The Throat

by Peter Straub

  “He already has,” I said, and told him what I had seen when I had driven John Ransom and Alan Brookner to the morgue that afternoon.

  “And you didn’t tell me until now?” Tom looked indignant. “You saw him at the Green Woman, doing something really fishy, and then you keep it to yourself? You just flunked Famous Detective School.”

  He immediately sat down at the computer and began moving through another series of complicated commands. The modem clucked to itself. It looked to me as though he was calling up the city’s registry of deeds.

  “Well, for one thing I wasn’t sure it was him,” I said. “And I forgot about it once you started breaking into every office in the state.”

  “The Green Woman closed down a long time ago,” Tom said, still punching in codes.

  I asked him what he was doing.

  “I want to see who owns that bar. Suppose it’s—”

  The screen went blank for a half-second, and RECEIVE flashed on and off. Tom whooped and clapped his hands.

  THE GREEN WOMAN TAPROOM 21b HORATIO STREET

  PURCHASED 01/07/1980, ELVEE HOLDINGS CORP

  PURCHASE PRICE $5,000

  PURCHASED 05/21/1935, THOMAS MULRONEY

  PURCHASE PRICE $3,200

  Tom combed his fingers through his hair so that it looked like a haystack. “Who are these people, and what are they doing?” He wrenched himself away from the screen and grinned at me. “I don’t have the faintest idea where we’re going, but we’re certainly getting somewhere. And you certainly saw our friend in the blue Lexus, you sure did, and I take back every bad thing I ever said about you.” He returned to the screen and disarranged his hair a little more. “Elvee bought the Green Woman Taproom, and look how little they paid for it. Maybe, do you think, we could even say he, meaning William Writzmann? Writzmann laid out a paltry five thousand. It was nothing but a leaky shell. What good is it? What could he use it for?”

  “It looked like he was moving things into it,” I said. “There were cardboard boxes next to the car.”

  “Or taking something out,” Tom said. “The place was a shed. The only thing it’s good for is storage. Our boy Writzmann bought a five-thousand-dollar shed. Why?”

  All this time, Tom was looking back and forth from the screen to me, torturing his hair. “There’s only one reason to buy the place. It’s the Green Woman Taproom. Writzmann is interested in the Green Woman.”

  “Maybe he was Mulroney’s nephew, and he was helping out the starving widow.”

  “Or maybe he was very, very interested in the Blue Rose case. Maybe our mysterious friend Writzmann has some connection to Blue Rose himself. He can’t be Blue Rose himself, he’s too young, but he could be—”

  Tom was looking at me, a wild speculative delight shining out from his entire face.

  “His son?” I asked. “You think Writzmann is the son of Blue Rose? On the evidence that he bought a rundown bar and stored boxes in it?”

  “It’s a possibility, isn’t it?”

  “Writzmann was two years old at the time of the murders. That’s pretty young, even for Heinz Stenmitz.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. You don’t like thinking about someone molesting a two-year-old child, but it happens. All you need is a Heinz Stenmitz.”

  “Do you think this Writzmann murdered April because he found out about her research? Maybe he even saw her looking around the bridge and the taproom.”

  “Maybe,” Tom said. “But why would he murder Grant Hoffman?” He frowned and ran his hand through his soft blond hair, and it fell back into place. “We have to find out what April was actually doing. We need her notes, or her drafts, or whatever she managed to get done. But before that—”

  He left the desk, picked up one of the neat white stacks of copied pages and handed it to me. “We have to start reading.”

  6

  SO FOR ANOTHER HOUR I sat in the comfortable leather chair, leafing through the police files on the Blue Rose case, deciphering the handwriting of half a dozen policemen and two detectives, Fulton Bishop and William Damrosch. Bishop, who was destined for a long, almost sublimely corrupt career in the Millhaven police department, had been taken off the case after two weeks: his patrons had been protecting him from what they saw as a kind of tar baby. I wished that they had let him investigate for another couple of weeks. His small, tight handwriting was as easy to read as print. His typed reports looked like a good secretary’s. Damrosch scribbled even when he was relatively sober and scrawled when he was not. Anything he wrote after about two in the afternoon was a hodgepodge in which whole words disappeared into wormy knots. He typed the way an angry child plays piano. After ten minutes, my head hurt; after twenty, my eyes ached.

  By the time I had gone through all the statements and reports, all I had come up with was a sense that very few people had liked Robert Bandolier. The only new thing I learned was that the killings had not been savage mutilations, like the murder of Grant Hoffman and Walter Dragonette’s performances: Blue Rose’s victims had been stabbed once, neatly, in the heart, and then their throats had been cut. It was as passionless as ritual slaughter.

  “Well, nothing jumped out at me, either,” Tom said. “There are a few minor points, but they can wait.” He looked at me almost cautiously. “I suppose you’re about ready to go?”

  “Well, your coffee is going to keep me awake for a while,” I said. “I could stay a little longer.”

  Tom’s obvious gratitude at my willingness to stay made him seem like a child left alone in a splendid house.

  “How about a little music?” he said, already getting up.

  “Sure.”

  He pulled a boxed set from the rows of CDs, removed one, and inserted the disc in the player. Mitsuko Uchida began playing the Mozart piano sonata in F. Tom leaned back into his leather couch, and for a time neither of us spoke.

  Despite my exhaustion, I wanted to stay another half hour, and not merely to give him company. I thought it was a privilege. I couldn’t banish Tom’s sorrows any more than he could banish mine, but I admired him as much as anyone I’ve ever known.

  “I wish we had discovered some disgruntled desk clerk named Lenny Valentine,” he said.

  “Do you really think there’s some connection between Elvee Holdings and the Blue Rose murders?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you think is going to happen?”

  “I think a dead body is going to turn up in front of the Idle Hour.” He reached for his drink and took another sip. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  I forgot I was tired, and when I looked at my watch I found that it was past two.

  After we had gone over what I was going to do the next day, Tom went to his desk and picked up the book with the plain gray binding. “Do you think you’ll have time to look through this over the next few days?”

  “What is it?” I should have known that the book wasn’t on his desk by accident.

  “The memoirs of an old soldier, published by a vanity press. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Vietnam, and there are some questions about what John actually did during his last few months in the service.”

  “He was at Lang Vei,” I said. “There aren’t any questions about that.”

  “I think he was ordered to say he was there.”

  “He wasn’t at Lang Vei?”

  Tom did not answer me. “Do you know anything about a strange character named Franklin Bachelor? A Green Beret major?”

  “I met him once,” I said, remembering the scene in Billy’s. “He was one of John’s heroes.”

  “Read this and see if you can get John to talk about what happened to him, but—”

  “I know. Don’t tell him you gave me the book. Do you think he’s going to lie to me?”

  “I’d just like to find out what actually happened.”

  Tom handed me the book. “It’s probably a waste of time, but indulge me.”

  I turned the book over in my hands a
nd opened it to the title page. WHERE WE WENT WRONG, or The Memoirs of a Plain Soldier, by Col. Beaufort Runnel (Ret.). I turned pages until I got to the first sentence.

  I have always loathed and detested deceit, prevarication, and dishonesty in all their many forms.

  “I’m surprised he ever made it to colonel,” I said, and then a coincidence I trusted was meaningless occurred to me. “Lang Vei starts with the initials LV,” I blurted.

  “Maybe you didn’t flunk out of Famous Detective School after all.” He grinned at me. “But I still hope we come across Lenny Valentine one of these days.”

  He took me downstairs and let me out into the warm night. What looked like millions of stars hung in the enormous reaches of the sky. As soon as I got to the sidewalk, I realized that for something like four hours, Tom had nursed a single glass of malt whiskey.

  7

  THE LIGHTS WERE TURNED OFF in all the big houses along Eastern Shore Road. Two blocks down from An Die Blumen, the taillights of a single car headed toward Riverwood. I turned the corner into An Die Blumen with a mind full of William Writzmann and an empty shell called the Green Woman Taproom.

  The long empty street stretched out in front of me, lined with the vague shapes of houses that seemed to melt together in the night. Street lamps at wide intervals cast fuzzy circles of light on the cracked cement. Everything before me seemed deceptively peaceful, not so much at rest as in concealment. The scale of the black sky littered with stars made me feel tiny. I shoved my hands into my pockets and began to walk faster.

  I had gone half a block down An Die Blumen before I fully realized what was happening to me—not a sudden descent of panic, but a gradual approach of fear that felt different from the way the past usually invaded me. No men in black flitted unseen across the landscape, no groans leaked out of the earth. I could not tell myself that this was just another bad one and sit down on someone else’s grass until it went away. It wasn’t just another bad one. It was something new.

  I hurried along with my hands in my pockets, unconsciously huddled into myself. I stepped down off a curb and walked across an empty street, and the dread that had come over me slowly focused itself into the conviction that someone or something was watching me. Somewhere in the blanket of shadows on the other side of An Die Blumen, a creature that seemed barely human followed me with its eyes.

  Then, with an absolute certainty, I knew: this was not just panic, but real.

  I moved down the next block, feeling the eyes claiming me from their hiding place. The touch of those eyes made me feel appallingly dirty, soiled in some way I could not bear to define—the being that looked through those eyes knew that it could destroy me secretly, could give me a secret wound visible to no one but itself and me.

  I moved, and it moved with me, sliding through the darkness across the street. At times it lagged behind, leaning against an invisible stone porch and smiling at my back. Then it melted through the shadows and passed among the trees and effortlessly moved ahead of me, and I felt its gaze linger on my face.

  I walked down three more blocks. My palms and my forehead were wet. It was concealed in the darkness in front of a building like a tall blank tomb, breathing through nostrils the size of my fists, taking in enormous gulps of air and releasing fumes.

  I can’t stand this, I thought, and without knowing I was going to do it, I walked across the street and went up the edge of the sidewalk in front of the frame house. My knees shook. A tall shadow moved sideways in the dark and then froze before a screen of black that might have been a hedge of rhododendrons and became invisible again. My heart thudded, and I nearly collapsed. “Who are you?” I said. The front of the house was a featureless slab. I took a step forward onto the lawn.

  A dog snarled, and I jumped. A section of the darkness before me moved swiftly toward the side of the house. My terror flashed into anger, and I charged up onto the lawn.

  A light blazed behind one of the second-floor windows. A black silhouette loomed against the glass. The man at the window cupped his hands over his eyes. Light, pattering footsteps disappeared down the side of the house. The man in the window yelled at me.

  I turned and ran back across the street. The dog pushed itself toward a psychotic breakdown. I ran as hard as I could down to the next corner, turned, and pounded up the street.

  When I got to John’s house, I waited outside the front door for my breathing to level out. I was covered in sweat, and my chest was heaving. I leaned panting against the door. I didn’t think the man in the Lexus could have moved that quietly or quickly, so who could it have been?

  An image moved into the front of my mind, so powerfully that I knew it had been hidden there all along. I saw a naked creature with thick legs and huge hands, ropes of muscle bulking in his arms and shoulders. A mat of dark hair covered his wide chest. On the massive neck sat the enormous horned head of a bull.

  8

  WHEN I GOT INTO JOHN’S OFFICE, I turned on some lights, made up my bed, and got Colonel Runnel’s book out of the satchel. Then I slid the satchel under the couch. After I undressed I switched off all the lights except the reading lamp beside the couch, lay down, and opened the book. Colonel Runnel stood in front of me, yelling about something he loathed and despised. He was wearing a starchy dress uniform, and rows of medals marched across his chest. After about an hour I woke up again and switched off the lamp. A car went past on Ely Place. Finally I went back to sleep.

  9

  AROUND TEN-THIRTY Tuesday morning I rang Alan Brookner’s bell. I’d been up for an hour, during which I had called the nursing registry to ensure that they had spoken to Eliza Morgan and that she had agreed to work with Alan, made a quick inspection of April Ransom’s tidy office, and read a few chapters of Where We Went Wrong. As a stylist, Colonel Runnel was very fond of dangling participles and sentences divided. Into thunderous fragments. All three Ransoms had been eating breakfast in the kitchen when I came down, John and Marjorie in their running suits, John in blue jeans and a green polo shirt, as if the presence of his parents had changed him back into a teenager. I got John alone for a second and explained about the nursing registry. He seemed grateful that I had taken care of matters without bothering him with the details and agreed to let me borrow his car. I told him that I’d be back in the middle of the afternoon.

  “You must have found some little diversion,” John said. “What time did you get home last night, two o’clock? That was some walk.” He allowed himself the suggestion of a smirk.

  When I told him about the man who had been following me, John looked alarmed and then immediately tried to hide it. “You probably surprised some peeping Tom,” he said.

  The usual reporters were slurping coffee on the front lawn. Only Geoffrey Bough intercepted me on the way to the car. I had no comments, and Geoffrey slouched away.

  Eliza Morgan opened Alan’s door, looking relieved to see me. “Alan’s been asking for you. He won’t let me help him get his clothes on—he won’t even let me get near his closet.”

  “His suit pockets are full of money,” I said. I explained about the money. The house still smelled like wax and furniture polish. I could hear Alan bellowing, “Who the hell was that? Is that Tim? Why the hell won’t anybody talk to me?”

  I opened his bedroom door and saw him sitting straight up in bed bare-chested, glaring at me. His white hair stuck up in fuzzy clumps. Silvery whiskers shone on his cheeks. “All right, you finally got here, but who is this woman? A white dress doesn’t automatically mean she’s a nurse, you know!”

  Alan gradually settled down as I explained. “She helped my daughter?”

  Eliza looked stricken, and I hurried to say that she had done everything she could for April.

  “Humpf. I guess she’ll do. What about us? You got a plan?”

  I told him that I had to check out some things by myself.

  “Like hell.” Alan threw back his sheet and blanket and swung himself out of bed. He was still wearing his boxer shorts.
As soon as he stood up, his face went gray, and he sat down heavily on the bed. “Something’s wrong with me,” he said and held his thin arms out before him to inspect them. “I can’t stand up. I’m sore.”

  “No wonder,” I said. “We did a little mountain climbing yesterday.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  I reminded him that we had gone to Flory Park.

  “My daughter used to go to Flory Park.” He sounded lost and alone.

  “Alan, if you’d like to get dressed and spend some time with John and his parents, I’d be happy to drive you there.”

  He started to push himself off the bed again, but his knees wobbled, and he sank back down again, grimacing.

  “I’ll run a hot bath,” Eliza Morgan said. “You’ll feel better when you’re shaved and dressed.”

  “That’s the ticket,” Alan said. “Hot water. Get the soreness out.”

  Eliza left the room, and Alan gave me a piercing look. He held up his forefinger, signaling for silence. Down the hall, water rushed into the tub. He nodded. Now it was safe to speak. “I remembered this man in town, just the ticket—brilliant man. Lamont von Heilitz. Von Heilitz could solve this thing lickety-split.”

  Alan was somewhere back in the forties or fifties. “I talked to him last night,” I said. “Don’t tell anybody, but he’s helping us.”

  He grinned at me. “Mum’s the word.”

  Eliza returned and led him away to the bathroom, and I went downstairs and let myself out of the house.

  10

  ICROSSED THE STREET and rang the bell of the house that faced Alan’s. Within seconds, a young woman in a navy blue linen suit and a strand of pearls opened the door. She was holding a briefcase in one hand. “I don’t know who you are, and I’m already late,” she said. Then she gave me a quick inspection. “Well, you don’t look like a Jehovah’s Witness. Back up, I’m coming out. We can talk on the way to the car.”