The Throat

by Peter Straub

  The two squad cars sped forward and spun sideways, their tires squealing, to block the ends of the street. The unmarked cars raced up to the Reliant, and in an instant the street was filled with policemen pointing guns at the young man getting out of his car.

  Kenneth Johnson, who described all of this to me, including what his children had done to bring such enveloping turmoil upon the Millhaven police department, told me later that when Walter Dragonette got out of his car and faced all those cops and guns, he gave them his secret smile.

  The police ordered him away from his car, and he cheerfully moved. They spoke, and Walter told them that he was the Meat Man. Yes, of course he would come down to the station with them. Well, certainly he would put down the paper bag in his hand. What was in the bag? Well, the only thing in the bag was the hacksaw blade he had just purchased. That was why he had left the house—to get a new hacksaw blade. Paul Fontaine, who still knew nothing about what had happened to April Ransom since he and John Ransom had left her bedside that morning, took a card from his jacket pocket and read Dragonette his rights under the Miranda decision. Walter Dragonette eagerly nodded that yes, he understood all of that. He’d want a lawyer, that was for sure, but he didn’t mind talking now. It was time to talk, wouldn’t the detective agree?

  Detective Fontaine certainly did think that it was time to talk. And would Mr. Dragonette permit the police to search his house?

  The Meat Man took his eyes from Detective Fontaine’s interesting face to smile and nod at Akeem and Kwanza, who were looking at him through their living room window. “Oh, by all means—I mean, they really should look through the place, really they should.” Then he looked back at Detective Fontaine. “Are they prepared for what they’re going to find?”

  “What are they going to find, Mr. Dragonette?” asked Sergeant Hogan.

  “My people,” the Meat Man said. “Why else would you be here?”

  Hogan asked, “Which people are we talking about, Walter?”

  “If you don’t know about my people—” He licked his lips, and twisted his head to look over his shoulder to see his little white house. “If you don’t know about them, what made you come here?” His eyes moved from Fontaine to Hogan and back again. They did not answer him. He put his hand over his mouth and giggled. “Well, whoever goes into my house is in for a little surprise.”

  8

  INEVER HEARD THE WAITRESS put the plate on the table. Eventually I realized that I could smell toast, looked up, and saw breakfast steaming beside my right elbow. I moved the plate in front of me and ate while I read about what the first policemen inside Walter Dragonette’s house had found there.

  First, of course, had been Alfonzo Dakins, whose shoulder joint had broken Dragonette’s hacksaw blade and forced him into an early morning trip to the hardware store. Alfonzo Dakins had met Walter Dragonette in a gay bar called The Roost, accompanied him home, accepted a beer treated with a substantial quantity of Halcion, posed for a nude Polaroid photograph, and passed out. He had partially reawakened to find Walter’s hands around his neck. The struggle that followed this discovery had awakened Akeem Johnson. If Dakins had not been woozy with Halcion and alcohol, he would easily have killed Dragonette, but the smaller man managed to hit him with a beer bottle and to snap handcuffs on him while he recovered.

  Roaring, Dakins had gotten back on his feet with his hands cuffed in front of him, and Dragonette stabbed him in the back a couple of times to slow him down. Then he stabbed him in the neck. Dakins had chased him into the kitchen, and Walter banged him on the head with a cast-iron frying pan. Dakins dropped to his knees, and Walter slammed the heavy pan against the side of his head and knocked him out more successfully than the first time.

  He covered the living room floor with old newspapers and dragged Dakins out of the kitchen. Three more layers of papers went around and beneath his body. Then Walter had removed the trousers, underwear, and socks he had been wearing, mounted Dakins’s huge chest, and finished the job of strangling him.

  He had photographed Dakins once more.

  Then he had “punished” Dakins for giving him so much unnecessary trouble and stabbed him half a dozen times in the back. When he felt that Dakins had been punished enough, he had anal intercourse with his dead body. Afterward, he went into the kitchen for his hacksaw and cut off Dakins’s big bowling-ball head. Then the blade had broken.

  On the top shelf of Dragonette’s refrigerator, the police discovered four other severed heads, two of black males, one of a white male, and one of a white female who appeared to be in her early teens. The second shelf contained an unopened loaf of Branola bread, half a pound of ground chuck in a supermarket wrapper, a squeezable plastic container of French’s mustard, and a six-pack of Pforzheimer beer. On the third shelf down stood two large sealed jugs each containing two severed penises, a human heart on a white china plate, and a human liver wrapped in Clingfilm. In the vegetable crisper on the right side of the refrigerator were a moldering head of iceberg lettuce, an opened bag of carrots, and three withered tomatoes. In the left crisper, police found two human hands, one partially stripped of its flesh.

  Human Hand, on the list of Les Viandes.

  On a shelf in the hall closet, in a row with two felt hats, one gray, one brown, were three skulls that had been completely cleaned of flesh. Two topcoats, brown and gray, a red-and-blue down jacket, and a brown leather jacket, hung from hangers; beneath the two jackets was a sixty-seven-gallon metal drum with three headless torsos floating in a dark liquid at first thought to be acid but later identified as tap water. Beside the drum was a spray can of Lysol disinfectant and two bottles of liquid bleach. When the big drum had been removed from the closet, a smaller drum was discovered behind it. Inside the second drum, two penises, five hands, and one foot had been kept in a liquid later determined to be tap water, vodka, rubbing alcohol, and pickle juice.

  A row of skulls stood as bookends and decorations on a long shelf in the living room—they had been meticulously cleaned and painted with a gray lacquer that made them look artificial, like Halloween jokes. (The books that separated the skulls, chiefly cookbooks and manuals of etiquette, had belonged to Florence Dragonette.)

  A long freezer in excellent working condition stood against one wall of the living room. When the policemen opened the freezer, they discovered six more heads, three male and three female, each of these encased in a large food-storage bag, two pairs of male human legs without feet, a freezer bag of entrails labeled STUDY, a large quantity of pickles that had been drained and dumped into a brown paper bag, two pounds of ground round, and the hand of a preteen female, minus three fingers. To the left of the freezer were an electric drill, an electrical saw, a box of baking soda, and a stainless-steel carving knife.

  A manila envelope on top of a dresser in the bedroom contained hundreds of Polaroid photographs of bodies before death, after death, and after dismemberment. Behind the house, police found a number of black plastic garbage sacks filled with bones and rotting flesh. One policeman described Dragonette’s backyard as a “trash dump.” Bones and bone fragments littered the uncut grass, along with ripped clothes, old magazines, some discarded eyeglasses and one partial upper plate, and broken pieces of electrical equipment.

  The initial assessment of the investigating officers was that the remains of at least nineteen people, and possibly as many as another five, had been located in Dragonette’s house. An Associated Press reporter made the obvious point that this made the Dragonette case—the “Meat Man” case—among the worst instances of multiple murder in American history, and, to prove the point, listed some of the competition:

  1980s: about fifty murdered women, most of them prostitutes, found near the Green River in the Seattle-Tacoma area

  1978: the bodies of thirty-three young men and boys found at John Wayne Gacy’s house in suburban Chicago

  1970s: twenty-six tortured and murdered youths discovered in the Houston area, and Elmer Wayne Henley convicted in
six of the deaths

  1971: the bodies of twenty-five farmworkers killed by Juan Corona discovered in California

  The reporter went on to list James Huberty, who killed twenty-one people in a McDonald’s; Charles Whitman, who killed sixteen people by sniping from a tower in Texas; George Banks, the murderer of twelve people in Pennsylvania; and several others, including Howard Unruh of Camden, New Jersey, who in 1948 shot and killed thirteen people in the space of twelve minutes and said, “I’d have killed a thousand if I’d had enough bullets.” In the heat of his research, the AP reporter forgot to mention Ted Bundy and Henry Lee Lucas, both of whom were responsible for more deaths than any of these; and it is possible that he had never heard of Ed Gein, with whom Walter Dragonette had several things in common, although Walter Dragonette had certainly never heard of him.

  A college professor in Boston who had written a book about mass murderers and serial killers said—presumably via telephone to the offices of the Ledger—that serial killers “tended to be either of the disorganized or the organized type,” and that Walter Dragonette seemed to him “a perfect example of the disorganized type.” Disorganized serial killers, said the professor, acted on impulse, were usually white male loners in their thirties with blue-collar jobs and a history of failed relationships. (Walter Dragonette, in spite of the professor’s confidence, had a white-collar job and had known exactly one supremely successful relationship in all his life, that with his mother.) Disorganized serial killers liked to keep the evidence around the house. They were easier to catch than the organized killers, who chose their victims carefully and covered their tracks.

  And how, the Ledger asked, could anyone do what Walter Dragonette had done? How could Lizzy Borden have done it? How could Jack the Ripper have done it? And how, for the Ledger writers did remember this name, could Ed Gein have dug those women out of their graves and skinned their bodies? If the professor in Boston could not answer this question—for wasn’t this question the essential question?—then the Ledger needed more experts. It had no trouble finding them.

  A psychologist at a state mental hospital in Chicago offered the suggestion that “none of these people will win any mental health awards,” and that they cut up their victims’ bodies to conceal what they had done. He blamed “violent pornography” for their actions.

  A criminologist in San Francisco who had written a “true crime” book about a serial killer in California blamed the anonymity of modern life. A Millhaven priest blamed the loss of traditional religious values. A University of Chicago sociologist blamed the disappearance of the traditional family. The clinical director of the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital told the Ledger that serial killers “confused sex and aggression.” The head of a crime task force in New York blamed the relaxation of sexual mores which had made homosexuality and “perversion in general” more acceptable. Someone blamed sunspots, and someone else blamed “the climate of economic despair that is all around us now.”

  A woman holding her two-year-old daughter on her shoulders in the crowd that had already collected in front of the white house on North Twentieth Street thought that Walter Dragonette did it because he wanted to be famous, and that the plan was going to work out just fine: “Well, take me, I came down here, didn’t I? This is history, right here. In six months, everything you see in front of you is going to be a miniseries on Channel Two.”

  These were the Ledger’s answers to the question of how anyone could do the things Walter Dragonette had confessed to doing.

  One article claimed that “the eyes of the world, from Akron to Australia, from Boise to Britain, from Cleveland to Canton” had “turned toward a white, one-story house in Millhaven.” Neighbors were talking to reporters from the BBC and news teams from three networks. One Philadelphia reporter was heard asking a resident of North Twentieth Street to describe what he called “the stench of death.” And here came the answer, written down by two reporters: “A real bad stink, real bad.”

  Another article reported that 961 men, women, and children were missing in the state of Illinois. A spokesman for the FBI said that if you were over twenty-one, you had the right to be missing.

  Arkham College officials warned their students to be careful about crime on campus, although students interviewed felt little concern for their own safety. “It’s just too strange to worry about,” said Shelley Manigault of Ladysmith, Wisconsin. “To me, it’s a lot more frightening to think about the position of women in society than about what one twisted white guy does when he’s inside his house.”

  The Ledger reported that Walter Dragonette had been friendless in high school, where his grades had varied from A to F. Classmates recalled that his sense of humor had been “weird.” He had been fascinated with the Blue Rose murders and had once run for class treasurer under the name Blue Rose, earning a schoolwide total of two votes. In the sixth grade, he had collected the corpses of small animals from the streets and empty lots and experimented with ways of cleaning their skeletons. In the eighth grade, he had privately exhibited in a plush-lined cigar box an object he had claimed to be the skeletal hand of a five-year-old boy. Those who had seen the object declared that it had been a monkey’s paw. For several days on end, he had pretended to be blind, coming to school with dark glasses and a white cane, and once he had nearly managed to persuade his homeroom teacher that he had amnesia. Twice during the time that he attended Carl Sandburg High School, Dragonette had used chalk to draw the outlines of bodies on the floor of the gymnasium. He told Detective Fontaine and Sergeant Hogan that the outlines were of the bodies of people he had actually killed—killed while he was in high school.

  For Dragonette claimed to have killed a small child named Wesley Drum in 1979, after having sex with him in a vacant lot. He said that when he was a sophomore at Carl Sandburg, the year he ran for class treasurer under the name Blue Rose, he had killed a woman who picked him up while he was hitchhiking—stabbed her with an army surplus knife while she stopped at a red light. He could not remember her name, but he knew that he had stuck her right in the chest, and then stuck her a couple more times while she was still getting used to the idea. He grabbed her purse and jumped out of the car a couple of seconds after the light changed. He was sorry that he had stolen the lady’s purse, and he wanted it known that he would be happy to return the $14.78 it had contained to her family, if someone would give him the right name and address.

  Both of these stories matched unsolved murders in Millhaven. Five-year-old Wesley Drum had been found dead and mutilated (though still in possession of both hands) in an empty lot behind Arkham College in 1979, and in 1980, Walter Dragonette’s fifteenth year, Annette Bulmer, a thirty-four-year-old mother of two dying from numerous deep stab wounds, had been pulled from a stalled car at the intersection of Twelfth Street and Arkham Boulevard.

  Walter readily gave the police what the Ledger called “assistance” on “several prominent recent cases.”

  I continued to leaf through the paper as I finished my breakfast, realizing that now I was free to do whatever I liked. April Ransom was recovering, and her confessed attacker had been arrested. A sick little monster who called himself the Meat Man had diverted himself from his amusements (or whatever it was when you killed people and had sex with their corpses) long enough to reenact the Blue Rose murders. No retired soldier in his sixties, back from Korea and Germany, patrolled Livermore Avenue in search of fresh victims: no murderer’s rose garden grew in the backyard of a well-kept little house in Pigtown. The past was still buried with the rest of my family in Pine Knoll.

  I folded the paper and waved to the waitress. When she came over to my booth, I told her that I could see why she’d been having trouble concentrating on her work this morning.

  “Well, yeah,” she said, warming up. “Things like that don’t happen in Millhaven—they’re not supposed to.”

  9

  THE MACHINE ANSWERED when I called Ransom from the St. Alwyn’s lobby, so he was either still asleep
or already back at the hospital.

  I walked back to the Pontiac, made a U-turn on Livermore Avenue, and drove back beneath the viaduct toward Shady Mount.

  Because I didn’t want to be bothered with a meter, I turned into one of the side streets on the other side of Berlin Avenue and parked in front of a small redbrick house. A big flag hung from an upstairs window and a yellow ribbon had been tied into a grandiose bow on the front door. I walked across the empty street in the middle of the block, wondering if April Ransom had already opened her eyes and asked what had happened to her.

  It was my last afternoon in Millhaven, I realized.

  For a moment, opening the visitors’ door, I wondered what name I would give to my unfinished book; and then, for the first time in a long dry time, the book jumped into life within me—I wanted to write a chapter about Charlie Carpenter’s childhood. It would be a lengthy tour of hell. For the first time in months, I saw my characters in color and three dimensions, breathing city-flavored air and scheming for the things they thought they needed.

  These fantasies occupied me pleasantly as I waited for, and then rode up in, the elevator. I barely noticed the two policemen who stepped inside the elevator behind me. The radios on their belts crackled as we ascended and stepped out of the elevator on the third floor. It was like having an escort. As burly and contained as a pair of Clydesdales, the two policemen moved around me and then turned the corner toward the nurses’ station.

  I rounded the corner a few seconds behind them. The policemen turned right at the nurses’ station and went toward April Ransom’s room through a surprising number of people. Uniformed police, plainclothes detectives, and what looked like a few civilians formed a disorganized crowd that extended from the station all the way around the curve to Mrs. Ransom’s room. The scene reminded me uncomfortably of the photograph of Walter Dragonette’s front lawn. All these men seemed to be talking to one another in little groups. An air of exhaustion and frustration, distinct as cigar smoke, hung over all of them.