The Throat

by Peter Straub

  Expresspost Mail and Fax was a bright white shopfront with its name painted in drastic red letters above a long window with a view of a clean white counter at which a man with rimless glasses and a red tie stood flipping through a catalogue. The bronze doors of individual mail receptacles lined the walls behind him.

  We came through the door, and the man closed the catalogue and placed it on a shelf beneath the counter and looked eagerly from Tom to me and back to Tom. “Can I do something for you?” he said.

  “Yes, thanks,” Tom said. “I want to pick up the papers that my colleague deposited here for the Elvee Corporation yesterday evening.”

  A shadow of uncertainty passed over the clerk’s face. “Your colleague? Mister Belin?”

  “That’s him,” Tom said. He brought the key out of his pocket and put it on the counter in front of the clerk.

  “Well, Mister Belin said he was going to do that himself.” He looked over his shoulder at a rank of the locked boxes. “We can’t give you a refund, or anything like that.”

  “That’s all right,” Tom said.

  “Maybe you should tell me your name, in case he comes back.”

  “Casement,” Tom said.

  “Well, I guess it’ll be all right.” The clerk picked up the key.

  “We’re grateful for your help,” Tom said.

  The clerk turned away and went to the wall to his right, twiddling the key in his fingers. The boxes in the bottom row were the size of the containers used to ship dogs on airplanes. When he had nearly reached the rear of the shop, the clerk knelt down and put the key into a lock.

  He looked back up at Tom. “Look—since you already paid for the week, I can reserve this one for you until the time is up. That way, if you want to use it again, you won’t have to pay twice.”

  “I’ll pass that on to Mister Belin,” Tom said.

  The clerk began pulling stacks of paper stuffed into manila folders out of the box.

  2

  WE CARRIED the long cardboard container the clerk had given us up the stairs to the office, Tom in front and me behind him. On the way back, Tom had stopped off at a stationery store and bought six reams of copy paper, four of which were now distributed across the tops of the files, with the other two slipped down beside the files at each end of the box. Halfway up the stairs, the handholds started to rip, and we had to carry the box the rest of the way by holding the bottom.

  The box went on the floor beside the copy machine. Tom flipped its square black switch, and the machine hummed and flashed. I picked up one of the fat manila folders and opened it up. Papers of varying sizes and colors filled it, some of them closely filled with single-space typing that ran from edge to edge without margins, other crowded with the handwriting I had first seen in the basement of the Green Woman. I turned to one of the typed pages.

  When we left the bar it was one or two in the morning, and she was too drunk to walk straight. I ought to take you in for public intoxication. You ain’t a cop now, are you? No, honey, I own one of those big hotels downtown, I already told you that. Which one? The Heartbreak Hotel, I said. I already been there. I probably owe you lots of rent. I know that, honey, we’ll take care of that. She giggled. Here’s my car. Her black skirt rode up on her thighs when she got in. Skinny thighs, one black and blue thumbprint. We got to the GWT and she said This dump? Don’t worry, there’s a throne all ready for you downstairs.

  I looked up at Tom, who was leafing through another file. “This is incredible,” I said. “He described them in such detail. He even put in the dialogue. It’s like a book.”

  Tom looked a little sickened by whatever he had read. He closed his file. “They seem to be more or less in order—each murder takes up about twenty pages, from what I see here. How many pages do you think we have, about a thousand?”

  “Something like that,” I said, looking down at the stacks.

  “At least fifty murders,” Tom said. Both of us looked at the stacks of papers. “I suppose he let Fontaine solve some of the most colorful ones.”

  “Who are you going to send copies to?”

  “The FBI. Isobel Archer. The new chief, Harold Green. Someone at the Ledger. Geoffrey Bough?”

  “You’ll make his day,” I said. “You’re not going to identify yourself, are you?”

  “Sure, I’m the worried citizen who found these papers in a garbage can. In fact, I think the worried citizen is about to call Ms. Archer right now.”

  He went to his desk and dialed a number. I sat down on the couch and listened to his half of the conversation. When I realized that I was still holding the thick file, I put it on the table as if I thought I might catch something from it.

  “I’d like to speak to Isobel Archer, please. It has to do with a shooting.

  “Yes, I’ll hold.

  “Miss Archer? I’m glad to be able to speak to you.

  “My name? Fletcher Namon.

  “Well, yes, it is about a shooting. I didn’t know what to do about this, so I thought I’d call you.

  “I don’t want to get involved with the police, Miss Archer. It’s about a policeman.

  “Well, yes.

  “Okay. Last night, this was. I saw a detective, I don’t know his name, but I saw him one night on the news, I know he’s some kind of detective, and he was going into the old movie theater down on Livermore.

  “Late at night.

  “No, I couldn’t tell you what time. Anyhow, after he got inside, I heard this shot.

  “No, I got out of there, fast.

  “I’m sure.

  “Sure, I’m sure. It was a gunshot.

  “Well, I don’t know what I expect you to do. I thought that was your business. I gotta go now.

  “No. Good-bye.”

  He put down the phone and turned to me. “What do you think?”

  “I think she’ll be down there with a hacksaw and blowtorch in about five minutes.”

  “I do, too.” He took all the pages out of the folder on his lap and tapped their bottom edges against his desk. “It’ll take me two or three hours to copy all this stuff. Do you want to hang around, or is there something else you feel like doing?”

  “I guess I should talk to John,” I said.

  “Do you want me with you?”

  “You’re an executive,” I said. “Flunkies like me do the dirty work.”

  3

  IWALKED THROUGH THE HEAT down the pretty streets toward John Ransom’s house. The Sevens, Omdurman Place, Balaclava Place, Victoria Terrace; brick houses matted with ivy, stone houses with ornate entrances and leaded windows, mansard roofs and pointed gables. Sprinklers whirled, and small boys zipped past on ten-speed bicycles. It looked like a world without secrets or violence, a world in which blood had never been shed. A FOR SALE sign had been staked into the neat lawn in front of Alan Brookner’s house.

  The white Pontiac stood at the curb across from John’s house, in the same place I had found it on my first morning back in town. It was squeezed into a parking place just long enough to accommodate it, and I remembered, as I had last night, a noisy little patriot in shorts charging out of his flag-draped fortress to yell about abuse. I walked across sunny Ely Place and went up to John’s front door and rang his bell.

  He appeared at the narrow window to the left of the door and looked out at me with frowning curiosity—the way you’d look at an encyclopedia salesman who had come back after you’d already bought the books. By the time he opened the door, his expression had altered into something more welcoming.

  “Tim! What are you doing back here?”

  “Something came up,” I said.

  “More research? The book going well?”

  “Very well. Can I come in for a minute?”

  “Well, sure.” He stepped back and let me in. “When did you get in? Just now?”

  “Yesterday afternoon.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t be staying in a hotel. Check out and come back here, stay as long as you like. I just got some
information about houses for sale in Perigord, we could go over it together.”

  “I’m not in a hotel,” I said. “I’m staying with Tom Pasmore.”

  “That stuck-up phony.”

  John had followed me into the living room. When I sat down on the couch facing the wall of paintings, he said, “Why don’t you make yourself at home?”

  “Thanks again for sending me the Vuillard,” I said. He had not rearranged the paintings to compensate for its absence, and the place where it had been looked naked.

  He was standing beside the couch, looking down at me, uncertain of my mood or intentions. “I knew you appreciated it. And like I said, I couldn’t have it in my house anymore—it was too much for me.”

  “I’m sure it was,” I said.

  He gave me the encyclopedia salesman look again and then moved his face into a smile and sat down on the arm of a chair. “Did you come here just to thank me for the painting?”

  “I wanted to tell you some things,” I said.

  “Why do I think that sounds ominous?” He hitched his knee up beside him on the fat arm of the chair and kept his smile. John was wearing a dark green polo shirt, faded jeans, and penny loafers without socks. He looked like a stockbroker on a weekend break.

  “Before we get into them, I want to hear how Alan’s doing.”

  “Before we get into these mysterious ‘things’? Don’t you think I’ll want to talk to you afterward?”

  I reminded myself that John Ransom was pretty smart, after all. “Not at all,” I said. “You might want to talk to me night and day.”

  “Night and day.” He tucked his foot in closer to his thigh. “Let’s try to keep that tone.” He looked up, theatrically. “Well, Alan. Dear old Alan. I don’t suppose you ever saw him when he was out at County.”

  “I stopped in for five minutes, on the way to the airport.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Did you? Well, in that case, you know how bad he was. Since then—really, since I moved him into Golden Manor—he’s come a long way. They’ve been giving him good care, which they damn well better, considering how much the place costs.”

  “Does he mind being there?”

  John shook his head. “I think he likes it. He knows he’ll be taken care of if anything happens to him. And the women are all crazy about him.”

  “Do you visit him often?”

  “Maybe once a week. That’s about enough for both of us.”

  “I suppose that’s right,” I said.

  He narrowed his eyes and bit on his lower lip. He didn’t get it. “So what did you want to tell me?”

  “In a day or two, this whole town is going to go crazy all over again. There’ll be another big shakeup in the police department.”

  He snapped his fingers and then pointed at me, grinning with delight. “You bastard, you found those papers. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “I found the papers,” I said.

  “You’re right! This town is going to lose its mind. How many people did Fontaine kill, anyway? Do you know?”

  “It wasn’t Fontaine. It’s the man who killed Fontaine.”

  His mouth opened, and his mouth twitched in and out of a grin. He was trying to decide if I were serious. “You can’t be trying to tell me that you think Alan—”

  He hadn’t even been interested enough to ask about the ballistics report. “Alan didn’t shoot Paul Fontaine,” I said. “Alan shot me. Someone was hiding between the houses across the street. I think he must have had some kind of assault rifle. Alan, you, me—we had nothing to do with it at all. He was already there by the time we got to the house. He was with Fontaine in the ghetto. Maybe he even saw him call me here. He probably followed him to the house.”

  “So the guy in Ohio identified the wrong man?”

  “No, he identified the right one. I just didn’t understand what he was doing.”

  John pressed a palm to his cheek and regarded me without speaking for a couple of seconds. “I don’t suppose I have to know the whole story,” he finally said.

  “No, it’s not important now. And I never saw you today, and you never saw me. Nothing I tell you, nothing you tell me, ever leaves this house. I want you to understand that.”

  He nodded, a little puzzled about the notion of his telling me anything, but eager enough to grasp what he thought was the main point. “Okay. So who was it?”

  “Michael Hogan,” I said. “The person you knew as Franklin Bachelor changed his name to Michael Hogan. Right now, he’s lying dead on the floor of the Beldame Oriental with a gun in his hand and the words BLUE ROSE written beside his body. In black marker.”

  John took in my words avidly, nodding slowly and appreciatively.

  “Isobel Archer is going to wangle her way inside the theater and find his body. A couple of days from now, she and a few other people, including the FBI, will get photocopies of the notes he took on his killings. About half of them are handwritten, and there won’t be any doubt that Hogan wrote them.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “Look, John,” I said. “If I killed a detective in Millhaven, I should never tell anyone about it. Right? But I want you to understand that everything we say here is only between us. It’ll never leave this room. So the answer is yes. I shot him.”

  “Wow.” John was absolutely glowing at me. “That’s amazing—you’re fantastic. The whole story is going to come out.”

  “I don’t think you want that,” I said.

  John stared at me, trying to read my thoughts. He slid his leg off the arm of the chair. Whatever he saw in me he didn’t like. He had stopped glowing, and now he was trying to look injured and innocent. “Why wouldn’t I want everything to come out?”

  “Because you murdered your wife,” I said.

  4

  FIRST, YOU BROUGHT HER to the St. Alwyn and stuck a knife in her, but you didn’t quite manage to kill her. So when you heard that she was coming out of the coma, you got into her room and finished her off. And of course, you killed Grant Hoffman, too.”

  He slid down off the arm of the chair into the seat. He was stunned. He wanted me to know that he was stunned. “My God, Tim. You know exactly what happened. You even know why. It was you who came up with Bachelor’s name. You put the whole thing together.”

  “You wanted me to know about Bachelor, didn’t you? That’s part of the reason you wanted me to come here in the first place. You had no idea he was living here—he was supposed to have come in from out of town after seeing your picture in the paper, killed Hoffman and your wife, and then slipped off into his new identity when things got too hot.”

  “This is so absurd, it’s crazy,” John said.

  “As soon as I got here, you told me you thought Blue Rose was an old soldier. And you had worked out this wonderful story about what happened when you got to Bachelor’s camp in Darlac Province. It was a good story, but it left out some important details.”

  “I never wanted to talk about that,” he said.

  “You made me work it out of you. You kept dropping hints.”

  “Hints.” He shook his head sadly.

  “Let’s talk about what really happened in Darlac Province,” I said.

  “Why don’t you just rave, and when you’re finished raving, why don’t you get out of here and leave me alone?”

  “You shared an encampment with another Green Beret named Bullock. Bullock and his A team went out one day and never came back. You went out and found their bodies tied to trees and mutilated. Their tongues had been cut out.”

  “I told you that,” John said.

  “You didn’t think the VC had killed them. You thought Bachelor had done it. And when you saw Bullock’s ghost, you were positive. You were where you thought he was all the time—you were at the point where you could see through the world.”

  “That’s where I was,” he said. “But I don’t think that you’ve ever been there.”

  “Maybe not, John. But the important thing is that you fel
t betrayed—and you were right. So you wanted to do what you thought Bachelor would do.”

  “You better know what you’re talking about,” John said. “You better not be throwing out guesses.”

  “Bachelor had already escaped by the time you got there. So you burned his camp to the ground. Then you systematically killed everyone who had been left behind, all of Bachelor’s followers who were too young, too old, or too feeble to go with him. How did you do it? One an hour, one every two hours? At the end, you killed his child—put him on the ground and cut him in half with your bayonet. Then you killed his wife. At the end, you hacked her up and put her in the communal pot and ate some of her flesh. You even cleaned her skull. You were being Bachelor, weren’t you?”

  He glowered at me, working his jaws. I saw that held-down anger surge into his eyes, but this time he did not try to conceal it. “You don’t really have the right to talk about this, you know. It doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to people like us.”

  “But I’m not wrong, am I?”

  “That’s not really relevant,” John said. “Nothing you say is really relevant.”

  “But it isn’t wrong,” I said.

  John threw up his hands. “Look, even if all this happened, which no one in the normal world would believe, because they could not even begin to comprehend it, it just gives Bachelor more reason to want revenge on me.”

  “Bachelor never worked that way,” I said. “He couldn’t. You were right about him—he was always across the border, and every human concern but survival was meaningless to him. After Lang Vo, he went through three or four different identities. By the time he spent twelve years calling himself Michael Hogan, all he cared about Franklin Bachelor was that the world should keep thinking he was dead.”

  “What you’re saying just proves that he killed my wife. If you don’t see that, I can’t even talk to you.”

  “He didn’t kill her,” I said. “He beat her up. Or he had Billy Ritz beat her up. It amounts to the same thing.”