The Throat (68 page)

Fontaine
crouched down beside the body and pulled back the plastic sheet. The
man who had followed John Ransom down Berlin Avenue in a blue Lexus
stared unseeing up at the overhang of the Idle Hour. Rain spattered
down onto his chest and ran into the slashes in a ragged, blood-soaked
shirt. Ridges of white skin surrounded long red wounds. The gray
ponytail lay like a pointed brush at the side of his neck. I wiped rain
off my face. Dark blood had stiffened on his open suit jacket.

Fontaine took
a pair of white rubber gloves from his pocket, pulled them on, and
leaned over the body to slide his hand under the bloody lapel. The
fabric lifted away from the shirt. Fontaine drew out the slim black
wallet I had seen before. He flipped it open. The little badge was
still pinned to a flap on the right side. Fontaine lifted the flap.
"The deceased is a gentleman named William Writzmann. Some of us know
him better under another name." He stood up. "Is Hogan here yet?" The
young officer held out a plastic evidence bag, and Fontaine dropped the
wallet into it.

One of the
men near me said that Hogan was on his way.

Fontaine
noticed me behind the barricade and came frowning toward me. "Mr.
Underhill, it's time for you to leave us."

"Is that
Billy Ritz?" I asked. As much rain was falling on the detective as on
me, but he still did not look really wet.

Fontaine
blinked and turned away.

"He was the
man who followed John. The one I told you about at the hospital." The
policemen standing near me edged away and put their hands under their
capes.

Fontaine
turned around and gave me a gloomy look. "Go home before you get
pneumonia." He went back to the body, but the young policeman was
already pulling the plastic sheet over Writzmann's wet, empty face.

The two
closest policemen looked at me with faces nearly as empty as
Writzmann's. I nodded to them and walked along the barricades past the
front of the tavern. Two blocks away, another dark blue sedan wearing a
flashing red bubble like a party hat was moving down South Sixth Street
toward the tavern. Rain streaked through the beams of its headlights. I
went across Sixth and looked up at the side of the St. Alwyn. A brass
circle at the tip of a telescope angled toward the Idle Hour from the
corner window of the top floor. I waited for a break in the line of
cars moving north in the single open lane and jogged toward the St.
Alwyn's entrance.

The night
clerk watched me leave a trail of damp footprints on the rug. My shoes
squished, and water dripped down inside my collar.

"See all that
excitement outside?" He was a dry old man with deep furrows around his
mouth, and his black suit had fit him when he was forty or fifty pounds
heavier. "What they got there, a stiff?"

"He looked
dead to me," I said.

He hitched up
his shoulder and twitched away, disappointed with my attitude.

When Glenroy
Breakstone picked up, I said, "This is Tim Underhill. I'm down in the
lobby."

"Come up, if
that's what you're here for." No jazz trivia this time.

Glenroy was
playing Art Tatum's record with Ben Webster so softly it was just a
cushion of sound. He took one look at me and went into his bathroom to
get a towel. The only light burning was the lamp next to his records
and sound equipment. The windows on Widow Street showed steady rain
falling through the diffuse glow thrown up by the streetlights.

Glenroy came
back with a worn white towel. "Dry yourself off, and I'll find you a
dry shirt."

I unbuttoned
the shirt and peeled it off my body. While I rubbed myself dry, Glenroy
returned to hand me a black long-sleeved sweatshirt like the one he was
wearing. His said
TALINN JAZZFEST
across the front;
when I unfolded the one he gave me, it said
BRADLEY'S
above a logo of a toothy man strumming a long keyboard. "I never even
worked that place," he said. "A bartender there likes my music, so he
mailed it to me. He thought I was about your size, I guess."

The
sweatshirt felt luxuriously soft and warm. "You moved the telescope
into your bedroom."

"I went into
the bedroom when I heard the sirens. After I got a look across the
street, I fetched my telescope."

"What did you
see?"

"They were
just pulling that blanket thing over the dead guy"

"Did you see
who it was?"

"I need a new
dealer, if that's what you mean. You mind coming into the bedroom? I
want to see what happens."

I followed
Glenroy into his neat, square bedroom. None of the lights had been
turned on, and glass over the framed prints and posters reflected our
silhouettes. I stood next to him and looked down across Livermore
Avenue.

The big cops
in rain capes still stood in front of the barricades. A long line of
cars crawled by. The plastic sheet had been folded down to Billy Ritz's
waist, and a stout, gray-haired man with a black bag squatted in front
of the body, next to Paul Fontaine. Billy looked like a ripped
mattress. The gray-haired man said something, and Fontaine pulled the
sheet back up over the pale face. He stood up and gestured at the
ambulance. Two attendants jumped out and rolled a gurney toward the
body. The gray-haired man picked up his bag and held out his hand for a
black rod that bloomed into an umbrella in front of him. "What do you
think happened to him?" I asked.

Glenroy shook
his head. "I know what they'll say, anyhow —they'll call it a drug
murder."

I looked at
him doubtfully, and he gave a short, sharp nod. "That's the story.
They'll find some shit in his pockets, because Billy always had some
shit in his pockets. And that'll take care of that. They won't have to
deal with any of the other stuff Billy was into."

"Did you see
the words on the wall over there?"

"Yeah. So
what?"

"Billy Ritz
is the third Blue Rose victim. He was killed—" I stopped myself,
because I suddenly realized where Billy Ritz had been killed. "His body
was found exactly where Monty Iceland was killed in 1950."

"Nobody cares
about those Blue Rose murders," Glenroy said. He stepped back and put
his eye to the end of the telescope. "Nobody is gonna care about Billy
Ritz, either, any more than they cared about Monty Leland. Is that
Hogan, that one over there now?"

I leaned
toward the window and looked down. It was Michael Hogan, all right,
rounding the corner in front of the tavern: the charge of his
personality leapt across the great distance between us like an
electrical spark.

Ignoring the
rain, Hogan began threading through the police outside the Idle Hour.
As soon as they took in his presence, the other men parted for him as
they would have for Arden Vass. Instantly in charge, he got to the body
and asked one of the policemen to fold back the sheet. Ritz's face was
a white blotch on the wet sidewalk. The ambulance attendants waited
beside their gurney, hugging themselves against the chill. Hogan stared
down at the body for a couple of seconds and commanded the sheet to be
raised again with an abrupt, angry-looking gesture of his hand.
Fontaine slumped forward to talk to him. The attendants lowered the
gurney and began maneuvering the body onto it. Glenroy left the
telescope. "Want a look?" I adjusted the angle to my height and put my
eye to the brass circle. It was like looking through a microscope.
Startlingly near, Hogan and Fontaine were facing each other in the
circle of my vision. I could almost read their lips. Fontaine looked
depressed, and Hogan was virtually luminous with anger. With the rain
glistening on his face, he looked more than ever like a romantic hero
from forties movies, and I wondered what he made of the end of Billy
Ritz. Hogan spun away to speak to the officer who had found the body.
The other policemen edged away from him. I moved the telescope to
Fontaine, who was watching the attendants wheel the gurney down the
sidewalk.

"That writing
is red," Glenroy said. I was still looking at Fontaine, and as Glenroy
spoke, the detective turned his head to look at the slogan on the wall.
I couldn't see his face. "Right," I said.

"Wasn't it
black, the other time? Behind the hotel?"

"I think so,"
I said.

Fontaine
might have been comparing the two slogans, too: he turned around and
stared fixedly across the street, toward the passage where three people
had been killed. Rain streamed off the tip of his nose.

"It's funny,
you mentioning Monty Leland," Glenroy said.

I
straightened up from the telescope, and Fontaine shrank to a damp
little figure on the sidewalk, facing in a different direction from all
of the other damp little figures. "Why is it funny?"

"He was kind
of in the same business as Billy. You know much about Monty Leland?"

"He was one
of Bill Damrosch's informers."

"That's
right. He wasn't much else, but he was that."

"Billy Ritz
was an informer?"

"Like I told
you—the man was in the middle. He was a contact."

"Whose
informer was he?"

"Better not
to know." Glenroy tilted up the telescope. "Show's over."

We went back
into the living room. Glenroy switched on a lamp near his table and sat
down. "How did you wind up out there in the rain?"

"Paul
Fontaine took me out to see Bob Bandolier's grave, and he got called
here on the way back. He wasn't in a very good mood."

"He was
saying—okay, maybe he did it, but he's dead. Right? So leave it alone."

"Right," I
said. "I think I'm beginning to see why."

Glenroy
hitched himself up in the chair. "Then you better watch who you talk
to. On the real side."

The record
ended, and Glenroy jumped up and flipped it over. He put the needle
down on the second side. "Night and Day" breathed out into the room.
Glenroy stood next to his shelves., looking down at the floor and
listening to the music. "Nobody like Ben. Nobody."

I thought he
was about to take the tension out of the air by telling me some
anecdote about Ben Webster, but he clamped his arms around his chest
and swayed in time to the music for a few seconds. "Suppose some doctor
got killed out at the stadium," he said. "I'm not saying this happened,
I just supposing. Suppose he got killed
bad
—cut up in a toilet."

He looked up
at me, and I nodded.

"Suppose I'm
a guy who likes to go to ball games now and then. Suppose I was there
that day. Maybe I might happen to see a guy I know. He's got some kind
of name like… Buster. Buster ain't worth much. When he ain't breaking
into someone's house, he's generally drunk on his ass. Now suppose one
time when I'm coming back from the food stand, I happen to see this
no-good Buster all curled up under the steps to the next level in a
puddle of Miller High Life. And if this ever happened, which it didn't,
the only reason I knew this was a human being and not a blanket was
that I knew it was Buster. Because the way this didn 't happen was, he
was jammed so far up under the steps you had to look for him to see
him." I nodded.

"Then just
suppose a detective gets word that Buster was out at the game that day,
and Buster once did four years at Joliet for killing a guy in a bar,
and when the detective goes to his room, he finds the doctor's wallet
in a drawer. What do you
suppose
happens next?"

"I suppose
Buster confesses and gets a life sentence."

"Sounds about
right to me," Glenroy said. "For a made-up story, that is."

I asked
Glenroy if he knew the number of a cab company. He took a business card
from the top of the dresser and carried it to me. When I reached for
the card, he held onto it for a second. "You understand, I never said
all that, and you never heard it."

"I don't even
think I was here," I said, and he let go of the card.

A dispatcher
said that a cab would pick me up in front of the hotel in five minutes.
Glenroy tossed me my wet shirt and told me to keep the sweatshirt.

Laszlo Nagy,
from my point of view a mass of dark curls erupting from the bottom of
a brown tweed cap, began talking as soon as I got into his cab. Some
guy got killed right there across the street, did I know that? Makes
you think of that crazy guy Walter Dragonette, didn't it? What makes a
guy do things like that, anyhow? You have to be God to know the answer
to that one, right? Laszlo Nagy had arrived from Hungary eight years
ago, and such terrible things never happened in Hungary. Other terrible
things happened instead. Do I see this terrible rain? Do I know how
long it will last, this terrible rain? It will last six hours exactly.
And what will come next? A fog will come next. The fog will be equally
terrible as the rain, because no driver will be able to see what is in
front of him. We will have fog two days. Many accidents will take
place. And why? Because Americans do not drive well in the fog.

I grunted in
all the appropriate places, thinking about what I knew and what it
meant. William Writzmann was the son of Oscar Writzmann—now I
understood Oscar's remark to John and me about going back to Pigtown,
where we belonged. As Billy Ritz, Writzmann had carried on an
interesting criminal career under the protection of a murderous
Millhaven policeman until the day after John and I had come crashing in
on his father. Writzmann had been the front man for Elvee Holdings;
Elvee's two fictitious directors had been named after Fee Bandolier's
father and an old head of homicide named Andy Belin. Tom Pasmore had
been right all along. And Fee Bandolier was a policeman in Millhaven.

I had no idea
of what to do next.

Laszlo drew
up in front of John's house. When I paid him, he told me that American
money should be in different sizes and colors, like bills in England
and France—and Hungary. He was still talking about the beauty of
European money when I closed the door.