The Throat (84 page)

As I said all
this, Sonny's face went from rigid anger to ordinary cop impassivity. I
figured that was a long distance. "I don't know where the notes are,
but the pictures are behind the furnace."

His eyes
flicked toward the house. "Fontaine owns it, through Elvee Holdings.
Also the Green Woman Taproom. Look at the Green Woman's basement,
you'll see where Billy Ritz died."

He took it
all in—his world was whirling over on itself as sickeningly as mine had
just done, but Sonny was not going to fail me. I nearly fainted from
sheer relief. "The ambulance'll be here in a second," he said. "That
old guy was April Ransom's father?"

I nodded.
"How is he?"

"He's talking
about the kingdom of heaven," Sonny said.

Oh yes, of
course. The kingdom of heaven. Where a certain man had wished to kill a
noble, tested his sword by striking it against the wall, and gone out
and killed the noble. What else would he be talking about?

"How's
Fontaine?"

"I think the
crazy old bastard killed him," he said, and then the huge space he had
occupied above me was filled again with black, starry night. Sirens
came screaming into the street.

During the
journey in the ambulance, as endless as if we were going to some
hospital on the moon, my body detached itself from my anxiety and
settled into its new condition. I was awash in blood, bathed in it,
blood covered my chest and my arms and hung like a sticky red syrup on
my face, but most of it belonged to the dead or dying man on the next
stretcher. I was going to live. One paramedic labored over Paul
Fontaine's body while another cut off my shirt and looked at my wound.
He held up two fingers in front of my face and asked how many I saw.
"Three," I said. "Just kidding." He jabbed me with a needle. I heard
Fontaine's body leap up off the stretcher as they tried to jump-start
him, once, twice, three times. "Holy moly," said the paramedic whose
face I had not seen, "I think this guy is Paul Fontaine."

"No shit,"
said the other. His face loomed again above mine, friendly,
reassuringly professional, and black. "Are you a cop, too? What's your
name, partner?"

"Fee
Bandolier," I said, and startled him by laughing.

Whatever he
had goosed into my veins put my pain to sleep and caused my anxiety to
retreat another three or four feet toward the roof of the ambulance,
where it hung like an oily cloud. We, the anxiety, the paramedics, the
leaping corpse, and myself, whirled forward on our journey to the moon.
"This Fontaine, he's a DOA," said the other paramedic, and from the
oily cloud came the information that I had heard Fontaine's last words,
but understood only one of them. He had struggled to speak—he had
licked his lips and forced out a syllable he wanted me to hear.
Bell
.
The bell tolls, ask not for whom. The tintinnabulation that so
musically wells, what a tale their terror tells, how the danger sinks
and swells. I wondered what was happening to Alan Brookner, I wondered
if Sonny Berenger would be able to remember everything I'd told him. I
had the feeling that a lot of policemen would be coming to see me, in
my hospital on the moon. Then I floated away.

I woke up
with the enormous drill-like head of an X-ray machine aimed at the
right side of my chest, most of which was covered with a bloody pad. A
technician armored in a diving helmet and a lead vest was ordering me
to stand still. Instead of my clothes, I was wearing a flimsy blue
hospital gown unbuttoned at the back and draped down off my right
shoulder like a toga. Someone had cleaned all the blood off me, and I
smelled like rubbing alcohol. It came as a surprise that I was standing
up by myself. "Could you please try to stand still?" asked the surly
beast in the armor, and the drill clicked and whirred. "Now turn
around, and we'll do your back." I found that I could turn around.
Evidently I had been performing miracles like this for some time.
"We'll have to get that arm up," said the beast, and came out from
behind his machine to take my right arm by the elbow and firmly rip it
away from my shoulder. He paid no attention to the noises I made. "Hold
it like that." Click. Whir. "You can go back to your room now."

"Where am I?"
I asked, and he laughed. "I'm serious. What hospital is this?"

He walked out
without speaking, and a nurse hurried forward out of nowhere with a
long blue splint festooned with dangling white strips of Velcro and the
information that I was in St. Mary's Hospital. Here was another
homecoming: it was in St. Mary's that I had spent two months of my
seventh year, and where a nurse named Hattie Bascombe had told me that
the world was half night. A great dingy pile of brown brick occupying
about a quarter-mile of Vestry Street, the hospital was a block away
from my old high school. In real time, if there is such a thing, the
whole endless journey in the ambulance could have taken no more than
five minutes. The nurse clamped the sling onto my arm, tied up my gown,
deposited me in a wheelchair, pushed me down a corridor, loaded me into
an empty elevator, unloaded me, and then navigated me through a maze of
hallways to a room with a high bed, both evidently mine. A lot of
people wanted to talk to me, she said, I was a pretty popular guy. I
said, "I vant to be alone." She was too young to know about Greta
Garbo, but she left me alone anyhow.

A
bemused-looking doctor with a long manila envelope in one hand came in
about ten minutes later. "Well, Mr. Underhill," he said, "you present
us with an unusual problem. The bullet that struck you traveled in a
nice straight line past your lung and came to rest beneath your right
shoulder blade. But according to these X rays, you're carrying so much
metal around in your back that we can't distinguish the bullet from
everything else. Under the circumstances, I think we'll just leave it
there."

Then he
shifted on his feet and smiled down at me with the envelope of X rays
dangling over his crotch in his joined hands. "Would you mind settling
a little dispute between me and the radiologist? What happened to you,
some kind of industrial accident?"

He had clear
blue eyes, a thick flop of blond hair on his forehead, and no lines at
all, none, not even crow's feet. "When I was a little boy," I said, "I
swallowed a magnet."

A tiny,
almost invisible horizontal wrinkle, as fine as a single hair on a
baby's head, appeared in the center of his forehead.

"Okay," I
said. "It was more in the nature of foreign travel." He didn't get it.
"If you're not going to operate, does that mean that I get to go home
tomorrow?"

He said that
they wanted to keep me under observation for a day or two. "We want to
keep you clear of infections, see that your wound begins to heal
properly." He paused. "And a police lieutenant named McCandless seemed
concerned that you stay in one place. I gather that you can expect a
lot of visitors over the next few days."

"I hope one
of them brings me something to read."

"I could pick
up some magazines from the lounge, if you like, and bring them to you
the next time I'm in this wing."

I thanked
him, and he smiled and said, "If you tell me how foreign travel can put
about a pound of metal fragments in your back."

I asked how
old the radiologist was.

That little
baby-hair wrinkle turned up in his forehead again. "About forty-six,
forty-seven, something like that."

"Ask him.
He'll explain it to you."

"Get some
rest," he said, and turned off the lights when he left.

As soon as he
was gone, whatever they had given me while I was still only
semiconscious began to wear off, and a wide track through my body burst
into flame. I groped around for the bell to ring the nurse and finally
found it hanging on a cord halfway down the side of the mattress. I
pushed the button twice, waited a long time, and then pushed it again.
A black nurse with stiff, bristling orange hair came in about twenty
minutes later and said that I was due for a painkiller in about an
hour. I didn't need it now, I just
thought
I needed it now. Out she
went. The flames laughed and caroused. An hour later, she turned on the
lights, wheeled in a tray with a row of needles lined up like dental
tools, told me to roll over and jabbed me in the butt. "See?" she said.
"You didn't really need it until now, did you?"

"Anticipation
is half the fun," I said. She turned off the light and went away. The
darkness started to move over me in long, smooth waves.

When I woke
up, the window at the end of the room shone with a delicate pink light.
The happy flames were already racing around and organizing another
shindig. A little stack of magazines stood on the bedside table. I
picked them up to see what they were. The doctor had brought me copies
of
Redbook, Modern Maturity, Modern
Bride,
and
Longevity
.
I guessed the
hospital didn't subscribe to
Soldier
of Fortune.
I opened
Redbook
and
began reading the advice column. It was very interesting on the subject
of menopause, but just when I was beginning to learn something new
about progesterone, my first visitor of the day arrived. Two visitors,
actually, but only one of them counted. The other was Sonny Berenger.

The man who
followed Sonny through the door had a wide, deeply seamed brick-colored
face and short reddish hair shot with gray that rolled back from his
forehead in tight waves. His tweed jacket bracketed a chest about four
feet across. Next to Sonny Berenger, he looked like a muscular dwarf
who could bend iron bars and bite nails in half. The detective gave me
a quick, unsettling glance and ordered Sonny to close the door.

He came up to
the bed and said, "My name is Ross McCandless, and I'm a lieutenant in
Homicide. We have a lot to talk about, Mister Underhill."

"That's
nice," I said.

Sonny came
back from shutting the door and went to the foot of the bed. He looked
about as animated as an Easter Island statue, but at least he didn't
look hostile.

McCandless
pulled up the chair and parked himself about two feet from my head. His
light blue eyes, set close to his sharp little pickax of a nose, were
utterly flat and dead, far past the boundary where they could have been
called expressionless. They did not even have enough life in them to be
lifeless. I was suddenly aware that the three of us were alone in the
room and that whatever happened between us was going to shape reality.
Sonny was going to contribute, or he would have been left out in the
hall, I was going to contribute, but whatever reality we created
together was mainly going to suit McCandless.

"How are you
feeling? You doing all right?"

"No serious
damage," I said.

"Yeah. I
talked to your doctor." That took care of the social portion of our
encounter. "I understand you feel you have some interesting information
about the late Detective Fontaine, and I want to know about that. All
about it. I've been talking with your friend Ransom, but it seems that
you're the key to what happened on South Seventh Street last night. Why
don't you just explain that whole situation to me, as you see it."

"Is Officer
Berenger going to take a statement?"

"There's no
need for that right now, Mr. Underhill. We are going to proceed with a
certain amount of care here. In due time, you will be asked to sign a
statement all of us will be able to live with. I assume you already
knew that Detective Fontaine died of his wounds."

He had
already cut Fontaine loose—now he was trying to control the damage. He
wanted me to give him a quick route out of the chaos. I nodded. "Before
I begin, could you tell me what happened to John and Alan Brookner?"

"When I left
Armory Place, Mr. Ransom was being questioned by Detective Monroe.
Professor Brookner is being held under observation at County Hospital.
Bastian is trying to get a statement from him, but I don't think he's
having much luck. The professor isn't very coherent."

"Has he been
charged with anything?"

"You might
say this conversation is part of that process. Last night, you made
certain statements to Officer Berenger concerning Paul Fontaine and a
company called Elvee Holdings. You also mentioned the names Fielding
Bandolier and Franklin Bachelor. Why don't you start by telling me how
you became aware of Elvee Holdings?"

"I had dinner
with John on my first night in Millhaven," I said. "Just as we were
finishing, he called the hospital and heard that his wife was showing
signs of improvement, and he immediately left the restaurant to walk to
Shady Mount." I described how I had noticed that a car was following
him, taken down the license number in my notebook, trailed after both
of them to Shady Mount, spoken to the driver in the hospital lobby, and
recognized him from my visit earlier that day. "The driver turned out
to be Billy Ritz."

"And what did
you do with the license number?"

"The next day
I went to the hospital without knowing that April had been killed, saw
Paul Fontaine along with a lot of policemen on her floor, and gave him
the license number."

McCandless
looked briefly at Sonny. "You gave it to Fontaine?"

"Actually, I
read it to him out of my notebook. I thought I had given him the sheet
of paper, but at April's funeral, I opened my notebook and saw that I
still had it. That afternoon, when John and Alan and I went to the
morgue to identify Grant Hoffman's body, I saw the same car parked next
to the Green Woman Taproom." I told him about seeing Billy Ritz putting
cardboard boxes in his trunk. McCandless was still waiting to see how
all this led to Elvee Holdings. I repeated what I had told John about
working with a computer at the university library. "It turned out that
a company named Elvee Holdings owned both the car and the Green Woman.
I got the names and addresses of the corporate officers." When I gave
him the names, McCandless could not keep from registering surprise—he'd
been busy with the consequences of the riot, and he was starting his
own research with me.