The Throat (67 page)

"Of course
not," I said.

"Then what do
you think you're doing?"

"All I did
was talk to some people."

His face
turned an ugly red. "We got a call from the Elm Hill police this
afternoon. Damn you, instead of paying attention to me, you and your
pal went out there and made everybody crazy. Listen to me—you have no
role in what is going on in Millhaven. You get that? The last thing we
need right now is bullshit about some—some—" He was too angry to
continue. He jabbed his index finger at me. "Get in the car." His eyes
were blazing.

I moved to
open the back door of the sedan, and he growled, "Not there, dummy. Go
around and get in the front."

He opened his
door and kept blazing at me as I walked around the front of the car and
got in the front seat. He got behind the wheel, slammed his door, and
wrenched the ignition key to the side. We streaked off down the street,
and he tore through the stop sign on Berlin Avenue and turned left in a
blare of horns. "Are we going to Armory Place?"

He told me to
shut up. The police radio crackled and spat, but he ignored it.
Fontaine simmered in silence all the way downtown, and when he hit the
on-ramp to the east-west expressway, he thumped the accelerator. We
hurtled out into the westbound traffic. Fontaine careened through the
other cars, ignoring the cacophony, and got us into the fast lane
without actually hitting another car. I managed not to put my arms in
front of my face. He kept his foot down until we reached seventy-five.
When a red Toyota refused to get out of his way, he flashed his lights
and held down the horn until it swerved into the next lane, and then he
roared past it.

I asked where
we were going.

His glare was
as solid as a blow. "I'm taking you to Bob Bandolier. Do me a favor and
keep your mouth shut until we get there."

Fontaine blew
the cars in front of us into smoke. When the stadium floated into view,
he flicked the turn indicator and changed lanes at the same time.
Brakes squealed behind us. Fontaine kept moving in an implacable
diagonal line until he got across the expressway. He was still doing
seventy when we squirted onto the off-ramp. Holding down the horn, he
blasted through a red light. The tires whined and the car heeled over
to the left as he dodged through the traffic and turned south. We
roared past the stadium and slowed down only when we reached Pine Knoll.

Fontaine
turned in through the gates and rolled up to the guardhouse. He cut off
the engine. "Okay, get out."

"Where am I
going to meet him, in the afterlife?" I asked, but he left the car and
stood in the slanting sun until I got out and walked toward him, and
then he began moving quickly up a gravel path toward the area where my
parents and my sister were buried. By now, I was regretting my crack
about the afterlife. The sprinklers were quiet, and the groundskeeper
had gone home. We were the only people in the cemetery. Fontaine moved
steadily and without looking back toward the stone wall at the far left.

He left the
path about thirty feet before the row of graves I had visited earlier
and led me up along a row of graves with small white headstones, some
decorated with bright, wilting roses and lilies. He stopped at a bare
white marker. I came up beside him and read what was carved into the
stone.
ROBERT C. BANDOLIER 21
SEPTEMBER 1919—22 MARCH 1972.

"You have
anything to say?"

"A Virgo.
That figures."

I thought he
was going to hit me. Fontaine unclenched his fists. His saggy face
twitched. He didn't look anything like a comedian. He stared at the
ground, then looked back up at me. "Bob Bandolier has been dead for
twenty years. He did not ignite the propane tanks at the house in Elm
Hill."

"No," I said.

"Nobody is
interested in this man." Fontaine's voice was flat and emphatic. "You
can't prove he was the Blue Rose killer, and neither can anyone else.
The case came to an end in 1950. That's that. Even if we wanted to open
it up again, which would be absurd, the conclusion would be exactly the
same.
And
, if you keep
wandering around, stirring things up, I'll have
you shipped back to New York on the next available flight. Or I'll
arrest you myself and charge you with disturbing the peace. Is that
clear?"

"Can I ask
you a couple of questions?"

"Is that
clear! Do you understand me?"

"Yes. Now can
I ask you a few things?"

"If you have
to." Fontaine visibly settled himself and stared off toward the row of
hemlocks, far in the distance.

"Did you hear
the substance of what the Sunchanas had to say about Bob Bandolier?"

"Unfortunately."

"Didn't you
think there was some chance they might be right?"

He grimaced
as if he had a headache. "Next question."

"How did you
know how to find this grave?"

He turned his
head and squinted at me. His chest rose and fell. "That's a hell of a
question. It's none of your business. Are you through?"

"Do the Elm
Hill police think that the explosion at the Sunchana house was
accidental?"

"That's none
of your business, either."

I couldn't
ask him any of the questions I really wanted answered. What seemed a
safer, more neutral question suddenly occurred to me, and,
thoughtlessly, I asked it. "Do you know if Bandolier's middle initial
stood for Casement?" As soon as I said it, I realized that I had
announced a knowledge of Elvee Holdings.

He stared up
at the sky. It was just beginning to get dark, and heavy gray clouds
were sailing toward us from over the hemlocks, their edges turned pink
and gold by the declining sun. Fontaine sighed. "Casement was
Bandolier's middle name. It was on his death certificate. He died of a
longstanding brain tumor. Is that it, or do you have some more
meaningless questions?"

I shook my
head, and he shoved his hands in his pockets and stamped back toward
the car.

Might as well
go for broke, I thought, and called out, "Does the name Belinski mean
anything to you? Andrew Belinski?"

He stopped
walking to turn around and glower at me. "As a matter of fact, not that
it's any business of yours, that was what we called the head of the
homicide unit when I came to Millhaven. He was one of the finest men I
ever met. He took on most of the people I work with now."

"That's what
you called him?"

Fontaine
kicked at the gravel, already sorry he had answered the question. "His
name was Belin, but his mother was Polish, and people just called him
Belinski. It started off as a joke, I guess, and it stuck. Are you
coming with me, or do you want to walk back to the east side?"

I followed
him toward the car, looking aimlessly at the headstones and thinking
about what he had told me. Then a name jumped out at me from a chipped
headstone, and I looked at it again to make sure I had seen it
correctly,
HEINZ FRIEDRICH STINMITZ , 1892-1950
. That
was all. The
stone had not merely been chipped; chunks had been knocked off, and
parts of the curved top were vaguely serrated, as if someone had
attacked it with a hammer. I stared at the battered stone for a moment,
feeling numb and tired, and then walked back to the car. Fontaine was
revving the engine, sending belches of black smoke out of the exhaust
pipe.

As soon as I
got back into the car, I realized that Fee Bandolier had to be a
Millhaven policeman—he had appropriated a name only a cop would know.

By the time
Fontaine rolled up the looping ramp to the expressway, the heavy clouds
I had seen coming in from the west had blotted out the sky. The
temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees. Fontaine got to the
end of the ramp and moved slowly forward until a truck hummed past,
then nudged the sedan into the space behind it. He checked his rearview
mirror before changing into the second lane. I rolled up my window
against the sudden cold and looked over at him. He was pretending I
wasn't there. I leaned back against the seat, and we drove peacefully
back toward the middle of town.

A raindrop
the size of an egg struck my side of the windshield; a few seconds
later, another noisily landed in the center of the windshield. Fontaine
sighed. The radio spooled out crackling nonsense. Two more fat
raindrops plopped onto the windshield.

"Are you
going to go back to New York soon, Underhill?"

The question
surprised me. "In a little while, probably."

"We all make
mistakes."

After a
little silence, Fontaine said, "I don't know why you'd want to hang
around here now." The big raindrops were landing on the windshield at
the rate of one per second, and we could hear them striking the roof of
the car like hailstones.

"Have you
ever had doubts about this police department?"

He looked at
me sharply, suspiciously. "What?"

The clouds
opened up, and a cascade of water slammed against the windshield.
Fontaine snapped on the wipers, and peered forward into the blur until
they began to work. He pulled out the knob for the headlights, and the
dashboard controls lit up. "I probably didn't phrase that very well," I
said.

"I have
plenty of doubts about you, which is something you ought to know
about." He scowled into the streaming windshield until the blade swept
it clean again. "You don't understand cops very well."

"I know
you're a good detective," I said. "You have a great reputation."

"Leave me out
of this, whatever it is."

"Have you
ever heard of—"

"Stop," he
said. "Just stop."

About thirty
seconds later, the intensity of the rain slackened off to a steady
drumming against the windshield and the top of the car. It slanted down
from the clouds in visible gray diagonals. Sprays of water flew away
from the wheels of the cars around us. Fontaine loosened his hands on
the wheel. We were going no more than thirty-five miles an hour.
"Okay," he said. "For the sake of my great reputation, tell me what you
were going to ask me."

"I wondered
if you ever heard of the Elvee Holdings Corporation."

For the first
time, I saw genuine curiosity in his glance. "You know, I'm wondering
about something myself. Is everyone in New York like you, or are you
some kind of special case?"

"We're all
full of meaningless little queries," I said.

The police
radio, which had been sputtering and hissing at intervals, uttered a
long, incomprehensible message. Fontaine snatched up the receiver and
said, "I'm on the expressway at about Twentieth Street, be there in ten
minutes."

He replaced
the receiver. "I can't take you back to Ransom's. Something came up."
He checked the mirror, looked over his shoulder, and rocketed into the
left lane.

Fontaine
unrolled his window, letting in a spray of rain, pulled a red light
from under his seat, and clapped it on the top of the car. He flicked a
switch, and the siren began whooping. From then on, neither of us
spoke. Fontaine had to concentrate on controlling the sedan as he
muscled it around every car that dared to get in front of him. At the
next exit, he swung off the expressway and went zooming up Fifteenth
Street Avenue the same way he had terrorized the expressway on our way
to Pine Knoll. At intersections, Fontaine twirled the car through the
traffic that stopped to let him go by.

Fifteenth
Street Avenue brought us into the valley, and factory walls rose up
around us. Fontaine turned south on Geothals and rocketed along until
we swerved onto Livermore. The streetlights were on in my old
neighborhood. The pouring sky looked black.

A long way
ahead of us, blinking red-and-blue lights filled the inside lane on the
other side of the street. Yellow sawhorses and yellow tape gleamed in
the lights. Men in caps and blue rain capes moved through the
confusion. As we got closer to the scene, I saw where we were going. I
should have known. It had happened again, just as Tom had predicted.

Fontaine
didn't even bother to look as we went past the Idle Hour. He went down
the end of the block, his siren still whooping, made a tight turn onto
the northbound lanes of Livermore, and pulled up behind an ambulance.
He was out of the car before it stopped ticking. Curls of steam rose up
off the sedan's hood.

I got out of
the car, hunched myself against the rain, and followed him toward the
Idle Hour.

Four or five
uniformed officers were standing just inside the barricades, and two
others sat smoking in the patrol car that blocked off the
avenue'sinside
lane. The rain had kept away the usual crowd. Fontaine darted through a
gap in the barricades and began questioning a policeman trying to stand
in the shelter of the tavern's overhang. Unlike the others, he was not
wearing a rain cape, and his uniform jacket was sodden. The policeman
took a notebook from his pocket and bent over the pages to keep them
dry as he read to Fontaine. Directly beside him at the level of his
shoulders, a red marker spelling the words blue rose burned out from
the dirty white planks. I stepped forward and leaned over one of the
yellow barricades.

A sheet of
loose black plastic lay over a body on the sidewalk. Rainwater puddled
and splashed in the hollows in the plastic, and runnels of rainwater
sluiced down from the body onto the wet pavement. From the bottom end
of the black sheet protruded two stout legs in soaked dark trousers.
Feet in basketweave loafers splayed out at ten to two. The cops
standing behind the barricade paid no attention to me. Steady rain beat
down on my head and shoulders, and my shirt glued itself to my skin.

Fontaine
nodded to the rain-drenched young policeman who had found the body and
pointed at the words on the side of the tavern. He said something I
couldn't hear, and the young policeman said, "Yes, sir."