The Throat

by Peter Straub

  One or two cops glanced at me as I came nearer to the nurses’ station. Officer Mangelotti was seated in a wheelchair before the counter. A white bandage stained red over his ear wrapped around his head, leaving his face so exposed it looked peeled. A man with a monkish hairline knelt in front of the wheelchair, speaking quietly. Mangelotti looked up and saw me. The man in front of him stood up and turned around to show me his saggy clown’s face and drooping nose. It was Detective Fontaine.

  His face twitched in a sorrowful smile. “Someone I know wants to meet you,” he said. Plummy pouches hung underneath his eyes.

  A uniformed policeman nearly seven feet tall moved toward me out of the corridor leading to April Ransom’s room. “Sir, unless you are on the medical staff of this hospital you will have to vacate this area.” He began shooing me away, blocking me from seeing whatever was going on behind him. “Immediately, sir.”

  “Leave him be, Sonny,” Fontaine said.

  The enormous cop turned to make sure he had heard correctly. It was like watching the movement of a large blue tree. Behind him two men pushed a gurney out of one of the rooms along the curve of the corridor. A body covered with a white sheet lay on the gurney. Three other policemen, two men in white coats, and a mustached man in a lightweight blue pinstriped suit followed the gurney out of the room. The last man looked familiar. Before the blue tree cut off my view, I caught a glimpse of Eliza Morgan leaning against the inner wall of the circular corridor. She moved away from the wall as the men pushed the gurney past her.

  Paul Fontaine came up beside the big officer. He looked like the other man’s monkey. “Leave us alone, Sonny.”

  The big cop cleared his throat with a noise that sounded like a drain unblocking. He said, “Yes, sir,” and walked away.

  “I told you police should never go to hospitals, didn’t I?” His eyes looked poached above the purple bags, and I remembered that he had been up all night long, first here, then at North Twentieth Street, and then back here again. “Do you know what happened?” A kind of animation moved in his face, but at a level beneath the skin, so that whatever he was feeling showed only as a momentary flash in his sagging eyes.

  “I thought I’d find John Ransom here.”

  “We got him at home. I thought you were staying with him.”

  “My God,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”

  His eyes widened, and his face went still. “You don’t know?” The men in white coats pushed the gurney past us, and three policemen came along behind them. Fontaine and I looked down at the small covered body. I remembered Eliza Morgan leaning against the wall, and suddenly I understood whose body it was. For a moment my stomach turned gray—it felt as though everything from the bottom of my rib cage to my bowels had gone flat and dead, mushy.

  “Somebody—?” I tried again. “Somebody killed April Ransom?”

  Fontaine nodded. “Have you seen the newspaper this morning? Watch any morning news? Listen to the radio?”

  “I read the paper,” I said. “I know about that man, ah, Walter Dragonette. You arrested him.”

  “We arrested him,” Fontaine said. He made it sound like a sad joke. “We did. We just didn’t do it soon enough.”

  “But he confessed to attacking Mrs. Ransom. In the Ledger—”

  “He didn’t confess to attacking her,” Fontaine said. “He confessed to killing her.”

  “But Mangelotti and Eliza Morgan were in that room.”

  “The nurse went for a cigarette right after she came on duty.”

  “What happened to Mangelotti?”

  “While Mrs. Morgan was out of the room, our friend Walter sauntered past the nurses’ station without anybody seeing him, ducked into the room, and clobbered Mangelotti on the side of the head with a hammer. Or something resembling a hammer. Our stalwart officer was seated beside the bed at the time, reading entries in his notebook. Then our friend beat Mrs. Ransom to death with the same hammer.” He looked up at me and then over at Mangelotti. He looked as if he had bitten into something sour. “This time, he didn’t bother signing the wall. And then he walked away past the patients’ lounge and went downstairs and got into his car to go to the hardware store for a hacksaw blade.” He looked at me again. Anger and disgust burned in his tired eyes. “He had to wait for the hardware store to open, so we had to wait. In the meantime, the nurse left the patients’ lounge and found the body. She yelled for the doctors, but it was too late.”

  “So Dragonette knew that she was about to come out of her coma?”

  He nodded. “Walter called to ask about her condition this morning. It must have been the last thing he did before he left home. Doesn’t that make you feel all warm and happy on the inside?” His eyes had gotten a little wild, and red lines threaded through the whites. He mimed picking up a telephone. “Hello, I just wanted to see how my dear lovely friend April Ransom is getting along, yes yes … Oh, you don’t say, really, well, isn’t that sweet? In that case, I’ll just be popping in to pay her a little social call, oh my yes indeedy, as soon, that is, as I cut the head off the guy on my living room floor, so you go ahead and make sure that she’ll be alone, and if you can’t arrange that, please see that nobody but Officer Mangelotti is alone in the room with her, yes, that’s M-A-N-G-E-L-O-DOUBLE T-I—”

  He did not stop so much as strangle on his own emotions. The other policemen watched him surreptitiously. In his wheelchair, Mangelotti heard every word, and flinched at the spelling of his name. He looked like a slaughterhouse cow.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “He went to all that trouble to protect himself, and the second you guys get out of your cars and wave your guns at him, he says, Well, I didn’t just kill everybody inside there, I also knifed those Blue Rose people. And then he was so lucky—to get here exactly when the nurse went out of the room. It seems a little unlikely.”

  Fontaine reared back and widened his bloodshot eyes. “You want to talk about unlikely? Unlikely doesn’t count anymore.”

  “No, but it confuses the civilians,” said a voice behind me. I turned around to see the man in the pinstriped suit who had followed April Ransom’s body out of her room. Deep vertical lines cut down his face on either side of his thin forties mustache. His light brown hair was combed straight back, exposing deep indentations in his hairline. He had looked familiar to me earlier because I had seen his picture in the paper that morning. He was Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan, Fontaine’s superior.

  Hogan put his hand on Fontaine’s elbow.

  “This is the guy who wanted to meet you,” Fontaine said.

  I sensed immediately that I was in the presence of a real detective, someone even Tom Pasmore would respect. Michael Hogan possessed a powerful personal authority. Hogan had the uncomplicated masculinity of old movie stars like Clark Gable or William Holden, both of whom he resembled in a generalized, real-world fashion. You could see Hogan commanding a three-masted schooner through a heavy storm or sentencing mutineers to death on the yardarm. His offhand remark about “civilians” seemed perfectly in character.

  What I was most conscious of at the moment when Michael Hogan shook my hand was that I wanted his approval—that most abject, adolescent desire.

  And then, in the midst of the crowd of policemen and hospital staff, he did an astonishing thing. He gave me his approval.

  “Didn’t you write The Divided Man?” I barely had time to nod before he said, “That was a very perceptive book. Ever read it, Paul?”

  As amazed as myself, Fontaine said, “Read it?”

  “About the last word on the Blue Rose business.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Fontaine. “Yes.”

  “It was the last word before Walter Dragonette came along,” I said.

  Hogan smiled at me as if I had said something clever. “Nobody is very happy about Mr. Dragonette,” Hogan said, and changed the subject without losing any of his remarkable civility. “I suppose you came here to find your friend Ransom.”

  “I did, ye
s,” I said. “I tried calling him, but all I got was the machine. Does he know—he does know what happened, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Hogan said, sounding like an ancient uncle rocking in front of a fire. “After Paul and I got the call about his wife, we got him at home.”

  “You heard April had been killed before Dragonette confessed to doing it?” I asked. I didn’t quite know why, but this seemed important.

  “That’s probably enough,” said Paul Fontaine. Before I saw the implications of my question, he sensed an implied criticism. “We’ve got work to do, Mr. Underhill. If you’d like to see your friend—”

  Hogan had immediately understood the nature of this criticism. He raised his eyebrows and broke into what Fontaine was saying. “We usually hear about crimes before we get confessions.”

  “I know that,” I said. “It’s more that I was wondering if Walter Dragonette heard about this crime before he confessed to it.”

  “It was a good clean confession,” Fontaine said.

  Fontaine was beginning to look irritated, and Hogan moved to mollify him. “He knew where she was being held. That information was never released. There are eight hospitals in Millhaven. When we asked Dragonette the name of the hospital where he had killed April Ransom, he said Shady Mount.”

  “Did he know her room number?”

  “No,” Hogan said, and at the same time Fontaine said, “Yes.”

  “Paul means he knew the floor she was on,” Hogan said. “He wouldn’t know that unless he’d been here.”

  “Then how did he know where to find her in the first place?” I asked. “I don’t suppose the switchboard gave out information about her.”

  “We really haven’t had the time to fully interrogate Mister Dragonette,” said Hogan.

  The uniformed officers moving back and forth between April Ransom’s room slowed down as they passed us.

  “You could meet your friend Ransom down on Armory Place,” Hogan said. “He’s waiting for Paul to begin Dragonette’s interrogation. And Paul, I think you could usefully start matters down there.”

  He turned back to me. “You know where Armory Place is?”

  I nodded.

  “Follow Paul and park in the police lot. You and Mister Ransom could watch some of the interrogation.” He asked Fontaine, “Is that okay with you?”

  Fontaine nodded.

  Downstairs, an elderly woman seated at a computer on one of the desks behind the counter looked up at us and twitched as if her chair had just given her an electric shock. April Ransom’s murder had unsettled the entire hospital. Fontaine said he would wait for me at the entrance to the hospital parking lot.

  “I know how to get to police headquarters,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah, but if you try to get into the lot without me, somebody might mistake you for a reporter,” he said.

  I trotted across the street and went up the block. Before I could put the key into the Pontiac’s door, a heavyset man in Bermuda shorts and a blue button-down shirt came rushing out of the front door of the house with the flag and the yellow ribbon. “Just hold it right there,” he shouted. “I got something to say to you.”

  I unlocked the door and waited for him to cross his lawn. He had a big belly and thin hairy legs, and his bulldog face was flushed pink. He came within ten feet of me and jabbed his finger at me. “Do you see any signs saying HOSPITAL PARKING on this street? The parking places on this street are not for you people—you can park at the meters, or go around to the hospital lot. I am sick and tired of being abused.”

  “Abused? You don’t know what the word means.” I opened the car door.

  “Wait up there.” He circled around the front of my car, still pointing at my chest. “These—are—our—spaces. I paid a lot of money to live in this neighborhood, and people like you treat it like a public park. This morning, some guy was sitting on my lawn—on my lawn! He got out of his car and he sat down on my lawn, like he owned it, and then he went over to the hospital!”

  “Your yellow ribbon made him feel at home,” I said, and got into the car.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “He thought it was a free country.” I started the car while he told me all about freedom. He was a patriot, and he had a lot of thoughts on the subject that people like me wouldn’t understand.

  10

  FONTAINE’S BLUE SEDAN led me downtown through a city that seemed deserted.

  The illusion of emptiness vanished as soon as we drove past the entrance to Armory Place. The newspaper articles had already brought perhaps a hundred people to the front of police headquarters. Signs bristled up over their heads. The crowd spilled down the wide steps of the huge gray building and flowed out onto the wide plaza between it and city hall. At the top of the steps, a man diminished by distance shouted into a bullhorn. Camera crews wound through his audience, recording it all for the evening news.

  The blue sedan turned right at the end of the plaza, and a block later turned right again into an unmarked lane. A sign announced NO ACCESS POLICE VEHICLES ONLY.

  Red brick walls hemmed in the narrow lane. I followed Fontaine’s car into a wide rectangular parking lot crowded with police cars. Uniformed officers dwarfed by the high walls leaned against the cars, talking. The back of the police headquarters loomed on the opposite side of the lot. A few policemen turned their heads when the Pontiac came in. When I pulled into an empty space alongside Fontaine, two of them appeared at my door.

  Fontaine got out of his car and said, “Don’t shoot him, he’s with me.”

  Without looking back, he took off toward a black metal door in the rear of the headquarters building. The two cops stepped aside, and I hurried after him.

  Like an old grade school, the police building was a warren of dark corridors with scuffed wooden floors, rows of doors with pebbled glass windows, and clanging staircases. Fontaine charged ahead past a crowded bulletin board and the open door to a locker room. A half-naked man sitting on a bench called out, “How’s Mangelotti?”

  “Dead,” Fontaine said.

  He double-jumped up a staircase and banged open a door marked HOMICIDE. I followed him into a room where half a dozen men seated at desks froze at the sight of me. “He’s with me,” Fontaine said. “Let’s get down to business and interrogate that piece of batshit right now.” The men had already stopped paying attention to me. “Let’s give him the chance to explain himself.” Fontaine took off his suit jacket and put it over the back of a chair. Files and loose papers lay stacked on his desk. “Let’s wrap up every unsolved murder on our books and start all over again with a clean slate. And then everybody will go home happy.”

  He rolled up his sleeves. The room smelled of sweat and stale cigarette smoke. It was a little bit hotter than the street. “Now don’t lose your head,” said a man at the back of the room.

  “That’s good,” Fontaine said.

  “Say, Paul,” said a detective with a round, chubby face who looked up at him from the next desk, “did it ever occur to you, and I’m sure it did, that your prisoner in there gave a whole new meaning to the expression, to give good head?”

  “I’m grateful to you for that insight,” Fontaine said. “When he starts to get hungry, I’ll send one of you in to work things out with him.”

  “Paul, is it my imagination, or is there a strange smell in here?” He sniffed the air.

  “Ah, the smell,” Fontaine said. “Do you know what our friend said when this odor was pointed out to him?”

  “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem?” said the other policeman.

  “Not quite. He said, and I quote, I’ve been meaning to do something about that.”

  Every man in the room cracked up. Fontaine regarded them stoically, as if he were resigned to their childishness. “Gentlemen, gentlemen. I am using the suspect’s exact words. He is a person of good intentions. The man fully intended to do something about the smell, which was as offe
nsive to him as it was to his neighbors.” He raised his arms in mock appeal and slowly turned around in a complete circle.

  A hidden connection that had struck me almost since I had walked into the detectives’ office finally surfaced: these men reminded me of the body squad. The homicide detectives were as caustic and exclusionary as Scoot and Ratman and the others, and their humor was as corrosive. Because they handled death all day long, they had to make it funny.

  “Are we set up for taping in Number One?” Fontaine asked.

  “Are you kidding?” asked the detective with the chubby face. Short blond hair like feathers stuck flat to his head, and his peaceful blue eyes were set as far apart as an ox’s. “That baby is set to go.”

  “Good,” Fontaine said.

  “Can we, uh, watch this, if we want to?” asked the blond detective.

  “I like to watch,” intoned a broad-shouldered detective with a heavy mustache that frothed over his upper lip. “I want to watch.”

  “You are free to join Mr. Underhill and Mr. Ransom in the booth,” Fontaine said, with as much dignity as possible.

  “Show time,” said the detective across the room who had advised Fontaine not to lose his head. He was a slim man with skin the color of light coffee and an almost delicate, ironic face. Alone of all the men in the room, he still had on his suit jacket.

  “My colleagues, the ghouls,” Fontaine said to me.

  “These guys remind me of Vietnam.”

  Something within Fontaine slowed down by an almost imperceptible degree. “You were there? That’s how you know Ransom?”

  “I met him there,” I said. “But I knew him from Millhaven.”