The Throat

by Peter Straub

  “Can I ask you a couple of questions?”

  “Is that clear? Do you understand me?”

  “Yes. Now can I ask you a few things?”

  “If you have to.” Fontaine visibly settled himself and stared off toward the row of hemlocks, far in the distance.

  “Did you hear the substance of what the Sunchanas had to say about Bob Bandolier?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Didn’t you think there was some chance they might be right?”

  He grimaced as if he had a headache. “Next question.”

  “How did you know how to find this grave?”

  He turned his head and squinted at me. His chest rose and fell. “That’s a hell of a question. It’s none of your business. Are you through?”

  “Do the Elm Hill police think that the explosion at the Sunchana house was accidental?”

  “That’s none of your business, either.”

  I couldn’t ask him any of the questions I really wanted answered. What seemed a safer, more neutral question suddenly occurred to me, and, thoughtlessly, I asked it. “Do you know if Bandolier’s middle initial stood for Casement?” As soon as I said it, I realized that I had announced a knowledge of Elvee Holdings.

  He stared up at the sky. It was just beginning to get dark, and heavy gray clouds were sailing toward us from over the hemlocks, their edges turned pink and gold by the declining sun. Fontaine sighed. “Casement was Bandolier’s middle name. It was on his death certificate. He died of a longstanding brain tumor. Is that it, or do you have some more meaningless questions?”

  I shook my head, and he shoved his hands in his pockets and stamped back toward the car.

  Might as well go for broke, I thought, and called out, “Does the name Belinski mean anything to you? Andrew Belinski?”

  He stopped walking to turn around and glower at me. “As a matter of fact, not that it’s any business of yours, that was what we called the head of the homicide unit when I came to Millhaven. He was one of the finest men I ever met. He took on most of the people I work with now.”

  “That’s what you called him?”

  Fontaine kicked at the gravel, already sorry he had answered the question. “His name was Belin, but his mother was Polish, and people just called him Belinski. It started off as a joke, I guess, and it stuck. Are you coming with me, or do you want to walk back to the east side?”

  I followed him toward the car, looking aimlessly at the headstones and thinking about what he had told me. Then a name jumped out at me from a chipped headstone, and I looked at it again to make sure I had seen it correctly, HEINZ FRIEDREICH STENMITZ, 1892–1950. That was all. The stone had not merely been chipped; chunks had been knocked off, and parts of the curved top were vaguely serrated, as if someone had attacked it with a hammer. I stared at the battered stone for a moment, feeling numb and tired, and then walked back to the car. Fontaine was revving the engine, sending belches of black smoke out of the exhaust pipe.

  As soon as I got back into the car, I realized that Fee Bandolier had to be a Millhaven policeman—he had appropriated a name only a cop would know.

  22

  BY THE TIME Fontaine rolled up the looping ramp to the expressway, the heavy clouds I had seen coming in from the west had blotted out the sky. The temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees. Fontaine got to the end of the ramp and moved slowly forward until a truck hummed past, then nudged the sedan into the space behind it. He checked his rearview mirror before changing into the second lane. I rolled up my window against the sudden cold and looked over at him. He was pretending I wasn’t there. I leaned back against the seat, and we drove peacefully back toward the middle of town.

  A raindrop the size of an egg struck my side of the windshield; a few seconds later, another noisily landed in the center of the windshield. Fontaine sighed. The radio spooled out crackling nonsense. Two more fat raindrops plopped onto the windshield.

  “Are you going to go back to New York soon, Underhill?”

  The question surprised me. “In a little while, probably.”

  “We all make mistakes.”

  After a little silence, Fontaine said, “I don’t know why you’d want to hang around here now.” The big raindrops were landing on the windshield at the rate of one per second, and we could hear them striking the roof of the car like hailstones.

  “Have you ever had doubts about this police department?”

  He looked at me sharply, suspiciously. “What?”

  The clouds opened up, and a cascade of water slammed against the windshield. Fontaine snapped on the wipers, and peered forward into the blur until they began to work. He pulled out the knob for the headlights, and the dashboard controls lit up.

  “I probably didn’t phrase that very well,” I said.

  “I have plenty of doubts about you, which is something you ought to know about.” He scowled into the streaming windshield until the blade swept it clean again. “You don’t understand cops very well.”

  “I know you’re a good detective,” I said. “You have a great reputation.”

  “Leave me out of this, whatever it is.”

  “Have you ever heard of—”

  “Stop,” he said. “Just stop.”

  About thirty seconds later, the intensity of the rain slackened off to a steady drumming against the windshield and the top of the car. It slanted down from the clouds in visible gray diagonals. Sprays of water flew away from the wheels of the cars around us. Fontaine loosened his hands on the wheel. We were going no more than thirty-five miles an hour. “Okay,” he said. “For the sake of my great reputation, tell me what you were going to ask me.”

  “I wondered if you ever heard of the Elvee Holdings Corporation.”

  For the first time, I saw genuine curiosity in his glance. “You know, I’m wondering about something myself. Is everyone in New York like you, or are you some kind of special case?”

  “We’re all full of meaningless little queries,” I said.

  The police radio, which had been sputtering and hissing at intervals, uttered a long, incomprehensible message. Fontaine snatched up the receiver and said, “I’m on the expressway at about Twentieth Street, be there in ten minutes.”

  He replaced the receiver. “I can’t take you back to Ransom’s. Something came up.” He checked the mirror, looked over his shoulder, and rocketed into the left lane.

  Fontaine unrolled his window, letting in a spray of rain, pulled a red light from under his seat, and clapped it on the top of the car. He flicked a switch, and the siren began whooping. From then on, neither of us spoke. Fontaine had to concentrate on controlling the sedan as he muscled it around every car that dared to get in front of him. At the next exit, he swung off the expressway and went zooming up Fifteenth Street Avenue the same way he had terrorized the expressway on our way to Pine Knoll. At intersections, Fontaine twirled the car through the traffic that stopped to let him go by.

  Fifteenth Street Avenue brought us into the valley, and factory walls rose up around us. Fontaine turned south on Geothals and rocketed along until we swerved onto Livermore. The streetlights were on in my old neighborhood. The pouring sky looked black.

  A long way ahead of us, blinking red-and-blue lights filled the inside lane on the other side of the street. Yellow sawhorses and yellow tape gleamed in the lights. Men in caps and blue rain capes moved through the confusion. As we got closer to the scene, I saw where we were going. I should have known. It had happened again, just as Tom had predicted.

  Fontaine didn’t even bother to look as we went past the Idle Hour. He went down the end of the block, his siren still whooping, made a tight turn onto the northbound lanes of Livermore, and pulled up behind an ambulance. He was out of the car before it stopped ticking. Curls of steam rose up off the sedan’s hood.

  I got out of the car, hunched myself against the rain, and followed him toward the Idle Hour.

  Four or five uniformed officers were standing just inside the barr
icades, and two others sat smoking in the patrol car that blocked off the avenue’s inside lane. The rain had kept away the usual crowd. Fontaine darted through a gap in the barricades and began questioning a policeman trying to stand in the shelter of the tavern’s overhang. Unlike the others, he was not wearing a rain cape, and his uniform jacket was sodden. The policeman took a notebook from his pocket and bent over the pages to keep them dry as he read to Fontaine. Directly beside him at the level of his shoulders, a red marker spelling the words BLUE ROSE burned out from the dirty white planks. I stepped forward and leaned over one of the yellow barricades.

  A sheet of loose black plastic lay over a body on the sidewalk. Rainwater puddled and splashed in the hollows in the plastic, and runnels of rainwater sluiced down from the body onto the wet pavement. From the bottom end of the black sheet protruded two stout legs in soaked dark trousers. Feet in basketweave loafers splayed out at ten to two. The cops standing behind the barricade paid no attention to me. Steady rain beat down on my head and shoulders, and my shirt glued itself to my skin.

  Fontaine nodded to the rain-drenched young policeman who had found the body and pointed at the words on the side of the tavern. He said something I couldn’t hear, and the young policeman said, “Yes, sir.”

  Fontaine crouched down beside the body and pulled back the plastic sheet. The man who had followed John Ransom down Berlin Avenue in a blue Lexus stared unseeing up at the overhang of the Idle Hour. Rain spattered down onto his chest and ran into the slashes in a ragged, blood-soaked shirt. Ridges of white skin surrounded long red wounds. The gray ponytail lay like a pointed brush at the side of his neck. I wiped rain off my face. Dark blood had stiffened on his open suit jacket.

  Fontaine took a pair of white rubber gloves from his pocket, pulled them on, and leaned over the body to slide his hand under the bloody lapel. The fabric lifted away from the shirt. Fontaine drew out the slim black wallet I had seen before. He flipped it open. The little badge was still pinned to a flap on the right side. Fontaine lifted the flap. “The deceased is a gentleman named William Writzmann. Some of us know him better under another name.” He stood up. “Is Hogan here yet?” The young officer held out a plastic evidence bag, and Fontaine dropped the wallet into it.

  One of the men near me said that Hogan was on his way.

  Fontaine noticed me behind the barricade and came frowning toward me. “Mr. Underhill, it’s time for you to leave us.”

  “Is that Billy Ritz?” I asked. As much rain was falling on the detective as on me, but he still did not look really wet.

  Fontaine blinked and turned away.

  “He was the man who followed John. The one I told you about at the hospital.” The policemen standing near me edged away and put their hands under their capes.

  Fontaine turned around and gave me a gloomy look. “Go home before you get pneumonia.” He went back to the body, but the young policeman was already pulling the plastic sheet over Writzmann’s wet, empty face.

  The two closest policemen looked at me with faces nearly as empty as Writzmann’s. I nodded to them and walked along the barricades past the front of the tavern. Two blocks away, another dark blue sedan wearing a flashing red bubble like a party hat was moving down South Sixth Street toward the tavern. Rain streaked through the beams of its headlights. I went across Sixth and looked up at the side of the St. Alwyn. A brass circle at the tip of a telescope angled toward the Idle Hour from the corner window of the top floor. I waited for a break in the line of cars moving north in the single open lane and jogged toward the St. Alwyn’s entrance.

  23

  THE NIGHT CLERK watched me leave a trail of damp footprints on the rug. My shoes squished, and water dripped down inside my collar.

  “See all that excitement outside?” He was a dry old man with deep furrows around his mouth, and his black suit had fit him when he was forty or fifty pounds heavier. “What they got there, a stiff?”

  “He looked dead to me,” I said.

  He hitched up his shoulder and twitched away, disappointed with my attitude.

  When Glenroy Breakstone picked up, I said, “This is Tim Underhill. I’m down in the lobby.”

  “Come up, if that’s what you’re here for.” No jazz trivia this time.

  Glenroy was playing Art Tatum’s record with Ben Webster so softly it was just a cushion of sound. He took one look at me and went into his bathroom to get a towel. The only light burning was the lamp next to his records and sound equipment. The windows on Widow Street showed steady rain falling through the diffuse glow thrown up by the streetlights.

  Glenroy came back with a worn white towel. “Dry yourself off, and I’ll find you a dry shirt.”

  I unbuttoned the shirt and peeled it off my body. While I rubbed myself dry, Glenroy returned to hand me a black long-sleeved sweatshirt like the one he was wearing. His said TALINN JAZZFEST across the front; when I unfolded the one he gave me, it said BRADLEY’S above a logo of a toothy man strumming a long keyboard. “I never even worked that place,” he said. “A bartender there likes my music, so he mailed it to me. He thought I was about your size, I guess.”

  The sweatshirt felt luxuriously soft and warm. “You moved the telescope into your bedroom.”

  “I went into the bedroom when I heard the sirens. After I got a look across the street, I fetched my telescope.”

  “What did you see?”

  “They were just pulling that blanket thing over the dead guy.”

  “Did you see who it was?”

  “I need a new dealer, if that’s what you mean. You mind coming into the bedroom? I want to see what happens.”

  I followed Glenroy into his neat, square bedroom. None of the lights had been turned on, and glass over the framed prints and posters reflected our silhouettes. I stood next to him and looked down across Livermore Avenue.

  The big cops in rain capes still stood in front of the barricades. A long line of cars crawled by. The plastic sheet had been folded down to Billy Ritz’s waist, and a stout, gray-haired man with a black bag squatted in front of the body, next to Paul Fontaine. Billy looked like a ripped mattress. The gray-haired man said something, and Fontaine pulled the sheet back up over the pale face. He stood up and gestured at the ambulance. Two attendants jumped out and rolled a gurney toward the body. The gray-haired man picked up his bag and held out his hand for a black rod that bloomed into an umbrella in front of him.

  “What do you think happened to him?” I asked.

  Glenroy shook his head. “I know what they’ll say, anyhow—they’ll call it a drug murder.”

  I looked at him doubtfully, and he gave a short, sharp nod. “That’s the story. They’ll find some shit in his pockets, because Billy always had some shit in his pockets. And that’ll take care of that. They won’t have to deal with any of the other stuff Billy was into.”

  “Did you see the words on the wall over there?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “Billy Ritz is the third Blue Rose victim. He was killed—” I stopped myself, because I suddenly realized where Billy Ritz had been killed. “His body was found exactly where Monty Leland was killed in 1950.”

  “Nobody cares about those Blue Rose murders,” Glenroy said. He stepped back and put his eye to the end of the telescope. “Nobody is gonna care about Billy Ritz, either, any more than they cared about Monty Leland. Is that Hogan, that one over there now?”

  I leaned toward the window and looked down. It was Michael Hogan, all right, rounding the corner in front of the tavern: the charge of his personality leapt across the great distance between us like an electrical spark.

  Ignoring the rain, Hogan began threading through the police outside the Idle Hour. As soon as they took in his presence, the other men parted for him as they would have for Arden Vass. Instantly in charge, he got to the body and asked one of the policemen to fold back the sheet. Ritz’s face was a white blotch on the wet sidewalk. The ambulance attendants waited beside their gurney, hugging themselve
s against the chill. Hogan stared down at the body for a couple of seconds and commanded the sheet to be raised again with an abrupt, angry-looking gesture of his hand. Fontaine slumped forward to talk to him. The attendants lowered the gurney and began maneuvering the body onto it.

  Glenroy left the telescope. “Want a look?”

  I adjusted the angle to my height and put my eye to the brass circle. It was like looking through a microscope. Startlingly near, Hogan and Fontaine were facing each other in the circle of my vision. I could almost read their lips. Fontaine looked depressed, and Hogan was virtually luminous with anger. With the rain glistening on his face, he looked more than ever like a romantic hero from forties movies, and I wondered what he made of the end of Billy Ritz. Hogan spun away to speak to the officer who had found the body. The other policemen edged away from him. I moved the telescope to Fontaine, who was watching the attendants wheel the gurney down the sidewalk.

  “That writing is red,” Glenroy said. I was still looking at Fontaine, and as Glenroy spoke, the detective turned his head to look at the slogan on the wall. I couldn’t see his face.

  “Right,” I said.

  “Wasn’t it black, the other time? Behind the hotel?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  Fontaine might have been comparing the two slogans, too: he turned around and stared fixedly across the street, toward the passage where three people had been killed. Rain streamed off the tip of his nose.

  “It’s funny, you mentioning Monty Leland,” Glenroy said.

  I straightened up from the telescope, and Fontaine shrank to a damp little figure on the sidewalk, facing in a different direction from all of the other damp little figures. “Why is it funny?”

  “He was kind of in the same business as Billy. You know much about Monty Leland?”

  “He was one of Bill Damrosch’s informers.”

  “That’s right. He wasn’t much else, but he was that.”