The Throat

by Peter Straub

  I stepped down, and she came out and locked her door. Then she looked at her watch. “If you start talking about the Kingdom of God, I’m going to stamp on your foot.”

  “I’m a friend of Alan Brookner’s,” I said. “I want to ask you about something a little bit strange that happened over there.”

  “At the professor’s house?” She looked at me quizzically. “Everything that happens over there is strange. But if you’re the person who got him to cut his lawn, the whole neighborhood is lining up to kiss your feet.”

  “Well, I called the gardener for him,” I said.

  Instead of kissing my feet, she strode briskly down the flagged pathway to the street, where a shiny red Honda Civic sat at the curb.

  “Better start talking,” she said. “You’re almost out of time.”

  “I wondered if you happened to see someone putting a car into the professor’s garage, one night within the past week or so. He thought he heard noises in his garage, and he doesn’t drive anymore himself.”

  “About two weeks ago? Sure, I saw it—I was coming home late from a big client dinner. Someone was putting a car in his garage, and the light was on. I noticed because it was past one, and there are never any lights on in there after nine o’clock.”

  I followed her around the front of the car. She unlocked the driver’s door.

  “Did you see the car or the person who was driving it? Was it a black Mercedes sports car?”

  “All I saw was the garage door coming down. I thought that the younger guy who visits him was putting his car away, and I was surprised, because I never saw him drive.” She opened the door and gave me another second and a half.

  “What night was that, do you remember?”

  She rolled her eyes up and jittered on one high heel. “Okay, okay. It was on the tenth of June. Monday night, two weeks ago. Okay?”

  “Thanks,” I said. She was already inside the car, turning the key. I stepped away, and the Civic shot down the street like a rocket.

  Monday, the tenth of June, was the night April Ransom had been beaten into a coma and knifed in room 218 of the St. Alwyn Hotel.

  I got into the Pontiac and drove down to Pigtown.

  11

  SOUTH SEVENTH STREET began at Livermore Avenue and extended some twenty blocks west, a steady, unbroken succession of modest two-story frame houses with flat or peaked porches. Some of the façades had been covered with brickface, and in a few of the tiny front yards stood garish plaster animals—Bambi deer and big-eyed collies. One house in twenty had a shrine to Mary, the Virgin protected from snow and rain by a curling scallop of cement. On a hot Tuesday morning in June, a few old men and women sat outside on their porches, keeping an eye on things.

  Number 17 was on the first block off Livermore, in the same position as our house, the fifth building up from the corner on the west side of the street. The dark green paint left long scabs where it had peeled off, and a network of cracks split the remaining paint. All the shades had been drawn. I left the car unlocked and went up the steps while the old couple sitting outside on the neighboring porch watched me over their newspapers.

  I pushed the bell. Rusting mesh hung in the frame of the screen door. No sound came from inside the house. I tried the bell again and then knocked on the screen door. Then I opened the screen door and hit my fist against the wooden door. Nothing. “Hello, is anybody home?” I hit the door a few more times.

  “Nobody’s at home in there,” a voice called.

  The old man on the neighboring porch had folded his newspaper across his lap, and both he and his wife were eyeing me expressionlessly. “Do you know when they’ll be back?”

  “You got the wrong house,” he said. His wife nodded.

  “This is the right address,” I said. “Do you know the people who live here?”

  “Well, if you say it’s the right house, keep on pounding.”

  I walked to the end of the porch. The old man and his wife were no more than fifteen feet away from me. He was wearing a faded old plaid shirt buttoned up tight against the cords in his neck. “What are you saying, no one lives here?”

  “You could say that.” His wife nodded again.

  “Is it empty?”

  “Nope. Don’t think it’s empty.”

  “Nobody’s home, mister,” his wife said. “Nobody’s ever home.”

  I looked from husband to wife and back again. It was a riddle: the house wasn’t empty, but nobody was ever home. “Could I come over and talk to you?”

  He looked at his wife. “Depends on who you are and what you want to talk about.”

  I told them my name and saw a trace of recognition in the man’s face. “I grew up right around the corner, on South Sixth. Al Underhill was my father.”

  “You’re Al Underhill’s boy?” He checked with his wife. “Come on up here.”

  When I got up onto their porch, the old man stood and held out his hand. “Frank Belknap. This is the wife, Hannah. I knew your father a little bit. I was at Glax thirty-one years, welding. Sorry we can’t give you a chair.”

  I said that was fine and leaned against the railing.

  “How about a glass of lemonade? We got August in the middle of June, now that the politicians poisoned the weather.”

  I thanked him, and Hannah got up and moved heavily through the door.

  “If your father’s still alive and kicking, tell him to drop in sometime, chew the fat. I was never one of the old Idle Hour gang, but I’d like to see Al again.” Frank Belknap had worked thirty-one years in the purposeful, noisy roughhouse of the factory, and now he spent all day on the porch with his wife.

  I told him that my father had died a few years ago. He looked resigned.

  “Most of that bunch died,” he said. “What brings you to the place next door?”

  “I’m looking for a man that used to live there.”

  Hannah came back through the door, carrying a green plastic tray with three tall glasses filled with ice and lemonade. I had the feeling that she had been waiting to hear what I was after. I took a glass and sipped. The lemonade was cold and sweet.

  “Dumkys lived there,” she said, and held the tray out to her husband.

  “Them, all their kids, and a couple of brothers.”

  “Dumkys rented.” Hannah took her seat again. “You like the lemonade?”

  “It’s very good.”

  “Make up a fresh jug every morning, stays cold all day long.”

  “It was one of the Dumkys you wanted?”

  “I was looking for the man that used to own the house, Bob Bandolier. Do you remember him?”

  Frank cocked his head and regarded me. He took a slow sip of the lemonade and held it in his mouth before swallowing. He was not going to say anything until I told him more.

  “Bandolier was the manager at the St. Alwyn for a long time.”

  “That right?”

  I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know.

  “My father worked there, too, for a while.”

  He turned his head to look at his wife. “Al Underhill worked at the hotel for a while. Knew Mr. Bandolier.”

  “Well, well. Guess he would have.”

  “That would have been before Al came to the plant,” Frank said to me.

  “Yes. Do you know where I could find Bandolier?”

  “Couldn’t tell you,” Frank said. “Mr. Bandolier wasn’t much for conversation.”

  “Dumkys rented furnished,” Hannah said.

  “So Mr. Bandolier moved out and left his furniture behind?”

  “That’s what the man did,” said Frank. “Happened when Hannah and me were up at our cottage. Long time ago. Nineteen seventy-two, Hannah?”

  Hannah nodded.

  “We came back from vacation, there were the Dumkys, every one of them. Dumkys weren’t very neighborly, but they were a lot more neighborly than Mr. Bandolier. Mr. Bandolier didn’t encourage conversation. That man would look right through you.”


  “Mr. Bandolier dressed like a proper gentleman, though. A suit and tie, whenever you saw him. When he did work in his garden, the man put on an apron. Kept his sorrows inside himself, and you can’t fault him for that.”

  “Mr. Bandolier was a widower,” Frank said. “We heard that from old George Milton, the man I bought this house from. Had a wife who died two-three years before we moved in. I suppose she used to keep things quiet for him.”

  “The man liked quiet. He’d be firm, but not rude.”

  “And his upstairs tenants, the Sunchanas, were nice folks, foreigners, but nice. We didn’t really know them either, of course, no more than to say hello to. Sunchanas stuck to themselves.”

  “Talked a little bit funny,” Frank said. “Foreign. She was one pretty woman, though.”

  “Would they know how I could get in touch with Mr. Bandolier?”

  The Belknaps smiled at each other. “Sunchanas didn’t get on with Mr. Bandolier,” Hannah said. “There was bad blood there. The day they moved out, they were packing boxes into a trailer. I came out to say good-bye. Theresa said she hoped she’d never have to see Mr. Bandolier again in all her life. She said they had a tiny little nest egg saved up, and they put a downpayment on a house way on the west side. When Dumkys left, one of the girls told me a young man in a military uniform came around and told them they’d have to pack up and leave. I told her the army didn’t act like that in the United States of America, but she wasn’t a real intelligent child.”

  “She didn’t know who the soldier was?”

  “He just turned up and made them skedaddle.”

  “There’s no sense to it, except that Mr. Bandolier could do things that way,” Frank said. “What I thought was, Mr. Bandolier wanted to live there by himself, and he got some fellow to come along and scare off his tenants. So I reckoned we’d be seeing Mr. Bandolier back here. Instead, the place stayed empty ever since. Mr. Bandolier still owns it, I believe—never saw a FOR SALE sign on the place.”

  I thought about it for a moment while I finished my lemonade. “So the house has been empty all this time? Who cuts the grass?”

  “We all do, taking turns.”

  “You’ve never seen that soldier the Sunchanas told you about?”

  “No,” Frank said.

  “Well,” Hannah said.

  “Oh, that old foolishness.”

  “You have seen him?”

  “Hannah didn’t see anything.”

  “It might not have been a soldier,” Hannah said. “But it isn’t just foolishness, either.”

  I asked her what she had seen, and Frank made a disgusted noise.

  Hannah pointed at him. “He doesn’t believe me because he never saw him. He goes to sleep at nine every night, doesn’t he? But it doesn’t matter if he believes me, because I know. I get up in the middle of the night, and I saw him.”

  “You saw someone going into the house?”

  “In the house, mister.”

  “Hannah’s ghost,” Frank said.

  “I’m the one who saw him, and he wasn’t a ghost. He was just a man.” She turned away from Frank, toward me. “Every two or three nights, I get up because I can’t sleep. I come downstairs and read.”

  “Tell him what you read,” Frank said.

  “Well, it’s true, I like those scary books.” Hannah smiled to herself, and Frank grinned at me. “I got a whole collection of them, and I get new ones at the supermarket. I always got one going, like now I’m reading Red Dragon, you know that one? I like those real gooshy ones.”

  Frank covered his mouth and cackled.

  “But that doesn’t mean I made it all up. I saw that man walking around in the living room next door.”

  “Just walking around in the dark,” Frank said. “Yep.”

  “Sometimes he has a little flashlight, but most times, he just goes in there and walks around for a while and sits down. And—”

  “Go on,” Frank said. “Say the rest.”

  “And he cries.” Hannah looked at me defiantly. “I use this little tiny light to read by, and from where I’m sitting in my chair, I can see him through the window on the side of the house—there’s only a net curtain on that window over there. He’s there maybe one night every two weeks. He walks around the living room. Sometimes he disappears into some other room, and I think he’s gone. But then I look up later, and he’s sitting down, talking to himself or crying.”

  “He never noticed your light?”

  “Those red dragons probably don’t see real good,” Frank said.

  “It’s little,” she said. “Like a pinpoint.”

  “You never saw him go into the house?”

  “I think he goes around the far side and comes in the back,” she said.

  “Probably he comes down the chimney.”

  “Did you ever call the police?”

  “No.” For the first time, she seemed embarrassed.

  “Tears from Beyond the Grave,” Frank said, “by I. B. Looney.”

  “Welders are all that way,” Hannah said. “I don’t know why, but they all think they’re comedians.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “I think it’s one of those poor little Dumkys, all grown up now, come back to a place where he used to be happy.”

  “Hillbillies don’t act like that,” Frank said. “And hillbillies is what they were. Even the little ones got so drunk they passed out on the lawn.” He grinned at his wife again. “She liked them because they called her ma’am.”

  She gave him a disapproving look. “There’s a big difference between being ignorant and being bad.”

  “Did you ever ask other people on the street if they saw him, too?”

  She shook her head. “There’s nobody in this neighborhood is up at night except me.”

  “Mr. Bandolier lived alone?”

  “He did everything alone,” Frank said. “He was a whole separate country.”

  “Maybe it’s him,” I said.

  “You’d need a microscope to find any tears in Mr. Bandolier,” Frank said, and for once his wife seemed to agree with him.

  Before I left, I asked Hannah Belknap to call me the next time she saw the man in the house next door. Frank pointed out the houses of the two other couples who had been on the block since the Belknaps had moved in, but he didn’t think they’d be able to help me find Robert Bandolier.

  One of these couples lived up at the end of the block and had only the vaguest memories of their former neighbor. They thought he was, in their words, “a stuck-up snob with his nose in the air,” and they had no interest in talking about him. They still resented his renting to the Dumkys. The other couple, the Millhausers, lived two houses up from Livermore, on the other side of the street. Mr. Millhauser came outside the screen door to talk to me, and his wife shouted from a wheelchair stationed far back in a gloomy hallway. They shared the universal dislike of Bob Bandolier. It was a shame that house just sat empty year after year, but they too had no wish to see more of the Dumkys. Mrs. Millhauser bawled that she thought the Sunchanas had moved to, what was that place called, Elm Hill? Elm Hill was a suburb on Millhaven’s far west side. Mr. Millhauser wanted to get back inside, and I thanked him for talking to me. His wife shouted, “That Bandolier, he was handsome as Clark Gable, but no good! Beat his wife black and blue!” Millhauser gave me a pained look and told her to mind her own business. “And you might as well mind yours, mister,” he said to me. He went back inside his house and slammed the door.

  12

  ILEFT THE CAR on South Seventh and walked toward the St. Alwyn through the steaming day. Everything I had heard in the past two days went spinning through my head. The farther I got from South Seventh Street, the less I believed that Hannah Belknap had seen anyone at all. I decided to give myself the pleasure of meeting Glenroy Breakstone even though it would probably turn out to be another blind alley, and after that I would try to find the Sunchanas.

  My stomach growled, and I realized
that I hadn’t eaten anything since dinner with the Ransoms at Jimmy’s, last night. Glenroy Breakstone could wait until after lunch—he was probably still in bed, anyhow. I got a Ledger from a coin-operated dispenser on the corner of Livermore and Widow Street and carried it through the street entrance of Sinbad’s Cavern.

  The restaurant had relaxed since the morning of Walter Dragonette’s arrest. Most of the booths were filled with neighborhood people and hotel residents eating lunch, and the young woman behind the bar was pulling draft beers for workmen covered in plaster dust. The waitress I had spoken to that morning came out of the kitchen in her blue cocktail dress and high heels. There was a lively buzz of conversation. The waitress waved me toward a table in a rear corner of the room. At a table directly across the room, four men ranging in age from over fifty to about twenty sat around a table, drinking coffee and paying no attention to one another. They were very much like the different men who had been at the same table on the day of April Ransom’s murder. One of them wore a summer suit, another a hooded sweatshirt and dirty trousers. The youngest man at the table was wearing baggy jeans, a mesh undershirt, and a heavy gold chain around his neck. They ignored me, and I opened my paper.

  Millhaven was still tearing itself apart. Half of the front page dealt with the protest meetings at Armory Place. The Reverend Al Sharpton had appeared as promised and declared himself ready to storm City Hall by himself if the policemen who had failed to respond to calls from Walter Dragonette’s neighbors were not put on Suspension or dismissed. Pictures of the chief and Merlin Waterford orating at April Ransom’s funeral, complete with full texts of both remarks, filled the top of the next page. All three editorials blasted Waterford and the performance of the police department.

  While I read all of this and ate a club sandwich, I gradually began to notice what the men across the room were doing. At intervals, they stood up and disappeared through an unmarked door in the wall behind their table. When one came out, another went in. I caught glimpses of a gray hallway lined with empty metal kegs. Sometimes the man coming back out left the restaurant, sometimes he went back to the table and waited. The men smoked and drank coffee. Whenever one of the original men left, another came in from outside and took his place. They rarely spoke. They did not look arrogant enough to be mobsters or furtive enough to be drug dealers making pickups.