The Throat (61 page)

"Drunker,"
said David. "On the weekends, he drank more, even more than usual. Then
began the yelling, yelling, yelling. And it got louder and louder,
until the screaming began."

"I would see
Anna outside in back when we hung up our wash, and she had so many
bruises. Sometimes it hurt her to raise her arms."

"He beat her
to death?" I asked.

She nodded.
"One night, I think in October, we heard the shouts, the curses. She
was crying so pitifully. He started smashing furniture. They were in
their bedroom, just below ours. That big loud voice, cursing at her. It
went on and on, and then it just stopped. There was silence." She
glanced at her husband, who nodded. "Their fights usually ended with
Anna crying, and Mr. Bandolier, Bob, calming down and…
crooning
at her.
This time the noise just stopped." She was looking down at the table.
"I felt sick to my stomach."

"But you
didn't go downstairs?" John asked.

"No," David
said. "Bob would not permit that."

"What did he
do, call an ambulance?" I asked.

Theresa shook
her head vigorously. "I think Anna was in a coma. The next morning, he
must have put her in bed and cleaned up the room."

This
description was so close to what had happened to April Ransom that I
looked to see how John was taking it. He was leaning forward with his
chin propped on his hand, listening calmly.

"We never saw
Anna anymore. He began doing all the washing. Eventually, he washed her
sheets every night, because we could see them on the line in the
mornings. And a smell began to come from their apartment. That smell
got worse and worse, and finally I stopped him one day and asked about
Anna. He said she was ill, but he was taking care of her."

David
stirred. "Theresa told me he was home all day, and I was worried
because of the thought of my wife in the same house with that, that mad
creature."

"But I was
fine, he never bothered me."

"Bandolier
stayed home all day?" I asked.

"I think he
must have been fired."

"He was," I
said. "Later, his boss took him back because he was good at his job."

"I can
imagine," Theresa said. "He probably made the trains run on time." She
shook her head and sipped her coffee again. "One day, David and I
couldn't take it anymore, thinking about what was going on downstairs.
David knocked on their door, and when it opened, we could see straight
through into their bedroom—and then we really knew."

"Yes," David
said.

"Her face was
covered in blood. There was a smell of—of rot. That's what it was. He
didn't know enough to turn her in bed, and she had bedsores. Her sheets
were filthy. It was obvious that she was dying. He came out bellowing
and ordered us upstairs."

"And a little
while after that, we saw a doctor come to their door," said David. "A
terrible doctor. I knew she was dead."

"I thought he
must have finally understood that she was dying and decided to get real
medical help. But David was right. A little while after the doctor
left, two men came and took her out. She was covered in a sheet. There
was never an obituary, there was no funeral, nothing."

Theresa put
her chin in her hand, like John, and turned her head to look out of the
big bright window. She sighed, distancing herself from what she was
remembering, and leaned back and pushed her hair off her forehead with
one hand. "We didn't know what could happen next. It was a terrible
time. Mr. Bandolier had some kind of job, because he went out of the
house dressed in his suits. We thought the police would come for him.
Even a doctor as terrible as that man who came to his apartment must
have known how Mrs. Bandolier had died. But nothing happened, and
nothing happened. And then something did happen, Mr. Underhill. But it
was nothing like what we expected."

She looked
straight into my eyes again. "Your sister was killed outside the St.
Alwyn Hotel."

Though she
had been leading me toward this connection all the way through her
story, I still could not be certain that I understood her. I had become
interested in Bob Bandolier, but chiefly as a source for other
information and only secondarily as himself, and therefore my next
question sounded doubtful. "You mean, you thought that he was the
person who murdered my sister?"

"Not at
first," she said. "We did not think that at all. But then about a week
later, maybe less—" She looked at her husband, and he shrugged.

"Five days,"
I said. My voice did not seem to be working properly. They both looked
at me, and I cleared my throat. "Five days later."

"Five days
later, after midnight, the sound of the front door of the building
opening and closing woke us both up. Maybe half an hour later, the same
sound woke us up again. And when we read the papers the next day—when
we read about that woman who was killed in the same place as the little
girl, your sister, we wondered."

"You
wondered," I said. "And five nights later?"

"We heard the
same thing—the front door opening and closing. After David went to
work, I went out to buy a newspaper. And there it was. Another person,
a musician, had been killed right in the hotel. I ran home and locked
myself in our apartment and called David at work."

"Yes," David
said. "And what I said to Theresa was, you cannot arrest a man for
murder because he leaves his house at night." He seemed more depressed
by what he had said forty years ago than by what had happened to his
house within the past twenty-four hours.

"And five
days later?"

"It was the
same," David said. "Exactly the same.
Another
person is killed."

"And you
still didn't go to the police?"

"We might
have, even though we were so frightened," Theresa said. "But the next
time someone was attacked, Mr. Bandolier was home."

"And what
about the time after that?"

"We heard him
go out, exactly as before," said David. "Theresa said to me, what if
another person tried to kill the young doctor? I said, what if the same
person tried to kill the doctor, Theresa? But on the weekends, we began
looking for another place to live. Neither of us could sleep in that
house anymore."

"Someone else
tried to kill Dr. Laing," I said. My feelings were trying to catch up
with my mind. I thought that there must be hundreds of questions I
should ask these two people. "What did you think after the detective
was found dead?"

"What did I
think? I did not think. I felt relief," David said.

"Yes,
tremendous relief. Because all at once, everyone knew that he was the
one. But later—"

She glanced
at her husband, who nodded unhappily.

"You had
doubts?"

"Yes," she
said. "I still thought that some other person might have tried to kill
the doctor. And the only person that poor policeman really had any
reason to hate so much was that terrible man, the butcher on Muffin
Street. And what we thought, what David and I thought—"

"Yes?" I said.

"Was that Mr.
Bandolier had murdered people because the hotel had fired him. He could
have done a thing like that, he was capable of that. People didn't mean
anything to him. And then, of course, there were the roses."

"What roses?"
John and I said this more or less in unison.

She looked at
me in surprise. "Didn't you say you went to the house?"

I nodded.

"Didn't you
see the roses at the front of the house?"

"No." I felt
my heart begin to pound.

"Mr.
Bandolier loved roses. Whenever he had time, he was out in front,
caring for his roses. You would have thought they were his children."

Time should
have stopped. The sky should have turned black. There should have been
a bolt of lightning and crashes of thunder. None of these things
happened. I did not pass out, I didn't leap to my feet, I didn't knock
the table over. The information I had been searching for, consciously
or unconsciously, all of my life had just been given to me by a
white-haired woman in a sweatshirt and blue jeans who had known it for
forty years, and the only thing that happened was that she and I both
picked up our cups and drank more steaming coffee.

I knew the
name of the man who had taken my sister's life —he was a horrible human
being named Bob Bandolier, Bad Bob, a Nazi of the private life—I might
never be able to prove that Bob Bandolier had killed my sister or that
he had been the man who called himself Blue Rose, but being able to
prove it was weightless beside the satisfaction of knowing his name. I
knew his name. I felt like a struck gong.

I looked out
of the window. The children who had been rolling down the hill were
scampering up over the dense green, holding their arms out toward their
parents. Theresa Sunchana reached out to rest her cool hand on my hand.

"I guess the
neighbors pulled out the roses after he left," I said. "The house has
been empty for years." This statement seemed absurdly empty and
anticlimactic, but so would anything else I could have said. The
children rushed into the arms of their parents and then spun away,
ready for another long giddy flip-flop down Elm Hill. Theresa's hand
squeezed mine and drew away.

If he was
still alive, I had to find him. I had to see him put in jail, or my
sister's hungry spirit would never be free, or I free of it.

"Should we go
to the police now?" David asked.

"We must,"
said Theresa. "If he's still alive, it isn't too late."

I turned away
from the window, able to look at Theresa Sunchana now without
disintegrating. "Thank you," I said.

She slid her
hand across the table again. I put mine on top of it, and she neatly
revolved her hand to give me another squeeze before she took her hand
back. "He was such a completely terrible human being. He even sent away
that adorable little boy. He
banished
him."

"The boy was
better off," David said.

"What little
boy was that?" I thought they must have been talking about some boy
from the neighborhood, some Pigtown boy like me.

"Fee," she
said. "Don't you know about Fee?"

I blinked at
her.

"Mr.
Bandolier banished him, he cast out his own son," she said.

"His son?" I
asked, stupidly.

"Fielding,"
said David. "We called him Fee—a sweet child."

"I loved that
little boy," Theresa told me. "I felt so
sorry
for him. I wish David
and I could have taken him."

Theresa
looked down into her cup when the inevitable objection came from David.
When he had finished listing the reasons why adopting the child had
been an impossibility, she raised her head again. "Sometimes I would
see him sitting on the step in front of the house. He looked so cold
and abandoned. His father made him go to the movies alone—a
five-year-old boy! Sending him to the movies by himself!"

All I wanted
to do was to get out of the coffee shop. A number of distressing
symptoms had decided to attack simultaneously. I felt hot and slightly
dizzy. My breath was caught in my throat.

I looked
across the table, but instead of the reassuring figure of Theresa
Sunchana, saw the boy from the Green Woman Taproom, the imagined boy
who was fighting to come into this world. Behind every figure stood
another, insisting on being seen.

Allerton, I
remembered. Or Allingham, on the side of a stalled truck. Where I dip
my buckets, where I fill my pen. David Sunchana's polite, unswervably
gentle voice brought me back to the table. "The insurance men. And we
have so many things to take from the house."

"Oh, we have
a thousand things to do. We'll do them." She was still sitting across
from me, and the sun still fell on the scene across the street, where a
boy carried a big kite shaped like a dragon uphill.

Theresa
Sunchana had not taken her eyes from me. "I'm glad you found us," she
said. "You needed to know."

I looked
around for the waitress, and John said, "I already paid." He looked a
little smug about it.

We stood up
from the table and, with the awkwardness and hesitancies of a party of
four, moved toward the door.

When I pulled
back out of the lot, I found Theresa's eyes in the rearview mirror
again. "You said Bandolier sent Fee away. Do you know where he sent
him?"

"Yes," she
said. "I asked him. He said that Fee went to live with Anna's sister
Judy in some little town in Iowa, or somewhere like that."

"Can you
remember the name of the town?"

"Is that of
any importance, at this point?" David asked.

We drove
around the pretty little pond. A boy barely old enough to walk clapped
his hands at a foot-high sailboat. We followed the meandering curves of
Bayberry Lane. "I don't think it was Iowa," she said. "Give me a
minute, I'll remember it."

"This woman
remembers everything," said David. "She is a phenomenon of memory."

From this end
of Bayberry Lane, their house looked like a photograph from London
after the blitz. A long length of glinting rubble led into a room
without an exterior wall. Both of the Sunchanas fell silent as soon as
it came into view, and they did not speak until I pulled up behind the
station wagon. David opened the door on his side, and Theresa leaned
forward and patted my shoulder. "I knew I'd remember. It was
Ohio—Azure, Ohio. And the name of Anna's sister was Judy Leatherwood."

"Theresa, you
amaze me."

"Who
could forget a name like Leatherwood?" She got out of the car and waved
at us as David put his fingers in his wiry hair and walked toward what
was left of his house.

"Bob
Bandolier?" John said. "That asshole, Bob Bandolier?"