The Throat

by Peter Straub

  Finally, he bent forward and looked at the photographs. “So here we are,” he said. “The sites of the original Blue Rose murders. With a slight overlay of static provided by the annoying tenants.”

  He pulled the fourth photograph toward him. “Hmmm.”

  “It has to be Stenmitz’s shop, doesn’t it?”

  Tom looked sharply up at me. “Do you have some doubts about that?”

  I said I wasn’t sure.

  “It’s almost unreadable,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be interesting if it were a photograph of something else?”

  “What about your computers? Do you have a way to lift off the ink and expose what’s underneath?”

  Tom thought about it for a couple of seconds, frowning down at the ruined photograph with his chin in his hand. “The computer can extrapolate from the bits and pieces that are still visible—suggest a reconstruction. There’s so much damage here it’ll probably offer several versions of the original image.”

  “How long would that take?”

  “At least a couple of days. It’ll have to go through a lot of variations, and some of them will be worthless. To tell you the truth, nearly all of them will be worthless.”

  “Are you willing to do it?”

  “Are you kidding?” He grinned at me. “I’ll start as soon as you leave. Something bothers you about this picture, doesn’t it?”

  “I can’t put my finger on it,” I said.

  “Maybe Bandolier originally intended to kill Stenmitz somewhere else,” Tom said, more to himself than to me. He was looking at an invisible point in space, like a cat.

  Then he focused on me again. “Why did Fee kill April Ransom?”

  “To finish what his father started?”

  “Did you read that book I gave you?”

  We looked at each other for a moment. Finally I said, “You think that Franklin Bachelor could be Fee Bandolier?”

  “I’m sure of it,” Tom said. “I bet that Fee called his father twice, in ’70 and ’71, and that’s why Bob changed his phone number. When Bob died, Fee inherited the house and sold it to Elvee.”

  “Can you get into the draft records from Tangent? We know Fee enlisted under another name right after he graduated from high school, in 1961.”

  “None of that information was ever computerized. But if you’d be willing to make a little trip, there’s a good chance we could find out.”

  “You want me to go to Tangent?”

  “I looked through almost every issue of the Tangent Herald published during the late sixties. I finally managed to find the name of the head of the local draft board, Edward Hubbel. Mr. Hubbel retired from the hardware business about ten years ago, but he’s still living in his own home, and he’s quite a character.”

  “Wouldn’t he give you the information over the phone?”

  “Mr. Hubbel is a little cranky. Apparently, war protestors gave him a lot of trouble during the late sixties. Someone tried to blow up the draft office in 1969, and he’s still mad. Even after I explained that I was writing a book about the careers of veterans from various areas, he refused to talk to me unless I saw him in person. But he said he kept his own records of every boy from Tangent who went into the army while he ran the board, and if someone will take the trouble to see him in person, he’ll make the effort of checking his files.”

  “So you do want me to go to Tangent,” I said.

  “I booked a ticket on a flight for eleven o’clock tomorrow. If the fog lifts, you can be back for dinner.”

  “What name did you use?”

  “Yours,” he said. “He won’t talk to anyone but a veteran.”

  “Okay. I’ll go to Tangent. Now will you tell me what you found in the police records in Allentown, Pennsylvania?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Nothing.”

  I stared at him. Tom was almost hugging himself in self-satisfaction.

  “And that’s the information you uncovered? Could you explain why that’s so wonderful?”

  “I didn’t find anything in the police records because I don’t have any access to them. You can’t get there from here. I had to do it the hard way, through the newspapers.”

  “So you looked in the newspaper and found Jane Wright.”

  He shook his head, but he was still bubbling over with suppressed delight.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “I didn’t find Jane Wright anywhere, remember? So I went back to the Allentown, Pennsylvania, records for anything that even looked close to the name and date on that piece of paper you found in the Green Woman.”

  Tom grinned at me again and stood up to walk around the side of the chesterfield. He picked up a manila folder lying next to the computer keyboard on his desk and tucked it under his elbow.

  “Our man wants to keep a narrative account of every murder he’s done as a kind of written memory. At the same time, someone as intelligent as Fee might work out a way to defuse these records, to make them harmless if anyone else found them. If he turned his own records into a kind of code, he’d have it both ways.”

  “A code? You mean, change the names or the dates?”

  “Exactly. I ploughed through microfilm of the Allentown paper from the mid-seventies. And in the papers from May 1978, I came across a very likely little murder.”

  “Same month, one year off.”

  “The victim’s name was Judy Rollin. Close enough to Jane Wright to suggest it, but so different that it amounts to a good disguise.” He took the folder from under his elbow, opened it up, and took out the sheet of paper on the bottom. Then he walked back to me and handed me the file. “Take a look.”

  I opened the file, which held copies of three pages of newsprint. Tom had circled one story on each page. The pages had been reduced in size, and the type was just large enough to be read without a magnifying glass. On the first page, the circled story was about the discovery by three teenage boys of the corpse of a young woman who had been knifed to death and then dumped behind an abandoned steel mill. The second story gave the dead woman’s name as Judy Rollin, twenty-six, a divorced hairdresser employed at the Hi-Tone Hair Salon last seen at Cookie’s, a club five miles from the old steel mill. Mrs. Rollin had gone to the club with two friends who had gone home together, leaving her behind. The third article, headed DOOMED BY LIFE IN FAST LANE, was a salacious description of both Judy Rollin and Cookie’s. The dead woman had indulged in drugs and alcohol, and the club was said to be “a well-known place of assignation for drug dealers and their customers.”

  The last article was ARRESTED GOOD-TIME GIRL MURDERER KILLS SELF IN CELL. A bartender at Cookie’s named Raymond Bledsoe had hanged himself in his cell after confessing to Mrs. Rollin’s murder. An informant had provided police with information that Bledsoe regularly sold cocaine to the victim, and Mrs. Rollin’s handbag had been found in the trunk of his car. The detective in charge of the case said, “Unfortunately, it isn’t possible for us to provide full-time surveillance for everyone who expresses an unwillingness to spend the rest of their lives in prison.” The name of the detective was Paul Fontaine.

  I handed the sheet of paper back to Tom, who slid it into his file.

  “Paul Fontaine,” I said. I felt a strange sense of letdown, almost of disappointment.

  “So it seems. I’m going to do some more checking, but …” Tom shrugged and spread out his hands.

  “He was so confident that he’d never get caught that he didn’t bother changing his name when he came to Millhaven.” Then I remembered the last time I’d seen Fontaine. “My God, I asked him if he’d ever heard of Elvee Holdings.”

  “He still doesn’t know how close we are. Fontaine just wants you to get out of town. If we can get our friend in Tangent to identify him as Franklin Bachelor, we’ll have a real weapon in our hands. And maybe you could fit in a visit to Judy Leatherwood, too.”

  “I suppose you have a picture,” I said.

  Tom nodded and went back to his desk to pick up a manila en
velope. “I clipped this out of the Ledger.”

  I opened the envelope and took out the photograph of Paul Fontaine standing in front of Walter Dragonette’s house in the midst of a lot of other officers. Then I looked back up at Tom and said that Judy Leatherwood wasn’t going to believe that I was showing her the photograph to straighten out an insurance matter.

  “That part’s up to you,” Tom said. “You have a well-developed imagination, don’t you?”

  The last thing he said to me before he closed the door was “Be careful.” I didn’t think he was talking about driving in the fog.

  PART

  TWELVE

  EDWARD HUBBEL

  1

  THE FLIGHT TO TANGENT, Ohio, took off at twelve fifty-five, nearly two hours late. For most of the morning, I thought the plane would never leave, and I kept calling the airport to see if the flight had been cancelled. A young man at the ticket counter assured me that although some arriving aircraft had been rerouted, there were no problems with takeoffs. So while John took a cab to the suburbs to pick up his wife’s car, I drove out to the airport at a rousing twenty-five miles an hour, passed a couple of fender-benders without having one, and left the Pontiac in the long-term parking garage.

  Our flight boarded at a quarter to eleven, and at a quarter after, the captain announced that the tower was going to take advantage of a reduction in the fog to land aircraft that had been stacked up above us for several hours. He apologized for the delay, but said that it would not last much longer than thirty minutes.

  After an hour, the stewardesses passed out free drinks and extra packets of honey-roasted nuts. I spent the time reading the last two day’s issues of the Ledger, which I’d brought along.

  The death of William Writzmann, alias Billy Ritz, took up only three inches of type on page five of the second section of yesterday’s paper. Five grams of cocaine, divided into a dozen smaller quantities and double-wrapped in plastic pill envelopes, had been found in his suit pockets. Detective Paul Fontaine, interviewed at the scene, speculated that Writzmann had been murdered during a drug transaction, although other possibilities were under investigation. When questioned about the words written above the body, Fontaine replied, “At present, we think this was an attempt to mislead our investigation.”

  The next day, two patrons of the Home Plate Lounge remembered seeing Billy Ritz with Frankie Waldo. Geoffrey Bough examined the life of Frankie Waldo and came to certain conclusions he was careful, over the course of three long columns, not to state. Over the past fifteen years, the Idaho Meat Company had lost ground to national distributors organized into vertical conglomerates; yet Waldo’s salary had tripled by 1990. In the mid-eighties, he had purchased a twelve-room house on four acres in Riverwood; a year later, he divorced his wife, married a woman fifteen years younger than himself, and bought a duplex apartment in the Waterfront Towers.

  The source of this affluence was his acquisition of Reed & Armor, a rival meat company that had gone into disarray after its president, Jacob Reed, disappeared in February of 1983—Reed had gone out for lunch one day and never been seen again. Waldo immediately stepped in, bought the disintegrating company for a fraction of its real value, and merged the resources of the two firms. It was the operations of this new company that had roused the suspicions of various regulatory agencies, as well as the Internal Revenue Service.

  Various persons who chose to remain anonymous reported having seen William Writzmann, known as Billy Ritz, in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs with Mr. Waldo, beginning in late 1982. I would have bet a year’s royalties that these persons were all Paul Fontaine, rewriting history to suggest that Billy Ritz had killed Jacob Reed so that Ritz and Waldo could launder drug money through a profitable meat company.

  I thought that Waldo was just a guy who spent too much money on stupid things. Eventually, he made the error of turning to Billy Ritz to get himself out of the hole. After that, he was nothing more than a victim with a glitzy apartment and a lakefront view. Paul Fontaine had Ritz murder Waldo in a way that looked like a gang killing. When Billy’s body turned up, it was just the bigger dealers taking out the little ones. I wondered if anyone but me would ever wonder why a big-time dealer like Billy Ritz was walking around with separate grams and half grams in his pockets.

  And then I reminded myself that I still had no real evidence that Paul Fontaine was Fee Bandolier. That was part of the reason I was sitting on a stalled airplane, waiting to take off for Ohio. I didn’t even want Fee to be Paul Fontaine—I liked Fontaine.

  2

  THE PLANE TOOK OFF into a clinging layer of fog that soon thickened into dark wool. Then we shot out of the soft, clinging darkness into radiant light. The plane made a wide circle in the sudden light, and I looked down at Millhaven through the little window. A dirty, wrinkled blanket lay over the city. After ten minutes, the blanket had begun to admit shafts of light. Five minutes later, the land lay clear and green beneath us.

  The speakers overhead hissed and crackled. The pilot’s unflappable voice cut through the static. “You people might be interested in knowing that we departed Millhaven just before the tower decided to shut down operations until further notice. That inversion bowl that caused all the trouble is still stickin’ around, so I congratulate you on not having chosen a later flight. Thank you for your patience.”

  An hour later, we landed at a terminal that looked like a ranch house with a conning tower. I walked through a long waiting room with rows of plastic chairs to the pay telephones and dialed the number Tom Pasmore had given me. A deep voice jerky with anxiety answered after four or five rings.

  “You’re the writer fellow I was talking to? Suppose you tell me what outfit you were in.”

  I told him.

  “You bring your discharge papers?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “Was that part of the agreement?”

  “How do I know you’re not some peacenik?”

  “I have a few genuine scars,” I said.

  “What camp were you stationed at and who was the CO there?”

  It was like talking to Glenroy Breakstone. “Camp Crandall. The CO was Colonel Harrison Pflug.” After a second, I said, “Known as the Tin Man.”

  “Come out and let me get a look at you.” He gave me a complicated set of directions involving a shopping mall, a little red house, a big rock, a dirt road, and an electric fence.

  At the rental counter, I signed up for every available kind of insurance and took the keys to a Chrysler Imperial. The young woman waved her hand toward the glass doors at what looked like a mile of parking lot. “Row D, space 20. You can’t miss it. It’s red.”

  I carried my briefcase out into the sun and walked across the lot until I came up to a cherry-red car about the size of a houseboat. It should have had a raccoon tail on the antenna and a pair of fuzzy dice in the front window. I opened the door and let the ordinary heat trickle into the oven of the interior. When I got in, the car smelled like a Big Mac box.

  About forty minutes later, I finally backtracked to a boulder slightly smaller than the one I had chosen, found my way to a dirt road that vanished into an empty field, and bounced the Chrysler’s tires along the ruts until the road split into two forks. One aimed toward a far-off farmhouse, and the other veered left into a grove of oak trees. I looked into the trees and saw flashes of yellow and the glint of metal. I turned left.

  Huge yellow ribbons had been tied head-high around each of the trees, and on the high cross-hatched metal fence that ran through them a black-and-white sign said: DANGER ELECTRIFIED FENCE NO TRESPASSERS. I got out of the car and went up to the fence. Fifty feet away, the dirt road ended at a white garage. Beside it stood a square, three-story white house with a raised porch and fluted columns. I pushed a button in the squawk box next to the gate.

  The same deep, anxious voice came through the box. “You’re a little late. Hold on, I’ll let you in.”

  The box buzzed, and I pushed open the gate. “Close the gate behind
you,” the voice ordered. I drove in, got out of the car, and pushed the gate shut behind me. An electronic lock slammed home a bolt the size of my fist. I got back in the car and drove up toward the garage.

  Before I stopped the car, a bent old man in a white short-sleeved shirt and a polka-dot bow tie appeared on the porch. He hobbled along the porch, waving at me to stop. I cut the engine and waited. The old man glowered at me and got to the white steps that came down to the lawn. He used the handrail and made it down the steps. I opened the door and stood up.

  “Okay,” he said. “I checked you out. Colonel Pflug was the CO at Camp Crandall right up until seventy-two. But I have to tell you, you have pretty flashy taste in vehicles.”

  He wasn’t kidding—Hubbel didn’t look like a man who had ever wasted much time on humor. He got up to within a yard of me and squinted at the car. Distaste narrowed his black little eyes. He had a wide flabby face and a short hooked nose like an owl’s beak. Liver spots covered his scalp.

  “It’s a rental,” I said, and held out my hand.

  He turned his distaste to me. “I want to see something in that hand.”

  “Money?”

  “ID.”

  I showed him my driver’s license. He bent so far over that his nose nearly touched the plastic covering. “I thought you were in Millhaven. That’s in Illinois.”

  “I’m staying there for a while,” I said.

  “Funny place to stay.” He straightened up as far as he could and glared at me. “How’d you learn my name?”

  I said that I had looked through copies of the Tangent newspaper from the sixties.

  “Yeah, we were in the paper. Irresponsibility, plain and simple. Makes you wonder about the patriotism of those fellows, doesn’t it?”

  “They probably didn’t know what they were doing,” I said.

  He glared at me again. “Don’t kid yourself. Those commie dupes put a bomb right in our front door.”