The Throat

by Peter Straub

  “You mean, he lives in my old neighborhood?” The exception he had mentioned must have been his wife.

  “I think so. People see him, but they don’t really notice him. As for relaxing, I don’t think he really can relax, so he wouldn’t take vacations or anything—probably couldn’t really afford that, anyhow—but I bet he was a gardener.”

  “And the phrase Blue Rose is related to his gardening?”

  Ransom shrugged. “It’s a funny choice of words—it’s his way of identifying himself. And I think gardening would suit this guy very well—he could work out some of his tensions, he could indulge his compulsion for order, and he can do it alone.”

  “So if we go down to the near south side and find a healthy-looking but boring sixty-year-old man who has a neat flower garden in back of his house, we’ll have our man.”

  Ransom smiled. “That’ll be him. Handle with care.”

  “After being Blue Rose for a couple of months forty years ago, he managed to control himself until this year, when he snapped again.”

  Ransom leaned forward again, excited to have reached the core of all his theorizing. “Maybe he wasn’t in Millhaven during those years. Maybe he had some job that took him here and there—maybe he sold ladies’ stockings or shoelaces or men’s shirts.” Ransom straightened up, and his eyes burned into me. “But I think he was in the military. I think he joined up to escape the possibility of arrest and spent all the time between then and now in army bases all over the country and in Europe. He would have been in Korea, he might even have been in Vietnam. He probably spent some time in Germany. He undoubtedly lived on a lot of those bases set outside small towns all over the South and the Midwest. And every now and then, I bet he went out and killed somebody. I don’t think he ever stopped. I think he was a serial killer before we even knew such things existed. Nobody ever connected his crimes, nobody ever matched the data—Tim, they only began to think about doing that five or six years ago. The FBI has never heard of this guy because nothing he ever did was reported to them. He’d get off the base, persuade some civilian to follow him into an alley or a hotel—he’s a very persuasive guy—and then he’d kill them.”

  6

  AS I LISTENED TO JOHN RANSOM, my eyes kept returning to the painting I thought was a Vuillard. A middle-class family that seemed to consist entirely of women, children, and servants moved through a luxuriant back garden and sat beneath the spreading branches of an enormous tree. Brilliant molten lemon yellow light streamed down through the intense electric green of the thick leaves.

  Ransom took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt. “You seem fascinated by this room, especially the paintings.” He was smiling again. “April would be pleased. She picked most of them out. She pretended that I helped her, but she did all the work.”

  “I am fascinated,” I said. “Isn’t that a Vuillard? It’s a beautiful painting.” The other paintings and little sculptures in the room seemed related to the Vuillard in some fashion, though they were clearly by several different artists. Some were landscapes with figures, some had religious themes, others were almost abstract. Most of them had a flat, delicate, decorative quality that had been influenced, like Van Gogh and Gauguin, but after them, by Japanese prints. Then I recognized that a small painting of the descent from the Cross was by Maurice Denis, and then I understood what April Ransom had done and was struck by its sheer intelligence.

  She had collected the work of the group called the Nabis, the “prophets”—she had found paintings by Sérusier, K.-X. Roussel, and Paul Ranson, as well as Denis and Vuillard. Everything she had bought was good, and all of it was related: it had a significant place in art history, and because most of these artists were not well known in America, their work would not have cost a great deal. As a collection, it had a greater value than the pieces would have had individually, and the pieces themselves would already be worth a good deal more than the Ransoms had paid for them. And they were pleasing paintings—they aestheticized pain and joy, grief and wonder, and made them graceful.

  “There must be more Nabis paintings in this room than anywhere else in the country,” I said. “How did you find them all?”

  “April was good at things like that,” Ransom said, suddenly looking very tired again. “She went to a lot of the families, and most of them were willing to part with a couple of pieces. It’s nice that you like the Vuillard—that was our favorite, too.”

  It was the centerpiece of their collection: the most important painting they owned, and also the most profound, the most mysterious and radiant. It was an outright celebration of sunlight on leaves, of the interaction of people in families and of people with the natural world.

  “Does it have a name?” I stood up to get a closer look.

  “I think it’s called The Juniper Tree.”

  I looked at him over my shoulder, but he gave no indication of knowing that there was a famous Brothers Grimm story with that name, nor that the name might have meant anything to me. He nodded, confirming that I had heard him right. The coincidence of the painting’s name affected me as I went toward the canvas. The people beneath the great tree seemed lonely and isolated, trapped in their private thoughts and passions; the occasion that had brought them together was a sham, no more than a formal exercise. They paid no attention to the radiant light and the vibrant leaves, nor to the shimmer of color which surrounded them, of which they themselves were a part.

  “I can see April when I look at that,” Ransom said behind me.

  “It’s a wonderful painting,” I said. It was full of heartbreak and anger, and these feelings magically increased its radiance—because the painting itself was a consolation for them.

  He stood up and came toward me, his eyes on the painting. “There’s so much happiness in that canvas.”

  He was thinking of his wife. I nodded.

  “You can help me, can’t you?” Ransom asked. “We might be able to help the police put a name to this man. By looking into the old murders, I mean.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  Ransom clamped his fist around my arm. “But I have to tell you, if I find out who attacked my wife, I’ll try to kill him—if I get anywhere near him, I’ll give him what he gave April.”

  “I can understand how you’d feel that way,” I said.

  “No, you can’t.” He dropped his hand and stepped closer to the painting, gave it a quick, cursory glance, and began wandering back to his chair. He put his hand on the stack of Vietnam novels. “Because you never had the chance to know April. I’ll take you to the hospital with me tomorrow, but you won’t really—you know, the person lying there in that bed isn’t—”

  Ransom raised a hand to cover his eyes. “Excuse me. I’ll get you some more coffee.”

  He took my cup back to the table, and I took in the room again. The marble fireplace matched the pinks and grays in the paintings on the long walls, and one vivid slash of red was the same shade as the sky in the Maurice Denis painting of the descent from the Cross. A pale, enormous Paul Ranson painting of a kneeling woman holding up her hands in what looked like prayer or supplication hung above the fireplace. Then I noticed something else, the flat edge of a bronze plaque laid flat on the marble.

  I walked around the furniture to take a look at it, and John Ransom came toward me with the mug as soon as I stood the plaque upright. “Oh, you found that.”

  I read the raised letters on the surface of the bronze. “The Association Award of the Financial Professionals of the City of Millhaven is hereby given to April Ransom on the Occasion of the Annual Dinner, 1991.”

  John Ransom sat down and held out his hand for the plaque. I exchanged it for the coffee, and he stared at it for a second before sliding it back onto the mantel. “The plaque is just a sort of token—the real award is having your name engraved on a big cup in a glass case in the Founder’s Club.”

  Ransom raised his eyes to mine and blinked. “Why don’t I show you the picture that was taken t
he night she won that silly award? At least you can see what she looked like. You’ll come to the hospital with me, too, of course, but in a way there’s more of the real April in the picture.” He jumped up and went out into the hallway to go upstairs.

  I walked over to the Vuillard painting again. I could hear John Ransom opening drawers in his bedroom upstairs.

  A few minutes later, he came back into the living room with a folded section of the Ledger in one hand. “Took me a while to find it—been intending to cut out the photograph and stick it in an album, but these days I can hardly get anything done.” He gave me the newspaper.

  The photograph took up the top right corner of the first page of the financial section. John Ransom was wearing a tuxedo, and his wife was in a white silk outfit with an oversized jacket over a low-cut top. She was gleaming into the camera with her arms around a big engraved cup like a tennis trophy, and he was nearly in profile, looking at her. April Ransom was nearly as tall as her husband, and her hair had been cropped to a fluffy blond helmet that made you notice the length of her neck. She had a wide mouth and a small, straight nose, and her eyes seemed very bright. She looked smart and tough and triumphant. She was a surprise. April Ransom looked much more like what she was, a shrewd and aggressive financial expert, than like the woman her husband had described to me during the ride to Ely Place from the airport. The woman in the photograph did not suffer from uselessly complicated moral sensitivities: she bought paintings because she knew they would look good on her walls while they quadrupled in value, she would never quit her job to have a child, she was hardworking and a little merciless and she would not be kind to fools.

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” Ransom asked.

  I looked at the date on the top of the page, Monday, the third of June. “How long after this came out was she attacked?”

  Ransom raised his eyebrows. “The police found April something like ten days after the awards dinner—that was on Friday, the thirty-first of May. That unknown man was killed the next Wednesday. On Monday night April never came home from the office. I went crazy, waiting for her. Around two in the morning I finally called the police. They told me to wait another twenty-four hours, and that she would probably come home before that. I got a call the next afternoon, saying that they had found her, and that she was unconscious but still alive.”

  “They found her in a parking lot, or something like that?”

  Ransom placed the folded section of the newspaper on the coffee table next to the stack of books. He sighed. “I guess I thought I must have told you. A maid at the St. Alwyn found her when she went in to check on the condition of a room.” There was something like defiance in his eyes and his posture, in the way he straightened his back, when he told me this.

  “April was in a room at the St. Alwyn Hotel?”

  Ransom jerked down the front of his suit jacket and smoothed his tie. “The room where the maid found her had been empty all day, and someone was due to take it on that night. April got up to that room, or was brought up to that room, conscious or not, without anyone seeing her go into the hotel.”

  “So how did she get there?” I asked. I felt sorry for John Ransom and asked my stupid question to buy time while I absorbed this information.

  “She flew. I don’t have any idea how she got into the hotel, Tim. All I know is that April would never have met any kind of boyfriend at the St. Alwyn, because even if she had a boyfriend, which she did not, the St. Alwyn is too seedy. She’d never go inside that place.”

  I thought: not unless she wanted a little seediness.

  “I know her—you never met her. I’ve been married to her for fourteen years, and you’ve only seen a picture of her. She would never have gone into that place.”

  Of course, John was right. He did know her, and I had been merely drawing inferences from a newspaper photograph and what had seemed to me the striking degree of calculation that had created her art collection.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “What was the room number?”

  “The maid found April in room 218. Room 218 of the St. Alwyn Hotel.” He smiled at me. “I wondered when you were going to get around to asking that question.”

  It was the same room in which James Treadwell had been murdered, also by someone who had signed the wall with the words BLUE ROSE.

  “And your detective doesn’t think that’s significant?”

  Ransom threw up his hands. “As far as the police are concerned, nothing that happened back in 1950 has any connection to what happened to my wife. William Damrosch got them all off the hook. He killed himself, the murders ended, that’s it.”

  “You said the first victim was found on Livermore Avenue.”

  Ransom nodded, fiercely.

  “Where on Livermore Avenue?”

  “You tell me. You know where it was.”

  “In that little tunnel behind the St. Alwyn?”

  Ransom smiled at me. “Well, that’s where I’d bet they found the body. The newspaper wasn’t specific—they just said ‘in the vicinity of the St. Alwyn Hotel.’ It never occurred to me that it might be the same place where the first victim was found in the fifties until April, until they found, um, until they found her. You know. In that room.” His smile had become ghastly—I think he had lost control over his face. “And I couldn’t be sure about anything, because all I had to go on was your book, The Divided Man. I didn’t know if you’d changed any of the places …”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

  “So then I read your book and thought I might call just to see—”

  “If I still thought that Damrosch was the man you call Blue Rose.”

  He nodded. That dead smile was fading, but he still looked as if a fishhook had caught in his mouth. “And you said no.”

  “And so—” I paused, stunned by what I had just learned. “And so, what it looks like is that Blue Rose is not only killing people in Millhaven again, but killing them in the same places he used forty years ago.”

  “That’s the way it looks to me,” Ransom said. “The question is, can we get anyone else to believe it?”

  7

  THEY’LL BELIEVE IT in a hurry after one more murder,” I said. “The third one was the exception I mentioned before—the doctor,” said Ransom.

  “I thought you were talking about your wife.”

  He frowned at me. “Well, in the book, the third one was the doctor. Big house on the east side.”

  “There won’t be one on the east side,” I said.

  “Look at what’s happening,” Ransom said. “It’ll be at the same address. Where the doctor died.”

  “The doctor didn’t die. That was one of the things I changed when I wrote the book. Whoever tried to kill Buzz Laing, Dr. Laing, cut his throat and wrote BLUE ROSE on his bedroom wall, but ran away without noticing that he wasn’t dead yet. Laing came to in time and managed to stop the bleeding and get himself to a hospital.”

  “What do you mean, ‘whoever tried to kill him’? It was Blue Rose.”

  I shook my head.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “As sure as I can be without evidence,” I said. “In fact, I think the same person who cut Buzz Laing’s throat also killed Damrosch and set it up to look like suicide.”

  Ransom opened his mouth and then closed it again. “Killed Damrosch?”

  I smiled at him—Ransom looked a little punchy. “Some information about the Blue Rose case turned up a couple of years ago when I was working on a book about Tom Pasmore and Lamont von Heilitz.” He started to say something, and I held up my hand. “You probably remember hearing about von Heilitz, and I guess you went to school with Tom.”

  “I was a year behind him at Brooks-Lowood. What in the world could he have to do with the Blue Rose murders?”

  “He didn’t have anything to do with them, but he knows who tried to kill Buzz Laing. And who murdered William Damrosch.”

  “Who is this?” Ransom seemed furious with excitement.
“Is he still alive?”

  “No, he’s not. And I think it would be better for Tom to tell you the story. It’s really his story, for one thing.”

  “Will he be willing to tell it to me?”

  “I called him before I left New York. He’ll tell you what he thinks happened to Buzz Laing and Detective Damrosch.”

  “Okay.” Ransom nodded. He considered this. “When do I get to talk to him?”

  “He’d probably be willing to see us tonight, if you like.”

  “Could I hire him?”

  Almost every resident of Millhaven over the age of thirty would probably have known that Tom Pasmore had worked for a time as a private investigator. Twenty years ago, even the Bangkok papers had run the story of how an independent investigator, a self-styled “amateur of crime” living in the obscure city of Millhaven, Illinois, had brilliantly reinterpreted all the evidence and records in the case of Whitney Walsh, the president of TransWorld Insurance, who had been shot to death near the ninth hole of his country club in Harrison, New York. A groundskeeper with a longstanding grudge against Walsh had been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Working on his own and without ever leaving Millhaven, Tom Pasmore had succeeded in identifying and locating the essential piece of evidence necessary to arrest and convict the real murderer, a former employee. The innocent man had been freed, and after he had told his story to a number of newspapers and national magazines, it was learned that Tom Pasmore had done essentially the same thing in perhaps a dozen cases: he had used public information and trial records to get innocent men out of jail and guilty ones in. The Walsh case had merely been the most prominent. There followed, in the same newspapers and magazines, a number of lurid stories about “The Real-Life Sherlock Holmes,” each containing the titillating information that the wizard habitually refused payment for his investigations, that he had a fortune of something between ten and twenty million dollars, that he lived alone in a house he seldom left, that he dressed with an odd, old-fashioned formality. These revelations came to a climax with the information that Tom Pasmore was the natural son of Lamont von Heilitz, the man who had been the inspiration for the radio character Lamont Cranston—“The Shadow.” By the time all of this had emerged, Tom ceased to give interviews. As far as anyone knew, he also ceased to work—scorched into retirement by unwelcome publicity. The press never unearthed another incident in which Tom Pasmore of Millhaven, Illinois, intervened from afar to free an innocent man and jail a guilty one for murder. Yet from my contact with him, I thought it was almost certain that he continued his work anonymously, and that he had created the illusion of retirement to maintain in absolute darkness the secret the press had not discovered, that he had long been the lover of a woman married into one of Millhaven’s wealthiest families.