The Throat

by Peter Straub

  PF: Yes.

  WD: Good. So I called up and asked if they could put me through, and the switchboard lady said no, Mrs. Ransom didn’t have a phone, and if I was her husband I’d know that. Well, that was really dumb. If you wanted everybody to guess where she was right away, you put her in the right place. Everybody like Mrs. Ransom goes to Shady Mount. My mom told me that when I was just a little boy, and it’s still true. So I’m sorry to criticize you and everything, but you didn’t even try to hide her. That’s really sloppy, if you want my opinion.

  PF: So you knew she was at Shady Mount, but how did you find out about her condition? And how did you learn her room number?

  WD: Oh, those things were real easy. You know how I said that my mom used to work at Shady Mount? Well, sometimes, of course, she used to take me there with her, and I knew a lot of the people who worked in the office. They were my mom’s friends—Cleota Williams, Margie Meister, Budge Dewdrop, Mary Graebel. They were a whole crowd. Went out for coffee and everything. When my mom died, I used to think that maybe I should kill Budge or Mary so that she’d have company. Because dead people are just like you and me, they still want things. They look at us all the time, and they miss being alive. We have taste and color and smells and feelings, and they don’t have any of those things. They stare at us, they don’t miss anything. They really see what’s going on, and we hardly ever really see that. We’re too busy thinking about things and getting everything wrong, so we miss ninety percent of what’s happening.

  PF: I still don’t know how you found out that—

  WD: Oh, my goodness, of course you don’t. Please forgive me! I’m really sorry. I was talking about my mom’s friends, wasn’t I? Really, my mouth should have a zipper on it, sometimes. Anyhow. Anyhow, as I was saying, Cleota died and Margie Meister retired and went to Florida, but Budge Dewdrop and Mary Graebel still work in the office at Shady Mount. Now Budge decided for some reason that I was a horrible person about the time my mother died, and she won’t even talk to me anymore. So I think I should have killed her. After all, I saved her life! And she just turns her back on me!

  PF: But your mother’s other friend, Mary Graebel—

  WD: She still remembers that I used to come in there when I was a little boy and everything, and of course I like to stop by the Shady Mount office every now and then and just chew the fat. So the whole thing was just as easy as pie. I stopped in on my lunch hour yesterday, and Mary and I had a nice long gabfest. And she told me all about their celebrity patient, and how she had a police guard and a private nurse, and how she was suddenly getting better up there on the third floor, and everything. And I could see fat old Budge Dewdrop fuming and fretting away all by herself over by the file cabinets, but Budge is too scared of me, I think, to do anything really overt. So she just gave us these looks, you know, these big looks. And I found out what I had to do.

  PF: And this Mary Graebel told you that the private duty nurse took breaks every hour?

  WD: No, I got lucky there. She was leaving the room just when I turned into the hallway. So I got in there fast. And I did it. Then I got out, fast.

  PF: Tell me about the officer in the room.

  WD: Well, I had to kill him, too, of course.

  PF: Did you?

  WD: What do you mean? Do you mean, did I really have to kill him, or did I really kill him?

  PF: I’m not really sure I follow that.

  WD: I’m just—forget it. Maybe I don’t remember the officer who was in the room very well. It’s a little blurry. Everything had to happen very fast, and I was nervous. But I know I heard you tell someone that the officer from the hospital was dead. You were walking past the cells, and I overheard what you said. You said, “He’s dead.”

  PF: I was exaggerating.

  WD: Okay, so I was exaggerating too. When I said that I killed him.

  PF: How did you try to kill the officer?

  WD: I don’t remember. It isn’t clear. My mind was all excited.

  PF: What happened to the hammer? You didn’t have it when you came back to your house.

  WD: I threw it away. I threw it into the river on my way back from the hospital.

  PF: You threw it into the Millhaven River?

  WD: From that bridge, the bridge right next to the Green Woman. You know, where they found that dead woman. The prostitute.

  PF: What dead woman are we talking about now, Walter? Is this someone else you killed?

  WD: God. You people don’t remember anything. Of course she wasn’t someone I killed, I’m talking about something that happened a long time ago. The woman was the mother of William Damrosch, the cop. He was down there, too—he was a baby, and they found him on the riverbank, almost dead. Don’t you ever read? This is all in The Divided Man.

  PF: I’m not sure I know why you want to bring this up.

  WD: Because it’s what I was thinking about! When I was driving across the bridge. I saw the Green Woman Taproom, and I remembered what happened on the riverbank, the woman, the prostitute, and her poor little baby, who grew up to be William Damrosch. He was called Esterhaz in the book. I was driving across the bridge. I thought about the woman and the baby—I always think about them, when I drive over the river there, alongside the Green Woman Taproom. Because all that is connected into the Blue Rose murders. And they never caught that man, did they? He just got clean away. Unless you’re dumb enough to think it was Damrosch, which I guess you are.

  PF: Actually, I’m a lot more interested in you.

  WD: Well, anyhow, I tossed the hammer right through the car window into the river. And then I drove right on home and met you. And I decided that it was time to tell the truth about everything. Time for everything to come out into the open.

  PF: Well, we’re grateful for your cooperation, Walter. I want to ask you about one detail before we break. You say that your mother’s friend, her name was, let’s see, her name was Budge Dewdrop, stopped talking to you after your mother’s death. Do you have any idea why she did that?

  WD: No.

  PF: None? No idea at all?

  WD: I told you. I don’t have any idea.

  PF: How did your mother die, Walter?

  WD: She just died. In her sleep. It was very peaceful, the way she would have wanted it.

  PF: Your mother would have been very unhappy if she had discovered some of your activities, wouldn’t she, Walter?

  WD: Well. I suppose you could say that. She never liked it about the animals.

  PF: Did she ever tell her friends about the animals?

  WD: Oh, no. Well, maybe Budge.

  PF: And she never knew that you had killed people, did she?

  WD: No. Of course she didn’t.

  PF: Was she ever curious about anything that made you uneasy? Did she ever suspect anything?

  WD: I don’t want to talk about this.

  PF: What do you think she said to her friend Budge?

  WD: She never told me, but she must have said something.

  PF: Because Budge acted like she was afraid of you.

  WD: She should have been afraid of me.

  PF: Walter, did your mother ever find one of your trophies?

  WD: I said, I don’t want to talk about this.

  PF: But you said it was time for everything to come out into the open. Tell me what happened.

  WD: What?

  PF: You told me about the mother who was dead on the riverbank. Now tell me about your mother.

  WD: (Inaudible.)

  PF: I know this is hard to do, but I also know that you want to do it. You want me to know everything, even this. Walter, what did your mother find?

  WD: It was a kind of a diary. I used to hide it in a jacket in my closet—in the inside pocket. She wasn’t snooping or anything, she just wanted to take the jacket to the cleaners. And she found the diary. It was kind of a notebook. I had some things in there, and she asked me about them.

  PF: What kind of things?

  WD: Like initials. And so
me words like tattoo or scar. Stuff like red hair. One of them said bloody towel. She must have talked to Budge Dewdrop about it. She shouldn’t have!

  PF: Did she ask you about the diary?

  WD: Sure, of course. But I never thought she believed me.

  PF: So she was suspicious before that.

  WD: I don’t know. I just don’t know.

  PF: Tell me how your mother died, Walter.

  WD: It doesn’t really matter anymore, does it? With all these other people, I mean.

  PF: It matters to you, and it matters to me. Tell me about it, Walter.

  WD: Well, this is what happened. It was the day after she found my diary. When she came home from work, she acted a little funny. I knew right away what it meant. She’d been talking to somebody, and she was guilty about that. I don’t even know what she said, really, but I knew it had to do with the diary. I made dinner, like I always did, and she went to bed early instead of staying up and watching television with me. I was very distressed, but I don’t think I showed it. I stayed up late, though I hardly understood what was going on in the movie, and I had two glasses of Harvey’s Bristol Cream, which is something I never did. Finally the movie was over, even though I couldn’t remember what happened in it. I only watched it for Ida Lupino, really—I always liked Ida Lupino. I washed my glass and turned off the lights and went upstairs. I was just going to look in my mother’s room before I went to bed. So I opened the door and went inside her room. And it was so dark in there I had to go up next to the bed to see her. I went right up next to her. And I said to myself, if she wakes up, I’ll just say good night and go to bed. And I stood there next to her for a long time. I thought about everything. I even thought about Mr. Lancer. If I hadn’t had those two glasses of Harvey’s Bristol Cream, I don’t think any of this would have happened.

  PF: Go on, Walter. Do you have a handkerchief?

  WD: Of course I have a handkerchief. I have a dozen handkerchiefs. It’s okay, I mean, I’m okay. Anyhow, I was standing next to my, ah, my mother. She was really asleep. I didn’t intend to do anything at all. And it didn’t feel like I was doing anything. It was like nothing at all was happening. I leaned over and pulled the extra pillow over her face. And she didn’t wake up, see? She didn’t move at all. So nothing at all was happening. And then I just pushed down on the pillow. And I closed my eyes and I held the pillow down. And after a while I took it off and went to bed. In my own bedroom. The next morning, I made us both breakfast, but she wouldn’t come when I said it was ready, so I went to her room and found her in her bed, and I knew right away that she was dead. Well, there it was. I called the police right from the bedroom. And then I went into the kitchen and threw away the food and waited until they came.

  PF: And when the police came, what did you tell them about your mother’s death?

  WD: I told them she died in her sleep. And that was true.

  PF: But not the whole truth, was it, Walter?

  WD: No. But I hardly knew what the whole truth was.

  PF: I can see that. Walter, we’re going to take a break now, and I’m going to give you a couple of minutes to be by yourself. Will you be all right?

  WD: Just let me be by myself for a while, okay?

  12

  FONTAINE PUSHED BACK HIS CHAIR and stood up. He nodded twice and turned away from Dragonette.

  “Were you satisfied with that, Mr. Ransom?” Wheeler asked. “Is there any doubt in your mind as to the identity of your wife’s murderer?”

  “How could there be?” John asked.

  Paul Fontaine saved me from speaking by opening the door and stepping inside the booth. “I think that’s all you’ll have to watch, Mr. Ransom. Go home and get some rest. If anything else turns up, we’ll be in touch with you.”

  “At least,” Wheeler said, “you know why he killed your wife.”

  “He killed her because he liked her,” Ransom said. “She had the office next door to his broker’s.” He sounded dumbfounded, almost stunned.

  “That was good work, Paul,” Wheeler said, standing up.

  We all stood up. Fontaine stepped out of the booth, and the rest of us followed him out into the light of the corridor.

  “You did a number on him,” Monroe said.

  Fontaine gave him a sad smile. “I figure we’ll have our charges ready by the end of the day. We have to get this one wrapped up with something more than our usual blinding speed, or the brass is going to have us cleaning toilets. I hate to admit this, but my getting Walter to admit that he killed his mother isn’t going to mean anything to the lieutenant.”

  “Well, McCandless didn’t actually have a mother,” Monroe said. “He came into the world via the Big Bang Theory.”

  Fontaine stepped backward and regarded Wheeler and Monroe with mock horror. “You two must have a couple of unsolved murders left to mull over.”

  “There are no more unsolved murders in Millhaven,” said Monroe. “Haven’t you heard?”

  He grinned at Ransom and me and turned away to walk back through the corridors to the Homicide office. Wheeler went with him.

  “Seems you have another fan in Mr. Dragonette,” Fontaine said to me.

  “It’s too bad he couldn’t tell us who the original Blue Rose was, while he was telling us who he wasn’t.”

  Out of the interrogation room, Fontaine’s skin appeared to be some shade halfway between yellow and green, like an old piece of lettuce.

  “Did the new cases ever cause you to look up the records for the old ones?” I asked him.

  “Blue Rose was way before my time.”

  “Do you think I could look at those records?” He was staring at me, and I said, “I’m still very curious about the Blue Rose case.”

  “You do research for books after you write them?”

  John Ransom turned ponderously toward me. “What’s the point?”

  “Yes, what is the point, Mr. Underhill?”

  “It’s a personal matter,” I said.

  Fontaine blinked, twice, very slowly. “Those records are a hot item. Well, since Mike Hogan is such an admirer of yours, we might be able to permit that breach of our normally fortresslike confidentiality. Of course, we have to find those records first. I’ll let you know. Thank you for giving us your time, Mr. Ransom. I’ll be calling you as things progress.”

  Ransom waved at him and began to move away toward the old part of the building.

  Something else occurred to me, and I asked Fontaine another question. “Did you ever find out the name of the man was who was following John? The gray-haired man driving the Lexus?”

  Fontaine pursed his lips. The lines around his eyes and mouth deepened, and the soft, saggy parts of his face seemed to get even more mournful. “I forgot all about that,” he said. “Do you think there’s any point in—?”

  He smiled and shrugged, and it seemed to me that part of the meaning of all this courtesy was that, in some fashion or another, he had just lied to me. A second later, it seemed impossible that Fontaine would deceive me about such a trivial matter. I watched him walking back toward the interrogation room, hunched over in his shapeless suit. What he had done in the interrogation room had made me free again, but I did not feel free.

  Fontaine looked sideways at a tall policeman who came out into the corridor holding a typed form and grabbed his elbow before he could get away. I remembered seeing the younger man at the hospital that morning.

  “Sonny, will you see that these two gentlemen find their way downstairs to the parking lot? I’d do it myself, but I have to get back to an interrogation.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sonny said. “There must be a couple hundred people on the steps. How do they get those signs made so fast?”

  “They don’t have jobs.”

  Sonny laughed and advanced toward us like Paul Bunyan moving in on a pine forest.

  As we clanged down the metal stairs in the old part of the building, Sonny told John that he was sorry about his wife’s death. “The whole de
partment’s sorry,” he said. “It was sort of like something you couldn’t believe, when we first heard it in the car this morning. I was with Detective Fontaine, bringing that guy into the station.”

  I asked, “You were all in the car together when the report came in about Mrs. Ransom?”

  He turned around on the stairs and looked up at me. “That’s what I just said.”

  “You were driving, and you could hear the report.”

  “Clear as a bell.”

  “What did it say?”

  “For God’s sake, Tim,” said John Ransom.

  “I just want to know what the report said.”

  “Well, the woman who called it in was pretty excited.” Sonny began moving more slowly down the stairs, gripping the handrail and looking back over his shoulder. “She said that Mrs. Ransom had been beaten to death in her room, excuse me, sir.”

  “And did she say something about Officer Mangelotti?”

  “Yeah, she said he was injured. She was new, and she must have been excited—she forgot to use the codes.”

  “What the hell is this about, Tim? I don’t want to know about this,” Ransom said. “What difference does it make?”

  “None, probably,” I said.

  “Dragonette spilled the beans right away,” Sonny said. “He told Fontaine, he says, If you guys had worked faster, you could have saved her, too. Fontaine says, Are you confessing to the murder of April Ransom, and he says, Of course. I killed her, didn’t I?”

  He got to the bottom of the stairs and strode down the corridor that had reminded me of an old grade school when I had pursued Paul Fontaine into the building. Now all of it felt tainted by what I had heard upstairs. The announcements and papers on the bulletin board looked like brutal jokes, GUNS FOR SALE GOOD CHEAP, NEED A DIVORCE LAWYER WITH 20 YEARS POLICE EXPERIENCE? KARATE FOR COPS. Someone had already put up a yellow sheet with these words printed in block capitals at its top: PEOPLE WALTER DRAGONETTE SHOULD HAVE ASKED HOME. The name of Millhaven’s mayor, Merlin Waterford, was first on the list.

  “Here you go.” Sonny held the door to the parking lot open with an outstretched arm and backed away so that he did not completely fill the frame. John Ransom squeezed past him, grimacing, and I ducked through the space between the big cop and the frame. Sonny smiled down at me.