The Throat

by Peter Straub

  “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.”

  PART

  SIXTEEN

  FROM DANGEROUS DEPTHS

  1

  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 says 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.

  2

  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.

  3

  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?”

  “Not yet, but I’m going to take lessons,” I said. “Do you have a phone book in this room?”

  Tom got up and pulled the directory off a shelf beside his desk. “Lessons in how to speak Millhaven?” He handed me the book.

  “Just wait,” I said, and looked up Byron Dorian’s number.

  4

  DORIAN SOUNDED UNSURPRISED to hear from me: what did surprise him, mildly, was that I was back in Millhaven. He told me that he was working on getting a show in a Chicago gallery and that he had done another Blue Rose painting. He asked me how my writing was going. I spoke a couple of meaningless sentences about how the writing was going, and then I did succeed in surprising him.

  “You want to learn how to talk with a Millhaven accent?”

  “I’ll have to explain later, but it’s important that the people I talk to think I’m who I say I am.”

  “This is wild,” Dorian said. “You’re even from here.”

  “But I don’t have the accent anymore. I know you can do it. I heard you do your father’s voice. That’s the accent I want.”

  “Oh, boy. I guess I can try. What do you want to say?”

  “How about ‘The police will be very interested’?”

  “The p’leece ’ll be very innarestud,” he said immediately.

  “ ‘This could be important for your career.’ ”

  “This cud be importint f’yore c’reer. What’s this about, anyhow?”

  “ ‘Hello.’ ”

  “H’lo. Does this have anything to do with April?”

  “No, it doesn’t. ‘I don’t want to go off on a tangent.’ ”

  “Are you saying that really, or do you want me to say it in Millhaven?”

  “Say it in Millhaven.”

  “I doan wanna go off onna tangunt. The whole thing is to put your voice up into your head and keep things flat. When you want emphasis, you just sort of stretch the word out. You know how you say Millhaven?”

  “Muhhaven,” I said.

  “Close. It’s really M’avun. Just listen to the guys on the news sometime—they all say M’avun. It’s almost maven, but not quite.”

  “M’avun,” I said. “H’lo. This cud be importint f’yore c’reer.”

  “That was good. Anything else?”

  I tried to think what else I would need. “Movie theater. Beldame Oriental. This manuscript has some interesting information.”

  “Movee theeadur. Beldayme Orientul. This manyewscrip has got sum innaresteen infermashun. Oh, and if you want to say a time, you know? Like five o’clock? You just say five clock, unless it’s twelve—you always say twelve o’clock, I don’t know why.”

  “I wanna meet yoo at five clock to talk about sum innaresteen infermashun.”

  “Tock, not talk—tock about. And ta, not to. Ta tock. Otherwise, you’re sounding pretty good.”

  “Tock,” I said.

  “Now you’re tockin’,” he said. “Good luck, whatever this is.”

  I hung up and looked over at Tom. “Do you realize,” he asked, “that you’re probably trying to learn to talk in exactly the same way you did when you were a little boy?”

  “I’m tryna lurn ta tock like Dick Mueller,” I said.

  5

  WHILE TOM PACED AROUND THE ROOM, I called each of them in turn—McCandless, Monroe and Hogan—saying that I was Dick Mueller, a good friend and colleague of April Ransom’s. I put my voice up into my head and kept it flat as Kansas. H’lo. I jus happena to cum across this innaresteen manyewscrip April musta hid beheyn the books in my office, because that’s where I founnit. Iss fulla innaresteen infurmashun, ya know? Very innaresteen infurmashun, speshally if yur a p’leeceman in M’aven. In fact, this cud be importint f’yore c’reer.

  McCandless said, “If what you found is so important, Mr. Mueller, why don’t you bring it in?”

  Hogan said, “The April Ransom case is over. Thanks for calling, but you might as well just throw the manuscript away.”

  Monroe said, “What is this, some kind of threat? What kind of information are you talking about?”

  I doan wanna go off onna tangent, but I think iss importunt for you ta tock ta me.

  McCandless: “If you want to talk about something, come down here to Armory Place.”

  Hogan: “I have the impression that we are talking. Why don’t you just say what you have to say?”

  Monroe: “Maybe you could be a little more specific, Mr. Mueller.”

  I wanna meet you inside the ol movie theeadur, the Beldame Orientul, five clock tomorrow morneen.

  McCandless: “I don’t think we have any more to say to each other, Mr. Mueller. Good-bye.”

  Hogan: “If you want to see me, Mr. Mueller, you can come to Armory Place. Good-bye.”

  Monroe: “Sure. I love it. Give my best wishes to your doctor, will you?” He hung up without bothering to say good-bye.

  I put down the receiver, and Tom stopped pacing.

  6

  HOW MUCH TIME do you think we have?” I asked.

  “At least until dark.”

  “How are we going to get in?”

  “Who do you think inherited the Lamont von Heilitz collection of picklocks and master keys? Give me enough time, and I can get in anywhere. But it won’t take five minutes to get into the Beldame Oriental.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  Tom let his mouth drop open, raised his shoulders, spread his hands, and gazed goggl
e-eyed around the room.

  “Oh. You went down and looked at it.”

  He came back to the couch and sat beside me. “The entry doors on Livermore Avenue open with a simple key that works a deadbolt. The same key opens the doors on the far side of the ticket booth.” He pulled an ordinary brass Medeco key from his jacket pocket and set it on the table. “There’s an exit to the alley behind the theater—double doors with a push-bar that opens them from the inside. On the outside, a chain with a padlock runs between the two bracket handles. So that’s easy, too.” From the same pocket, he removed a Yale key of the same size and color and placed it beside the first. “We could also go in through the basement windows on the alley, but I imagine you’ve had enough B&E to last you a while.”

  “So do you want to go in through the front or the back?”

  “The alley. No one will see us,” Tom said. “But it has one drawback. Once we’re inside, we can’t replace the chain. On the other hand, one of us could go in, and the other one could reattach the chain and wait.”

  “In front?”

  “No. On the other side of the alley there’s a wooden fence that juts out from the back of a restaurant. They line up the garbage cans inside the fence. The top half of the fence is louvered—there are spaces between the slats.”

  “You want us to wait out there until we see someone let himself into the theater?”

  “No, I want you inside, and me behind the fence. When I see someone go in, I come around to the front. Those old movie theaters have two entrances to the basement, one in front, near the manager’s office, and the other in back, close to the doors. In the center of the basement there’s a big brick pillar, and behind that is the boiler. On the far side are old dressing rooms from the days when they used to have live shows between the movies. If I come down in front, he’ll hear me, but he won’t know you are already there. I could drive him right back to the pillar, where you’d be hiding, and you could surprise him.”