The Throat (86 page)

Geoffrey
Bough conned his way past the receptionist and turned up outside my
door about an hour after Ross McCandless left. I was playing with the
cold oatmeal the kitchen had sent up, coaxing it into a mound and then
mushing it flat. The first indication I had of the reporter's arrival
was the sound of Mangelotti saying, "No. No way. Get out of here." I
thought he was ordering John Ransom away from my room, and I shoved
away the oatmeal and called out, "Come on, Mangelotti, let him in."

"No way,"
Mangelotti said.

"You heard
him," said a voice I knew. Bough squeezed his skinny chest past
Mangelotti and leaned into the room. "Hi, Tim," he said, as if we were
old friends. Maybe we were, by now—I realized that I was glad to see
him.

"Hello,
Geoffrey," I said.

"Tell this
officer to give me five minutes, will you?"

Mangelotti
planted his hand on Bough's chest and pushed him part of the way into
the hall. Geoffrey gesticulated at me over the cop's head, but
Mangelotti gave him another push, and the reporter disappeared.

I heard him
protesting all the way down the hallway to the elevator. Mangelotti was
so angry with me that he closed the door when he came back.

The next time
the door opened, I was beginning to wish that I had eaten the oatmeal.
Sonny Berenger came in with a single sheet of paper on a clipboard.
"Your statement's ready," he said, and handed it to me. He pulled a
ballpoint out of his pocket. "Sign it anywhere on the bottom."

Most of the
sentences in the statement began with "I" and contained fewer than six
words. There was at least one typing mistake in every sentence, and the
grammar was casual. It was a bare-bones account of what had happened
outside Bob Bandolier's old house. The last two sentences were:
"Professor Brookner fired two shots, striking me. I heard the shooting
to continue." McCandless had probably made him rewrite it three times,
taking new details out each time.

"I have to
make some changes in this before I sign it," I said.

"What do you
mean, changes?" Berenger asked.

I began
writing in "with one of them" after "striking me," and Berenger leaned
over the clipboard to see what I was doing. He wanted to grab the pen
out of my hand, but he relaxed when he saw what I was doing. I crossed
out the "to" in the last sentence, and then wrote my name under the
statement.

He took back
the clipboard and the pen, puzzled but relieved.

"Just
editing," I said. "I can't help myself."

"The
lieutenant's a big believer in editing."

"I got that
part."

Sonny stepped
back from the bed and glanced toward the door to make sure it was
closed. "Thanks for not saying that you told me about the photographs."

"Will Monroe
let John go home after you get back with that statement?"

"Probably.
Ransom's just sitting at his desk, trading Vietnam stories." He still
did not want to go, towering near the bed with his clipboard like
Officer Friendly in a high school auditorium.

For the first
time, he looked openly at the pad of gauze taped to my shoulder. I saw
him decide not to say anything about it, and then he took a step
backward toward the door. "Should I tell Ransom you'd like to see him?"

"I'd like to
see anybody except Mangelotti," I said. After Sonny left, a
black-haired, energetic young doctor bounced in to tape fresh gauze
over the bloody hole. "You're going to have to run around your backhand
for a month or so, but otherwise, you'll be fine." He pressed the last
of the tape into place and straightened up. Curiosity was fairly
boiling out of him. "The police seem to feel you'll be safer in here."

"I think it's
the other way around," I said.

After that, I
read
Modern Maturity
. Cover
to cover, every word of it, including the
advertisements. I had to change my running shoes and do something about
my IRA account. For lunch, I had a piece of chicken so pale that it
nearly disappeared into the plate. I ate every scrap, even the gristly
little bits that clung to the bones.

When John
turned up several hours later, Mangelotti refused to let him in until
he got permission from the department. Permission took a long time to
get, and while they were at the desk, I got out of bed and hauled my
glucose pole across the room to the sink and looked at myself in the
mirror. I had a little more color than the chicken, and I needed a
shave. As revenge for the magazines, I peed into the sink. By the time
Mangelotti learned he would not be suspended for letting John into my
room, I had hobbled back to bed, feeling as though I had just climbed
one of the minor Alps.

John came in
carrying a beat-up white canvas bag, closed the door, and leaned back
against it, shaking his head from side to side in frustration. "Can you
believe that guy is still on the force? What's he doing here anyhow?"

"Defending me
from the press."

John
snickered and pushed himself off the door. I looked greedily at the
canvas bag.
ARKHAM COLLEGE
was printed on its side in
big red letters.

"Funny thing,
you look like a guy who just got shot. I stopped off at the house and
picked up some books. Nobody was willing to tell me how long you'd be
in here, so I got a lot of them." He set the bag next to me and began
piling books on the table.
The Nag
Hammadi Library
, Sue Grafton, Ross
Macdonald, Donald Westlake, John Irving, A. S. Byatt, Martin Amis.
"Some of these belonged to April. And I thought you'd be interested in
seeing this." He took a thick, green-jacketed book out of the bag and
held it up so that I could see the cover.
The Concept of the Sacred
,
Alan Brookner. "Probably his best book."

I took it
from him. As battered as an old suitcase, smudged, soft with use, it
looked as if it had been read a hundred times. "I'm really grateful," I
said.

"Keep it." He
reared back in the chair and shook out his arms. "What a night."

I asked what
happened to him after I'd been taken away.

"They jammed
Alan and me into a police car and hauled us off to Armory Place. Then
they locked us up in a little room and asked the same questions over
and over." After a couple of hours, they had driven him home and let
him get some sleep, and then picked him up again and started the
questioning all over again. Eventually, McCandless had taken a
statement and then let him go. He had not been charged with anything.

He took hold
of my wrist. "You didn't say anything about the car, did you? Or about
that other stuff?" He meant Byron Dorian.

"No. I stuck
to Elvee and Franklin Bachelor and the Blue Rose business."

"Ah." He
leaned back in the chair and looked up, giving thanks. "I didn't know
what shape you were in. Good. I had a few worried moments there."

"What about
Alan? I heard he was at County Hospital."

John groaned.
"Alan fell apart. For a long time, he kept quoting one of those damned
gnostic verses. Then he started on baby talk. I don't know what he did
when they interrogated him, but Monroe finally told me that he was
under sedation at County. I guess they have to charge him with reckless
use of a weapon, or reckless endangerment, or something like that, but
Monroe told me that he would probably never have to go to trial or
anything. I mean, he won't end up in
jail
.
But God, you should see him."

"You visited
him?"

"I feel like
he's taken over my life. I went to County and there's Alan, lying in a
bed and saying things like I live in a little white house. Is my daddy
home yet? My brother made pee-pee off the bridge.' Literally. He's
about four years old. To tell you the truth, I don't think he's ever
going to be anything else."

"Oh, my God,"
I said.

"So then his
lawyer gets ahold of me and tells me that since he appointed April the
trustee of his estate a couple of years ago, now I'm his trustee by
default, unless I elect to turn the job over to him. Fat chance. He's
about eighty years old, a lawyer straight out of Dickens. So I have to
deal with the bank, I have to sign a million papers, I have to see his
case through the court, I have to sell his house."

"Sell his
house?"

"He can't
live there anymore, he's
gone
.
I have to find a home that'll take him,
which is a good trick, given his condition."

I pictured
Alan babbling about a little white house and felt a wave of pity and
sorrow that nearly made me dizzy. "What's happening out in the world?
Is it on the news?"

"Are we on
the news, do you mean? I put on the radio when I got home, and all I
heard about us was that Detective Paul Fontaine had been killed in an
incident that took place in the Livermore Avenue area. I'll tell you
one thing—Armory Place is keeping a very tight lid on things."

"I guessed,"
I said.

"Tim, I have
to get moving. All this business about Alan— you know." He stood up and
looked benignly down. "I'm glad you're on the mend. Man, I couldn't
tell
what
happened to you
last night."

"Alan hit me
in the shoulder." Of course, John knew that, but I felt that it
deserved a little more attention.

"You nearly
flipped over. I'm not kidding. Your feet flew straight out in front of
you.
Wham
, you're down."

My hand moved
automatically to the gauze pad. "You know what's funny about all this?
Nobody seems to doubt that Fontaine killed April and Grant Hoffman.
They don't have the notes, or they claim they don't, and they don't
have any evidence. All they have is what we gave them, and they knew
him for better than ten years. His own department, people who thought
he was God yesterday morning, did a 360-degree turn twelve hours later."

"Of course
they did." John smiled and shook his head, looking at me as if I'd
flunked an easy test. "McCandless and Hogan found out that they never
really knew the guy at all. They might not be showing it to us, but
they're feeling betrayed and angry. Just when they have to convince
this entire city that their cops are hot shit after all, their best
detective turns out to be very, very dirty."

John came
forward, buttoning his suit, his eyes alight with a private
understanding. "And Monroe searched his apartment, right? He found the
discharge papers, but who knows what else he found? Just the fact
they're not telling us that they came up with knives or bloodstains on
his shoes means that they did."

When he saw I
took the point that they would have been much tougher on us if they had
not, he glanced toward the door and then lowered his voice. "What I
think is, I bet Monroe found those notes we were looking for, took them
straight to McCandless, and after McCandless read them, he put them
through a shredder. Case closed."

"So they'll
never officially clear April's murder?"

"McCandless
told me he'd get me for breaking and entering if he ever heard that I
was talking to the press." He shrugged. "Why is that fat little shit
sitting outside your door? He's useless at saving lives, but he's good
enough to keep Geoffrey Bough out of your room."

"You can live
with that?" I asked, but the answer had been present since he had
walked into the room.

"I know who
murdered my wife, and the son of a bitch is dead. Can I live with that?
You bet I can." John looked at his watch. "Hey, I'm already late for a
meeting at the bank. You're okay? Need anything else?"

I asked him
to arrange airline tickets for the day after tomorrow and to give the
flight information to McCandless.

Alan
Brookner's book made two or three hours zoom by in happy concentration,
even though I probably understood about one-fourth of what I was
reading. The book was as dense and elegant as an Elliot Carter string
quartet, and about as easy to grasp on first exposure. After a
bright-faced little nurse rolled in the magic tray and injected me, the
book began speaking with perfect clarity, but that may have been
illusory.

I heard the
door close and looked up to see Michael Hogan coming toward me. His
long face seemed about as expressive as Ross McCandless's rusty iron
mask, but as he got closer I saw that the effect was due to exhaustion
not disdain. "I thought I'd check up on you before I went home," he
said. "Mind if I sit down?"

"No, please
do," I said, and he slipped into the chair sideways, almost languidly.
A stench of smoke and gunpowder floated toward me from his wrinkled
pinstripe suit. I looked at Hogan's weary, distinguished face, still
distinguished in spite of the marks of deep exhaustion, and realized
that the odor was nothing more than the same smell of ashes that I had
caught at the Sunchanas' burned-out house. Along with Fontaine, Hogan
had spent a lot of the night near burning buildings, and he had not
been home since then.

"You look
better than I do," he said. "How are things going? In much pain?"

"Ask me again
in about an hour and a half."

He managed to
smile through the tangle of emotions visible in his weary face.

"I guess the
riot is over," I said, but he sent the riot into oblivion with a wave
of his hand and an impatient, bitter glance that touched me like an
electric shock.

Hogan sighed
and slumped into the chair. "What you and Ransom were trying to do was
incredibly stupid, you know."

"We didn't
know who to trust. We didn't think anybody would believe us unless we
caught him in his old house and made him talk."

"How did you
think you were going to get him to talk?"

He was
avoiding the use of the name—the process John had predicted was already
beginning.