The Throat (85 page)

"We're
checking on Elvee right now, and I suppose we'll come up with the same
information," he said. "Did you understand the significance of the name
Andrew Belinski?"

"Not at the
time."

"And you say
you got all this information by using a computer at the university
library?"

"That's
right," I said.

He didn't
believe me—he must have known that I wouldn't be able to get motor
vehicle records through a university computer—but he wasn't going to
press the point. "Someday, you'll have to show me how you did that."

"I guess I
got lucky," I said. "Did John tell you that I have a long-standing
interest in the old Blue Rose murders? That's why he called me."

"Go on," he
said.

For something
like ten minutes, I told him about meeting the Belknaps, hearing about
Bob Bandolier, visiting the Sunchanas, and for the first time learning
of the existence of Fielding Bandolier. The computer told me that Elvee
owned Bob Bandolier's old house. A vanity press book by a retired
colonel gave me an idea about a soldier, supposedly killed in action,
who had an old grudge against John Ransom. I talked about Judy
Leatherwood and Edward Hubbel.

"You saw no
need to come to the police with all this information."

"I did go to
the police," I said. "I went to Fontaine. He was the detective in
charge of April's case. Once I mentioned the Sunchanas, Fontaine
ordered me to stay away from the old Blue Rose murders, and then he
suggested that I get out of town. When I didn't, he took me himself to
Bob Bandolier's grave, in order to prove that Bandolier couldn't have
had anything to do with the new deaths. He was the one who told me
about Andy Belin's nickname, by the way, but he denied knowing anything
about Elvee."

McCandless
nodded. "Ransom said he called you to arrange a meeting near the St.
Alwyn."

"He found out
that I had gone to his old hometown in Ohio. When I came back, somebody
tried to run me off the highway in the fog. Fontaine wanted me dead,
but he didn't know what I had learned from Hubbel."

McCandless
hitched his chair an inch closer to the bed. "Then this woman on South
Seventh Street called you." We were getting to the red meat now, and I
had the feeling that something was going on that I did not quite
understand. McCandless seemed to grow heavier and denser with
concentration, as if he were now willing me to put things in a way that
would match a prearranged pattern. The only pattern I could see grew
out of what I had already told him, and I alluded again to the
agreement Hannah Belknap had made with me.

He nodded.
That was explanatory, but unimportant.

A cart
rattled past the door, and someone down the hall began shouting.

"What did you
have in mind when you decided to go to the Bandolier house?"

"I wanted to
surprise Fontaine. John and I thought we could knock him out or
overpower him and find the boxes of notes." I looked down the bed at
Sonny, but Sonny was still made of stone.

"What was the
point of bringing that old man along with you?"

"Alan can be
extremely insistent. He didn't give us much choice."

"Apparently,
a lot of people heard Professor Brookner threaten to kill the man who
murdered his daughter. I guess he was insistent then, too."

I remembered
the funeral—John must have told them about Alan's outburst. "I ordered
him to stay in the car, but he wanted to be close to the action, and he
followed us on the other side of the street."

"You had
already been inside the house."

I nodded.
"Looking for his records—those boxes he moved out of the Green Woman.
You found them, didn't you?"

"No,"
McCandless said.

I felt my
stomach sinking toward the mattress.

"How'd you
happen to get in, that first time?"

"The back
door wasn't locked," I said.

"Really,"
McCandless said. "He left the place open. Like the Green Woman, right?
You went up there, you found the lock broken."

"Right," I
said. "So I went in and had a look around."

"That's
probably a real common activity in New York, breaking and entering. Out
here, we sort of frown on it." The man down the hall started shouting
again, but the dead eyes never left mine. "Anyhow, let's say you and
your buddy got in there. There's an interesting little present down in
the basement, but no boxes full of good stuff. On the other hand, you
picked up something, didn't you? A piece of paper."

I'd been
carrying that paper around in my jacket pocket ever since Tom gave it
back to me. I had forgotten all about it, and someone at the hospital
had turned it over to the police. "Tampering with evidence carries a
little weight, too." John had told him all about getting into the house
and the tavern, and they were keeping him at Armory Place until
McCandless decided what to do with me. The decision had to do with the
way I answered his questions—unless I helped him push reality into the
shape he wanted, he'd be happy to mess up my life with as many criminal
charges as he could think up.

"I might even
be tempted to think that you and your pal brought along the old man
because you knew he'd shoot Fontaine as soon as he had the chance."

"We told him
to stay in the car," I said, wearily. "We didn't want him anywhere near
us. This is crazy. John didn't let him have the gun, he took it. We
didn't even have a real plan." The pain dialed itself up a couple of
notches. It was a long time until my next injection. "Look, if you saw
the paper, you understood what it was, right? You saw that it was about
a woman in Allentown. Fontaine worked in Allentown."

"Yeah."
McCandless sighed. "But we don't have anything that proves he killed
anybody there. And this conversation isn't really about Paul Fontaine
anymore. It's about you."

He abruptly
stood up and walked over to the window. He rubbed his face, looking out
at the street. Sunlight blazed on the building across the street.
McCandless tugged at his belt and turned slowly around. "I have to
think about this city. At this point, things could go a couple of
different ways. There's going to be a lot of changes in the department.
You got a guy in Ohio who says Fontaine was somebody else. What I got
is a dead detective and the tail end of a riot. What I don't need is a
lot of publicity about another serial killer in
Millhaven,
especially
one on
the force. Because then, what we get is
even more trouble than we already have." He sighed again. "Am I making
sense to you?"

"Too much," I
said.

"Everything
in the world is politics." He walked back to the chair, planted his
hands on its back, and leaned forward. "Let's talk about what happened
when Fontaine got shot."

He looked up
as the door swung open. The blond doctor I had met last night took two
steps into the room, froze, and turned right around and walked out
again.

"When we're
done," McCandless said, "all this is settled for good. After this,
there are going to be no surprises. On the night of the riot, you went
down to that house with the intention of overpowering and capturing a
man you had reason to believe had killed two people. You intended to
turn him over to the police."

"Exactly," I
said.

"Did you hear
gunfire in the neighborhood?"

"Not then.
No, I'm wrong. I heard shots from the area of the riot."

"What
happened when you got to the house?"

"John and I
were going around to the back door, but I took him along the side of
the house again to go up onto the porch. When John and I got near the
porch steps, Alan saw the front door open and started yelling."

"The patrol
car was about a block away at that point."

"That's
right," I said. "Alan saw Fontaine and started screaming, 'Is that
him?' Fontaine said something like, 'Damn you, Underhill, you're not
going to get away.' I don't think the men in the car had seen us yet."

McCandless
nodded.

"John ran up
to Alan and tried to get him to calm down, but Alan yanked the gun away
from him and started shooting. The next thing I knew, I was lying down
in a pool of blood."

"How many
shots did you hear?"

"There must
have been two," I said.

He waited a
significant beat. "I asked, how many did you hear?"

I thought
back. "Well, I saw Alan fire twice," I said. "But I think I might have
heard more than two shots."

"Brookner
fired twice," McCandless said. "Officer Berenger fired a warning shot
into the air. The couple who live across the street from where you were
say they heard at least five shots, and so does the woman next door.
Her husband slept through the whole thing, so he didn't hear anything.
Berenger's partner thinks he heard five shots, fired very close
together."

"It's like
the grassy knoll," I said.

"You were
facing Ransom and Brookner. What did you see? There had been some
trouble in that area during the rioting."

I remembered
what I had seen. "I had an impression that there was a person between
the houses behind Alan and Ransom."

"Good for
you, Mr. Underhill. Did you see this person?"

"I thought I
saw movement. It was dark. Then everything went crazy."

"Have you
ever heard of someone named Nicholas Ventura?"

A second too
late, I said, "No."

"No, I don't
suppose so," McCandless said. He must have known that I was lying.
"Ventura was an up-and-coming young sleazeball who ran into some
trouble on Livermore Avenue during the rioting. Somebody took a knife
away from him and almost broke off his arm." McCandless almost smiled
at me and then came around the chair and sat down, facing me. "Some
party called 911 from the St. Alwyn Hotel almost immediately afterward,
but I don't imagine that it was the same party that kicked the shit out
of Ventura, do you?"

"No," I said.

"In fact,
what happened to Ventura was riot-related, wouldn't you say?"

I nodded.

"Probably you
heard about the death of a man named Frankie Waldo."

"I heard
something about it," I said. "If you want to know what I think—"

"So far, you
don't think anything about it," McCandless said. "Unofficially, I can
tell you that Waldo was tied into Billy Ritz's drug business. And Ritz
was killed in retribution for his murder."

"Do you think
you can really do this?" I asked.

"I didn't
hear you."

"Ritz was
payback for Waldo."

"Like I told
you, everything is politics." He stood up. "By the way, Officer
Berenger found some old photographs in the basement of that house. I
think some good might come out of this, despite what you idiots tried
to do."

"You're not
too unhappy that Fontaine is dead, are you?"

McCandless
moved away from the chair. Sonny stepped back and looked down toward
his feet. He was deaf and blind. "You know what makes me happy?"
McCandless asked me. "I can protect him one hell of a lot better the
way things are."

"You didn't
have much trouble believing that he was really Franklin Bachelor. All
you have is what I told you about Edward Hubbel. I don't get it."

McCandless
gave me a long, utterly unreadable look. Then he glanced down the bed
at Sonny, who snapped his head up like a soldier on parade. "Tell him."

"Detective
Monroe made a search of Detective Fontaine's apartment this morning."
Sonny directed his words to the bright window. "He located Major
Bachelor's discharge papers in his desk."

If I hadn't
known how much it would hurt, I would have laughed out loud. "I wonder
if he also came across some boxes of notes."

"There never
were any boxes of notes," McCandless said.

"Not now, I
bet," I said. "Congratulations."

McCandless
let it roll right off him. Maybe they hadn't destroyed the notes, after
all. Maybe Fontaine had flushed them down the toilet, page by page,
before we had shown up at his old house.

"You'll be
protected from journalists as long as you are here," McCandless said.
He sounded like he was reading me my Miranda
rights. "The hospital will screen all your calls, and I'm stationing an
officer at the door to secure your privacy. In about an hour, Officer
Berenger will bring you your statement, based on your responses to my
questions. Is that correct, Sonny?"

"Yes, sir,"
Sonny said.

"And you
might think about booking your ticket home for the day of your release.
You'll be taken to the airport in a patrol car, so after you arrange
the ticket, give the officer your flight information."

"All in the
interest of my security," I said.

"Take care of
yourself," McCandless said. "You look lousy, if you want to know the
truth."

"Glad to help
you out," I said. They were already moving toward the door.

I opened the
magazine and tried to revive my interest in menopause. Some of the
symptoms had an ironic familiarity— heavy bleeding, increased pain,
depression. The columnist had nothing to say about sudden flare-ups of
anger against authority figures who looked like retired circus
performers. I understood some of what McCandless had been after, but
his insistence on there having been more than three gunshots puzzled
me. Whatever I had said had satisfied him, but I couldn't figure out
why. Then I started worrying about Alan. I reached across my chest to
get the telephone and call County Hospital, but the operator almost
apologetically told me that I was restricted by police order to
incoming calls. I picked up
Modern
Bride
and discovered that today's
young woman got married in pretty much the same kind of thing as
yesterday's. I was just getting into
Longevity
and 'Exercises for the
Recently Bereaved' when a short, pudgy young policeman stuck his head
in the door and said, "I'll be right out here, okay?" We recognized
each other at the same moment. It was Officer Mangelotti, minus the
white head bandage he'd been wearing when I last saw him. "Nobody said
I had to talk to you, though," he said, and gave me what he thought was
a truly evil scowl. His folding chair squeaked when he sat down.