The Throat

by Peter Straub

  Glenroy wiped his finger over the white smears on the glass, rubbed his gums, and closed the box and the mirror. He gave me the first halfway friendly look of the night and looked at the box again. “Billy better show up before tomorrow, man.” He leaned back in his chair, wiping his finger under his nose.

  “Does Tom do coke?” I asked.

  He grinned derisively at me. “Tom won’t hardly do anything at all anymore. That cat hardly even drinks. He acts like he juices all day and all night, but you watch him. He takes one tiny little sip, and that’s it. That’s that. He’s funny, man. He looks like he’s half asleep, you know what he’s doing? The man is working.”

  “I noticed that the other night,” I said. “He nursed one drink all night long.”

  “He’s a sneaky mother.” Breakstone stood up and went to the turntable. He removed the Ike Quebec record, grabbed its plastic inner sleeve from a shelf, and slid it into the sleeve. “Duke, I want some Duke.” He moved along the shelves, running his hand over the tops of the albums, and pulled out an Ellington record. With the same rough delicacy, he set the record on the turntable. Then he turned down the volume knob on the amplifier. “I don’t suppose you came over here just to listen to my records.”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said. “I came here to tell you how James Treadwell was killed.”

  “You found that bitch!” His whole face brightened. He took his chair again, picked the burning cigarette out of the ashtray, and squinted at me through the smoke as he inhaled. “Tell me about it.”

  “If Bob Bandolier came to James’s room late at night, would James have let him in?”

  Nodding, he said, “Sure.”

  “And if Bandolier wanted to get in without knocking, he could just have let himself in.”

  His eyes widened. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “Glenroy, Bandolier murdered James Treadwell. And the woman, and Monty Leland, and Stenmitz. His wife was dying because he beat her into a coma, and he got angry because Ransom fired him when he had to take extra time to care for her. He killed all of them to ruin the hotel’s business.”

  “You’re saying Bob killed all these people, and then afterward, he just came back here like nothing happened?”

  “Exactly.” I told him what I had learned from Theresa Sunchana, and I watched him take it all in.

  When I was done, he said, “Roses?”

  “Roses.”

  “I don’t know if I can believe this.” Breakstone shook his head slowly, smiling. “I saw Bob Bandolier every day, almost every day, when I was here at home. He was a miserable bastard, but outside of that, he was normal, if you know what I mean.”

  “Did you know he had a wife and a son?”

  “First I ever heard of it.”

  For a time we said nothing. Glenroy stared at me, shaking his head now and then. Once or twice he opened his mouth and closed it without saying anything. “Bob Bandolier,” he said, but not to me. Finally, he said, “This lady heard him going out every night someone was killed?”

  “Every night.”

  “You know, he could have done it. I know he didn’t give a damn about anybody but himself.” He frowned at me for a little time.

  Glenroy was changing an idea he had held firmly for forty years. “He was the kind of man who’d beat a woman, that’s right.” He gave me a sharp look. “I tell you, what I think, Bob would sort of like his woman helpless. She wouldn’t walk around, messing things up. That kind of guy, he could go for that.”

  He was silent for another couple of seconds, and then he stood up, walked away a couple of steps, turned around and sat back down again. “There isn’t any way to prove all this, is there?”

  “No, I don’t think it can be proved. But he was Blue Rose.”

  “Goddamn.” He smiled at me. “I’m starting to believe it. James probably didn’t even know Bob was fired. I didn’t know for maybe a week, when I asked one of the maids where he was. You know, they didn’t even uncover his meat scam—he was back in time to switch back to Idaho.”

  “Speaking of the meat business,” I said, and asked him if he’d heard about Frankie Waldo.

  “We better not talk about that. I guess Frankie got too far out of line.”

  “It sounds like a mob killing.”

  “Yeah, maybe it’s supposed to look that way.” He hesitated, then decided not to say any more.

  “You mean it had something to do with Billy Ritz?”

  “Frankie just got out of line, that’s all. That day we saw him, he was one worried man.”

  “And Billy reassured him that everything was going to be okay.”

  “Looked that way, didn’t it? But we weren’t supposed to see that. If you don’t get in Billy’s way, everything’s cool. Someday, they’ll nail somebody for Waldo’s murder.”

  “Paul Fontaine has a great arrest record.”

  “He sure does. Maybe pretty soon he’ll get whoever killed your friend’s wife.” There was an odd smile on his face.

  “I have an idea about that,” I said.

  Glenroy refused to say any more. He was casting glances at his box again, and I left a few minutes later.

  18

  THE CLERK ASKED ME if Glenroy was feeling any better, and when I said that I thought he was, he said, “Will he let the maids in there tomorrow?”

  “I doubt it,” I said, and went back to the pay phone. I could hear him sighing to himself while I dialed.

  Twenty minutes later, I pulled up in front of Tom Pasmore’s house on Eastern Shore Drive. Tom had still been in bed when he answered, but he said he’d be up by the time I got there.

  On the telephone, I’d asked Tom if he would like to know the name of the Blue Rose murderer.

  “That’s worth a good breakfast,” he told me.

  My stomach growled just as Tom opened the door, and he said, “If you can’t control yourself better than that, get in the kitchen.” He looked resplendent in a white silk robe that came down to a pair of black slippers. Under the robe, he was wearing a pink shirt and a crimson necktie. His eyes were clear and lively.

  The smell of food hit me as soon as I reached the table, and saliva filled my mouth. I walked into the kitchen. In separate pans on two gas rings on the range, diced ham, bits of tomatoes, and a lot of whitish cheese lay across irregular circles of egg. Two plates had been set out on the counter, and four brown pieces of toast jutted up out of a toaster. I smelled coffee.

  Tom rushed in behind me and immediately picked up a spatula and experimentally slid it under each of the omelettes. “You butter the toast, if you want some, and I’ll take care of these. They’ll be ready in a minute.”

  I took out the hot slices of toast, put two on each plate, and smeared butter over them. I heard one of the omelettes slapping into its pan and looked sideways to see him fold over the edges of the second one and toss it neatly into the air and field it with the pan. “When you live alone, you learn to amuse yourself,” he said, and slid them onto the plates.

  I had finished a quarter of my omelette and an entire piece of toast before I could speak. “This is wonderful,” I said. “Do you always flip them like that?”

  “No. I’m a show-off.”

  “You’re in a good mood.”

  “You’re going to give me the name, aren’t you? And I have something to give you.”

  “Something besides this omelette?”

  “That’s right.”

  Tom took the plates into the kitchen and brought out a glass cylinder of strong filtered coffee and two cups. I leaned back into the sturdy, comfortable chair. Tom’s coffee was another sort of substance from Byron Dorian’s, stronger, smoother, and less bitter.

  “Tell me everything. This is a great moment.”

  I started with the man who had followed me back to John’s from his house and finished with Glenroy Breakstone’s final remark. I talked steadily for nearly half an hour, and all Tom did was to smile occasionally. Every now and then he raised his e
yebrows. Once or twice he closed his eyes, as if to see exactly what I was describing. He read the fragment from the taproom and handed it back without comment.

  When I had finally finished, he said, “Most of Glenroy’s clothes come from festivals or jazz parties, have you noticed that?”

  I nodded. This was what he had to say?

  “Because he almost always wears black, those outfits always look pretty good on him. But their real function is to declare his identity. Since the only people he sees at all regularly, at least while he’s at home, are the desk clerk, his dealer, and me, the person to whom he’s announcing that he is Glenroy Breakstone, the famous tenor player, is mostly Glenroy Breakstone.” He smiled at me. “Your case is a little different.”

  “My case?” I looked at the clothes I had on. They mainly announced that I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what I wore.

  “I’m not talking about your clothes. I mean, the child who appears to you from time to time—from what you call the imaginative space.”

  “That’s work.”

  “Of course. But a lot of children are scattered through your whole story. It’s as though you’re fitting everything that happens to you into a novel. And the main element of this novel isn’t Bob Bandolier or April Ransom, but this nameless boy.”

  So far Tom had said nothing at all about Bob Bandolier, and all of this seemed like an unnecessary indirection. I had mentioned the boy, maybe vaingloriously, to give Tom some insight into the way I worked, and now I had begun feeling a bit impatient with him, as if he were ignoring some splendid gift I had laid before him.

  “Do you know what movie was playing at your old neighborhood theater during the last two weeks of October in 1950?”

  “I don’t have any idea.”

  “A film noir called From Dangerous Depths. I looked back at old issues of the paper. Isn’t it interesting to think that everyone we’re talking about might have seen that movie over those two weeks?”

  “If they went to the movies, they all did,” I said.

  He smiled at me again. “Well, it’s a minor point, but I’m intrigued that even when you’re doing my job for me, going around and investigating, you’re still doing yours—even when you’re in the basement of the Green Woman.”

  “Well, in a way they’re the same job.”

  “In a sense,” Tom said. “We just look through different frames. Different windows.”

  “Tom, are you trying to let me down gently? Don’t you think Bob Bandolier was the Blue Rose killer?”

  “I’m sure he was. I don’t have doubt about that. This is a great moment. You know who killed your sister, and I know the real name of Blue Rose. Those people who knew him, the Sunchanas, are finally going to tell the police what they’ve been sitting on for forty years, and we’ll see what happens. But your real mission is over.”

  “You sound like John,” I said.

  “Are you going to go back to New York now?”

  “I’m not done yet.”

  “You want to find Fee Bandolier, don’t you?”

  “I want to find Bob.” I thought about it. “Well, I’d like to know about Fee, too.”

  “What was the name of that town?”

  I was sure he remembered it, but I told him anyhow. “Azure, Ohio. The aunt was named Judy Leatherwood.”

  “Do you suppose Mrs. Leatherwood is still alive? It would be interesting to know if Fee went off to college, or if he, what, killed himself driving a stolen car while he was drunk. After all, when he was five years old, he all but saw his father beat his mother to death. And at some level, he would have known that his father went out and killed other people.” He interrogated me with a look. “Do you agree?”

  “Children always pick up on what’s going on. They might not admit it, or acknowledge it, but they understand.”

  “All of which amounts to substantial disturbance. And there’s one other terrible thing that happened to him.”

  I must have looked blank.

  “The reason his father murdered Heinz Stenmitz,” Tom said. “Didn’t that woman you liked so much say that Bob sent him to the movies? Fee went along to see From Dangerous Depths, and who should the boy meet but his father’s partner in a business arrangement?”

  I had managed to forget this completely.

  “Do you want to see what I found?” His eyes sparkled. “I think it’ll interest you.”

  “You found where Writzmann lives?”

  He shook his head.

  “You found out something about Belinski or Casement?”

  “Let me show you upstairs.”

  Tom bounded up the stairs and led me into his office. He threw his robe on the couch, waved me to a chair, and went around the room, turning on the lights and the computers. Suspenders went up the front of the pink shirt like dark blue stripes. “I’m going to hook into one of the data bases we used the last time.” He put himself in front of the desk computer and began punching in codes. “There’s a question we didn’t ask, because we thought we already knew the answer.” He turned sideways on the chair and looked at me with a kind of playful expectancy. “Do you know what it was?”

  “I have no idea,” I admitted.

  “Bob Bandolier owned a property at Seventeen South Seventh Street, right?”

  “You know he did.”

  “Well, the city has records of all leaseholders and property owners, and I thought I’d better make sure that address was still listed under his name. Just watch, and see what turned up.”

  He had linked his computer to the mainframe at Armory Place and through it to the Registrar of Deeds. The modem burped. “I just keyed in the address,” Tom said. “This won’t take long.”

  I looked at the blank gray screen. Tom leaned forward with his hands on his knees, smiling to himself.

  Then I knew. “Oh, it can’t be,” I said.

  Tom put his finger to his lips. “Shhh.”

  “If I’m right …” I said.

  “Wait.”

  RECEIVE flashed in the upper left corner of the screen.

  “Here we go,” Tom said, and leaned back.

  A column of information sped down the screen.

  17 SOUTH SEVENTH STREET

  PURCHASED 04/12/1979 ELVEE HOLDINGS CORP 314 SOUTH FOURTH STREET MILLHAVEN IL

  PURCHASE PRICE $1,000

  PURCHASED 05/01/1943 ROBERT BANDOLIER 14B SOUTH WINNETKA STREET MILLHAVEN IL

  PURCHASE PRICE $3,800

  “Good old Elvee Holdings,” Tom said, virtually hugging himself in gleeful self-congratulation and smiling like a new father.

  “My God,” I said. “A real connection.”

  “That’s right. A real connection between the two Blue Rose cases. What if Bob Bandolier is the man who’s been following you?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “If he tried to kill the Sunchanas after seeing you in Elm Hill, he didn’t want them to tell you something.”

  I nodded.

  “What is it?”

  “They knew that he killed his wife. They told me about the roses.”

  “The Belknaps could have told you about the roses. And a doctor signed Anna Bandolier’s death certificate. She’s been dead so long that no one could prove that she had been beaten. But the Sunchanas knew about the existence of Fielding Bandolier.”

  “But anyone who asked the Sunchanas the right questions would find out what he had done.”

  “And find out that he had a son. I think the person who followed you was Fee.”

  I stopped breathing. Fee Bandolier had tried to kill the Sunchanas. Then I realized what a long leap Tom had made. “Why do you even think that Fee came back to Millhaven? He’s had forty years to get as far away as he can.”

  Tom asked me if I remembered the price Elvee had paid for the house on South Seventh.

  I looked at the screen of the monitor, but the letters and numbers were too small to read from across the room. “I think it was something like ten thousa
nd dollars.”

  “Take a look.”

  I walked up beside him and looked at the screen.

  “A thousand?”

  “You saw ten thousand because you expected to see something like that. Elvee bought the house for next to nothing. I think that means that Elvee Holdings is Fee Bandolier. And Fee protects himself here, too, by putting up a smoke screen of fake directors and a convenience address.”

  “Why would Bob give him his house? He sent him away when he was five. As far as we know, he never saw him again.” Tom held up his hands. He didn’t know. Then another of Tom’s conclusions fell into place for me. “You think Fee Bandolier was the man in uniform, the soldier who threatened Frank Belknap.”

  “That’s right. I think he came back to take possession of the house.”

  “He’s a scary guy.”

  “I think Fee Bandolier is a very scary guy,” Tom said.

  19

  IWANT TO SEE if we can talk to Judy Leatherwood,” he said. “Go down the hall to the bedroom and pick up the telephone next to the bed when I tell you. In the meantime, I’ll try to get her number from Information.”

  He pulled a telephone book out of a drawer and started looking for dialing codes in Ohio. I went into the hall, pushed open the door to a darkened room, and went inside and turned on the light. A telephone stood on an end table at the side of a double bed.

  “Success,” Tom called out. “Pick up now.”

  I put the receiver to my ear and heard the musical plunk, plunk, plunk of the dialing. The Leatherwood telephone rang three times before a woman picked it up and said, “Hello?” in a quavery voice.

  “Am I speaking to Mrs. Judith Leatherwood?” Tom asked.

  “Well, yes, you are,” said the quavery voice. She was faintly alarmed by the official-sounding voice coming from Tom’s mouth.

  “Mrs. Leatherwood, this is Henry Bell from the Mid-States Insurance Company. I’m in the Millhaven office, and I promise you I’m not trying to sell you insurance. We have a five-thousand-dollar death benefit to pay out, and I am trying to locate the beneficiary. Our field agents have discovered that this beneficiary was last known to be living with you and your husband.”