The Throat

by Peter Straub

  “You must be the new Billy Ritz,” I said. “The old one had a little more style.”

  “Nobody is gonna help you now, shithead. There’s nowhere you can go.” He reached behind his back with his right hand, the muscles popping in his biceps and shoulders, and the hand came back filled with a solid black rod with shiny steel tips on both ends. A long blade popped out of the case. He was grinning again. He was going to have a good day, after all, and his boss was going to think he was a hot shot.

  Ice formed in my stomach, in my lungs, along the inside of my chest. This was fear, a lot less of it than I had felt on the highway, and useful because of the anger that came along with it. I was safer here on the sidewalk than I had been tearing along on a fogbound highway. Nothing was going to come at me that I couldn’t already see. I was probably twenty-five years older than this creep and a lot less muscular, but at his age, I had spent an entire summer in a sweatbox in Georgia, dealing with lousy food and a lot of determined men coming at me with knives and bayonets.

  He jabbed at me, just having fun. I didn’t move. He jabbed again. I kept my feet planted. We both knew he was too far away to touch me. He wanted me to run, so that he could trot up behind me and clamp his left arm around my neck.

  He prowled toward me, and I let my arms dangle, watching his hands and his feet. “Jesus, you got nothing, you got no moves at all,” he said.

  His right foot stabbed out, and his right arm came up toward me. I felt a blast of mingled adrenaline and rage and twisted to my left. I grabbed his wrist with my right hand and closed my left just above his elbow. In the half-second he could have done something to get his momentum back, he swiveled his head and looked into my eyes. I brought up my right knee and slammed my hands down as hard as I could. I even grunted, the way they recommended back in Georgia. His arm came apart in my hands—the two long bones snapped away from the elbow, and the big one, the radius, sliced through the skin of his inner arm like a razor. The knife clunked down onto the sidewalk. He made a small astonished sound, and I got both hands on his forearm and yanked it, using as much torque as I could. I was hoping it would come off, but it didn’t. Maybe I was standing too close to him. He stumbled in front of me, and I saw his eyes bulge. He started screaming. I pushed him down, but he was already crumpling. He landed on his side with his knees drawn up. His chest was sprayed with blood, and blood pumped through the ragged hole in his arm.

  I walked around him and picked up the knife. He was still screaming, and his eyes looked glazed. He thought he was going to die. He wasn’t, but he’d never really use his right arm again. I walked up to him and kicked the place where his elbow used to be. He passed out.

  I looked up and down the street. There wasn’t a person in sight. I knelt down beside him and shoved my hand into the pocket of his pants. I found a set of keys and a number of slippery little things. I threw the keys into the storm drain and put my hand back into his pocket and came out with four double-wrapped little plastic envelopes filled with white powder. These I dropped into my jacket pocket. I rolled him over and picked the pocket on the other side. He had a fat little wallet with about a hundred dollars and a lot of names and addresses written on little pieces of paper. I lifted the flap and looked at his driver’s license. His name was Nicholas Ventura, of McKinney Street, about five blocks west of Livermore. I dropped the wallet and walked away on legs made of air. At the end of the block I realized that I was still holding his knife. I threw it into the street. It bounced and clattered until it was a dark spot in the fog.

  I had seen him before, waiting with three other men at a round table at the back of Sinbad’s Cavern. He was part of the talent pool. I turned into Widow Street and got myself up the steps to the St. Alwyn’s entrance on my air-legs. I felt sick and weary, more sick than weary, but weary enough to lie down for a week. Instead of adrenaline, I could taste disgust.

  The dried-out night clerk looked up at me and then elaborately looked away. I went to the pay telephones and called 911. “There’s an injured man on the sidewalk alongside the St. Alwyn Hotel,” I said. “That’s on Livermore Avenue, between South Sixth and South Seventh. He needs an ambulance.” The operator asked my name, and I hung up. Out of the sides of his eyes, the clerk watched me move toward the elevators. When I pushed the button, he said, “You don’t go up without you go through me.”

  “I’ll go through you, if that’s what you really want,” I said. He moved like a ghost to the far end of the counter and began playing with a stack of papers.

  9

  IRAPPED TWICE on Glenroy’s door. Nat Cole was singing about Frim-Fram sauce with shifafa on the side, and Glenroy called out, “Okay, I’m coming.” I could barely hear him through the music. The door opened, and Glenroy’s eager smile vanished as soon as he saw my face. He leaned out and looked around me to see if anyone else was in the corridor.

  “Hey, man, I said for you to come before eight. Why don’t you go downstairs, get a drink at the bar, and then call me from the lobby? It’ll be okay, I just need some time, you know.”

  “It’s okay now,” I said. “I have something for you.”

  “I got some private business to do.”

  I palmed two of the packets and showed them to him. “Your man had an accident.”

  He backed away from the door. I walked toward the table with the box and the mirror. Glenroy kept his eyes on me until I sat down. Then he closed the door. I could see caution, worry, and curiosity working in his eyes. “I guess I should hear this story,” he said, and came toward the table like a cat padding into a strange room.

  Glenroy took the chair across from me, put the palms of his hands on the table, and stared at me as if I were some neighborhood child who had suddenly displayed a tendency toward arson.

  “Were you waiting for a grown-up delinquent named Nicholas Ventura?” I asked.

  He closed his eyes and blew air through his nose.

  “I want you to talk to me,” I said.

  He opened his eyes as soon as I began to speak, and now he looked at me with an unhappy pity. “I thought I told you about staying out of trouble. You looked like you understood me.”

  “I had to take a trip today,” I said. “Ventura was waiting for me. He tried to run me off the highway, and he nearly managed to do it.”

  Glenroy let one hand drop to the table and pressed the other against his cheek. He wanted to close his eyes again—he’d have closed his ears, if he could.

  “Then I came here,” I said. “I parked a couple of blocks away. The accident was that he saw me when he was coming here to make his delivery. He brightened right up.”

  “I got nothing to do with him, except for one thing,” he said. “I can’t explain him to you.”

  “He pulled out a knife and tried to kill me. I took care of that. He isn’t going to talk about it, Glenroy. He’ll be too embarrassed. But I don’t think he’ll be around anymore.”

  “You took his merchandise away from him?”

  “I went through his pockets. That’s how I learned his name.”

  “I suppose it could be worse,” Glenroy said. “As it is, I’m glad I’m getting on that plane to Nice the day after tomorrow.”

  “You’re not in any danger. I just want you to give me a name.”

  “You’re a fool.”

  “I already know the name, Glenroy. I just want to make sure all the edges are nailed down. And then I want you to do something for me.”

  He rolled his head sideways on his palm. “If you want to be my friend, give me that merchandise and leave me out of it.”

  “I’m going to give it to you,” I said. “After you tell me the name.”

  “I’d rather stay alive,” he said. “I can’t tell you anything. I don’t even know anything.” But he straightened up and pulled his chair closer to the table.

  “Who was the detective that Billy Ritz worked with? Who helped him plant evidence, after he killed people?”

  “Nobody knows that.” Glenroy s
hook his head. “Some people might have worked out that that kind of business was goin’ on, but those people made sure they stayed on the right side of Billy. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “You’re lying,” I said. “I’m going to flush that shit down the toilet—I need your help, Glenroy.”

  He glowered at me for a moment, trying to work out how he could get what he wanted without endangering himself. “Billy was connected,” he said. “You know what I mean? He was all over the place.”

  “What are you saying? That he was an informant for more than one detective?”

  “That was the word.” He was deeply uncomfortable.

  “You don’t have to tell me any names. Just nod when I say the name of anyone who used Billy as a source.”

  He chewed on it for a time and finally nodded.

  “Bastian.”

  He did not react.

  “Monroe.”

  He nodded.

  “Fontaine.”

  He nodded again.

  “Wheeler.”

  No response.

  “Hogan.”

  He nodded.

  “Good God,” I said. “What about Ross McCandless?”

  Glenroy pursed his lips, and then nodded again.

  “Any more?”

  “Someone like Billy keeps his business to himself.”

  “You didn’t tell me a thing,” I said. This was far truer than I wished it to be. At least Glenroy had nodded when I said Paul Fontaine’s name, but he had not given me the confirmation I wanted.

  “What was that thing you wanted me to do?” he asked. “Throw myself in front of a bus?”

  “I want you to show me room 218,” I said.

  “Shoo,” he said. “Is that all? Show me what you got in your pocket.”

  I took out the four packets and put them on the table in front of him. Glenroy picked up each in turn and hefted it for weight, smiling to himself. “Guess I was his first stop of the night. This is a double eightball. Nick was gonna eyeball it down into packets, probably cut off a little for himself every time he did it.”

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “Nick still out there?”

  “I called 911. He’s in a hospital by now. He’ll have to stay there for a couple of days.”

  “Maybe you and me will both stay alive for a while, after all.”

  “To tell you the truth, Glenroy, it could have gone either way.”

  “Now I know you’re dangerous.” He pushed himself away from the table and stood up. “You said you want to see James’s old room?”

  Before we left, he scooped up the plastic envelopes and put them in the wooden box.

  10

  GLENROY PUSHED THE BUTTON marked 2 on the panel and leaned back on the wooden bar. “What did you find out?”

  “Bob Bandolier had a son,” I said. “After Bob’s wife died, he sent him away to live with relatives. I think he started killing people when he was a teenager. He enlisted under a phony name and went to Vietnam. He worked in a couple of police departments around the country and finally came back here.”

  “Lot of detectives here were in Vietnam.” The elevator came to a stop, and the doors slid open. A corridor painted a dark, gloomy shade of green stretched out before us. “But only one of them looks like he takes after Bad Bob.”

  We stepped out, and Glenroy looked up at me speculatively, beginning to get worried again. “You think this guy killed your friend’s wife?”

  I nodded. “Which one?”

  Glenroy motioned me down the hallway. He did not speak until we came around a corner and came up to the door of room 218. Yellow police tape was strung tautly across the frame, and a white notice on the door announced that entrance was a crime punishable by a fine and a jail term. “All this trouble, and they never bothered to lock the door,” Glenroy said. “Not that the locks would stop you, anyhow.”

  I bent down to look at the keyhole in the doorknob. I didn’t see any scratches.

  Glenroy didn’t even bother to look up and down the corridor. He just put his hand on the knob and opened the door. “No sense in hanging around.” He bent under the tape and walked into the room.

  I crouched down and followed him. Glenroy closed the door behind us.

  “I was thinking of Monroe,” Glenroy said. “He looks like Bob Bandolier. Monroe is a mean son of a bitch, too. He got a few people alone, you know, and they didn’t look so good, time he got through with them.”

  He was looking at the floor as he spoke. I couldn’t take my eyes off the bed, and what he was telling me fought for space in my mind with the shock of what was before me. The bed reminded me of the chair in the basement of the Green Woman. Whoever had brought April Ransom into this room had not bothered to pull back the long blue quilt or uncover the pillows. A dark stain lay like a shadow across the bed, and runners and strings of the same dark noncolor dripped down the sides of the quilt. Brown splashes and spatters surrounded the words above the bed. BLUE ROSE had been written in the same spiky letters I had seen in the alleyway behind the hotel.

  “A cop like that turns up, every now and then,” Glenroy said. He had wandered over to the window, which looked down into the passage behind the hotel.

  “Goddamn, I hate being in this room.” Glenroy drifted off to the dresser unit that ran along the wall opposite the bed. Cigarette butts filled the ashtray on top of the dresser. “Why did you want me to come here, anyhow?”

  “I thought you might notice something,” I said.

  “I notice I want to get out.” Glenroy finally glanced at the bed. “Your buddy has a lot of those pens.”

  I asked him what he meant.

  “The words. They’re blue. That makes three. Red, black, and blue.”

  I looked at the wall again. Glenroy was right—the slogan was written in dark blue ink.

  “If it’s all the same to you, I’m going back upstairs.” Glenroy went to the door, cracked it open, and glanced back at me. His face was tight with impatience. I took in the slanting words for as long as I thought he could stand it, tingling with a recognition that would not come into focus.

  I followed Glenroy back under the tape. “You better not come back here for a while,” he said, and started toward the elevator.

  I wandered down the hall until I came to a pair of wide metal doors. They led down to another pair of doors that must have opened into the lobby, and then continued down another few steps to the back entrance. I walked outside into the narrow alley behind the hotel, half-expecting a couple of policemen to come toward me with drawn guns. Cold fog moved up the alley from the brick passage, licking against the back of the pharmacy that had taken over the old annex. Up to my left, I could see the crumpled nose of Nick Ventura’s car poking past the rear of the hotel.

  I hurried through the passage. A few gunshots came from Messmer Avenue, a little more orange tinted the sky. A long smear of blood lay across the sidewalk. I walked around it and plodded through the fog until I got to the Pontiac. I kept seeing room 218 in my mind without understanding what had been wrong up there.

  When I got close enough to the car to see it clearly, I groaned out loud. Some wayward child had happened along with a baseball bat and clubbed in the rear window. The Pontiac looked like it had been driven away from a junkyard. I didn’t think John was going to react very gracefully to the sight of his car. I was surprised that I still cared.

  PART

  THIRTEEN

  PAUL FONTAINE

  1

  BACK AT JOHN’S, I took a couple of aspirins for the pain in my back and went upstairs. I didn’t even bother with a book, I just stretched out on the guest bed and waited for unconsciousness. John must have been still on his way home from Chicago—I wasn’t looking forward to his reaction to what had happened to his car. I had just decided to tell him about my meetings with Tom Pasmore when I witnessed my hand picking up the fourth, most disfigured photograph from the blood-soaked bed in the St. Alwyn. I understood that if I shook
the photograph while holding it upside down, the markings would fall away like hair cuttings. I upended and shook the little square. Dried-up ink fragments obediently dropped to the floor. I turned the photograph over and saw an image I knew—a photograph my mother had taken in front of the house on South Sixth Street. A three-year-old me stood on the sidewalk while my father, Al Underhill, crouched behind me, his hat slanted back on his head, his hand loose and proprietorial on my shoulder.

  2

  SOME TIME LATER, an actual hand on my shoulder brought me back up into the real world. I opened my eyes to the gloating face of John Ransom, six or seven inches away from mine. He was almost demonic with glee. “Come on,” he said, “let’s hear about it. You tell me your adventures, and I’ll tell you mine.”

  “Did you see your car?”

  He pulled away from me, waving the trouble away with his thick hands.

  “Don’t worry about that, I understand. I almost had a real crack-up myself on the way to Chicago. You must have been sideswiped, right?”

  “Someone ran me off the road,” I said.

  He laughed and pulled the chair closer to the bed. “Listen to this. It was perfect.”

  John had made it from Purdum to Chicago in four hours, narrowly missing several incidents of the sort he’d assumed I’d had. The fog had vanished about thirty miles this side of Chicago, and he’d parked a block from the train station.

  He had left the keys in the unlocked car and walked up the street. Two potential thieves had been chased away on the basis of being dressed too well. “I mean, some yuppie, what’s he going to do, actually steal it? Give me a break. I had to shut up some guy who started yelling for a cop, and he gave me a big lecture about leaving the keys in my car. Anyhow, this white kid finally comes up, gold chain around his neck, his pants halfway down his ass, no laces in his shoes, and when this jerk sees the keys he starts ambling around the car, checking out the street to make sure nobody’s watching him—I’m standing there, looking into a window, practically praying that he’ll try the door.” And finally the boy had tried the open door, nearly fainted when it opened, and jumped in and driven away in the car of his dreams.