The Throat

by Peter Straub

  We both smiled.

  “You actually had your name changed officially? You went to city hall, or wherever?”

  “It’s easy to change your name. You just fill out a form. I did the whole thing through the mail.”

  “Your father must have been a little …”

  “He was, a lot. Big time upset. I see his point. I even agree with him. But he knows I wouldn’t do it all over again, and that helps. He says, Well, kid, at least you kept your goddamn initials.” This was delivered in a forceful raspy growl that communicated both affection and exasperation and summoned up George Dubbin with eerie clarity.

  “That was good,” I said. “I bet he sounds just like that.”

  “I was always a good mimic.” He smiled at me again. “At school, I used to drive the teachers crazy.”

  The revelation about his name had dissipated the tension between us.

  “Talk to me about April Ransom,” I said.

  14

  INSTEAD OF ANSWERING, Byron reached for his cup, stood up, and walked to the table, where he began lining up the bottles filled with brushes. He got them all into a nice straight row at the far end of the table. In order to be able to see him, I stood up, too, but all I could see was his back.

  “It’s hard to know what to say.” Next he started lining up the tubes of paint. He looked over his shoulder and seemed surprised to see me up on my feet, looking at him. “I don’t think I could just sum her up in a couple of sentences.” He turned all the way around and leaned back against the table. The way he did it made the table seem as if it had been built specifically for this purpose, to be leaned against in precisely that easy, nonchalant way.

  “Try. See what comes out.”

  He looked up, elongating his pale neck. “Well, at first I thought she was a sort of ideal patron. She was married, she lived in a good house, she had a lot of money, but she wasn’t even a little bit snobbish—when she came here, the first time I met her, she acted like ordinary people. She didn’t mind that I lived in a dump, by her standards. After she was here about an hour, I realized that we were getting along really well. It was like we turned into friends right away.”

  “She was perceptive,” I said.

  “Yeah, but it was more than that. There was a lot going on inside her. She was like a huge hotel, this place with a thousand different rooms.”

  “She must have been fascinating,” I said.

  He walked to the covered windows and brushed the drop cloths with the side of his hand. Once again, I could not see his face. “Hotel.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said hotel. I said she was like a hotel. That’s kind of funny, isn’t it?”

  “Have you ever been to the St. Alwyn?”

  He turned around, slowly. His shoulders were tight, and his hands were slightly raised. “What’s that supposed to mean? Are you asking if I took her there and beat her up and knifed her?”

  “To tell you the truth, that thought never occurred to me.”

  Dorian relaxed.

  “In fact, I don’t think she was assaulted in the hotel.”

  He frowned at me.

  “I think she was originally injured in her Mercedes. Whoever assaulted her probably left a lot of blood in the car.”

  “So what happened to it?”

  “The police haven’t found it yet.”

  Dorian wandered back to the daybed. He sat down and drank some of his coffee.

  “Do you think her marriage was happy?”

  His head jerked up. “Do you think her husband did it?”

  “I’m just asking if you thought she had a happy marriage.”

  Dorian did not speak for a long time. He swallowed more coffee. He crossed and uncrossed his legs. He grazed his eye along the row of paintings. He put his chin in his hand. “I guess her marriage was okay. She never complained about it.”

  “You thought about it for a long time.”

  He blinked at me. “Well, I had the feeling that if April weren’t so busy, she would have been lonely.” He cleared his throat. “Because her husband didn’t really share her interests, did he? She couldn’t talk to him about a lot of stuff.”

  “Things she could talk about with you.”

  “Well, sure. But I couldn’t talk with her about her business—whenever she started up about puts and calls and all that, the only words I ever understood were Michael and Milken. And her job was tremendously important to her.”

  “Did she ever say anything to you about moving to San Francisco?”

  He cocked his head, moving his jaw as if he were chewing on a sunflower seed. “Did you hear something about that?” His eyes had become cautious. “It was more like a remote possibility than anything else. She probably just mentioned it once, when we were out walking, or something.” He cleared his throat again. “You heard something about that, too?”

  “Her father mentioned it to me, but he wasn’t too clear about it, either.”

  His face cleared. “Yeah, that makes sense. If April had ever moved anywhere, she would have brought him along. Not to live with her, I mean, but to make sure she could still take care of him. I guess he’s getting kind of out of it.”

  “You said you went for walks?”

  “Sure, sometimes we’d just go walk around.”

  “Did you go out for drinks, or anything like that?”

  He pondered that. “When we were still talking about the paintings, we went out for lunch a couple of times. Sometimes we went for drives.”

  “Where would you go?”

  He threw up his hands and looked rapidly from side to side. I asked if he minded my asking these questions.

  “No, it’s just hard to answer. It’s not like we went for drives every day or anything. Once we went to the bridge, and April told me about what used to go on at that bar on Water Street, right next to the bridge.”

  “Did you ever try to go in there?”

  He shook his head. “It’s closed up, you can’t go in.”

  “Did she ever mention someone named William Writzmann?”

  He shook his head again. “Who’s he?”

  “It probably isn’t important.”

  Dorian smiled at me. “I’ll tell you a place we used to go. I never even knew it existed until she showed it to me. Do you know Flory Park, way out on Eastern Shore Drive? There’s a rock shelf surrounded by trees that hangs out over the lake. She loved it.”

  “Alan took me there,” I said, seeing the two of them going down the trail to the little glen above the lake.

  “Well, then, you know.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know. It’s very private.”

  “It was private,” he said. He stared at me for a moment, chewing on the nonexistent seed, and jumped up again. He carried the cup into the kitchen. I heard him rinse the cup and open and close the refrigerator. He came out carrying a bottle of Poland Water. “You want some of this?”

  “I still have some coffee left, thanks.”

  Dorian went to his table and poured bottled water into his cup. Then he moved one of the tubes of paint a fraction of an inch. “I ought to get back to work soon.” He closed both hands around the cup. “Unless you want to buy a painting, I don’t think I can spare much more time.”

  “I do want to buy one of your paintings,” I said. “I like your work a lot.”

  “Are you trying to bribe me, or something like that?”

  “I’m trying to buy one of your paintings,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about doing that since I first saw them.”

  “Really?” He managed to smile at me again. “Which one do you want?” His hands were all right now, and he moved toward the paintings on the wall.

  “The men in the bar.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I like that one, too.” He turned doubtfully to me. “You really want to buy it?”

  I nodded. “If you can pack it for shipping.”

  “I can do that, sure.”

  “How much do you want?”
/>
  “God. I never thought about that yet.” He grinned. “Nobody but April ever even saw them before this. A thousand?”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “I have your address, and I’ll send you a check from John’s house. Have UPS ship it to this address.” I took one of my cards from my wallet and gave it to Dorian.

  “This is really nice of you.”

  I told him I was happy to have the painting, and we went toward the door. “When you looked up and down the street before you let me in, did you think that John might be out there?”

  He stopped moving, his hand already on the doorknob. Then he opened the door and let in a blaze of sudden light.

  “Anything you did is okay with me, Byron,” I said. He looked as if he wanted to flee back into the artificial light. “You were tremendously helpful to her.”

  Dorian shuddered, as if a winter wind were streaming through the open door. “I’m not going to say any more to you. I don’t know what you want.”

  “All I want from you is that painting,” I said, and held out my hand. He hesitated a second before taking it.

  15

  AFTER ALL THAT, I did not want to just drive back to Ely Place. I had to let everything sort itself out in my mind before I went back to John’s house. The satisfaction of knowing that Bob Bandolier was the Blue Rose murderer had left me. Before anything like it could return, I had to know who had killed April Ransom. I sat behind the wheel of the Pontiac until I noticed that Dorian was peeking out at me through a dimple in one of the drop cloths.

  I drove away without any idea of where I would go. I would be like April Ransom, I thought, like April Ransom at the wheel of her Mercedes, Byron Dorian in the other seat. I’d just drive, and see where I wound up.

  16

  IHAD GONE no more than five blocks when it occurred to me that I had, in effect, done no more than to swap one ghost for another. Where I had seen April Underhill’s disgruntled spirit, now I would find myself seeing April Ransom’s.

  A series of images marched across my inner eye. I saw Walter Dragonette sitting across the battered table from Paul Fontaine, crying victim, victim, victim; then saw Scoot, my old partner in the body squad at Camp White Star, bending to dismember the corpse of Captain Havens. I saw the human jigsaw puzzles sealed up in the body bags; the boy in the hut at Bong To; April Ransom and Anna Bandolier lying unconscious on their beds, separated by space and time. A meaning which seemed nearly close enough to touch connected these images. The figure with an outstretched hand stepping out of death or the imaginative space offers the pearl. On the open palm is written a word no one can read, a word that cannot be spoken.

  17

  IHAD RETURNED on automatic pilot to my old neighborhood and was turning from South Sixth Street onto Muffin Street. It was one of those sleepy pockets of commerce that had long ago inserted itself into a residential area, like the row of shops near Byron Dorian’s studio but even less successful, and two little shops with soaped windows flanked a store where bins of bargain shoes soaked up sunlight on the pavement.

  On the other side of the shoe store was the site of Heinz Stenmitz’s two-story frame house. A wide X of boards blocked the entrance to the porch, and vertical pallets of nailed boards covered the windows. On the other side of the house, the site of the butcher shop with its triangular sign, was an empty lot filled with skimpy yellow ragweed and bright sprays of Queen Anne’s lace. The weeds led down into a roughly rectangular hollow in the middle of the lot. Red bricks and gray concrete blocks lay among the weeds around the perimeter of the hollow. That vacancy seemed right to me. No one had debased the site with an apartment building or a video shop. Like his house, it had been left to rot away.

  At the end of the block, I turned onto South Seventh Street. Next to Bob Bandolier’s empty house, the Belknaps were drinking Hannah’s lemonade and talking to one another on their porch. Hannah was smiling at one of Frank’s jokes, and neither of them noticed me driving past. I stopped at Livermore Avenue, turned right on Window Street, parked in an empty spot a block away from the St. Alwyn, and walked past Sinbad’s Cavern to the hotel.

  The same old man I had seen before sat smoking a cigar in the lobby; the same feeble bulb burned behind its green shade beside the same worn couch; but the lobby seemed bleaker and sadder.

  Under the lazy scrutiny of the desk clerk, I walked toward the pay phone and dialed the number on the slip of paper in my wallet. I spoke for a short time to a gruff, familiar voice. George Dubbin, Byron’s father, told me that Damrosch had questioned Bob Bandolier—“Sure he did. Bill was a good cop.” Then he said, “I wish my kid would go out with women his own age.” When the conversation was over, I went across the lobby to the house phone and punched Glenroy Breakstone’s room number.

  “You again. Tom’s friend.”

  “That’s right. I’m down in the lobby. Can I come up for a short talk?”

  He sighed. “Tell me the name of the great tenor player in Cab Calloway’s band.”

  “Ike Quebec,” I said.

  “You know what to get before you come up.” He put the phone down.

  I went up to the clerk, who had recognized me and was already bending under the desk. He came up with two packs of Luckies and rapped them down on the counter. “Surprised he let you come up. Bad day for old Glenroy, bad day.”

  “I’ll watch my back.”

  “Better watch your head, because that’s what he’s gonna mess with.” He raised his right hand and shot me with his index finger.

  When I knocked on Breakstone’s door, loud jazz muffled his voice. “What’d you do, fly? Give me a minute.”

  Under the music, I heard the sound of wood clicking against wood.

  Glenroy opened the door and scowled at me with red-rimmed eyes. He was wearing a thin black sweatshirt that said SANTA FE JAZZ PARTY. “You got ’em?” He held out his hand.

  I put the cigarettes in his hand, and he wheeled away from me, jamming one pack into each of his pockets, as if he thought I might try to steal them. He took two steps and stopped, pointing an imperious finger into the air. The music surrounded us, as did a faint trace of marijuana. “You know who that is?”

  It was a tenor saxophone player leading a small group, and at first I thought he was playing an old record of his own, one I didn’t know. The tune was “I Found a New Baby.” Then the saxophone started to solo.

  “Same answer as before. Ike Quebec. On Blue Note, with Buck Clayton and Keg Johnson, in 1945.”

  “I should of thought of a harder question.” He lowered his hand and proceeded across the bright rug to the same low table where we had been sitting before. Beside the Krazy Kat mirror and the wooden box sat a round white ashtray crowded with mashed butts, a nearly full pack of Luckies and a black lighter, a bottle of Johnny Walker Black, and a highball glass containing an inch of whiskey. Breakstone dropped into a chair and looked at me sourly. I took the other chair without being invited.

  “You messed me up,” he said. “Ever since you were here, I been thinking about James. I gotta start getting my shit together to go to France, and I can’t do anything but remember that boy. He never had his chance. We ought to be sitting up here together right now, talking about what tunes we’ll play and the assholes we’ll have to play ’em with, but we can’t, and that’s not right.”

  “It still affects you so much, after forty years?”

  “You don’t understand.” He picked up his glass and swallowed half of the whiskey. “What he was starting, nobody could finish but him.”

  I thought of April Ransom and her manuscript.

  He was glaring at me with his red eyes. “All of that music he would have made, nobody else can make that. I should have been standing right next to him, listening to the things he would have done. That boy was like my son, you understand? I play with lots of piano players, and some of them are great, but no piano player except James ever grew up right under my wing, you know?” He finished the whiskey in his glass and thumped th
e glass down on the table. His eyes moved to the wooden box, then back to me. “James played so pretty—but you never heard him, you don’t know.”

  “I wish I had,” I said.

  “James was like Hank Jones or Tommy, and nobody heard him except me.”

  “He was like you, you mean.”

  The red eyes gave me a deep, deep look. Then he nodded. “I wish I could go to Nice with him. I wish I could see through his eyes again.”

  He poured another inch of whiskey into his glass, and I looked around the room. Subtle signs of disorder were everywhere—the telescope tilted wildly upward, records and compact discs were spread on the floor in front of the shelves, record sleeves covered the octagonal table. Gray smears of ash dirtied the wrinkled Navaho rugs.

  The record came to an end, and he glanced up at the turntable. “If you want to hear something, put it on. I’ll be right back.”

  Glenroy slid the box toward him, and I said, “You can do what you like. It’s your place.”

  He shrugged and swung back the top of the box. Two two-gram bottles, one about half full and the other empty, lay in a rounded groove along one side. A short white straw lay beside them. In the middle of the box was a baggie filled with marijuana buds resting on a layer of loose, crumbled shreds. He had lots of different kinds of rolling paper. Glenroy flipped back the lid of the mirror, took out a vial, unscrewed the top, and used the spoon to dump two fat white piles of powder on the mirror. He pushed them into rough lines with the long spoon attached to the screw top. Then he worked an end of the straw into one of his nostrils and sucked up one of the lines. He did the same thing with the other nostril.

  “You get high?”

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  He screwed the cap back on the bottle and put it into the groove in the box. “I been trying to get in touch with Billy, but I can’t find him in any of his places. I want to get some for the plane over, you know.”