The Throat

by Peter Straub

  At this stage of his life, April wrote, Stenmitz was a striking figure who, with his long blond hair and handsome blond beard, bore a great resemblance to the conventional Christian portrait of Jesus; moreover, he conducted informal church services in his shop on Sundays. Long after, at his trial for child abuse, it was introduced as evidence of the preacher-butcher’s good character that he had often sought his parishioners at the train and bus stations and had given special attention to those frightened and confused immigrants from Central and South American countries who were handicapped by an ignorance of English as well as poverty.

  11

  APRIL RANSOM was quietly making the case that Heinz Stenmitz had murdered William Damrosch’s mother. She believed that, on a dark cold night in February, gullible and intoxicated witnesses had seen the butcher’s flowing hair and remembered the old stories of the persecuted angel.

  I looked up to see that Alan had returned from his nap. His hands were clasped at his waist, his chin was up, and his eyes were bright and curious. “Do you think it’s good?”

  “It’s extraordinary,” I said. “I wish she had been able to finish it. I don’t know how she ever managed to get even this much together.”

  “Efficiency. And she was my daughter, after all. She knew how to do research.”

  “I’d like to be able to read the whole thing,” I said.

  “Keep it as long as you like,” Alan said. “For some reason, I can’t seem to make much headway on it.”

  For a moment I was unable to keep from registering the shock of the understanding Alan had just given me. He could not read his daughter’s manuscript, which meant that he could no longer read at all. I turned to the television to hide my dismay. The screen showed a long view of Illinois Avenue. People stood three and four deep along the sidewalks, yelling along with someone chanting through a bullhorn.

  “Oh, my God,” I said, and looked at my watch. “I have to meet John.” I stood up.

  “I knew it’d be good,” Alan said.

  PART

  TEN

  WILLIAM WRITZMANN

  1

  IN SHIRTSLEEVES, Ransom motioned me inside and went into the living room to turn off the television, which showed the same roped-off stretch of Illinois Avenue I had just seen on Alan’s set. The books had been pushed to the side of the coffee table, and loose pages of the Blue Rose file lay over the rest of its surface. The green linen jacket was draped over the back of the couch. Just before John reached the television, a slightly breathless Isobel Archer appeared on its screen, holding a microphone and saying, “The stage is set for an event unlike any which has occurred in this city since the early days of the civil rights movement, and which is sure to inspire controversy. As the tensions in Millhaven grow more and more intense, religious and civic leaders demand—”

  John bent over to turn the set off. “I thought you’d be back before this.” He noticed the thick folder in my hand. “What’s that, the other part of the file?”

  I placed the folder beside the telephone. “April’s manuscript has been at Alan’s house all this time.”

  He lifted the green jacket off the couch and slipped it on. “You must have taken a look at it, then.”

  “Of course I did,” I said, opening the upside-down file to its last pages. I had looked through only something like the first quarter of The Bridge Project, and I wondered what April had written last. A letterhead was darkly visible through the paper on the top of the pile, and, curious, I lifted up the sheet and turned it over. It was a sheet of April’s personal stationery, and the letterhead was her name and address. The letter had been dated some three months ago and was addressed to the chief of police, Arden Vass.

  John came toward me from the living room, adjusting the linen jacket.

  The letter explained that April Ransom had become interested in writing a paper that would touch upon the Blue Rose murders of forty years before and hoped that Chief Vass would give her permission to consult the original police files for the case.

  I turned over the next letter, dated two weeks later, expressing the same desire in somewhat stronger terms.

  Beneath this was a letter addressed to Sergeant Michael Hogan and dated five days after the second letter to Arden Vass. April wondered if the sergeant might assist her in her research—the chief had not responded to her requests, and if Sergeant Hogan had any interest in this fascinating corner of Millhaven history, Ms. Ransom would be most grateful. Sincerely yours.

  Another letter to Michael Hogan followed, regretting what might seem the writer’s bad manners, but hoping to make amends for them by her willingness to spend her own time trying to locate a forty-year-old file in whatever storage facility it was kept.

  “Hogan knew she was interested in the old Blue Rose case,” I said. John was reading the letter over my shoulder. He nodded. “He plays it pretty close to the vest, doesn’t he?”

  John stepped beside me and turned over the next sheet, also a letter. This was to Paul Fontaine.

  Dear Detective Fontaine: I turn to you in something like desperation, after failing to receive replies from Chief Vass and Sergeant Michael Hogan. I am an amateur historian whose latest project concerns the history and origins of the Horatio Street bridge, the Green Woman Taproom, and among other topics, the connections of these sites to the Blue Rose murders that took place in Millhaven in 1950. I would very much like to see the original police file for the Blue Rose case, and have already expressed my absolute willingness to search for this file myself, wherever it may be stored.

  Detective Fontaine, I am writing to you because of your splendid reputation as an investigator. Can you see that I too am talking about an investigation, one back into a fascinating time? I trust that you will at least give me the courtesy of a reply.

  Yours in hope,

  April Ransom

  “She was jiving him,” John said. “Yours in hope? April would never say anything like that.”

  “Do you think she might ever have taken a look at the Green Woman?”

  He straightened up and looked at me. “I’m beginning to wonder if I was ever qualified to answer questions like that.” He threw up his arms. “I didn’t even really know what she was working on!”

  “She didn’t either, exactly,” I said. “It was only partly a historical paper.”

  “She couldn’t be satisfied!” John said, stepping toward me. “That’s it. She wasn’t satisfied with being a star at Barnett, she wasn’t satisfied with doing the same kind of articles anybody else would write, she wasn’t …” He clamped his mouth shut and looked moodily at the manuscript file. “Well, let’s get downtown before the damn march is all over.” He threw open the door and stormed outside.

  As soon as he was in the car, he bent over, placed a hand on my thigh and his head on my knee, and reached under my seat. “Oh, no,” I said.

  “Oh, yes.” John straightened up, holding the revolver. “I hate to say it, but we might need this.”

  “Then count me out.”

  “Okay, I’ll go alone.” He leaned back, held in his stomach, and slid the gun into his trousers. Then he looked back at me. “I don’t think we’ll need a gun, Tim. But if we meet someone, I want to have something to fall back on. Don’t you want to take a look at the place?”

  I nodded.

  “This is just backup.”

  I started the car, but did not take my eyes off him. “Like at Writzmann’s?”

  “I made a mistake.” He grinned, and I turned the car off. He held up his hands, palms out. “No, I mean it, I shouldn’t have done that, and I’m sorry. Come on, Tim.”

  I started the car again. “Just don’t do that again. Ever.”

  He was shaking his head and hitching the jacket around the curved tusk of the handle. “But suppose some guy walks in when we’re there. Wouldn’t you feel easier if you knew we had a little firepower?”

  “If it were in my hands, maybe,” I said.

  Wordlessly, John opened h
is jacket, pulled the gun out of his trousers, and handed it to me. I put it on the seat beside me and felt it press uncomfortably into my thigh. When I came to a red light, I picked it up and pushed the barrel into the left side of my belt. The light turned green, and I jerked the car forward.

  “Why would Alan buy a gun?”

  John smiled at me. “April got it for him. She knew he kept a lot of cash in the house, in spite of her efforts to get the money into the bank. I guess she figured that if someone broke in, all Alan had to do was wave that cannon around, and the burglar would get out as soon as he could.”

  “If he was just supposed to wave it around, she shouldn’t have bought him any bullets.”

  “She didn’t,” John said. “She just told him to point the gun at anyone who broke in. One day last year when she was out of town, Alan called, all pissed off that April didn’t trust him enough to give him bullets, he could handle a gun better than I could—”

  “Is that true?” Alan Brookner did not seem like a man who would have spent a great deal of time firing guns.

  “Got me. Anyhow, he chewed me out until I gave up and took him to a shop down on Central Divide. He bought two boxes of hollow points. I don’t know if he ever told April, but I sure didn’t.”

  As I drove down Horatio Street, distant crowd noises came to us from the direction of Illinois Avenue and the other side of the river. Voices shouting slogans into bullhorns rose above mingled cheers and boos.

  I looked south toward Illinois at the next cross street. A thick pack of people, some of them waving signs, blocked the avenue. As gaudy and remote as a knight in armor, a mounted policeman in a riot helmet trotted past them. As soon as I got across the street, the march vanished again into distant noise.

  The tenements along this section of Horatio Street looked deserted. A few men sat drinking beer and playing cards in parked cars.

  “You looked through that file?” I asked.

  “Funny, isn’t it?”

  “Well, they never did ask about who had been fired recently.”

  “You didn’t notice? Come on.” He sat up on the car seat and stared at me to see if I was just pretending to be unobservant. “Who is the one guy they should have talked to? Who knew more about the St. Alwyn than anyone else?”

  “Your father.”

  “They talked to my father.”

  I remembered that and tried another name. “Glenroy Breakstone, but I read his statements, too.”

  “You’re not thinking.”

  “Then tell me.”

  He sat there twisted sideways, looking at me with an infuriating little smile on his lips. “There are no statements from the famous Bob Bandolier. Isn’t that a little bit strange?”

  2

  YOU MUST BE MISTAKEN,” I Said.

  He snorted.

  “I’m sure I read about Bob Bandolier in those statements.”

  “Other people mention him from time to time. But he wasn’t working in the hotel when the murders took place. So for Damrosch—probably Bandolier never crossed his mind at all.”

  With the bridge directly before us, I turned left onto Water Street. Forty feet away, the Green Woman Taproom sat on its concrete slab across from the tenements. Pigeons waddled and strutted over the slashes of graffiti.

  Ten feet beyond the front of the bar, a fifteen-foot section of the concrete sloped down smoothly to meet the roadbed. Pigeons ambled and flapped away from my tires. I drove slowly up past the left side of the bar. The second, raised section of the tavern ended in a flat frame wall with an inset door.

  I swung around the back of the building and swerved in behind it. Tarpaper covered the back of the building. Above the back door, two windows were punched into the high blank façade. Ransom and I softly closed our doors. Now nearly at the Illinois Avenue bridge, cut from view by the curve of the river and the prisonlike walls of an abandoned factory, the army advanced. An outsize, brawling voice bellowed, “Justice for all people! Justice for all people!”

  Pigeons moved jerkily across SKUZ SUKS and KILL MEE DEATH.

  A blaze of whiteness caught my eye, and I turned toward it—the harsh sunlight poured down like a beam onto a dove standing absolutely still on the concrete.

  I looked at Ransom’s white, shadowless face across the top of the car. “Maybe someone took those pages out of the file.”

  “Why?”

  “So April wouldn’t see them. So we wouldn’t see them. So nobody would ever see them.”

  “Suppose we try to get inside this place before the march breaks up?” Ransom said.

  3

  JOHN PULLED OPEN THE SCREEN DOOR and fought with the knob. Then he banged his shoulder against the door.

  I pulled out the revolver and came up beside him. He was fighting the knob again. I got closer and saw that he was pulling on a steel padlock. I pushed him aside and pointed the gun barrel at the lock.

  “Cool it, Wyatt.” John pushed down the barrel with a forefinger. He went back to the car and opened the trunk. After an excruciating period that must have been shorter than it seemed, he pushed down the lid and came toward me carrying a jack handle. I stepped aside, and John slid the rod into the shackle of the padlock. Then he twisted the rod until the lock froze it and pulled down heavily on the top end of the rod. His face compressed, and his shoulders bulged in the linen jacket. His face turned dull red. I pulled up on the bottom of the rod. Something between us suddenly went soft and malleable, like putty, and the shackle broke.

  John staggered forward, and I almost fell on my backside. He dropped the rod, yanked the broken lock away from the clip and set it on the concrete beside the jack handle. “What are you waiting for?” he said.

  I pushed the door aside and walked into the Green Woman Taproom.

  4

  WE STOOD IN A NEARLY EMPTY ROOM about ten feet square. On the far wall, a staircase with a handrail led up to the room above. A brown plastic davenport with a slashed seat cover stood against the far wall, and a desk faced out from the wall to my left. A tattered green carpet covered the floor. Another door faced us from the far wall. John closed the door, and most of the light in the old office disappeared.

  “Was this where you saw Writzmann taking stuff out of his car?” John asked me.

  “His car was pulled up alongside the place, and the front door was open.”

  Something rustled overhead, and both of us looked up at the pockmarked ceiling tiles.

  “You want to look in front, and I’ll check up there?”

  I nodded, and Ransom moved toward the stairs. Then he stopped and turned around. I knew what was on his mind. I tugged the Colt out of my waistband and passed it to him, handle first.

  He carried the pistol toward the staircase. When he set his foot on the first tread, he waved me into the next rooms, and I went across the empty office and opened the door to the intermediate section of the building.

  A long wooden counter took up the middle of the room. Battered tin sinks and a ridged metal counter took up the far wall. Once, cabinets had been attached to thick wooden posts on the rough plaster walls. Broken pipes jutting up from the floor had fed gas to the ovens. A beam of buttery light pooled on the far wall. Upstairs, Ransom opened a creaking door.

  An open hatch led into the barroom. Thick wads of dust separated around my feet.

  I stood in the hatch and looked around at the old barroom. The tinted window across the room darkened the day to an overcast afternoon in November. Directly before me was the curved end of the long bar, with a wide opening below a hinge so the bartender could swing up a section of the wood. Tall, ornate taps ending in the heads of animals and birds stood along the bar.

  Empty booths incongruously like seventeenth-century pews lined the wall to my right. A thick mat of dust covered the floor. As distinct as tracks in snow, a double set of footprints led up to and away from a three-foot-square section of the floor near the booths. I stepped through the hatch. When I looked down, I saw tiny, long-toed print
s in the dust.

  The sense came to me of having faced precisely this emptiness at some earlier stage of my life. I took another step forward, and the feeling intensified, as if time were breaking apart around me. Some dim music, music I had once known well but could no longer place, sounded faintly in my head.

  A chill passed through my entire body.

  Then I saw that someone else was in the empty room, and I went stiff with terror. A child stood before me on the dusty floor, looking at me with a terrible, speaking urgency. Water rushed beneath Livermore Avenue’s doomed elms and coursed over dying men screaming in the midst of dead men dismembered in a stinking green wilderness. I had seen him once before, long ago.

  And then it seemed to me that another boy, another child, stood behind him, and that if this child should reach out for me, I myself would instantly be one of the dismembered dead.

  The Paradise Garden, the Kingdom of Heaven.

  I took another step forward, and the child was gone.

  Another step took me closer to the window. Two square outlines had been stamped into the cushion of felt near the window. Brown pellets like raisins lay strewn over the streaky floor.

  Heavy footsteps came through the old kitchen. Ransom said, “Something chewed a hole the size of Nebraska in the wall up there. Find the boxes?”

  “They’re gone,” I said. I felt light-headed.

  “Shit.” He came up beside me. “Well, that’s where they were, all right.” He sighed. “The rats went to work on those boxes—maybe that’s why Writzmann moved them.”

  “Maybe—” I didn’t finish the sentence, and it sounded as if I were agreeing with him. I didn’t want to say that the boxes might have been moved because of his wife.