The Throat (91 page)

Tom picked up
and started talking. "Oh, good. You got my message. You can deal with
it or not, that's up to you, but I think this time I'm going to have to
do
something
, for once in my
life."

"Slow down,"
I said, slightly alarmed and even more puzzled than before. Tom's words
had flown past so, quickly that I could now barely retain them. "We
have to decide about
what
?"

"Let me tell
you what I've been doing lately," Tom said. For a week or so, he had
busied himself with the two or three other cases he had mentioned to me
in the hospital, but without shedding the depression I had seen there.
"I was just going through the motions. Two of them turned out all
right, but I can't take much credit for that. Anyhow, I decided to take
another look through all those Allentowns, and any other town with a
name that seemed possible, to see if I could find anything I missed the
first time."

"And you
found Lenny Valentine?"

"Well, first
I found Jane Wright," he said. "Remember Jane? Twenty-six, divorced,
murdered in May 1977?"

"Oh, no," I
said.

"Exactly.
Jane Wright lived in Allerton, Ohio, a town of about fifteen thousand
people on the Ohio River. Nice little place, I'm sure. From 1973 to
1979, they had a few random murders— well, twelve actually, two a year,
bodies in fields, that kind of thing—and about half of them went
unsolved, but I gather from the local paper that most people assumed
that the killer, if there was one single killer, was some kind of
businessman whose work took him through town every now and then. And
then they stopped."

"Jane
Wright," I said. "In Allerton, Ohio. I don't get it."

"Try this.
The name of the homicide detective in charge of the case was Leonard
Valentine."

"It can't
be," I said. "This is impossible. We had this all worked out. Paul
Fontaine was in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in May of 'seventy-seven."

"Precisely.
He was in Pennsylvania."

"That old man
I talked to, Hubbel, pointed right at Fontaine's picture."

"Maybe his
eyesight isn't too good."

"His eyesight
is terrible," I said, remembering him pushing his beak into the
photograph.

Tom said
nothing for a moment, and I groaned. "You know what this means? Paul
Fontaine is the only detective in Millhaven, as far as we know, who
could
not
have killed Jane
Wright. So what was he doing at that house?"

"I suppose he
was beginning a private little investigation of his own," Tom said.
"Could it be a coincidence that a woman named Jane Wright is killed in
a town with the right sort of name in the right month of the right
year? And that the detective in charge of the case has the initials LV,
as in Elvee? Is there any way you can see that as coincidental?"

"No," I said.

"Me,
neither," Tom said. "But I don't understand this LV business anymore.
Would someone call himself Lenny Valentine because it starts with the
same letters as Lang Vo? That just doesn't sound right."

"Tom," I
said, remembering the idea I'd had that morning, "could you check on
the ownership of a certain building for me?"

"Right now,
you mean?"

I said yes,
right now.

"Sure, I
guess," he said. "What building is it?"

I told him,
and without asking any questions, he switched on his computer and
worked his way into the civic records. "Okay," he said. "Coming up."
Then it must have come up, because I could hear him grunt with
astonishment. "You know this already, right? You know who owns that
building."

"Elvee
Holdings," I said. "But it was just a guess until I heard you grunt."

"Now tell me
what it means."

"I guess it
means I have to come back," I said, and fell silent with the weight of
all
that
meant. "I'll get the
noon flight tomorrow. I'll call you as
soon as I get there."

"As soon as
you get here, you'll see me at the gate. And you have your pick of the
Florida Suite, the Dude Ranch, or the Henry the Eighth Chamber."

"The what?"

"Those are
the names of the guest rooms. Lamont's parents were a little bit
eccentric. Anyhow, I'll air them out, and you can choose between them."

"Fontaine
wasn't Fee," I said, finally stating what both of us knew. "He wasn't
Franklin Bachelor."

"I'm partial
to the Henry the Eighth Chamber myself," Tom said. "I'd suggest you
stay away from the Dude Ranch, though. Splinters."

"So who is
he?"

"Lenny
Valentine. I just wish I knew
why
."

"And how do
we find out who Lenny Valentine is?" Then an idea came to me. "I bet we
can use that building."

"Ah," Tom
said. "Suddenly, I'm not depressed anymore. Suddenly, the sun came up."

And so, again
because of an unsolved murder, I flew back to Millhaven, carried the
same two bags out again into the bright, science-fictional spaces of
its airport, and again met the embrace of an old friend with my own. A
twinge, no more, blossomed and faded in my shoulder. I had removed the
blue cast shortly after putting down the telephone the night before.
Tom snatched my hanging bag and stepped back to grin at me. He looked
revived, younger, and more vital than when he had visited me in the
hospital. Everything about him seemed fresh, and the freshness was more
than an aura of soap, shampoo, and clear blue eyes: it was the result
of an awakened excitement, a readiness to join the fray.

Tom asked
about my shoulder and said, "This might be crazy—it's so little
evidence, to bring you all the way back here."

We were
walking through the long gray tube, lined with windows on the runway
side, that led from the gate into the center of the terminal.

"I don't care
how little it is." I felt the truth of it as soon as I had spoken—the
size of the evidence didn't matter when the evidence was right. If we
could apply pressure in the right place, a dead woman in a small town
in Ohio would let us pry open the door to the past. Tom and I had
worked out a way to do that on the telephone last night. "I liked Paul
Fontaine, and even though I had what looked like proof, I never—"

"I could
never quite believe it, either," Tom said. "It all fit together so
neatly, but it still felt wrong."

"But this old
queen in Tangent, Hubbel, pointed right at him. He couldn't see very
well, but he wasn't blind."

"So he made a
mistake," Tom said. "Or we're making one. We'll find out, soon enough."

The glass
doors opened before us, and we walked outside. Across the curving
access road, hard bright sunlight fell onto the miles of pale concrete
of the short-term parking lot. I stepped down off the curb, and Tom
said, "No, I parked up this way."

He gestured
toward the far end of the passenger loading zone, where a shiny blue
Jaguar Vanden Plas sat in the shade of the terminal just below a
NO
PARKING
sign. "I didn't know you had a car," I said.

"It mainly
lives in my garage." He opened the trunk and put my bags inside, then
lowered the lid again. The trunk made a sound like the closing of a
bank vault. "Something came over me, I guess. I saw it in a showroom
window, and I had to have it. That was ten years ago. Guess how many
miles it has on it."

"Fifty
thousand," I said, thinking I was being conservative. In ten years, you
could put fifty thousand miles on your car just by driving once a week
to the grocery store.

"Eight," he
said. "I don't get out much."

The interior
of the car looked like the cockpit of a private jet. When Tom turned
the key, the car made the noise of an enormous, extremely
self-satisfied cat being stroked in a pool of sunlight. "Lots of times,
when I can't stand being in the house anymore, when I'm stuck or when
there's something I know I'm not seeing, I go out into the garage and
take the car apart. I don't just clean the spark plugs, I clean the
engine
." We rolled down the
access road and slipped without pausing
into the light traffic on the expressway. "I guess it isn't transport,
it's a hobby, like fly fishing." He smiled at the picture he had just
evoked, Tom Pasmore in one of his dandy's suits sitting on the floor of
his garage in the middle of the night, polishing up the exhaust
manifold. Probably his garage floor sparkled; I thought the entire
garage probably resembled an operating theater.

He brought me
out of this reverie with a question. "If we're not wasting our time and
Fontaine was innocent, who else could it be? Who is Fee Bandolier?"

This was what
I had been considering during the flight. "He has to be one of the men
who used Billy Ritz as an informant. According to Glenroy, that means
he's either Hogan, Monroe, or McCandless."

"Do you have
a favorite?"

I shook my
head. "I think we can rule out McCandless on grounds of age."

Tom asked me
how old I thought McCandless was, and I said about fifty-seven or
fifty-eight, maybe sixty.

"Guess again.
He's no older than fifty. He just looks that way."

"Good Lord,"
I said, realizing that the intimidating figure who had questioned me in
the hospital was about my own age. He instantly became my favorite
candidate.

"How about
you?" I asked. "Who do you think he could be?"

"Well, I
managed to get into the city's personnel files, and I went through most
of the police department, looking for their hiring dates."

"And?"

"And Ross
McCandless, Joseph Monroe, and Michael Hogan were all hired from other
police departments within a few months of each other in 1979. So was
Paul Fontaine. Andy Belin hired all four of them."

"I don't
suppose one of them came from Allerton?"

"None of them
came from anywhere in Ohio—McCandless claims to be from Massachusetts,
Monroe says he's from California, and Hogan's file sa
ys
he's from
Delaware."

"Well, at
least we each have the same list," I said.

"Now all we
have to do is figure out what to do with it," Tom said, and for the
rest of the drive to Eastern Shore Road we talked about that—what to do
with the people on our list.

His garage
looked a lot more like the service bays in the gas stations on Houston
Street than an operating room. I think it might have been even messier
than the service bays. For some reason, I found this reassuring. We got
the bags out of the Jaguar's trunk, walked through the piles of rags
and boxes of tools, and after Tom swung down the door of the old
garage, went into the house through the kitchen door. I felt a surge of
pleasure— it was good to be in Tom Pasmore's house again.

He led me
upstairs and past his office to a narrow, nearly vertical staircase
which had once led up to the servants' rooms on the third floor. An
only slightly worn gray-and-blue carpet with a floral pattern covered
the stairs and extended into the third-floor hallway. Over each of the
three doors hung an elaborately hand-painted sign announcing the name
of the room. Dude Ranch Bunkhouse, Henry VIII Chamber, Florida Suite.

"I bet you
thought I was kidding," Tom said. "Lamont's parents really were a
little strange, I think. Now Dude Ranch has saddles and Wanted posters
and bleached skulls, Henry has a suit of armor and an enclosed bed
that's probably too small for you, and Florida has violent wallpaper,
rattan chairs, and a stuffed alligator. But it's big."

"I'll take
it," I said. "Delius once wrote something called 'Florida Suite.' "

He opened the
door to a set of rooms with dormer windows and white wallpaper printed
with the flat patterns of enormous fronds—it reminded me of Saigon's
dining room. Yellow cushions brightened the rattan furniture, and the
eight-foot alligator grinned toward a closet, as if waiting for dinner
to walk out.

"Funny you
should remember that," Tom said. "There's a picture of Delius in the
bedroom. Do you need help hanging up your things? No? Then I'll meet
you in my office, one floor down, whenever you're ready."

I took my
bags into the bedroom and heard him walk out of the suite. Over a
glass-topped bamboo table with conch shells hung a photograph of Delius
that made him look like the physics master in a prewar English public
school. Frederick Delius and an alligator, that seemed about right. I
washed my hands and face, wincing a little when I moved my right arm
the wrong way, dried myself off, and went downstairs to give Tom the
last part of the plan we had been working out in the car.

"Dick Mueller
was the first person to mention April's project to you, wasn't he? So
he hints that he came across something in the manuscript."

"Something
worth a lot of money."

"And then he
arranges our meeting. And our boy gets rattled."

"We hope," I
said. We were seated on the chesterfield in Tom's office, with the
three surreal computer dreams spread out on the table before us. Now
that we knew the identity of the building in the defaced photograph,
the computer's lunatic suggestions made a kind of sense—the pyramids
and ocean liners were exaggerations of the marquee, and the glass
guardhouses had grown out of the ticket booth. Bob Bandolier had
intended to murder Heinz Stenmitz in the most fitting place possible,
in front of the Beldame Oriental. The presence of either other people
or Stenmitz himself had caused a change in Bandolier's plans, but the
old theater had retained its importance to his son.

"It has to be
where he's keeping his notes," I went on. "It's the last place left."

Tom nodded.
"Do you think you can really convince him that you're Dick Mueller? Can
you do that voice?"