The Throat (69 page)

I ran up the
walk and let myself into the dark house with the extra key. In the
kitchen, I rubbed the rain off my face with a paper towel, and then I
went upstairs to do some work until John came home.

After I had
showered, dressed in clean, dry clothes, and worked for an hour or so,
I sat on the bed and called Tom Pasmore. No woman named Jane Wright had
been killed in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in May or any other month of
1977, but there were lots of other Allentowns in the United States, and
he was gradually working through them. He told me he was going to look
into Tangent's history as soon as he found the right Allentown. Tom had
a lot to say about Fee Bandolier. He also had a few ideas of how to
proceed, all of which sounded dangerous to me. When we finished, I felt
hungry again and decided to go downstairs to see if there was anything
in the refrigerator except vodka.

As I was
going toward the stairs, I heard a car splashing to a stop at the front
of the house and went to the window at the front of the hallway. A dark
green cab stood near the curb. Sheets of water washed down the street,
and rain bounced crazily off the roof of the cab. Through the streaming
water I could read the words
MONARCH CAB CO
. and a
local telephone number on the front door. John Ransom was leaning over
the front seat, wrangling with the driver. I ran back to the guest room
and dialed the number on the cab door.

"This is
Miles Darrow, the accountant for Mr. John Ransom. I understand that my
client has used the services of your cab company within the past few
hours. He has a problem saving his receipts, and I wonder if you could
tell me where your driver picked him up, where he was going, and what
the average fare would be to Ely Place on the east side from that
location. No reason letting the IRS get it all."

"Gee, you're
a good accountant," said the woman I was speaking to. "I took the call
from Mr. Ransom myself. Pickup was at his house and destination was the
Dusty Roads Sunoco Service Station on Claremont Road in Purdum, then to
return back to Ely Place. The average fare, that's kind of hard to say,
but it would have to be about sixty-seventy dollars, except more on a
day like this. And waiting time would add some more, but I don't know
about that."

"Dusty
Rhoades?" I asked.

She spelled
the name for me. "Not like the baseball player," she said. "It's more
like a kind of a cute kind of a name."

That was
about right. Purdum was an affluent town about twenty miles up the
shoreline. There was a well-known boarding school in Purdum; a famous
polo player, if you knew about things like that, owned a stable and a
riding school there. In Purdum, every traffic accident involved at
least two Mercedes. I thanked her for her help, hung up, and listened
to John moving through the living room. I went to the head of the
stairs. The television began to babble. A heavy body hit the couch.

I started
down the stairs, telling myself that John would have stowed Alan's gun
somewhere in his room.

He didn't say
anything until he had given me a long, disapproving look from the
couch. Streaks of moisture still dampened his scalp, and widening dark
spots covered the shoulders of the dark green linen jacket. On the
television screen, a beautifully dressed, handsome black family sat
around a dining room table in what looked like a million-dollar house.
John took a big mouthful from a glass filled with clear liquid and a
lot of ice cubes, still giving me the full weight of his disapproval.
Maybe it was disappointment. Then he looked back at the black family.
The soundtrack told us that they were hugely enjoyable. "I didn't know
you were home," he said, stressing the pronoun.

"I had a busy
day," I said.

He shrugged,
still watching the television.

I walked
behind the couch and leaned against the mantel. The bronze plaque with
April's name on it still lay on the pink-and-gray marble. "I'll tell
you what I did, if you tell me what you did."

He gave me a
look of pure annoyance and turned theatrically back to the set.
"Actually, I thought I'd get home long before you came back. I had a
little errand to get out of the way, but it look longer than I
thought." Loud, sustained laughter came from the television. The father
of the black family was strutting around the table in an exaggerated
cakewalk. "I had to go to my office at Arkham to go over the curriculum
for next year. What took so long was that I had to hand in Alan's
reading list, too."

"I suppose
you called a taxi service," I said.

"Yeah, and I
waited an extra twenty minutes for the driver to find the place. You
shouldn't be able to drive a cab until you know the city. And the
suburbs, too."

The Monarch
driver hadn't known how to find Claremont Road. Maybe he hadn't even
known how to find Purdum. "So what did you do?" he asked.

"I discovered
some interesting information. Elvee Holdings has owned Bob Bandolier's
house since 1979."

"What?" John
finally looked up at me. "Elvee has a connection to Bandolier?"

"I was coming
back here to tell you when Paul Fontaine jumped out of an unmarked car,
frisked me, and yelled at me because a cop in Elm Hill bugged him about
Bandolier."

John smiled
when I said I had been frisked. "Did you assume the position?"

"I didn't
have much choice. When he was done yelling, he pushed me into his car
and drove like a madman to the expressway, down the expressway, and
finally got off at the stadium exit. He was taking me to Bob Bandolier."

John
stretched his arm along the top of the couch and leaned toward me.

"Bandolier is
buried in Pine Knoll Cemetery. He's been dead since 1972. You know how
much Elvee paid for his house? A thousand dollars. What must have
happened was that he left the house to his son, who sold it to the
company he set up as soon as he came home from Vietnam."

"Writzmann,"
John said. "I get it. This is
great
."

"Before we
could get back to the east side, just about the time it started to
rain, Fontaine answered a call and took me down to Sixth and Livermore.
And there, lying in front of the Idle Hour beneath the slogan Blue
Rose, was William Writzmann. Oscar Writzmann's son."

For once,
John looked stupefied. He even forgot about his drink.

"Also known
as Billy Ritz. He was a small-time coke dealer down around the St.
Alwyn. He also had connections to some police officer in Millhaven. I
think that policeman is Fee Bandolier, grown up. I think he murders
people for pleasure and has been doing it for a long time."

"And he can
cover up these murders because he's a cop?"

"That's
right."

"So we have
to find out who he is. We have to nail him."

I began
saying what I had to say. "John, there's a way to look at things that
makes everything I just told you irrelevant. William Writzmann and Bob
Bandolier and the Green Woman would have nothing to do with the way
your wife died."

"You just
lost me."

"The reason
none of that would matter is that you killed April."

He started to
say something, but stopped himself. He shook his head and tried to
smile. I had just announced that the earth was flat, and if you went
too far in any one direction you fell off. "You're kidding me, I hope.
But I have to tell you, it isn't funny."

"Just suppose
these things are true. You knew Barnett offered her a big new job in
San Francisco. Alan knew about it, too, even though he was too mixed up
to really remember anything about it."

"Well,
exactly," John said. "This is still supposed to be a joke, right?"

"If April was
offered that kind of job, would you want her to take it? I think you
would have been happier if she'd quit her job altogether. April's
success always made you uneasy—you wanted her to stay the way she was
when you first met her. Probably she did say that she was going to quit
after a couple of years."

"I told you
that. She wasn't like the rest of those people at Barnett—it was a big
joke to April."

"She wasn't
like them because she was so much better than they were. In the
meantime, let's admit that you saw your own job disappearing. Alan only
got through last year because you were holding his hand."

"That's not
true," John said. "You saw him at the funeral."

"What he did
that day was an astonishing act of love for his daughter, and I'll
never forget it. But he knows he can't teach again. In fact, he told me
he was worried about letting you down."

"There are
other jobs," John said. "And what does this make-believe have to do
with April, anyhow?"

"You were
Alan Brookner's right-hand man, but how much have you published? Can
you get a professorship in another department?"

His body
stiffened. "If you think I'm going to listen to you trash my career,
you're wrong." He put his drink on the table and swiveled his entire
body toward me.

"Listen to me
for a minute. This is how the police will put things together. You
resented and downplayed April's success, but you needed her. If someone
like April can make eight hundred thousand dollars for her father, how
much could she make for herself? A couple of million? Plenty of money
to retire on."

John made
himself laugh. "So I killed her for her money."

"Here's the
next step. The person I went to see downtown was Byron Dorian."

John rocked
back on the couch. Something was happening to his face that wasn't just
a flush.

"Suppose
April and Dorian saw each other a couple of times a week. They were
interested in a lot of the same things. Suppose they had an affair.
Maybe Dorian was thinking about going to California with her." John's
face darkened another shade, and he clamped his mouth shut. "I'm pretty
sure she was going to bring Alan along with her. I bet she had a couple
of brochures squirreled away up in her office. That means the police
have them now."

John licked
his lips. "Did that pretentious little turd put you on this track? Did
he say he slept with April?"

"He didn't
have to. He's in love with her. They used to go to this secluded little
spot in Flory Park. What do you suppose they did there?"

John opened
his mouth and breathed in and out, so shocked he couldn't speak. Years
ago, I thought, April had taken him there, too. John's face softened
and lost all its definition. "Are you almost done?"

"You couldn't
stand it," I said. "You couldn't keep her, and you couldn't lose her,
either. So you worked out a plan. You got her to take you somewhere in
her car. You got her to park in a secluded place. As soon as she
started talking, you beat her unconscious. Maybe you stabbed her after
you beat her. Probably you thought you killed her. There must have been
a lot of blood in the car. Then you drove to the St. Alwyn and carried
her in through the back door and up the service steps to room 218. They
don't have room service, the maids don't work at night, and almost
everybody who lives there is about seventy years old. There's no one in
those halls after midnight. You still have master keys. You knew the
room would be empty. You put her on the bed and stabbed her again, and
then you wrote
BLUE ROSE
on the wall."

He was
watching me with assumed indifference—I was explaining that the earth
was flat all over again.

"Then you
took the car to Alan's house and stashed it in his garage. You knew
he'd never see it—Alan never even left his house. You cleaned up all
the obvious bloodstains. As far as you knew, you could keep it there
forever, and no one would ever find it. But then you got me here, in
order to muddy the water by making sure everybody thought about the old
Blue Rose murders. I started spending time with Alan, so the garage
wasn't safe anymore. You had to move the Mercedes. What you did was
find a friendly garage out of town, put it in for a general service and
a good cleaning, and just left it there for a week."

"Are we still
talking about a hypothesis?"

"You tell me,
John. I'd like to know the truth."

"I suppose I
killed Grant Hoffman. I suppose I went to the hospital and killed
April."

"You wouldn't
be able to let her come out of her coma, would you?"

"And Grant?"
He was still trying to look calm, but red-and-white blotches covered
his face.

"You were
setting up a pattern. You wanted me and the cops to think that Blue
Rose was back to work. You picked a guy who would have remained
unidentified forever if he hadn't been wearing your father-in-law's old
sport jacket. Even when we saw the body, you still pretended he was a
vagrant."

John was
rhythmically clenching and unclenching his jaws.

"It wouldn't
be hard for me to think you just got me out here to use me."

"You just
turned into a liability—if you talk to anybody, you could convince them
that all of this bullshit is real. Go upstairs and start packing, Tim.
You're gone."

He started to
get up, and I said, "What would happen if the police went to Purdum,
John? Did you take her car to Purdum?"

"Damn you,"
he said, and rushed at me.

He was on me
before I could stop him. The odors of sweat and alcohol poured out of
him. I punched him in the stomach, and he grunted and wrenched me away
from the fireplace. His arms locked around my middle. It felt like he
was trying to crush me to death. I hit the side of his head two or
three times, and then I got my hands under his chin and tried to pry
him off of me. We struggled back and forth, rocking between the
fireplace and the couch. I shoved up on his meaty chin, and he released
his arms and staggered back. I hit him once more in the belly.