The Throat

by Peter Straub

  “You go to Brooks-Lowood, too?”

  “Holy Sepulchre,” I said. “I grew up on South Sixth Street.”

  “Bastian there is from your part of town.”

  Bastian was the corrupt cherub with feathery blond hair and wide-set blue eyes. “I used to go to those athletes’ suppers at your school,” he said. “When I played football at St. Ignatius. I remember your coach. A real character.”

  “Christ wouldn’t have dropped the ball,” I said, mystifying the other men.

  “Jesus stands facing the goalposts,” Bastian said. He was looking upward, holding one hand on his heart and pointing toward an invisible horizon with the other.

  “In his heart is a powerful will to win. He knows the odds are against him, but he also knows that at the end of the day, victory will be his.” I knew this even better than Bastian, having had to listen to it day after day for three years.

  “Righteousness is a—is a what?” Bastian looked straight up at the fluorescent lights.

  “Righteousness is a mighty—”

  “A mighty fire!” Bastian yelled, sounding a lot more like Mr. Schoonhaven than I did. He was still pointing at the distant goalposts with his hand clamped to his heart.

  “That was it,” I said. “It came with hamburgers and Hawaiian Punch.”

  “Well, now that we’re prepared,” Fontaine said. “Bastian, get Dragonette out of the cell and put him in Number One. The rest of you who are coming, let’s move, okay?”

  At last I understood that he had not been trying to leave me behind when he came sprinting into the building. In spite of his exhaustion, he had been excited by the upcoming interrogation. His urgency was the expression of an intense desire to get into that room.

  He moved toward the door, and the black detective and the big man with the energetic mustache stood up to follow. Bastian left the room through a side door and went down the long corridor I had briefly glimpsed.

  The rest of us began moving down toward the front of the building. The hallway was slightly cooler than the squad room. “First things first,” Fontaine said, and ducked into a room with an open door. Tube lighting fell on two formica-topped tables and a number of assorted chairs. Three men drinking coffee at one of the tables looked up at Fontaine. “You were at the hospital?” one of them asked.

  “Just got back.” Fontaine went up to one of two coffee machines, took a thick paper cup off a stack, and poured hot black coffee into it.

  “How’s Mangelotti?”

  “We could lose him.” He sipped from the coffee. I poured for myself.

  On the side wall of the coffee room hung a big rectangle of white paper covered with names written in red or black marker. It was divided into three sections, corresponding to the three homicide shifts. Lieutenant Ross McCandless commanded the first shift. Michael Hogan and William Greider were his detective sergeants. From the list of names written in black and red marker beneath Hogan’s, April Ransom jumped out at me. It was written in red marker.

  The other two detectives helped themselves to coffee and introduced themselves. The black detective was named Wheeler, the big man Monroe. “You know what bugs me about those people out in front?” Monroe asked me. “If they had any sense, they’d be cheering because we got this guy behind bars.”

  “You mean you want gratitude?” Fontaine drew another cup of coffee and led the three of us out of the lounge. Over his shoulder, he said, “I’ll tell you one good thing, anyhow. There’s going to be a mile of black ink on the board in a couple of hours.”

  On the other side of the lounge we entered the new part of the building. The floor was gray linoleum and the walls were pale blue with clear glass windows. The air conditioning worked, and the corridor felt almost cool. The three of us rounded a corner, and John Ransom looked up from a plastic chair pushed against one of the blue walls. He looked no more rested than Fontaine. John was wearing khaki pants and a white dress shirt, and he had obviously showered and shaved just before or after he had learned that his wife had been murdered. He looked like a half-empty sack. I wondered how long he had been sitting by himself.

  “God, Tim, I’m glad you’re here,” he said, jumping up. “So you know? They told you?”

  “Detective Fontaine told me what happened.” I did not want to tell him that I had seen April’s body being taken from her room. “John, I’m so sorry.”

  Ransom held up his hands as if to capture something. “It’s unbelievable. She was getting better—this guy, this monster, found out she was getting better—”

  Fontaine stepped before him. “We’re going to let you and your friend observe a portion of my interrogation. Do you still want to do it?”

  Ransom nodded.

  “Then let me show you where you’ll be sitting. Want any coffee?”

  Ransom shook his head, and Fontaine took us past the glass wall of a vast darkened room where a few people sat smoking as they waited to be questioned.

  He nodded for Wheeler to open a blond wooden door. Six or seven feet down the corridor an identical door bore a dark blue plaque with the white numeral 1 at its center. Fontaine waved me in first, and I stepped into a dark chamber furnished with six chairs at a wooden table. In front of the table, a window looked into a larger, brighter room where a slim young man in a white T-shirt sat at a slight angle to a gray metal table. He was sliding a red aluminum ashtray aimlessly back and forth across the table. His face was without any expression at all.

  I sat down in the last chair, and Detective Monroe entered and took the chair beside me. John Ransom followed him. He made an involuntary grunt when he saw Walter Dragonette, and then he sat down beside the black detective. Monroe stepped inside and sat down on the other side of Ransom. Everything had been choreographed so that a couple of detectives would be able to restrain Ransom, if it turned out to be necessary.

  Fontaine stepped inside. “Dragonette can’t see or hear you, but please don’t make any loud noises or touch the glass. All right?”

  “Yes,” Ransom said.

  “I’ll come back when the first part of the interrogation is over.”

  He stepped outside, and Wheeler stood up and closed the door. Walter Dragonette looked like a man killing time in an airport. Every now and then he smiled at the ting-ting-ting of the flimsy ashtray as he tapped it against the table. A key turned in the door behind him, and he stopped toying with the ashtray to look over his shoulder.

  A uniformed officer let in Paul Fontaine. He held a file clamped under his arm and a container of coffee in each hand.

  “Hello, Walter,” Fontaine said.

  “Hi! I remember you from this morning.” Walter sat up straight and folded his hands together on the table. He twisted to watch Fontaine go to the end of the table. “Do we finally get to talk now?”

  “That’s right,” Fontaine said. “I brought you some coffee.”

  “Oh thanks, but I don’t drink coffee.” Dragonette gave his torso a curious little shake.

  “Whatever you say.” Fontaine removed the plastic top from one container and dropped it into a wastebasket. “Sure you won’t change your mind?”

  “Caffeine’s bad for you,” said Dragonette.

  “Smoke?” Fontaine placed a nearly full packet of Marlboros on the table.

  “No, but it’s fine with me if you want to.”

  Fontaine raised his eyebrows and tapped a cigarette from the pack.

  “I just want to say one thing right at the start of this,” said Dragonette.

  Fontaine lit the cigarette with a match and blew out smoke, extinguishing the match and quieting Dragonette with a wave of the hand. “You will be able to say everything you want to, Walter, but first we have to take care of some details.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right, Walter. Please give me your name, address, and date of birth.”

  “My name is Walter Donald Dragonette, and my address is 3421 North Twentieth Street, where I have resided all of my life since bei
ng born on September 20, 1965.”

  “And you have waived the presence of an attorney.”

  “I’ll get a lawyer later. I want to talk to you first.”

  “The only other thing I have to say is that this conversation is being videotaped so that we can refer to it later.”

  “Oh, that’s a good idea.” Dragonette looked up at the ceiling, and then over his shoulder, and grinned and pointed at us. “I get it! The camera’s behind that mirror, isn’t it?”

  “No, it isn’t,” Fontaine said.

  “Is it on now? And are you sure it’s working?”

  “It’s on now,” Fontaine said.

  “So now we can start?”

  “We’re starting right now,” Fontaine said.

  11

  THE FOLLOWING IS A RECORD of the conversation that followed.

  WD: Okay. I have one thing I want to say right away, because it’s important that you know about this. I was sexually abused when I was just a little boy, seven years old. The man who did it was a neighbor down the street, and his name was Mr. Lancer. I don’t know his first name. He moved away the year after that. But he used to invite me into his house, and then he’d, you know, he’d do things to me. I hated it. Anyhow, I’ve been thinking about things, about why I’m here and all, and I think that’s the whole explanation for everything, right there, Mr. Lancer.

  PF: Did you ever tell anyone about Mr. Lancer? Did you ever tell your mother?

  WD: How could I? I hardly even know how to describe it to myself! And besides that, I didn’t think my mother would believe me. Because she liked Mr. Lancer. He helped keep up the tone of the neighborhood. Do you know what he was? He was a photographer, and he took baby pictures, and pictures of children. You bet he did. He took pictures of me without my clothes on.

  PF: Is that all he did?

  WD: Oh, no. Didn’t I say he abused me? Well, that’s what he did. Sexually. That’s the really important part. He made me play with him. With his, you know, his thing. I had to put it in my mouth and everything, and he took pictures. I wonder if those pictures are in magazines. He had magazines with pictures of little boys.

  PF: You took pictures, didn’t you, Walter?

  WD: Did you see them? The ones in the envelope?

  PF: Yes.

  WD: Well, now you know why I took them.

  PF: Was that the only reason you took pictures?

  WD: I don’t know. I sort of had to do that. It’s important to remember things, it’s very important. And then there was one other reason.

  PF: What was it?

  WD: Well, I could use them to decide what I was going to eat. When I got home from work. That’s why I sometimes called the pictures, the envelope of pictures, the “menu.” Because it was like a list of what I had. I was always going to get the pictures organized into a nice scrapbook, with the names and everything, but you got me before I got around to it. That’s okay, though. I’m not mad or anything. It was really just having the pictures, really, not putting them in a book.

  PF: And help you pick out what you were going to eat.

  WD: It was the menu. Like those restaurants that have pictures of the food. And besides, you can wander down Memory Lane, and have those experiences again. But even after you sort of used up the picture, it’s still a trophy—like an animal head you put on a wall. Because a long time ago, I figured out that that’s what I was, a hunter. A predator. Believe me, I wouldn’t have chosen it, there’s a lot of work involved, and you have to have incredible secrecy, but it chose me and there it was. You can’t go back, you know.

  PF: Tell me about when you figured out that you were a predator. And I want to hear about how you got interested in the old Blue Rose murders.

  WD: Oh. Well, the first thing was, I read this book called The Divided Man, and it was about this screwed-up cop who found out that he killed people and then he killed himself. The book was about Millhaven! I knew all the streets! That was really interesting to me, especially after my mother told me that the whole thing was real. So I learned from her that there used to be this man who killed people and wrote BLUE ROSE on the wall, or whatever, near the bodies. Only it wasn’t the policeman.

  PF: It wasn’t?

  WD: Couldn’t be, never ever. No way. No. Way. That detective in the book, he wasn’t a predator at all. I knew that—I just didn’t know what you called it, yet. But whoever it really was, he was like my real dad. He was like me, but before me. He hunted them down, and he killed them. Back then, the only things I killed were animals, just for practice, so I could see what it was like. Cats and dogs, a lot of cats and dogs. You could use a knife, and it was pretty easy. The hard part was getting the skeletons clean. Nobody really knows how much work that is. You really have to scrub, and the smell can get pretty bad.

  PF: You thought that the Blue Rose murderer was your father?

  WD: No, I thought he was my real dad. No matter whether he was my actual father or not. My mother never told me much about my dad, so he could have been anybody. But after I read that book and found out how real it was, I knew I was like that man’s real son, because I was like following in his footsteps.

  PF: And so, a couple of weeks ago, you decided to copy what he had done?

  WD: You noticed? I wasn’t sure anyone would notice.

  PF: Notice what?

  WD: You know. You almost said it.

  PF: You say it.

  WD: The places—they were the same places. You knew that, didn’t you?

  PF: Those Blue Rose murders were a long time ago.

  WD: There’s no excuse for ignorance like that. You didn’t notice because you never knew in the first place. I think that’s really second-rate.

  PF: I agree with you.

  WD: Well, you should. It’s shoddy.

  PF: You went to a lot of trouble to recreate the Blue Rose murders, and nobody noticed. Noticed the details, I mean.

  WD: People never notice anything. It’s disgusting. They never even noticed that all those people were missing. Now I suppose nobody’ll even notice that I got arrested, or all the things I did.

  PF: You don’t have to worry about that, Walter. You are becoming very well known. You’re already notorious.

  WD: Well, that’s all wrong, too. There isn’t anything special about me.

  PF: Tell me about killing the man on Livermore Street.

  WD: The man on Livermore Street? He was just a guy. I was waiting in that little alley or whatever you call it, in back of that hotel. A man came along. It was, let’s see, about midnight. I asked him some question, who knows, like if he could help me carry something into the hotel through the back door. He stopped walking. I think I said I’d give him five bucks. Then he stepped toward me, and I stabbed him. I kept on stabbing him until he fell down. Then I wrote BLUE ROSE on the brick wall. I had this marker I brought along, and it worked fine.

  PF: Can you describe the man? His age, his appearance, maybe his clothes?

  WD: Real, real ordinary guy. I didn’t even pay much attention to him. He might have been about thirty, but I’m not even too sure of that. It was dark.

  PF: What about the woman?

  WD: Oh, Mrs. Ransom? That was different. Her, I knew.

  PF: How did you know her?

  WD: Well, I didn’t actually know her to speak to, or anything like that. But I knew who she was. My mother left some money when she died, about twenty thousand dollars, and I wanted to take care of it. So I used to go down to Barnett and Company to see Mr. Richard Mueller, he invested the money for me? And I’d see him maybe once a month. For a while I did, anyhow, before things got kind of hectic around here. Mrs. Ransom was in the office next to Mr. Mueller’s, and so I’d see her most times I went there. She was a really pretty woman. I liked her. And then her picture was in the paper that time she won the big award. So I decided to use her for the second Blue Rose person, the one in the St. Alwyn, room 218. It had to be the right room.

  PF: How did you get her to the h
otel?

  WD: I called her at the office and said that I had to tell her something about Mr. Mueller. I made it sound like it was really bad. I insisted that she meet me at the hotel, and I said that I lived there. So I met her in the bar, and I said that I had to show her these papers that were in my room because I was afraid to take them anywhere. I knew room 218 was empty because I looked at it just before dinner, when I snuck in the back door. The locks are no good in the St. Alwyn, and there are never any people in the halls. She said she’d come up to see the papers, and when we got into the room I stabbed her.

  PF: Is that all you did?

  WD: No. I hit her, too. That was even in the newspapers.

  PF: How many times did you stab Mrs. Ransom?

  WD: Maybe seven, eight times. About that many times.

  PF: And where did you stab her?

  WD: In the stomach and chest area. I don’t really remember this.

  PF: You didn’t take pictures.

  WD: I only took pictures at home.

  PF: Did you get to the room by going through the lobby?

  WD: We walked straight through the lobby and went up in the elevator.

  PF: The clerk on duty claims he never saw Mrs. Ransom that night.

  WD: He didn’t. We didn’t see him, either. It’s the St. Alwyn, not the Pforzheimer. Those guys don’t stay behind the desk.

  PF: How did you leave?

  WD: I walked down the stairs and went out the back door. I don’t think anybody saw me.

  PF: You thought you had killed her.

  WD: Killing her was the whole idea.

  PF: Tell me about what you did this morning.

  WD: All of it?

  PF: Let’s leave out Alfonzo Dakins for now, and just concentrate on Mrs. Ransom.

  WD: Okay. Let me think about it for a second. All right. This morning, I was worried. I knew Mrs. Ransom was getting better, and—

  PF: How did you know that?

  WD: First, I found out what hospital she was at by calling Shady Mount and saying I was Mrs. Ransom’s husband, and could they put me through to her room? See, I was going to keep calling hospitals until I got to the right one. I just started with Shady Mount because that’s the one I knew best. On account of my mom. She worked there, did you know that?