The Throat (97 page)

I turned away
and wobbled toward the wall. I groped around on the cinderblocks until
I found the switch. Then I turned on the lights and looked back at him.
A narrow line of red trickled out of the hole at his hairline and
slanted across his forehead.

Tom came
forward, holstering his automatic, and knelt beside Hogan's body. He
rolled him onto his back, and Hogan's right arm landed softly in the
growing pool of blood. The odor lodged in my stomach like a rotten
oyster. Tom thrust his hands into one of the pockets of the gray suit
coat

"What are you
doing?" I asked.

"Looking for
a key." He moved to the other side of the body and slid his hand into
the other pocket. "Well, well." He brought out a small silver key and
held it up.

"What's that
for?"

"The papers,"
he said. "And now…" He put his hand into the inner pocket of his own
jacket and came out with a black marker pen. He uncapped the pen and
looked up at me as if daring me to stop him. "I'm no policeman," he
said. "I'm not interested in justice, but justice is probably what this
is." He duck-walked a step away from the body, brushed a layer of dust
off the cement, and wrote
BLUE ROSE
in big slanting
letters. He spun himself around and looked at me again. "This time, it
really was the detective," he said. "Give me that gun."

I came toward
him and handed him the .38. Tom wiped it carefully with his
handkerchief and bent over to place it in Hogan's right hand. Then he
wrapped the fingers around the handle and poked the index finger
through the trigger guard. After that, he raised the front of the suit
jacket and pulled Hogan's own .38 out of its holster. He stood up and
came toward me, holding out Hogan's gun. "We'll get rid of this later."

I slid the
revolver into the little wallet clipped to my belt without taking my
eyes off Hogan's body.

"We'd better
get out of here," Tom said.

I didn't
answer him. I stepped forward and looked down at the face, the open
eyes, the slack, empty face.

"You did the
right thing," Tom said.

"I have to
make sure," I said. "You know what I mean? I have to be sure."

I knelt
beside the body and gathered the material at the waist of the black
T-shirt. I pulled the fabric up toward Hogan's neck, but could not see
enough. I yanked up the entire shirt until it was bunched under his
arms and leaned over to stare at the dead man's chest. It was pale and
hairless. Half a dozen circular scars the size of dimes shone in the
white skin.

A wave of
pure relief went through me like honey, like gold, and the reek of
blood suddenly smelled like laughter.

"Good-bye,
Fee," I said, and yanked the shirt back down.

"What was
that about, anyhow?" Tom asked behind me.

"The body
squad," I said. "Old habit."

I stood up.

Tom looked at
me curiously, but did not ask. I switched off the light, and we went up
the stairs in the dark.

Less than
three minutes later, we were outside in the alley, and five minutes
after that, we were back in the Jaguar, driving east.

"Hogan
reacted to the name."

"He sure
did," I said.

"And the
business about his chest?"

"Bachelor had
little round scars on his chest."

"Ah, I
forgot. The punji stick scars. One of those books I have mentioned
them."

"They weren't
punji stick scars. Fee had them, too."

"Ah," Tom
said. "Yes. Poor Fee."

I thought:
Sail on, Fee, sail away, Fee Bandolier.

In the dark
of the night, we threw Michael Hogan's revolver into the Millhaven
River from the Horatio Street bridge. It was invisible even before it
smacked into the water, and then it disappeared from history.

The last
thing I remembered was the pistol smacking down into the water. I
walked out of the garage, having spent all the time between Horatio
Street and Eastern Shore Drive with Michael Hogan in the basement of
the Beldame Oriental, and went across the top of the driveway in the
dark of the night. The moon had long ago gone down, and there were no
stars. The world is half night, and the other half is night, too. I saw
his face in the sharp, particular beam of the penlight; I saw the black
little hole, smaller than a dime, smaller than a penny, appear like a
beauty spot beneath his thinning hair.

He had grown
to the age of five a block away from me. Our fathers had worked in the
same hotel. Sometimes I must have seen him as I wandered through the
neighborhood—a little boy sitting on the front steps beside a bed of
carefully tended roses.

Tom came up
beside me and opened the kitchen door. We went inside, and he flicked a
switch, shedding soft light over the old sinks and the white
wainscoting and the plain, scarred wooden counter. "It's a little past
three," Tom said. "Do you want to go to bed right away?"

"I don't
really know," I said. "What happens now?" I meant: Whom do we tell? How
do we tell?

"What happens
now is that I have a drink," Tom said. "Do you feel like going straight
upstairs?"

Frederick
Delius and the stuffed alligator, the Florida Suite. "I don't think I
could go to sleep," I said.

"Keep me
company, then." He dumped ice cubes in a glass, covered them with malt
whiskey, and sipped from the glass, watching me. "Are you okay?"

"I'm okay," I
said. "But we can't just let him lie there, can we? For the church
people to find?"

"I don't
think the church people ever go into the basement. The only thing they
use down there is the organ, and they raise that from the stage."

I poured
water into a glass and drank half of it in one long swallow.

"I have some
ideas," Tom said.

"You want
people to know, don't you?" I swallowed most of the rest of the water
and refilled the glass. My hands and arms seemed to be functioning by
themselves.

"I want
everybody to know," Tom said. "Don't worry, they won't be able to bury
it this time." He took another sip. "But before we start shouting from
the rooftops, I want to get those papers. We need them."

"Where are
they? Hogan's apartment?"

"Come on
upstairs with me," Tom said. "I want to look at a photograph with you."

"What
photograph?"

He did not
answer. I trailed along behind him as he went into the vast, cluttered
downstairs room, walked past the couch and the coffee table, and went
up the stairs to the second floor, turning on lights as he went.

Inside his
office, he walked around the room, switching on the lamps. He sat down
at his desk, and I fell into his chesterfield. Then I unzipped the
holster and placed it on the glass table before me. Tom had pulled out
the top drawer of his desk to remove a familiar-looking manila envelope.

"What I don't
understand," he said, "is how Hubbel identified Paul Fontaine. Hogan
was in that picture, standing right next to Fontaine. So how could
Hubbel make a mistake like that?"

"He had lousy
eyesight," I said.

"That bad?"

"He had to
put his eyes right up to what he was looking at. His nose practically
touched the paper."

"So he
actually examined the photograph very carefully." Tom was facing me,
leaning forward with the envelope in his hands.

"It looked to
me like he did."

"Let's see if
we can solve this one." He opened the flap and drew the newspaper
photograph out of the envelope. Tom set the envelope on his desk and
carried the photograph and his drink to the couch and sat beside me. He
leaned forward and placed the photograph between us on the table. "How
did he identify Fontaine?"

"He pointed
at him."

"Right at
Fontaine?"

"Right at
him," I said. "Dead bang at Paul Fontaine."

"Show me."

I leaned over
and looked at the picture of Walter Dragonette's front lawn crowded
with uniformed and plainclothes policemen. "Well," I said, "it was
right in front of him, for one thing."

"Move it."

I slid the
photograph before me. "Then he pointed at Fontaine."

"Point at
him."

I reached out
and planted my finger on Paul Fontaine's face, just as Edward Hubbel
had done in Tangent, Ohio. My finger, like Edward Hubbel's, covered his
entire face.

"Yes," Tom
said. "I wondered about that."

"About what?"

"Look at what
you're doing," Tom said. "If you put your finger there, who are you
pointing at?"

"You know who
I'm pointing at," I said. Tom leaned, lifted my hand off the
photograph, and slid it across the table so that it was directly in
front of him. He placed his finger over Fontaine's face exactly as I
had. The tip of his finger aimed directly at the next man in the
picture, Michael Hogan. "Whose face am I pointing at?" Tom asked.

I stared down
at the photograph. He wasn't pointing at Fontaine, he was obliterating
him.

"I bet it
wasn't Ross McCandless who canceled the trip to Tangent," Tom said.
"What do you think?"

"I think—I
think I'm an idiot," I said. "Maybe a moron. Whichever one is dumber."

"I would have
thought he meant Fontaine, too. Because, like you, I would have
expected
him to identify
Fontaine."

"Yes, but…"

"Tim, there
isn't any blame."

"Fontaine
must have looked into Elvee Holdings. John and I led Hogan straight to
him, and all he wanted to do was get my help."

"Hogan would
have killed Fontaine whether you and John were there or not, and he
would have blamed it on random violence. All you did was confirm that
another shooter was present that night."

"Hogan."

"Sure. You
just gave them a nice convenient eyewitness." He took another swallow
of his drink, seeing that he had succeeded in banishing most of my
guilt. "And even if you hadn't seen some indistinct figure, wasn't
McCandless intent on making you say that you had? It made everything
easier for him."

"I guess
that's right," I said, "but I still think I'm going to retire to
Florida."

He smiled at
me. "I'm going to bed, too—I want us to get those papers as soon as
possible tomorrow morning. This morning, I mean."

"Are you
going to tell me where they are?"

"You tell me."

"I don't have
the faintest idea," I said.

"What's the
last place left? It's right in front of us."

"I don't
appreciate this," I said.

"It starts
with E," he said, smiling.

"Erewhon," I
said, and Tom kept smiling. Then I remembered what we had learned when
we first began looking into Elvee. "Oh," I said. "Oh."

"That's
right," Tom said.

"And it was
only a couple of blocks from the Beldame Oriental, so he probably moved
them around five or six yesterday evening, right after he got off
shift."

"Say it."

"Expresspost,"
I said. "The mail drop on South Fourth Street."

"See?" Tom
said. "I told you you knew."

Shortly
afterward, I went upstairs to Frederick Delius and the alligator,
undressed, and crawled into bed to get four hours of restless,
dream-ridden sleep. I woke up to the smell of toast and the knowledge
that the most difficult day I was to have in Millhaven had just begun.

By
eight-thirty the sun was already high over the rooftops of South Fourth
Street, and we stepped out of the car's briskly conditioned air into
ninety-degree heat that almost instantly plastered my shirt to my
sides. Tom Pasmore was wearing one of his Lamont von Heilitz specials,
a blue three-piece windowpane check suit that made him look as if he
had just arrived from Buckingham Palace. I had on more or less what I'd
worn on the airplane, jeans and a black double-breasted jacket over a
white button-down shirt, and I looked like the guy who held the horses.

Expresspost
Mail and Fax was a bright white shopfront with its name painted in
drastic red letters above a long window with a view of a clean white
counter at which a man with rimless glasses and a red tie stood
flipping through a catalogue. The bronze doors of individual mail
receptacles lined the walls behind him.

We came
through the door, and the man closed the catalogue and placed it on a
shelf beneath the counter and looked eagerly from Tom to me and back to
Tom. "Can I do something for you?" he said.

"Yes,
thanks," Tom said. "I want to pick up the papers that my colleague
deposited here for the Elvee Corporation yesterday evening."

A shadow of
uncertainty passed over the clerk's face. "Your colleague? Mister
Belin?"

"That's him,"
Tom said. He brought the key out of his pocket and put it on the
counter in front of the clerk.

"Well, Mister
Belin said he was going to do that himself." He looked over his
shoulder at a rank of the locked boxes. "We can't give you a refund, or
anything like that,"

"That's all
right," Tom said.

"Maybe you
should tell me your name, in case he comes back."

"Casement,"
Tom said.

"Well, I
guess it'll be all right." The clerk picked up the key.

"We're
grateful for your help," Tom said.

The clerk
turned away and went to the wall to his right, twiddling the key in his
fingers. The boxes in the bottom row were the size of the containers
used to ship dogs on airplanes. When he had nearly reached the rear of
the shop, the clerk knelt down and put the key into a lock.

He looked
back up at Tom. "Look—since you already paid for the week, I can
reserve this one for you until the time is up. That way, if you want to
use it again, you won't have to pay twice."

"I'll pass
that on to Mister Belin," Tom said.