The Throat (55 page)

"You
want to break in?"

"Hey, my
old man owned a hotel," John said. "I have a lot of skeleton keys."

The next
morning I learned that while John Ransom and I had talked about seeing
death moving through life, Mr. and Mrs. David Sunchana of North
Bayberry Lane, Elm Hill, had nearly died in a fire caused by a gas
explosion. I remembered the propane tanks and wondered what had caused
the explosion. The thought that I might have caused it sickened me.
Maybe the person who had followed me to Elm Hill had wanted to keep Bob
Bandolier's old tenants from talking to me so badly that he had tried
to kill them.

Ralph
and Marjorie had gone back upstairs after their breakfast to pack for
the return to Arizona, and John had gone out. Ralph had left the
Ledger
folded open to the sports pages, which crowed about the 9 to 4 victory
of the Millhaven team over the Milwaukee Brewers. I flipped the paper
back to the front page and read the latest dispatches from Armory
Place. Local civic and religious leaders had formed the "Committee for
a Just Millhaven" and demanded a room at City Hall and secretarial help.

The
Reverend Clement Moore was leading a protest march down Illinois Avenue
at three o'clock in the afternoon. The mayor had issued a permit for
the march and assigned all off-duty policemen to handle security and
crowd control. Illinois Avenue would be closed to traffic from
one-thirty until five o'clock.

A
two-paragraph story on the fifth page reported that the previously
unknown man murdered on Livermore Avenue had been positively identified
as Grant Hoffman, 31, a graduate student in religion at Arkham College.

I turned
the page and saw a small photograph of what looked like a farmhouse
that had been half-destroyed by fire. The left side of the house had
sunk into a wasteland of ashes and cinders from which protruded a
freestanding porcelain sink surrounded by snapped-off metal pipes. The
fire had blackened the remaining facade and left standing the uprights
of what must have been a sort of porch. Beside the house stood a
windowless little garage or shed.

I did
not even recognize it until I saw the name Sunchana in the caption
beneath the photograph. My breath stopped in my throat, and I read the
article.

An Elm
Hill patrolman named Jerome Hodges had been driving down North Bayberry
Lane at the time of the explosion and had immediately radioed for a
fire truck from the joint Elm Hill-Clark Township station. Patrolman
Hodges had broken into the house through a bedroom window and led Mr.
Sunchana back out through the window while carrying Mrs. Sunchana in
his arms. The fire truck had arrived in time to save some of the house
and furniture, and the Sunchanas had been released from Western Hills
hospital after examination had proven them unharmed. The explosion was
not suspected to have been of suspicious origin.

I
carried the newspaper to the counter, looked up the number of the
Millhaven police headquarters in the directory,
and asked to speak to Detective Fontaine. The police operator said she
would put me through to his desk.

I
shouldn't have been surprised when he answered, but I was.

After I
identified myself, he asked, "You get anything out of Damrosch's old
records?"

"No, not
much. I'll get them back to you." Then something occurred to me.
"Didn't you tell me that someone else had been looking through the Blue
Rose file?"

"Well,
the little case, whatever, was sitting on top of the files down in the
basement."

"Did you
remove anything from the file?"

"The
nude pictures of Kim Basinger will cost you extra."

"It's
just that it was obvious that the records had been held together by
rubber bands—they were ripped that way—but the rubber bands were gone.
So I wondered if whoever looked at the file before me went through it,
trying to find something."

"A
forty-year-old rubber band was no longer in evidence. Do you have any
other gripping information?"

I told
him about going out to Elm Hill to talk to the Sunchanas, and that I
had seen someone following me.

"This is
the couple who had the fire?"

"Yes,
the Sunchanas. When I was on the porch, I turned around and saw someone
watching me from a row of trees across the street. He disappeared as
soon as I saw him. That doesn't sound like much, but someone has been
following me." I described what had happened the other night.

"You
didn't report this incident?"

"He got
away so quickly. And John said he might have been just a peeping Tom."

Fontaine
asked me why I had wanted to talk to the Sunchanas in the first place.

"They
used to rent the top floor of a duplex owned by a man named Bob
Bandolier. I wanted to talk to them about Bandolier."

"I
suppose you had a reason for that?"

"Bandolier
was a manager at the St. Alwyn in 1950, and he might remember something
helpful."

"Well,
as far as I know, there wasn't anything suspicious about the explosion
out there." He waited a second. "Mr. Underhill, do you often imagine
yourself at the center of a threatening plot?"

"Don't
you?" I asked.

Overhead,
the Ransoms squabbled as Ralph pulled a wheeled suitcase down the hall.
"Anything else?"

I felt
an unreasonable reluctance to share William Writzmann's name with him.
"I guess not."

"Propane
tanks aren't the safest things in the world," he said. "Leave the
Sunchanas alone from now on, and I'll get back to you if I find out
anything you ought to know."

In a
bright pink running suit, Ralph came down with the other, smaller
suitcase, and carried it to the door, where he set it beside the
wheeled case. He came back toward the kitchen and stood in the door.
"Are you talking to John?"

"Is John
back?" Marjorie said. She came down in pink Reeboks and a running suit
that matched her husband's. Maybe that was what the Ransoms had been
arguing about. They looked like a pair of Easter Bunnies.

"No,"
Ralph said. "No, no, no."

"As you
could probably guess, things are a little crazy down here," Fontaine
was saying. "Enjoy our beautiful city. Join a protest march." He hung
up.

Marjorie
pushed past Ralph and stood scowling at me through her sunglasses. She
put her hands on her pink, flaring hips. "That's not John, is it?" she
asked in a loud voice. "If it is, you might remind him that we have to
get to the airport."

"I told
you," Ralph said. "He's not talking to John."

"You
told me John wasn't back," Marjorie said. Her voice was even louder.
"That's what you
told
me."
She zoomed out of the kitchen so quickly she
nearly left a vapor trail.

Ralph
went to the sink for a glass of water, raised the glass, and looked at
me with a mixture of bravado and uncertainty. "She's a little on edge.
Getting to the airport, getting on the plane, you know."

"It
wasn't
me
," Marjorie called
from the living room. "If my son isn't back
here in ten minutes, we're going to the airport in a cab."

"I'll
drive you," I said. Both of them began refusing before I had finished
making the offer.

Ralph
glanced toward the living room and then sat at the other end of the
kitchen table from me.

"It's
about this driving business—John isn't the kind of person who ought to
have his license suspended. I asked him what kind of troubles he had
that made him get picked up three times for drunken driving. It does
you good to talk about these things, get them out in the open."

"He's
home," Marjorie announced in a thunderous stage whisper. Ralph and I
heard the sound of the front door opening.

"I hope
he can put it all behind him," Ralph said.

John's
voice, full of loud false cheer, called out, "Is everybody okay?
Everything all set?"

Ralph
wiped his hand across his mouth and shouted back, "Have a nice walk?"

"Hot out
there," John said. He walked into the kitchen, and Marjorie came
trailing behind him, smiling and showing all her teeth. John was
wearing loose, faded jeans and a dark green linen sports coat buttoned
over his belly. His face shone with perspiration. He glanced at me,
twisting his mouth to demonstrate his exasperation, and said, "Those
two the only bags?"

"That
and your mother's carryon," Ralph said. "We're all set, think we ought
to get moving?"

"Plenty
of time," John said. "If we leave in twenty minutes, you'll still have
about an hour before they call your flight."

He sat
down between Ralph and myself at the table. Marjorie stood behind him
and put her hands on his shoulders. "It's good for you to walk so
much," she said. "But, honey, you could sure use a little loosening up.
Your shoulders are so tight!" She stood behind him and kneaded his
shoulders. "Why don't you take off that jacket? You're all wetl" John
grunted and twitched her off.

At the
airport, Ralph insisted that we not walk them to the gate. "Too much
trouble to park—we'll say good-bye here." Marjorie tilted her head for
a kiss beside the suitcases. "Just take it easy until your teaching
starts again," she said.

Ralph
hugged his stiff, resisting son, and said, "You're quite a guy." We
watched them go through the automatic doors in their Easter Bunny
suits. When the glass doors closed, John got in the passenger seat and
cranked down the window. "I want to break something," he said.
"Preferably something nice and big." Ralph and Marjorie were moving
uncertainly toward the lines of people at the airline desks. Ralph
groped in a zippered pocket of the running suit, brought out their
tickets, and stooped over to pull his suitcase toward the end of the
line. "I guess they'll get there," John said. He leaned back against
the seat.

I pulled
away from the curb and circled around the terminals back to the access
road.

"I have
to tell you what happened last night," I said. "The people I went out
to see in Elm Hill were nearly killed in a fire."

"Oh,
Jesus." John turned to look behind us. "I saw you checking the mirror
on the way out here. Did anyone follow us out here?"

"I don't
think so."

He was
almost kneeling on the seat, scanning the cars behind us. "I don't see
any blue Lexus, but probably he's got more than one car, don't you
think?"

"I don't
even know who
he
is," I said.

"William
Writzmann. Wasn't that the name you said last night?"

"Yes,
but who is he?"

He waved
the question away. "Tell me about the fire."

I
described what I had read in the newspaper and told him about my
conversation with Fontaine.

"I'm fed
up with these cops." John hoisted himself around, pulled his left leg
up onto the seat, and twitched down the hem of the green jacket. "After
it turned out that Walter Dragonette's confession was false, all they
think of is hauling me down to the station. Whose negligence got her
killed in the first place?"

He
twitched his jacket down over his belly again and put his left arm up
on the back of the seat. He kept an eye on the traffic behind us. "I'm
not letting Fontaine stand in my way." He turned his head to give me a
hard look. "Still willing to stay and help me?"

"I want
to find Bob Bandolier."

"William
Writzmann is the one I want to find," John said.

"We're
going to have to be careful," I said, meaning no more than that we
would have to keep out of Fontaine's way.

"You
want to see careful?" John tapped my shoulder. "Look." I turned my
head, and he unbuttoned the linen jacket and held it out from his side.
The curved handle of a handgun stuck up out of the waistband of his
trousers. "After you took it away from Alan, I put it in my safety
deposit box. This morning, I went down to the bank and got it out."

"This is
a bad idea," I said. "In fact, it's a really terrible idea."

"I know
how to handle a firearm, for God's sake. So do you, so stop looking so
disapproving."

My
effort to stop looking as disapproving as I felt was at least good
enough to make him stop smirking at me.

"What
were you going to do next?" he asked me.

"If I
can find the Sunchanas, I'd like to talk to them. Maybe I could learn
something if I knocked on a few more doors on South Seventh Street."

"There's
no reason to go back to Pigtown," John said.

"Do you
remember my telling you about the old couple I talked to, the ones who
lived next to the Bandolier house? The woman, Hannah Belknap, told me
that late at night she sometimes sees a man sitting alone in the living
room." I then went through Frank Belknap's response to his wife's story
and his private words to me on the sidewalk.

"It's
Writzmann," John said. "He burns down houses."

"Hold
on. This soldier threatened Belknap twenty years ago. Fontaine says
propane tanks aren't the safest things in the world."

"Do you
really believe that?"

"No," I
confessed. "I think somebody followed me to the Sunchanas and decided
to stop them from talking to me. That means we're not supposed to learn
something about Bob Bandolier."

"I'd
like to pay a call on Oscar Writzmann before we do anything else. Maybe
I can get something out of him. Will you let me try?"

"Not if
you're going to pull that gun on him."

"I'm
going to ask him if he has a son named William."

Against
my better judgment, I left the north-south expressway at the point in
downtown Millhaven where it connects with the east-west expressway.
Once again I turned west. From the loop of the interchange, the tall
square shapes of the Pforzheimer and the Hepton hotels stood like
ancient monuments among the scoops and angles, the peaks and slabs of
the new buildings east of the Millhaven River.