The Throat (64 page)

After all
that, I did not want to just drive back to Ely Place. I had to let
everything sort itself out in my mind before I went back to John's
house. The satisfaction of knowing that Bob Bandolier was the Blue Rose
murderer had left me. Before anything like it could return, I had to
know who had killed April Ransom. I sat behind the wheel of the Pontiac
until I noticed that Dorian was peeking out at me through a dimple in
one of the drop cloths.

I drove away
without any idea of where I would go. I would be like April Ransom, I
thought, like April Ransom at the wheel of her Mercedes, Byron Dorian
in the other seat. I'd just drive, and see where I wound up.

I had gone no
more than five blocks when it occurred to me that I had, in effect,
done no more than to swap one ghost for another. Where I had seen April
Underhill's disgruntled spirit, now I would find myself seeing April
Ransom's.

A series of
images marched across my inner eye. I saw Walter Dragonette sitting
across the battered table from Paul Fontaine, crying
victim, victim,
victim
; then saw Scoot, my old partner in the body squad at Camp
White
Star, bending to dismember the corpse of Captain Havens. I saw the
human jigsaw puzzles sealed up in the body bags; the boy in the hut at
Bong To; April Ransom and Anna Bandolier lying unconscious on their
beds, separated by space and time. A meaning which seemed nearly close
enough to touch connected these images. The figure with an outstretched
hand stepping out of death or the imaginative space offers the pearl.
On the open palm is written a word no one can read, a word that cannot
be spoken.

I had
returned on automatic pilot to my old neighborhood and was turning from
South Sixth Street onto Muffin Street. It was one of those sleepy
pockets of commerce that had long ago inserted itself into a
residential area, like the row of shops near Byron Dorian's studio but
even less successful, and two little shops with soaped windows flanked
a store where bins of bargain shoes soaked up sunlight on the pavement.

On the other
side of the shoe store was the site of Heinz Stenmitz's two-story frame
house. A wide X of boards blocked the entrance to the porch, and
vertical pallets of nailed boards covered the windows. On the other
side of the house, the site of the butcher shop with its triangular
sign, was an empty lot filled with skimpy yellow ragweed and bright
sprays of Queen Anne's lace. The weeds led down into a roughly
rectangular hollow in the middle of the lot. Red bricks and gray
concrete blocks lay among the weeds around the perimeter of the hollow.
That vacancy seemed right to me. No one had debased the site with an
apartment building or a video shop. Like his house, it had been left to
rot away.

At the end of
the block, I turned onto South Seventh Street. Next to Bob Bandolier's
empty house, the Belknaps were drinking Hannah's lemonade and talking
to one another on their porch. Hannah was smiling at one of Frank's
jokes, and neither of them noticed me driving past. I stopped at
Livermore Avenue, turned right on Window Street, parked in an empty
spot a block away from the St. Alwyn, and walked past Sinbad's Cavern
to the hotel.

The same old
man I had seen before sat smoking a cigar in the lobby; the same feeble
bulb burned behind its green shade beside the same worn couch; but the
lobby seemed bleaker and sadder.

Under the
lazy scrutiny of the desk clerk, I walked toward the pay phone and
dialed the number on the slip of paper in my wallet. I spoke for a
short time to a gruff, familiar voice. George Dubbin, Byron's father,
told me that Damrosch had questioned Bob Bandolier—"Sure he did. Bill
was a good cop." Then he said, "I wish my kid would go out with women
his own age." When the conversation was over, I went across the lobby
to the house phone and punched Glenroy Breakstone's room number.

"You again.
Tom's friend."

"That's
right. I'm down in the lobby. Can I come up for a short talk?"

He sighed.
"Tell me the name of the great tenor player in Cab Calloway's band."

"Ike Quebec,"
I said.

"You know
what to get before you come up." He put the phone down.

I went up to
the clerk, who had recognized me and was already bending under the
desk. He came up with two packs of Luckies and rapped them down on the
counter. "Surprised he let you come up. Bad day for old Glenroy,
bad
day."

"I'll watch
my back."

"Better watch
your head, because that's what he's gonna mess with." He raised his
right hand and shot me with his index finger.

When I
knocked on Breakstone's door, loud jazz muffled his voice. "What'd you
do, fly? Give me a minute."

Under the
music, I heard the sound of wood clicking against wood.

Glenroy
opened the door and scowled at me with red-rimmed eyes. He was wearing
a thin black sweatshirt that said
SANTA FE JAZZ PARTY
.
"You got 'em?" He held out his hand.

I put the
cigarettes in his hand, and he wheeled away from me, jamming one pack
into each of his pockets, as if he thought I might try to steal them.
He took two steps and stopped, pointing an imperious finger into the
air. The music surrounded us, as did a faint trace of marijuana. "You
know who that is?"

It was a
tenor saxophone player leading a small group, and at first I thought he
was playing an old record of his own, one I didn't know. The tune was
"I Found a New Baby." Then the saxophone started to solo.

"Same answer
as before. Ike Quebec. On Blue Note, with Buck Clayton and Keg Johnson,
in 1945."

"I should of
thought of a harder question." He lowered his hand and proceeded across
the bright rug to the same low table where we had been sitting before.
Beside the Krazy Kat mirror and the wooden box sat a round white
ashtray crowded with mashed butts, a nearly full pack of Luckies and a
black lighter, a bottle of Johnny Walker Black, and a highball glass
containing an inch of whiskey. Breakstone dropped into a chair and
looked at me sourly. I took the other chair without being invited.

"You messed
me up," he said. "Ever since you were here, I been thinking about
James. I gotta start getting my shit together to go to France, and I
can't do anything but remember that boy. He never had his chance. We
ought to be sitting up here together right now, talking about what
tunes we'll play and the assholes we'll have to play 'em with, but we
can't, and that's not
right
."

"It still
affects you so much, after forty years?"

"You don't
understand." He picked up his glass and swallowed half of the whiskey.
"What he was starting, nobody could finish but him."

I thought of
April Ransom and her manuscript.

He was
glaring at me with his red eyes. "All of that music he would have made,
nobody else can make that. I should have been standing right next to
him, listening to the things he would have done. That boy was like my
son, you understand? I play with lots of piano players, and some of
them are great, but no piano player except James ever grew up right
under my wing, you know?" He finished the whiskey in his glass and
thumped the glass down on the table. His eyes moved to the wooden box,
then back to me. "James played so pretty—but you never heard him, you
don't know."

"I wish I
had," I said.

"'James was
like Hank Jones or Tommy, and nobody heard him except me."

"He was like
you, you mean."

The red eyes
gave me a deep, deep look. Then he nodded. "I wish I could go to Nice
with him. I wish I could see through his eyes again."

He poured
another inch of whiskey into his glass, and I looked around the room.
Subtle signs of disorder were everywhere—the telescope tilted wildly
upward, records and compact discs were spread on the floor in front of
the shelves, record sleeves covered the octagonal table. Gray smears of
ash dirtied the wrinkled Navaho rugs.

The record
came to an end, and he glanced up at the turntable. "If you want to
hear something, put it on. I'll be right back."

Glenroy slid
the box toward him, and I said, "You can do what you like. It's your
place."

He shrugged
and swung back the top of the box. Two two-gram bottles, one about half
full and the other empty, lay in a rounded groove along one side. A
short white straw lay beside them. In the middle of the box was a
baggie filled with marijuana buds resting on a layer of loose, crumbled
shreds. He had lots of different kinds of rolling paper. Glenroy
flipped back the lid of the mirror, took out a vial, unscrewed the top,
and used the spoon to dump two fat white piles of powder on the mirror.
He pushed them into rough lines with the long spoon attached to the
screw top. Then he worked an end of the straw into one of his nostrils
and sucked up one of the lines. He did the same thing with the other
nostril.

"You get
high?"

"Not
anymore," I said.

He screwed
the cap back on the bottle and put it into the groove in the box. "I
been trying to get in touch with Billy, but I can't find him in any of
his places. I want to get some for the plane over, you know."

Glenroy wiped
his finger over the white smears on the glass, rubbed his gums, and
closed the box and the mirror. He gave me the first halfway friendly
look of the night and looked at the box again. "Billy better show up
before tomorrow, man." He leaned back in his chair, wiping his finger
under his nose.

"Does Tom do
coke?" I asked.

He grinned
derisively at me. "Tom won't hardly do anything at all anymore. That
cat hardly even drinks. He acts like he juices all day and all night,
but you watch him. He takes one tiny little sip, and that's it. That's
that
. He's funny, man. He
looks like he's half asleep, you
know what he's doing? The man is working."

"I noticed
that the other night," I said. "He nursed one drink all night long."

"He's a
sneaky
mother." Breakstone
stood up and went to the turntable. He
removed the Ike Quebec record, grabbed its plastic inner sleeve from a
shelf, and slid it into the sleeve. "Duke, I want some Duke." He moved
along the shelves, running his hand over the tops of the albums, and
pulled out an Ellington record. With the same rough delicacy, he set
the record on the turntable. Then he turned down the volume knob on the
amplifier. "I don't suppose you came over here just to listen to my
records."

"No, I
didn't," I said. "I came here to tell you how James Treadwell was
killed."

"You found
that bitch!" His whole face brightened. He took his chair again, picked
the burning cigarette out of the ashtray, and squinted at me through
the smoke as he inhaled. "Tell me about it."

"If Bob
Bandolier came to James's room late at night, would James have let him
in?"

Nodding, he
said, "Sure."

"And if
Bandolier wanted to get in without knocking, he could just have let
himself in."

His eyes
widened. "What are you trying to tell me?"

"Glenroy,
Bandolier murdered James Treadwell. And the woman, and Monty Leland,
and Stenmitz. His wife was dying because he beat her into a coma, and
he got angry because Ransom fired him when he had to take extra time to
care for her. He killed all of them to ruin the hotel's business."

"You're
saying Bob killed all these people, and then afterward, he just came
back here like nothing happened?"

"Exactly." I
told him what I had learned from Theresa Sunchana, and I watched him
take it all in.

When I was
done, he said, "Roses?"

"Roses."

"I don't know
if I can believe this." Breakstone shook his head slowly, smiling. "I
saw Bob Bandolier every day, almost every day, when I was here at home.
He was a miserable bastard, but outside of that, he was normal, if you
know what I mean."

"Did you know
he had a wife and a son?"

"First I ever
heard of it."

For a time we
said nothing. Glenroy stared at me, shaking his head now and then. Once
or twice he opened his mouth and closed it without saying anything.
"Bob Bandolier," he said, but not to me. Finally, he said, "This lady
heard him going out every night someone was killed?"

"Every night."

"You know, he
could have done it. I know he didn't give a damn about anybody but
himself." He frowned at me for a little time.

Glenroy was
changing an idea he had held firmly for forty years. "He was the kind
of man who'd beat a woman, that's right." He gave me a sharp look. "I
tell you, what I think, Bob would sort of like his woman helpless. She
wouldn't walk around, messing things up. That kind of guy, he could
go
for that."

He was silent
for another couple of seconds, and then he stood up, walked away a
couple of steps, turned around and sat back down again. "There isn't
any way to prove all this, is there?"

"No, I don't
think it can be proved. But he was Blue Rose."

"Goddamn." He
smiled at me. "I'm starting to believe it. James probably didn't even
know Bob was fired. I didn't know for maybe a week, when I asked one of
the maids where he was. You know, they didn't even uncover his meat
scam—he was back in time to switch back to Idaho."

"Speaking of
the meat business," I said, and asked him if he'd heard about Frankie
Waldo.

"We better
not talk about that. I guess Frankie got too far out of line."

"It sounds
like a mob killing."

"Yeah, maybe
it's supposed to look that way." He hesitated, then decided not to say
any more.

"You mean it
had something to do with Billy Ritz?"

"Frankie just
got out of line, that's all. That day we saw him, he was one worried
man."