The Throat

by Peter Straub

  “Anticipation is half the fun,” I said. She turned off the light and went away. The darkness started to move over me in long, smooth waves.

  When I woke up, the window at the end of the room shone with a delicate pink light. The happy flames were already racing around and organizing another shindig. A little stack of magazines stood on the bedside table. I picked them up to see what they were. The doctor had brought me copies of Redbook, Modern Maturity, Modern Bride, and Longevity. I guessed the hospital didn’t subscribe to Soldier of Fortune. I opened Redbook and began reading the advice column. It was very interesting on the subject of menopause, but just when I was beginning to learn something new about progesterone, my first visitor of the day arrived. Two visitors, actually, but only one of them counted. The other was Sonny Berenger.

  3

  THE MAN WHO FOLLOWED SONNY through the door had a wide, deeply seamed brick-colored face and short reddish hair shot with gray that rolled back from his forehead in tight waves. His tweed jacket bracketed a chest about four feet across. Next to Sonny Berenger, he looked like a muscular dwarf who could bend iron bars and bite nails in half. The detective gave me a quick, unsettling glance and ordered Sonny to close the door.

  He came up to the bed and said, “My name is Ross McCandless, and I’m a lieutenant in Homicide. We have a lot to talk about, Mister Underhill.”

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  Sonny came back from shutting the door and went to the foot of the bed. He looked about as animated as an Easter Island statue, but at least he didn’t look hostile.

  McCandless pulled up the chair and parked himself about two feet from my head. His light blue eyes, set close to his sharp little pickax of a nose, were utterly flat and dead, far past the boundary where they could have been called expressionless. They did not even have enough life in them to be lifeless. I was suddenly aware that the three of us were alone in the room and that whatever happened between us was going to shape reality. Sonny was going to contribute, or he would have been left out in the hall, I was going to contribute, but whatever reality we created together was mainly going to suit McCandless.

  “How are you feeling? You doing all right?”

  “No serious damage,” I said.

  “Yeah. I talked to your doctor.” That took care of the social portion of our encounter. “I understand you feel you have some interesting information about the late Detective Fontaine, and I want to know about that. All about it. I’ve been talking with your friend Ransom, but it seems that you’re the key to what happened on South Seventh Street last night. Why don’t you just explain that whole situation to me, as you see it.”

  “Is Officer Berenger going to take a statement?”

  “There’s no need for that right now, Mr. Underhill. We are going to proceed with a certain amount of care here. In due time, you will be asked to sign a statement all of us will be able to live with. I assume you already knew that Detective Fontaine died of his wounds.”

  He had already cut Fontaine loose—now he was trying to control the damage. He wanted me to give him a quick route out of the chaos. I nodded. “Before I begin, could you tell me what happened to John and Alan Brookner?”

  “When I left Armory Place, Mr. Ransom was being questioned by Detective Monroe. Professor Brookner is being held under observation at County Hospital. Bastian is trying to get a statement from him, but I don’t think he’s having much luck. The professor isn’t very coherent.”

  “Has he been charged with anything?”

  “You might say this conversation is part of that process. Last night, you made certain statements to Officer Berenger concerning Paul Fontaine and a company called Elvee Holdings. You also mentioned the names Fielding Bandolier and Franklin Bachelor. Why don’t you start by telling me how you became aware of Elvee Holdings?”

  “I had dinner with John on my first night in Millhaven,” I said. “Just as we were finishing, he called the hospital and heard that his wife was showing signs of improvement, and he immediately left the restaurant to walk to Shady Mount.” I described how I had noticed that a car was following him, taken down the license number in my notebook, trailed after both of them to Shady Mount, spoken to the driver in the hospital lobby, and recognized him from my visit earlier that day. “The driver turned out to be Billy Ritz.”

  “And what did you do with the license number?”

  “The next day I went to the hospital without knowing that April had been killed, saw Paul Fontaine along with a lot of policemen on her floor, and gave him the license number.”

  McCandless looked briefly at Sonny. “You gave it to Fontaine?”

  “Actually, I read it to him out of my notebook. I thought I had given him the sheet of paper, but at April’s funeral, I opened my notebook and saw that I still had it. That afternoon, when John and Alan and I went to the morgue to identify Grant Hoffman’s body, I saw the same car parked next to the Green Woman Taproom.” I told him about seeing Billy Ritz putting cardboard boxes in his trunk. McCandless was still waiting to see how all this led to Elvee Holdings. I repeated what I had told John about working with a computer at the university library. “It turned out that a company named Elvee Holdings owned both the car and the Green Woman. I got the names and addresses of the corporate officers.” When I gave him the names, McCandless could not keep from registering surprise—he’d been busy with the consequences of the riot, and he was starting his own research with me.

  “We’re checking on Elvee right now, and I suppose we’ll come up with the same information,” he said. “Did you understand the significance of the name Andrew Belinski?”

  “Not at the time.”

  “And you say you got all this information by using a computer at the university library?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  He didn’t believe me—he must have known that I wouldn’t be able to get motor vehicle records through a university computer—but he wasn’t going to press the point. “Someday, you’ll have to show me how you did that.”

  “I guess I got lucky,” I said. “Did John tell you that I have a long-standing interest in the old Blue Rose murders? That’s why he called me.”

  “Go on,” he said.

  For something like ten minutes, I told him about meeting the Belknaps, hearing about Bob Bandolier, visiting the Sunchanas, and for the first time learning of the existence of Fielding Bandolier. The computer told me that Elvee owned Bob Bandolier’s old house. A vanity press book by a retired colonel gave me an idea about a soldier, supposedly killed in action, who had an old grudge against John Ransom. I talked about Judy Leatherwood and Edward Hubbel.

  “You saw no need to come to the police with all this information.”

  “I did go to the police,” I said. “I went to Fontaine. He was the detective in charge of April’s case. Once I mentioned the Sunchanas, Fontaine ordered me to stay away from the old Blue Rose murders, and then he suggested that I get out of town. When I didn’t, he took me himself to Bob Bandolier’s grave, in order to prove that Bandolier couldn’t have had anything to do with the new deaths. He was the one who told me about Andy Belin’s nickname, by the way, but he denied knowing anything about Elvee.”

  McCandless nodded. “Ransom said he called you to arrange a meeting near the St. Alwyn.”

  “He found out that I had gone to his old hometown in Ohio. When I came back, somebody tried to run me off the highway in the fog. Fontaine wanted me dead, but he didn’t know what I had learned from Hubbel.”

  McCandless hitched his chair an inch closer to the bed. “Then this woman on South Seventh Street called you.” We were getting to the red meat now, and I had the feeling that something was going on that I did not quite understand. McCandless seemed to grow heavier and denser with concentration, as if he were now willing me to put things in a way that would match a prearranged pattern. The only pattern I could see grew out of what I had already told him, and I alluded again to the agreement Hannah Belknap had made w
ith me.

  He nodded. That was explanatory, but unimportant.

  A cart rattled past the door, and someone down the hall began shouting.

  “What did you have in mind when you decided to go to the Bandolier house?”

  “I wanted to surprise Fontaine. John and I thought we could knock him out or overpower him and find the boxes of notes.” I looked down the bed at Sonny, but Sonny was still made of stone.

  “What was the point of bringing that old man along with you?”

  “Alan can be extremely insistent. He didn’t give us much choice.”

  “Apparently, a lot of people heard Professor Brookner threaten to kill the man who murdered his daughter. I guess he was insistent then, too.”

  I remembered the funeral—John must have told them about Alan’s outburst. “I ordered him to stay in the car, but he wanted to be close to the action, and he followed us on the other side of the street.”

  “You had already been inside the house.”

  I nodded. “Looking for his records—those boxes he moved out of the Green Woman. You found them, didn’t you?”

  “No,” McCandless said.

  I felt my stomach sinking toward the mattress.

  “How’d you happen to get in, that first time?”

  “The back door wasn’t locked,” I said.

  “Really,” McCandless said. “He left the place open. Like the Green Woman, right? You went up there, you found the lock broken.”

  “Right,” I said. “So I went in and had a look around.”

  “That’s probably a real common activity in New York, breaking and entering. Out here, we sort of frown on it.” The man down the hall started shouting again, but the dead eyes never left mine. “Anyhow, let’s say you and your buddy got in there. There’s an interesting little present down in the basement, but no boxes full of good stuff. On the other hand, you picked up something, didn’t you? A piece of paper.”

  I’d been carrying that paper around in my jacket pocket ever since Tom gave it back to me. I had forgotten all about it, and someone at the hospital had turned it over to the police.

  “Tampering with evidence carries a little weight, too.”

  John had told him all about getting into the house and the tavern, and they were keeping him at Armory Place until McCandless decided what to do with me. The decision had to do with the way I answered his questions—unless I helped him push reality into the shape he wanted, he’d be happy to mess up my life with as many criminal charges as he could think up.

  “I might even be tempted to think that you and your pal brought along the old man because you knew he’d shoot Fontaine as soon as he had the chance.”

  “We told him to stay in the car,” I said, wearily. “We didn’t want him anywhere near us. This is crazy. John didn’t let him have the gun, he took it. We didn’t even have a real plan.” The pain dialed itself up a couple of notches. It was a long time until my next injection. “Look, if you saw the paper, you understood what it was, right? You saw that it was about a woman in Allentown. Fontaine worked in Allentown.”

  “Yeah.” McCandless sighed. “But we don’t have anything that proves he killed anybody there. And this conversation isn’t really about Paul Fontaine anymore. It’s about you.”

  He abruptly stood up and walked over to the window. He rubbed his face, looking out at the street. Sunlight blazed on the building across the street. McCandless tugged at his belt and turned slowly around. “I have to think about this city. At this point, things could go a couple of different ways. There’s going to be a lot of changes in the department. You got a guy in Ohio who says Fontaine was somebody else. What I got is a dead detective and the tail end of a riot. What I don’t need is a lot of publicity about another serial killer in Millhaven, especially one on the force. Because then, what we get is even more trouble than we already have.” He sighed again. “Am I making sense to you?”

  “Too much,” I said.

  “Everything in the world is politics.” He walked back to the chair, planted his hands on its back, and leaned forward. “Let’s talk about what happened when Fontaine got shot.”

  He looked up as the door swung open. The blond doctor I had met last night took two steps into the room, froze, and turned right around and walked out again.

  “When we’re done,” McCandless said, “all this is settled for good. After this, there are going to be no surprises. On the night of the riot, you went down to that house with the intention of overpowering and capturing a man you had reason to believe had killed two people. You intended to turn him over to the police.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Did you hear gunfire in the neighborhood?”

  “Not then. No, I’m wrong. I heard shots from the area of the riot.”

  “What happened when you got to the house?”

  “John and I were going around to the back door, but I took him along the side of the house again to go up onto the porch. When John and I got near the porch steps, Alan saw the front door open and started yelling.”

  “The patrol car was about a block away at that point.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Alan saw Fontaine and started screaming, ‘Is that him?’ Fontaine said something like, ‘Damn you, Underhill, you’re not going to get away.’ I don’t think the men in the car had seen us yet.”

  McCandless nodded.

  “John ran up to Alan and tried to get him to calm down, but Alan yanked the gun away from him and started shooting. The next thing I knew, I was lying down in a pool of blood.”

  “How many shots did you hear?”

  “There must have been two,” I said.

  He waited a significant beat. “I asked, how many did you hear?”

  I thought back. “Well, I saw Alan fire twice,” I said. “But I think I might have heard more than two shots.”

  “Brookner fired twice,” McCandless said. “Officer Berenger fired a warning shot into the air. The couple who live across the street from where you were say they heard at least five shots, and so does the woman next door. Her husband slept through the whole thing, so he didn’t hear anything. Berenger’s partner thinks he heard five shots, fired very close together.”

  “It’s like the grassy knoll,” I said.

  “You were facing Ransom and Brookner. What did you see? There had been some trouble in that area during the rioting.”

  I remembered what I had seen. “I had an impression that there was a person between the houses behind Alan and Ransom.”

  “Good for you, Mr. Underhill. Did you see this person?”

  “I thought I saw movement. It was dark. Then everything went crazy.”

  “Have you ever heard of someone named Nicholas Ventura?”

  A second too late, I said, “No.”

  “No, I don’t suppose so,” McCandless said. He must have known that I was lying. “Ventura was an up-and-coming young sleazeball who ran into some trouble on Livermore Avenue during the rioting. Somebody took a knife away from him and almost broke off his arm.” McCandless almost smiled at me and then came around the chair and sat down, facing me. “Some party called 911 from the St. Alwyn Hotel almost immediately afterward, but I don’t imagine that it was the same party that kicked the shit out of Ventura, do you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “In fact, what happened to Ventura was riot-related, wouldn’t you say?”

  I nodded.

  “Probably you heard about the death of a man named Frankie Waldo.”

  “I heard something about it,” I said. “If you want to know what I think—”

  “So far, you don’t think anything about it,” McCandless said. “Unofficially, I can tell you that Waldo was tied into Billy Ritz’s drug business. And Ritz was killed in retribution for his murder.”

  “Do you think you can really do this?” I asked.

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “Ritz was payback for Waldo.”

  “Like I told you, every
thing is politics.” He stood up. “By the way, Officer Berenger found some old photographs in the basement of that house. I think some good might come out of this, despite what you idiots tried to do.”

  “You’re not too unhappy that Fontaine is dead, are you?”

  McCandless moved away from the chair. Sonny stepped back and looked down toward his feet. He was deaf and blind. “You know what makes me happy?” McCandless asked me. “I can protect him one hell of a lot better the way things are.”

  “You didn’t have much trouble believing that he was really Franklin Bachelor. All you have is what I told you about Edward Hubbel. I don’t get it.”

  McCandless gave me a long, utterly unreadable look. Then he glanced down the bed at Sonny, who snapped his head up like a soldier on parade. “Tell him.”

  “Detective Monroe made a search of Detective Fontaine’s apartment this morning.” Sonny directed his words to the bright window. “He located Major Bachelor’s discharge papers in his desk.”

  If I hadn’t known how much it would hurt, I would have laughed out loud. “I wonder if he also came across some boxes of notes.”

  “There never were any boxes of notes,” McCandless said.

  “Not now, I bet,” I said. “Congratulations.”

  McCandless let it roll right off him. Maybe they hadn’t destroyed the notes, after all. Maybe Fontaine had flushed them down the toilet, page by page, before we had shown up at his old house.

  “You’ll be protected from journalists as long as you are here,” McCandless said. He sounded like he was reading me my Miranda rights. “The hospital will screen all your calls, and I’m stationing an officer at the door to secure your privacy. In about an hour, Officer Berenger will bring you your statement, based on your responses to my questions. Is that correct, Sonny?”

  “Yes, sir,” Sonny said.