The Throat (80 page)

"I want you
to show me room 218," I said. "Shoo," he said. "Is that all? Show me
what you got in your pocket."

I took out
the four packets and put them on the table in front of him. Glenroy
picked up each in turn and hefted it for weight, smiling to himself.
"Guess I was his first stop of the night. This is a double eightball.
Nick was gonna eyeball it down into packets, probably cut off a little
for himself every time he did it."

"Congratulations," I said. "Nick still out there?"

"I called
911. He's in a hospital by now. He'll have to stay there for a couple
of days."

"Maybe you
and me will both stay alive for a while, after all."

"To tell you
the truth, Glenroy, it could have gone either way."

"Now I
know
you're dangerous." He pushed himself away from the table and
stood up.
"You said you want to see James's old room?"

Before we
left, he scooped up the plastic envelopes and put them in the wooden
box.

Glenroy
pushed the button marked 2 on the panel and leaned back on the wooden
bar. "What did you find out?"

"Bob Bandolier had a son," I said. "After Bob's wife died, he sent
him away to live with relatives. I think he started killing people when
he was a teenager. He enlisted under a phony name and went to Vietnam.
He worked in a couple of police departments around the country and
finally came back here."

"Lot of
detectives here were in Vietnam." The elevator came to a stop, and the
doors slid open. A corridor painted a dark, gloomy shade of green
stretched out before us. "But only one of them looks like he takes
after Bad Bob."

We stepped
out, and Glenroy looked up at me speculatively, beginning to get
worried again. "You think this guy killed your friend's wife?"

I nodded.

"Which one?"

Glenroy
motioned me down the hallway. He did not speak until we came around a
corner and came up to the door of room 218. Yellow police tape was
strung tautly across the frame, and a white notice on the door
announced that entrance was a crime punishable by a fine and a jail
term. "All this trouble, and they never bothered to lock the door,"
Glenroy said. "Not that the locks would stop you, anyhow."

I bent down
to look at the keyhole in the doorknob. I didn't see any scratches.

Glenroy
didn't even bother to look up and down the corridor. He just put his
hand on the knob and opened the door. "No sense in hanging around." He
bent under the tape and walked into the room.

I crouched
down and followed him. Glenroy closed the door behind us.

"I was
thinking of Monroe," Glenroy said. "He looks like Bob Bandolier. Monroe
is a mean son of a bitch, too. He got a few people alone, you know, and
they didn't look so good, time he got through with them."

He was
looking at the floor as he spoke. I couldn't take my eyes off the bed,
and what he was telling me fought for space in my mind with the shock
of what was before me. The bed reminded me of the chair in the basement
of the Green Woman. Whoever had brought April Ransom into this room had
not bothered to pull back the long blue quilt or uncover the pillows. A
dark stain lay like a shadow across the bed, and runners and strings of
the same dark noncolor dripped down the sides of the quilt. Brown
splashes and spatters surrounded the words above the bed.
BLUE
ROSE
had
been written in the same spiky letters I had seen in the alleyway
behind the hotel.

"A cop like
that turns up, every now and then," Glenroy said. He had wandered over
to the window, which looked down into the passage behind the hotel.

"Goddamn, I
hate being in this room." Glenroy drifted off to the dresser unit that
ran along the wall opposite the bed. Cigarette butts filled the ashtray
on top of the dresser. "Why did you want me to come here, anyhow?"

"I thought
you might notice something," I said.

"I notice I
want to get out." Glenroy finally glanced at the bed. "Your buddy has a
lot of those pens."

I asked him
what he meant.

"The words.
They're blue. That makes three. Red, black, and blue."

I looked at
the wall again. Glenroy was right—the slogan was written in dark blue
ink.

"If it's all
the same to you, I'm going back upstairs." Glenroy went to the door,
cracked it open, and glanced back at me. His face was tight with
impatience. I took in the slanting words for as long as I thought he
could stand it, tingling with a recognition that would not come into
focus.

I followed
Glenroy back under the tape. "You better not come back here for a
while," he said, and started toward the elevator.

I wandered
down the hall until I came to a pair of wide metal doors. They led down
to another pair of doors that must have opened into the lobby, and then
continued down another few steps to the back entrance. I walked outside
into the narrow alley behind the hotel, half-expecting a couple of
policemen to come toward me with drawn guns. Cold fog moved up the
alley from the brick passage, licking against the back of the pharmacy
that had taken over the old annex. Up to my left, I could see the
crumpled nose of Nick Ventura's car poking past the rear of the hotel.

I hurried
through the passage. A few gunshots came from Messmer Avenue, a little
more orange tinted the sky. A long smear of blood lay across the
sidewalk. I walked around it and plodded through the fog until I got to
the Pontiac. I kept seeing room 218 in my mind without understanding
what had been wrong up there.

When I got
close enough to the car to see it clearly, I groaned out loud. Some
wayward child had happened along with a baseball bat and clubbed in the
rear window. The Pontiac looked like it had been driven away from a
junkyard. I didn't think John was going to react very gracefully to the
sight of his car. I was surprised that I still cared.

Back at
John's, I took a couple of aspirins for the pain in my back and went
upstairs. I didn't even bother with a book, I just stretched out on the
guest bed and waited for unconsciousness. John must have been still on
his way home from Chicago —I wasn't looking forward to his reaction to
what had happened to his car. I had just decided to tell him about my
meetings with Tom Pasmore when I witnessed my hand picking up the
fourth, most disfigured photograph from the blood-soaked bed in the St.
Alwyn. I understood that if I shook the photograph while holding it
upside down, the markings would fall away like hair cuttings. I upended
and shook the little square. Dried-up ink fragments obediently dropped
to the floor. I turned the photograph over and saw an image I knew—a
photograph my mother had taken in front of the house on South Sixth
Street. A three-year-old me stood on the sidewalk while my father, Al
Underhill, crouched behind me, his hat slanted back on his head, his
hand loose and proprietorial on my shoulder.

Some time
later, an actual hand on my shoulder brought me back up into the real
world. I opened my eyes to the gloating face of John Ransom, six or
seven inches away from mine. He was almost demonic with glee. "Come
on," he said, "let's hear about it. You tell me your adventures, and
I'll tell you mine."

"Did you see
your car?"

He pulled
away from me, waving the trouble away with his thick hands.

"Don't worry
about that, I understand. I almost had a real crack-up myself on the
way to Chicago. You must have been sideswiped, right?"

"Someone ran
me off the road," I said.

He laughed
and pulled the chair closer to the bed. "Listen to this. It was
perfect."

John had made
it from Purdum to Chicago in four hours, narrowly missing several
incidents of the sort he'd assumed I'd had. The fog had vanished about
thirty miles this side of Chicago, and he'd parked a block from the
train station.

He had left
the keys in the unlocked car and walked up the street. Two potential
thieves had been chased away on the basis of being dressed too well. "I
mean, some yuppie, what's he going to do, actually steal it? Give me a
break. I had to shut up some guy who started yelling for a cop, and he
gave me a big lecture about leaving the keys in my car. Anyhow, this
white kid finally comes up, gold chain around his
neck, his pants halfway down his ass, no laces in his shoes, and when
this
jerk sees the keys he
starts ambling around the car, checking out
the street to make sure nobody's watching him—I'm standing there,
looking into a window, practically praying that he'll try the door."
And finally the boy had tried the open door, nearly fainted when it
opened, and jumped in and driven away in the car of his dreams.

"The kid'll
beat the shit out of it for a couple of weeks, total it, and I'll get
the insurance. Perfect." He all but covered his own face with kisses.
Then he remembered that I had been in an accident and looked at me with
a sort of humorous concern. "So you got run off the road? What
happened?"

I went into
the bathroom, and he stood outside the door while I splashed water on
my face and told him about coming back from Tangent.

I rubbed my
face with a towel. John was standing in the doorway, chewing on the
inside of his cheek.

"He pulled a
knife on me, but I got lucky. I broke his arm."

"Jesus," John
said.

"Then I went
inside the hotel and took a look at the room where they found April."

"What
happened to the guy?"

"He's in the
hospital now."

I went toward
the door, and John backed away and slapped me on the back as I came
through. "What was the point of going to the room?"

"To see if
I'd notice anything."

"It must be
pretty bad," John said.

"I have the
feeling I missed something, but I can't work out what it was."

"The cops
have been over that room a million times. Ah, what am I saying? A cop
is the one who did it."

"I know who
he is," I said. "Let's go downstairs, and I'll tell you the rest of my
adventures."

"You found
out his name in Tangent? Somebody described him?"

"Better than
that," I said.

"John,"
I said, "I want to know where you were assigned after you brought the
man you thought was Franklin Bachelor back to the States."

We were
sitting at the table, eating a dinner both of us had made up out of
food we had come across in the refrigerator and the freezer. John
wolfed down the meal as if he hadn't eaten in a week. He'd had two
substantial glasses of the hyacinth vodka while we worked in the
kitchen and opened another bottle of the Chateau Petrus from his cellar.

Since we had
come downstairs, he had been debating out loud with himself whether he
should really go back to Arkham next year. If you thought about it, he
said, his book was really a higher duty than meeting his classes. Maybe
he should admit that he had to move on to a new phase of his life. My
question interrupted this self-absorbed flow, and he looked up from his
plate and stopped chewing. He washed down the food in his mouth with
wine.

"You know
exactly where I was. Lang Vei."

"Weren't you
really somewhere else? A camp not far from Lang Vei?"

He frowned at
me and sliced off another bit of veal. He took some more of the wine.
"Is this more wild stuff you got from that quartermaster colonel?"

"Tell me."

He set down
his knife and fork. "Don't you think the name of the cop is a lot more
important? I've been really patient with you, Tim, I let you do your
Julia Child number at the stove, but I don't feel like rooting around
in ancient history."

"Did someone
tell you to say that you'd been at Lang Vei?"

He gave me
the look you'd give a mule that had decided to stop moving. Then he
sighed. "Okay. After I finally made it to Khe Sanh, a colonel in
Intelligence showed up and ordered me to tell people I'd been at Lang
Vei. My orders were all rewritten, so as far as history goes, I was at
Lang Vei."

"Did you know
why you were given those orders?"

"Sure. The
army didn't want to admit how badly it fucked up."

"Where were
you, if you weren't at Lang Vei?"

"A little
encampment called Lang Vo. We got wiped out right after Lang Vei was
overrun. Me and a dozen Bru. The North Vietnamese took us apart."

"After you
came back from Langley, they sent you off to a postage stamp in the
jungle." So far, Colonel Runnel had been telling the truth. "Why did
they do that?"

"Why do they
do anything? That's the kind of thing we did."

"Did you
think you were being punished for having brought back the wrong man?"

"It wasn't
punishment
." He glared at me.
"I didn't lose any rank."

Maybe he was
right. But I thought that Runnel was right, too. John was beginning to
flush, turning red from the neck up.

"Tell me what
happened at Lang Vo."

"It was a
massacre." He was looking straight into my eyes. "First they shelled
us, and then North Vietnamese regulars swarmed in, and then the tanks
blasted the hell out of whatever was left standing." His entire face
had turned red. "I felt like fucking Custer."

"Custer
didn't get out alive," I said.

"I don't have
to defend myself to you." He jammed his fork into the home fries,
brought one up to his mouth, and looked at it as if it had turned into
a cockroach. He put the fork back down on his plate.

I said that I
wanted to know what had happened.

"I made a
mistake," he said, and met my eyes again. "You want to know what
happened, that's what happened. I didn't think they'd send so much
force after us. I didn't think it'd be a goddamn siege."