The Throat

by Peter Straub

  “Alan wanted to see it once more.”

  “What did he do? Moon around and think about April?”

  “Something like that.”

  He grunted in a way that combined irritation and dismissal.

  “John,” I said, “even after we listened to Walter Dragonette talk about the Horatio Street bridge, even after we went there, you didn’t think that April’s interest in the bridge was worth bringing up?”

  “I didn’t know much about it,” he said.

  “What?” Alan muttered. “What was that about April?” He rubbed his eyes and sat up straight, peering out to see where we were going.

  John groaned and turned away from us.

  “We were talking about some research April was doing,” I said.

  “Ah.”

  “Did she ever talk to you about it?”

  “April talked to me about everything.” He waited a moment. “I don’t remember the matter very well. It was about some bridge.”

  “Actually, it was that bridge right ahead of us,” John said. We were on Horatio Street. A block before us stood the embankment of the Millhaven River and the low walls of the bridge.

  “Wasn’t there something about a crime?”

  “It was a crime, all right,” John said.

  I looked at the Green Woman Taproom as we went past and, in the second before the bridge walls cut it from view, saw a blue car drawn up onto the cement slab beside the tavern. Two cardboard boxes stood next to the car, and the trunk was open. Then we were rattling across the bridge. The instant after that, I thought that the car had looked like the Lexus that followed John Ransom to Shady Mount. I leaned forward and tried to see it in the rearview mirror, but the walls of the bridge blocked my view.

  “You’re hung up on that place. Like Walter Dragonette.”

  “Like April,” I said.

  “April had too much going on in her life to spend much time on local history.” He sounded bitter about it.

  Long before we got close to Armory Place, voices came blasting out of the plaza. “Waterford must go! Vass must go! Waterford must go! Vass must go!”

  “Guess the plea for unity didn’t work,” John said.

  “You turn right up here to get to the morgue,” Alan said.

  8

  ARAMP LED UP TO the entrance of the Millhaven County Morgue. When I pulled up in front of the ramp, Paul Fontaine got out of an unmarked sedan and waved me into a slot marked FOR OFFICIAL VEHICLES ONLY. He stood slouching with his hands in the pockets of his baggy gray suit. We were ten minutes late.

  “I’m sorry, it’s my fault,” I said.

  “I’d rather be here than Armory Place,” Fontaine said. He took in Alan’s weariness. “Professor Brookner, you could sit it out in the waiting room.”

  “No, I don’t think I could,” Alan said.

  “Then let’s get it over with.” At the top of the ramp, Fontaine let us into an entry with two plastic chairs on either side of a tall ashtray crowded with butts. Beyond the next door, a blond young man with taped glasses sat drumming a pencil on a battered desk. Wide acne scars sandblasted the flesh under his chin.

  “We’re all here now, Teddy,” Fontaine said. “I’ll take them back.”

  “Do the thang,” Teddy said.

  Fontaine gestured toward the interior of the building. Two rows of dusty fluorescent tubes hung from the ceiling. The walls were painted the flat dark green of military vehicles. “I’d better prepare you for what you’re going to see. There isn’t much left of his face.” He stopped in front of the fourth door on the right side of the corridor and looked at Alan. “You might find this disturbing.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Alan said.

  Fontaine opened the door into a small room without furniture or windows. Banks of fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling. In the center of the room a body covered with a clean white sheet lay on a wheeled table.

  Fontaine went to the far side of the body. “This is the man we found behind the St. Alwyn Hotel.” He folded back the sheet to the top of the man’s chest.

  Alan drew in a sharp breath. Most of the face had been sliced into strips of flesh that looked like uncooked bacon. The teeth were disturbingly healthy and intact beneath the shreds of skin. A cheekbone made a white stripe beneath an empty eye socket. The lower lip dropped over the chin. Long wounds separated the flesh of the neck; wider wounds on the chest continued on beneath the sheet.

  Fontaine let us adjust to the spectacle on the table. “Does anything about this man look familiar? I know it’s not easy.”

  John said, “Nobody could identify him—there isn’t anything left.”

  “Professor Brookner?”

  “It could be Grant.” Alan took his eyes from the table and looked at John. “Grant’s hair was that light brown color.”

  “Alan, this doesn’t even look like hair.”

  “Are you prepared to identify this man, Professor Brookner?”

  Alan looked back down at the body and shook his head. “I can’t be positive.”

  Fontaine waited to see if Alan had anything more to say. “Would it help you to see his clothes?”

  “I’d like to see the clothing, yes.”

  Fontaine folded the sheet back up over the body and walked past us toward the door to the corridor.

  Then we stood in another tiny windowless room, in the same configuration as before, Fontaine on the far side of a wheeled table, the three of us in front of it. Rumpled, bloodstained clothes lay scattered across the table.

  “What we have here is what the deceased was wearing on the night of his death. A seersucker jacket with a label from Hatchett and Hatch, a green polo shirt from Banana Republic, khaki pants from the Gap, Fruit of the Loom briefs, brown cotton socks, cordovan shoes.” Fontaine pointed at each item in turn.

  Alan raised his eagle’s face. “Seersucker jacket? Hatchett and Hatch? That was mine. It’s Grant.” His face was colorless. “And he told me that he was going to treat himself to some new clothes with the money I gave him.”

  “You gave money to Grant Hoffman?” John asked. “Besides the clothes?”

  “Are you sure this was your jacket?” Fontaine lifted the shredded, rusty-looking jacket by its shoulders.

  “I’m sure, yes,” Alan said. He stepped back from the table. “I gave it to him last August—we were sorting out some clothes. He tried it on, and it fit him.” He pressed a hand to his mouth and stared at the ruined jacket.

  “You’re positive.” Fontaine laid the jacket down on the table.

  Alan nodded.

  “In that case, sir, would you please look at the deceased once more?”

  “He already looked at the body,” John said in a voice too loud for the small room. “I don’t see any point in subjecting my father-in-law to this torture all over again.”

  “Sir,” Fontaine said, speaking only to Alan, “you are certain that this was the jacket you gave to Mr. Hoffman?”

  “I wish I weren’t,” Alan said.

  John exploded. “This man just lost his daughter! How can you think of subjecting him to—”

  “Enough, John,” Alan said. He looked ten years older than when he had hurled the wreath into the lake.

  “You two gentlemen can wait in the hall,” Fontaine said. He came around the table and put his hand high on Alan’s back, just below the nape of his neck. This gentleness, his whole tone when dealing with Alan, surprised me. “You can wait for us in the hall.”

  A technician in a white T-shirt and white pants came through the adjoining door and crossed to the table. Without looking at us, he began folding the bloody clothes and placing them in transparent evidence bags. John rolled his eyes, and we went into the hall.

  “What a setup,” John said. He was spinning around and around in the hallway. I leaned my back against a wall. Low voices came from inside the other room.

  At the sound of footsteps, John stopped spinning. Paul Fontaine stayed inside the room while Alan mar
ched out.

  “I’ll be in touch soon,” Fontaine said.

  Alan walked down the hallway without speaking or looking back.

  “Alan?” John called.

  He kept on walking.

  “It was someone else, right?”

  Alan walked past Teddy and opened the door to the entry. “Tim, will you drop me off?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  Alan moved through the door and let it close behind him. “What the hell,” John said. By the time we got into the entry, the outside door had already closed behind Alan. When we got outside, he was on his way down the ramp.

  We caught up with him on the ramp. John put his arm through Alan’s, and Alan shook him off.

  “I’m sorry you had to see that,” John said.

  “I want to go home.”

  “Sure,” John said. When we got to the car, he opened the door for the old man, closed it behind him, and got into the backseat. I started the engine. “At least that’s over,” John said.

  “Is it?” Alan asked.

  I backed out of the space and turned toward Armory Place. John leaned forward and patted Alan’s shoulder.

  “You’ve been great all day long,” John said. “Is there anything I can do for you now?”

  “You could stop talking,” Alan said.

  “It was Grant Hoffman, wasn’t it?” I asked.

  “Oh, God,” John said.

  “Of course it was,” Alan said.

  9

  ISLOWED DOWN as we drove past the Green Woman Taproom, but the blue car was gone.

  “Why would anybody kill Grant Hoffman?” John asked.

  No one responded. We drove back to his house in a silence deepened rather than broken by the sounds of the other cars and the slight breeze that blew in through the open windows. At Ely Place John told me to come back when I could and got out of the car. Then he paused for a second and put his face up to the passenger window and looked past Alan at me. A hard, transparent film covered his eyes like a shield. “Do you think I should tell my parents about Grant?”

  Alan did not move.

  “I’ll follow your lead,” I said.

  He said he would leave the door unlocked for me and turned away.

  When I followed Alan inside his house, he went upstairs and sat on his bed and held out his arms like a child so that I could remove his jacket. “Shoes,” he said, and I untied his shoes and slipped them off while he fumbled with his necktie. He tried unbuttoning his shirt, but his fingers couldn’t manage it, and I undid the buttons for him.

  He cleared his throat with an explosive sound, and his huge, commanding voice filled the room. “Was April as bad as Grant? I have to know.”

  It took me a moment to understand what he meant. “Not at all. You saw her at the funeral parlor.”

  He sighed. “Ah. Yes.”

  I slid the shirt down his arms and laid it on his bed.

  “Poor Grant.”

  I didn’t say anything. Alan undid his belt and stood up to push his trousers down over his hips. He sat again on the bed, and I pulled the trousers off his legs.

  Dazed and unfocused, he watched me pull a handkerchief, keys, and bills from his trouser pockets and put them on his bedside table.

  “Alan, do you know why April was interested in the Horatio Street bridge?”

  “It had something to do with the Vuillard in their living room. You’ve seen it?”

  I said that I had.

  “She said one of the figures in the painting reminded her of a man she had heard about. A policeman—some policeman who killed himself in the fifties. She couldn’t look at the painting without thinking about him. She did some research on it—April was a great researcher, you know.” He wrenched the pillow beneath his head. “I need to get some sleep, Tim.”

  I went to the bedroom door and said that I’d call him later that evening, if he liked.

  “Come here tomorrow.”

  I think he was asleep before I got down the stairs.

  10

  RALPH AND MARJORIE RANSOM, back in their black-and-silver running suits, sat side by side on one of the couches.

  “I agree with John,” Ralph said. “Thin stripes and puckered cotton, that’s a seersucker jacket. That’s the point. All seersucker jackets look alike. Hatchett and Hatch probably unloaded ten thousand of the things.”

  By this time I was coming into the living room, and Marjorie Ransom leaned forward to look past her husband. “You saw that poor boy too, didn’t you, Tim? Did he look like John’s student to you?”

  Ralph broke in before I could respond. “At this stage of the game, Alan Brookner couldn’t tell Frank Sinatra from Gabby Hayes.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said.

  “Mom,” John said loudly, carrying a fresh drink in from the kitchen, “Tim has no idea what Grant Hoffman looked like.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’m a stranger here myself.”

  “Get yourself a drink, son,” Ralph said. “It’s the Attitude Adjustment Hour.”

  “That’s what they call it at our center,” Marjorie said. “Attitude Adjustment Hour. Isn’t that cute?”

  “I’ll get myself something in the kitchen,” I said, and went around the back of the couch and looked at the Vuillard over the tops of the Ransoms’ heads.

  Only one figure on the canvas, a child, looked forward and out of the painting, as if returning the viewer’s gaze. Everyone else, the women and the servants and the other children, was caught in the shimmer of light and the circumstances of their gathering. The child who faced forward sat by himself on the lush grass, a few inches from a brilliant smear of golden light. He was perhaps an inch from the actual center of the painting itself, where the shape of a woman turning toward a tea service intersected one of the boughs of the juniper tree. As soon as I had seen him, he became the actual center of the painting, a sober, dark-haired boy of seven or eight looking unhappily but intently out of both the scene and the frame—right at me, it seemed. He knew he was in a painting, the meaning of which he contained within himself.

  “Tim only came here to admire my art,” John said.

  “Oh, it’s just lovely,” Marjorie said. “That big red one?”

  I went into the kitchen and poured a glass of club soda. When I returned, Ralph and Marjorie were talking about something the day had brought back to them, a period that must have been the unhappiest of their lives.

  “I’ll never forget it,” Marjorie said. “I thought I was going to faint.”

  “That guy at the door,” Ralph said. “God, I knew what it was as soon as the car pulled up in front of the house. He got out and stood there, making sure the address was right. Then the other one, the sergeant, got out, and handed him the flag. I didn’t know whether to cry or punch him in the mouth.”

  “And then we got that telegram, and there it was in black and white. Special Forces Captain John Ransom, killed in action at Lang Vei.”

  “Nobody knew where I was, and another guy was identified as me.”

  “Is that what happened?” I asked.

  “What a foul-up,” said Ralph. “If you made a mistake like that in business, you’d be out on your ear.”

  “It’s surprising more mistakes like that weren’t made,” I said.

  “In my opinion, John should have got at least a Silver Star, if not the Medal of Honor,” Ralph said. “My kid was a hero over there.”

  “I survived,” John said.

  “Ralph broke down and cried like a baby when we found out,” Marjorie said.

  Ralph ignored this. “I mean it, kid. To me, you’re a hero, and I’m damn proud of you.” He set down his empty glass, stood up, and went to his son. John obediently stood up and let himself be embraced. Neither of them looked as though he had done much embracing.

  When his father let him go, John said, “Why don’t we all go out for dinner? It’s about time.”

  “This one’s on me,” Ralph said, reminding me of his son. “You
better get me while you can, I’m not going to be around forever.”

  When we got back from Jimmy’s, I told John that I wanted to take a walk. Ralph and Marjorie headed in for a nightcap before going to bed, and I let myself out, took Damrosch’s case from the trunk, and walked on the quiet streets beneath the beautiful starry night to Tom Pasmore’s house.

  PART

  SEVEN

  TOM PASMORE

  1

  FAMILIAR JAZZ MUSIC came from Tom’s speakers, a breathy, authoritative tenor saxophone playing the melody of “Star Dust.”

  “You’re playing ‘Blue Rose,’ “I said. “Glenroy Breakstone. I never heard it sound so good.”

  “It came out on CD a couple of months ago.” He was wearing a gray glen plaid suit and a black vest, and I was sure that he had gone back to bed after the service. We emerged from the fabulous litter into the clearing of the sofa and the coffee table. Next to the usual array of bottles, glasses, and ice bucket lay the disc’s jewel box. I picked it up and looked at the photograph reproduced from the original album—Glenroy Breakstone’s broad face bent to the mouthpiece of his horn. When I was sixteen, I had thought of him as an old man, but the photograph showed a man no older than forty. Of course the record had been made long before I became aware of it, and if Breakstone were still alive, he had to be over seventy.

  “I think I’m trying to get inspired,” Tom said. He bent over the table and poured an inch of malt whiskey into a thick low glass. “Want anything? There’s coffee in the kitchen.”

  I said that I’d be grateful for the coffee, and he went back into his kitchen and returned a moment later with a steaming ceramic mug.

  “Tell me about the morgue.” He sat down in his chair and gestured me toward the couch in front of the coffee table.

  “They had the man’s clothes laid out, and Alan recognized the jacket as one he’d given to this student, Grant Hoffman.”

  “And you think that’s who it was?”

  I nodded. “I think it was Hoffman.”

  Tom sipped the whiskey. “One. The original Blue Rose murderer is torturing John Ransom. Probably he intends to kill him, too, eventually. Two. Someone else is imitating the original Blue Rose killer, and he too is trying to destroy John. Three. Another party is using the Blue Rose murders to cover up his real motives.” He took another little sip. “There are other possibilities, but I want to stick with these, at least for now. In all three cases, some very determined character is still happily convinced the police think that Walter Dragonette committed his crimes.”