Special
Forces Captain John Ransom, killed in action at Lang Vei."

"Nobody
knew where I was, and another guy was identified as me."

"Is that
what happened?" I asked.

"What a
foul-up," said Ralph. "If you made a mistake like that in business,
you'd be out on your ear."

"It's
surprising more mistakes like that weren't made," I said.

"In my
opinion, John should have got at least a Silver Star, if not the Medal
of Honor," Ralph said. "My kid was a hero over there."

"I
survived," John said.

"Ralph
broke down and cried like a baby when we found out," Marjorie said.

Ralph
ignored this. "I mean it, kid. To me, you're a hero, and I'm damn proud
of you." He set down his empty glass, stood up, and went to his son.
John obediently stood up and let himself be embraced. Neither of them
looked as though he had done much embracing.

When his
father let him go, John said, "Why don't we all go out for dinner? It's
about time."

"This
one's on me," Ralph said, reminding me of his son. "You better get me
while you can, I'm not going to be around forever."

When we
got back from Jimmy's, I told John that I wanted to take a walk. Ralph
and Marjorie headed in for a nightcap before going to bed, and I let
myself out, took Damrosch's case from the trunk, and walked on the
quiet streets beneath the beautiful starry night to Tom Pasmore's house.

Familiar
jazz music came from Tom's speakers, a breathy, authoritative tenor
saxophone playing the melody of "Star Dust."

"You're
playing 'Blue Rose,' " I said. "Glenroy Breakstone. I never heard it
sound so good."

"It came
out on CD a couple of months ago." He was wearing a gray glen plaid
suit and a black vest, and I was sure that he had gone back to bed
after the service. We emerged from the fabulous litter into the
clearing of the sofa and the coffee table. Next to the usual array of
bottles, glasses, and ice bucket lay the disc's jewel box. I picked it
up and looked at the photograph reproduced from the original
album—Glenroy Breakstone's broad face bent to the mouthpiece of his
horn. When I was sixteen, I had thought of him as an old man, but the
photograph showed a man no older than forty. Of course the record had
been made long before I became aware of it, and if Breakstone were
still alive, he had to be over seventy.

"I think
I'm trying to get inspired," Tom said. He bent over the table and
poured an inch of malt whiskey into a thick low glass. "Want anything?
There's coffee in the kitchen."

I said
that I'd be grateful for the coffee, and he went back into his kitchen
and returned a moment later with a steaming ceramic mug.

"Tell me
about the morgue." He sat down in his chair and gestured me toward the
couch in front of the coffee table.

"They
had the man's clothes laid out, and Alan recognized the jacket as one
he'd given to this student, Grant Hoffman."

"And you
think that's who it was?"

I
nodded. "I think it was Hoffman."

Tom
sipped the whiskey. "One. The original Blue Rose murderer is torturing
John Ransom. Probably he intends to kill him, too, eventually. Two.
Someone else is imitatirig the original Blue Rose killer, and he too is
trying to destroy John. Three. Another party is using the Blue Rose
murders to cover up his real motives." He took another little sip.
"There are other possibilities, but I want to stick with these, at
least for now. In all three cases, some very determined character is
still happily convinced the police think that Walter Dragonette
committed his crimes."

Tommy
Flanagan began spinning out an ethereal solo on "Star Dust."

I told
Tom about April Ransom's interest in the Horatio Street bridge and
William Damrosch.

"Did she
write up any of her findings?"

"I don't
know. Maybe I could look around her office and find her notes. I'm not
even sure John really knew anything about it."

"Don't
let him know you're interested in the notes," he said. "Let's just do
things quietly, for a while."

"You're
thinking about it, aren't you? You already have ideas about it."

"I want
to find out who killed her. I also want to find out who killed this
Grant Hoffman. And I want your help."

"You and
John."

"You'll
be helping John, too, but I'd rather you didn't tell him about our
discussions until I say it's okay."

I agreed
to this.

"I said
that I want to find out," Tom said. "That's what I meant. I want to
know how and why April Ransom and that graduate student were killed. If
we can help the police at that point, fine. If not, that's fine, too.
I'm not in the justice business."

"You
don't care if April's murderer is arrested?"

"I can't
predict what will happen. We might learn his identity without being
able to do anything about it. That would be acceptable to me."

"But if
we find out who he is, we should be able to give our information to the
police."

"Sometimes
it works out that way." He leaned back in his chair, watching to see
how I was taking this.

"What if
I can't agree to this? I just go back to John's and forget about this
conversation?"

"You go
back to John's and do whatever you like."

"I'd
never know what happened. I'd never know what you did or what you found
out."

"Probably
not."

I
couldn't stand the thought of walking away without knowing what he
would do—I had to know what the two of us could discover.

"If you
think I'm going to walk out now, you're crazy," I said.

"Ah,
good," he said, smiling. He had never doubted that I would accept his
terms. "Let's go upstairs. I'll show you my toys."

At the
far left of the big downstairs room, past the cabinets for the sound
system and the shelves packed with compact discs, a wide staircase led
up to the second floor. Tom went up the stairs one step ahead of me
now, already talking. "I want us to begin at the beginning," he said.
"If nothing else comes out of this, I want to understand the first Blue
Rose murders. For a long time, Lamont thought it was solved, I guess—as
you did, Tim. But I think it always bothered him." At the top of the
stairs, he turned around to look at me. "Two days before his death, he
told me the whole history of the Blue Rose murders. We were on the
plane back from Eagle Lake, and we were going to stay at the St.
Alwyn." He laughed out loud. "A couple of nuns in the seats in front of
us almost broke their necks, they were listening in so hard. Lamont
said that you could call Damrosch's suicide a sort of wrongful
arrest—by then he knew that my grandfather had killed Damrosch. Lamont
was doing two things at once. He was preparing me to face the truth
about my grandfather."

He
stepped back to let me reach the top of the stairs.

"And the
second thing Lamont was doing—"

"Was to
get me interested in the Blue Rose murders. I think the two of us would
have worked on that one next. And do you know what that means? If he
hadn't been killed, Lamont and I might have saved April Ransom's life."

His face
twitched. "That's something I'd like to be clear about."

"Me,
too," I said. I had my own reason for wanting to learn the identity of
the original Blue Rose murderer.

"Okay,"
he said. Now Tom did not look languid, bored, amused, indifferent, or
detached. He didn't look lost or unhappy. I had seen all of these
things in him many times, but I had never seen him in the grip of a
controlled excitement. He had never let me see this steely side of him.
It looked like the center of his being.

"Let's
get to work." Tom turned around and went down the hallway to what had
been the door of Lamont von Heilitz's bedroom and went in.

The old
bedroom was dark when I followed him in. My first impression was of a
fire-sale chaos like the room downstairs. I saw the dim shapes of desks
and cabinets and what looked like the glassy rectangles of several
television sets. Books on dark shelves covered most of the walls. A
thick dark curtain covered the window. In the depths of the room, Tom
switched on a halogen lamp just as I finally grasped that the
televisions were computer monitors.

He went
methodically around the room, switching on lamps, as I took in that his
office served two purposes: the mansion's old master bedroom was a much
neater version of the room downstairs. It was where Tom both lived and
worked. Against one wall of books, three office workstations held
computers; a fourth, larger computer stood on the long wooden desk that
faced the curtained window. File cabinets topped with microdiscs in
plastic boxes stood beside each workstation and flanked his desk. Next
to one of the workstations was a professional copy machine. Sound
equipment crowded two tall shelves on the bookcase at the wall to my
left. A long red leather chesterfield like Alan Brookner's, a plaid
blanket folded over one of its arms, stood before the wall of books. A
matching armchair sat at right angles to the chesterfield. Within reach
of both was a glass table heaped with books and magazines, with a rank
of bottles and ice bucket like the table downstairs. On the glossy
white mantel of the room's fireplace, yellow orchids leaned and yawned
out of tall crystal vases. Sprays of yellow freesias burst up out of a
thick blue vase on a low, black piece of equipment that must have been
a subwoofer.

The
lamps cast mellow pools of light that burnished the rug lapping against
the bookshelves. The orchids opened their lush mouths and leaned
forward.

I
wondered how many people had been invited into this room. I would have
bet that only Sarah Spence had been here before me.

"My
father told me something I never forgot, when we were flying back from
Eagle Lake.
Occasionally, you have
to go back to the beginning and see
everything in a new way."

Tom set
his glass down on his desk and picked up a book bound in gray fabric
boards. He turned it over in his hands, and then turned it over again,
as if looking for the title. "And then he said,
Occasionally, there are
powerful reasons why you can't or don't want to do that.
" He
looked for
the invisible writing again. Even the spine of the book was blank.
"That's what we're going to do to the Blue Rose case. We're going to go
back to the beginning, the beginnings of a couple of things, and try to
see everything in a new way."

I felt a
flicker, no more than that, of an absolute uneasiness. Tom Pasmore
placed the peculiar book back down on the desk and came toward me with
his hands out, and I picked up the battered old satchel and gave it to
him.

The
moment of uneasiness had felt almost like guilt. Tom switched on the
copy machine. It began to hum. Deep in its interior, an incandescently
bright light flashed once.

Tom took
a wad of yellowing paper six or seven inches thick out of the satchel.
The top page had long tears at top and bottom that looked like they had
been made by someone trying to check the pages beneath without removing
a rubber band, but there was no rubber band. Part of my mind visualized
a couple of stringy, broken forty-year-old rubber bands lying limp in a
leather crease at the bottom of the satchel.

He put
the documents on the copy machine. "Better err on the side of caution."
He lifted off the top sheet and repaired the rips with tape. Then he
squared up the stack of pages and inserted the whole thing face down in
a tray. He twisted a dial. "I'll make a copy for each of us." He
punched a button and stepped back. The incandescent light flashed
again, and two clean sheets fed out into trays on the side of the
machine. "Good baby," Tom said to it, and turned to me with a wry smile
and said, "Don't put your business on the street, as a wise man once
said to me."