The Throat (70 page)

John clutched
his stomach and stepped backward, glaring at me.

"You killed
her," I managed to say.

He lunged
toward me, and I put my hands on his shoulders and tried to push him
aside. John rode in under me, clamped his right arm around my waist,
and pulled me into his shoulder. His head was a boulder in my side. I
grabbed the brass plaque off the mantel and pounded it into his neck.
Ransom pushed me backward with all of his weight. My feet vanished
beneath me, and I landed on the marble apron of the fireplace so hard I
saw actual stars. Ransom reached wildly up toward my head and got a
hand on my face and pulled himself up onto my chest. Both hands closed
around my neck. I bashed the plaque into the side of his head. Because
of the way I was holding the award, I couldn't use the edge, only the
flat surface. I hit him with the plaque again. A creaky squawk came
from my throat, and I merely tapped the plaque against the side of his
head. My muscles felt like water. I used the last of my strength to
bash the metal plaque against his head again.

John's hands
loosened on my throat. All the tension went out of his body. He was a
huge slack weight pressing down on me. His chest heaved. Strangled,
wheezing noises came from his mouth. After a couple of seconds, I
realized that he wasn't dying right on top of me. He was weeping. I
crawled out from under him and lay panting on the carpet. I unwrapped
my fingers from the plaque. John curled up like a fetus and continued
to cry, his arms tented over his head.

After a
little while, I got upright and slid along the marble apron and leaned
against the edge of the fireplace. We'd been fighting for no more than
a minute or two. Someone had been slamming a baseball bat into my arms,
my back, my legs, my chest, and my head. I still felt Ransom's hands
around my neck.

John lowered
his arms and lay curled up with his chest on the marble apron and his
hips and legs on the carpet. An ugly wound bled down into his hair. He
reached into his trouser pocket for a dark blue handkerchief and put it
up against the cut. "You're a real bastard."

"Tell me what
happened," I said. "Try to get in the truth this time."

He looked at
the handkerchief. "I'm bleeding." He placed the handkerchief back over
the wound.

"You can put
a bandage on it later."

"How did you
know about Purdum?"

"I was
sneaky," I said. "Where is her car now, John?"

He tried to
push himself up and groaned. He lay back down again. "It's out there in
a storage garage. In Purdum. April and I could have retired there. It's
a beautiful place."

People like
Dick Mueller moved to Riverwood. People like Ross Barnett retired to
estates in Purdum.

John sat up,
holding the handkerchief to the side of his head, and slid on his
bottom until his back hit the other side of the fireplace. We sat there
like andirons. He wiped his free hand down over his face and snorted
back mucus. Then he looked at me, red-eyed. "I'm sorry I went for you
like that, but you pushed my buttons, and I snapped. Did I hurt you?"

"Was that
what happened with April? You snapped?"

"Yeah." He
nodded very carefully, wincing. I got another darting look from the red
eyes. "I wasn't going to tell you about any of this, because it makes
me look so bad. But I didn't invite you here to use you—you have to
know that."

"Then tell me
what happened."

He sighed.
"You got a lot of it right. Barnett spoke to April confidentially about
going into business in San Francisco. I wasn't crazy about that. I
wanted her to keep to the agreement we made—that she'd quit after she
proved she could do a good job at Barnett. But then she had to prove
she was the best broker and analyst in the whole damn Midwest. It got
so I never saw her except on weekends, and not always then. But I
didn't want her to go to California. She could open her own office
here, if that was what she wanted. Everything would have been all
right, if it hadn't been for that fourth-rate, womanizing twerp." He
glared at me. "Dorian had an affair with Carol Judd, the dealer who put
him onto April, did you know that?"

"I guessed,"
I said.

"The guy is
slime. He goes after older women. I will never, never know what April
saw in him. He was
cute
, I
guess."

"How did you
find out about it?"

John
inspected the handkerchief again. I couldn't see the wound, but the
handkerchief was bright with blood. "Could we move? I have to take care
of this gash."

I got up, all
my joints aching, and held out a hand for him. John grabbed my hand and
levered himself up. He steadied himself on the mantel for a moment and
then began moving across the living room toward the stairs.

Leaning over
to let the blood drip into the sink, John dipped a washcloth into the
stream of cold water and dabbed at the inch-long abrasion on the side
of his head, where his hair began to get thin. It didn't look so bad
now that it was clean. He had placed a square white bandage on the edge
of the sink. I was sitting on the tub, looking up at him and holding a
wad of folded tissues.

"April told
me she was working late at the office. Just to see if she was telling
me the truth, I called her line every half hour for three hours. Every
half hour, on the button. Maybe six times. She was never there. Around
eleven-thirty, I went up to her office here and looked in the file
where she kept her charge slips and credit card records. Okay."

He held out
his hand, and I passed him the tissues. He clamped them down on the
gash to dry it and then tossed them into the wastebasket and snatched
up the bandage square. He centered it over the wound, pushed wisps of
hair out of the way, and flattened it down on his scalp. "That'll do. I
guess I won't need any stitches." He turned his head to see the bandage
from different angles. "Now all I have is one hell of a headache."

He opened his
medicine chest, shook two aspirin tablets onto his palm, and swallowed
them with a gulp of water from a surprisingly humble red plastic cup.

"You know
what I found? Charges from Hatchett and Hatch. She bought
clothes
for
that little turd."

"How do you
know they weren't yours?" He sneered at me in the mirror. "I haven't
bought anything there in years. All my suits and jackets are made for
me. I even get my shirts made to order at Paul Stuart, in New York. And
I order my shoes from Wilkes Bashford in San Francisco." He lifted a
foot so that I could admire a dark brown pigskin cap-toe. "About all I
buy in Millhaven is socks and underwear." He patted the bandage and
stepped away from the sink. "Could we go downstairs so I could get a
drink? I'm going to need one."

I followed
him into the kitchen, and he gave me a chastened look as he opened the
freezer. Now that his father was gone, the three-hundred-dollar bottle
was back in the vodka library. "I'm not going to run away or anything,
Tim, you don't have to act like my shadow,"

"What did you
do when she finally came home?" He poured about three inches of
hyacinth vodka into a glass. He tasted it before answering me. "I
should never put ice cubes in this stuff. It's too refined to
dilute—such a delicate flavor. Would you like a sip?"

"A sip
wouldn't help me. Did you confront her directly?"

He took
another taste and nodded. "I had the charge slips right in front of
me—I was sitting out there in the living room, and she came in about a
quarter past twelve. God, I almost died." He looked up at the ceiling
and let out a nearly soundless sigh. "She looked so beautiful. She
didn't see me for a second. And as soon as she noticed me, she
changed
.
All the life went out of her. She might have just seen her jailer.
Right up until that moment, I was still thinking that there could be
another explanation for everything. The clothes could have been for her
father—he used to like that store. But the second I saw her mood change
like that, I knew."

"Did you lose
your temper?"

He shook his
head. "I felt like someone had just shoved a knife in my back. 'Who is
it?' I said. 'Your little pet, Byron?' She said she didn't know what I
was talking about. So I told he
r
I knew that she
hadn't
been at her office all night, and she gave me some kind of story about
not answering the
phone
,
about being in the
copy
room,
in another
office
… so I said, April, what
are these charge slips? and she kept
giving me lies, and I kept saying Dorian, Dorian, Dorian, and finally
she plunked herself down in a chair and said, okay, I've been seeing
Byron. What's it to you? God, it was like she was killing me. Anyhow,
she got less defensive as we went along, and she said she was sorry I
had to find out like this, she didn't like being underhanded, and she
was almost glad I'd found out, so we could talk about ending our
marriage."

"Did she
mention the job in San Francisco?"

"No, she
saved that for the car. I want to go into the other room, Tim. I'm a
little bit dizzy, okay?"

In the living
room, he noticed the bronze plaque on me floor and bent down to pick it
up. He showed it to me. "Is this what you were clobbering me with?" I
said that it was, and he shook his head over the irony of it all. "Damn
thing even looks like a murder weapon," he said, and put it back on me
mantel.

"Whose idea
was it to go for a ride?"

John looked
slightly peevish for a second, but no more than that. "I'm not used to
being grilled. This is still a very touchy subject."

He went to
the couch. The cushions exhaled when he sat down. He drank and held the
liquid in his mouth for a moment as he looked around the room. "We
didn't break anything. Isn't that amazing? The only reason I know I was
in a fight is that I feel like shit."

I sat down on
the chair and waited.

"Okay. I got
everything I thought about that weasel, Dorian, out of my system, and
finally I started telling her what I should have said at the
beginning—I said I loved her and I wanted to stay married. I said that
we had to give ourselves another chance. I said she was the most
important person in my life. Hell, I said she
was
my life."

Tears spilled
out of his eyes. "And that was true. Maybe I wasn't much of a husband,
but April was my whole life." He got his handkerchief halfway to his
face before noticing its condition. He checked his trousers for
bloodstains and dropped the handkerchief in a clean ashtray. "Tim, do
you happen to have… ?" I fished mine out of my pocket and tossed it to
him. It was two days old, but still clean, mostly. John pressed it to
his eyes, wiped his cheeks, and threw it back to me.

"Anyhow, she
said she couldn't sit still any longer, she had to go out for a drive
or something. I even asked if I could come along. If you want to talk
to me, you'd better, hadn't you? she said. So we drove around, I don't
even remember where. We kept saying the same things over and over—she
wouldn't
listen
to me.
Finally, we ended up somewhere around Bismarck
Boulevard, on the west side."

John pushed
out air between his lips. "She pulled over on Forty-sixth, Forty-fifth,
I don't remember. There was a bar down at the end of the block. The
Turf Lounge, I think it was." He looked at me, and his mouth twitched.
His glance shot away again, and he made a wild inventory of the things
in the room. "Tim, you remember how I kept looking for a car following
us, after we dropped off my parents? I think someone was following
April and me that night. I wasn't too straight, you know, I was
reallyscrewed up. But I still pick up on things, I haven't lost all the
old radar. But sometimes I get that feeling, and no one's there, you
know? Doesn't that happen to you?" I nodded.

"Anyhow,
there wasn't anybody else on the street. All the lights were out,
except in the bar. I was begging for my life. I told her about this
place I found in Purdum, good price, fifteen acres, a pond, a beautiful
house. We could have had our own art gallery there. I got done telling
her about it, and she said, Ross might want me to go to San Francisco.
I'd head my own office, she said. Forget that stuffed shirt Ross, I
said, what do you want? I've been thinking of taking it, she said. I
said, Without discussing it with me first? And she said—I didn't see
any point in bringing you into it.
Bringing
me into it.
She was giving
me broker talk! I couldn't help myself, Tim." He sat forward and stared
at me. His mouth worked while he figured out a way to say it. "I
couldn't help myself. Literally." His face reddened. "I just— smacked
her. I reached up and belted her in the face. Twice." His eyes got
swimmy, bleary with tears. "I, I felt so shocked— I felt so dirty.
April was crying. I couldn't take it."

His voice
crumbled, and he closed his eyes and reached a big pink hand out toward
me. For an odd second I thought he wanted me to grasp it. Then I
realized what he wanted and passed him my handkerchief again. He held
it over his eyes and bent forward and wept.

"Oh, God," he
said at last, sitting up. His voice was soft and cottony. "April just
sat there with tears all over her face." His chest was jerking, and he
mopped his eyes until he could speak again. "She didn't
say
anything. I
couldn't sit in that car anymore. I got out and walked away. I'm pretty
sure I heard a car starting up, but I wasn't paying attention to things
like that. I didn't think I was going up to the bar, but when I got to
the door, I went inside. I never even noticed if anyone else was in the
place. I put down about four drinks, boom boom boom boom, one right
after the other. I have no idea how long I was in there. Then this sumo
wrestler type of guy was standing in front of me, telling me that they
were closing and I had to pay up. I guess he was the bartender, but I
couldn't even remember seeing him before. He said—get this—"