The Throat

by Peter Straub

  “Now I know you’re crazy.” John threw back his head and growled at the ceiling. His face was starting to get red. “I told you. I hit her. It was the end of my marriage.” He lowered his head and looked at me with spurious pity. “Why in the world would Billy Ritz beat up my wife?”

  “To slow her down,” I said. “Or stop her altogether, without killing her.”

  “Slow her down. That means something to you.”

  “April was writing a letter a week to Armory Place about the Green Woman. Hogan took his victims there. He kept his notes in the basement. He had to stop her.”

  “So he killed her,” John said. “I wish you could hear yourself. You turn everything around into its opposite.”

  “You went out for a drive with April the night she admitted seeing Byron Dorian. You’d been planning to kill her for weeks. You had an argument in the car, and you got out and went to the bar down the street. I think you were drinking to get up the courage to finally do it. You thought you’d have to get home by yourself, but when you left the bar, her car was still parked down the street. And when you looked inside it, there she was, unconscious. Probably bleeding. You were very convincing about the shock of seeing the car, but part of your shock was that she was waiting for you to come back.”

  He rolled back in the chair and put his hands over his eyes.

  “You didn’t know who had beaten her up—all you knew was that it was time to carry out your plan. So you drove behind the St. Alwyn, let yourself in the back door, and carried her up the stairs to the second floor, beat her and stabbed her, and wrote BLUE ROSE on the wall. That’s where you made a mistake.”

  He took his hands off his eyes and let his arms drop.

  “You used a blue marker. Hogan’s markers were either black or red, the colors used to mark homicides as either open or closed on the Homicide Division’s board. I bet you went into the pharmacy in the old annex and bought the marker that night. When you killed Grant Hoffman, you got it right—you wrote BLUE ROSE with a black marker. You probably bought that one at the pharmacy, too, and threw it away later.”

  “Jesus, you don’t quit,” John said. “So after I spend all night by her bedside, I suppose I got up the next morning and ran all the way down Berlin Avenue with a hammer in my hand, miraculously got into her room, killed her, miraculously got out, and then ran all the way back. And I managed to do all that in about fifteen-twenty minutes.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “On foot.”

  “You drove,” I said. “You parked on the street across Berlin Avenue so no one in the hospital would see your car, and then you waited on the lawn until you saw the night workers leave the hospital. The man who owned the property saw you out in front of his house. He could probably even identify you.”

  John knitted his fingers together, propped his chin on them, and glared at me.

  “You were going to lose everything, and you couldn’t take it. So you cooked up this Blue Rose business to make it look as though her death were part of a pattern—you used some kind of story to sucker poor Grant Hoffman into that passage, and you tore him to pieces to make sure he’d never be identified. You’re worse than Hogan—he couldn’t help killing, but you murdered two people for the sake of your own comfort.”

  “So what do you think you’re going to do now?” John was still glaring at me, his chin propped on his joined hands.

  “Nothing. I just want you to understand that I know.”

  “You think you know. You think you understand.” John glared at me for a moment—his feelings were boiling away within him—and then he pushed himself up out of his chair. He could not sit still any longer. “That’s funny, actually. Very funny.” He took two steps toward the wall of paintings and then slammed his hands together, palm to palm, not as if applauding, but as if trying to give himself pain. “Because you never understood anything. You have no idea of who I really am. You never did.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “Not until now, anyhow.”

  “You’re not even close. You never will be. You know why? Because you have a little mind—a little soul.”

  “But you murdered your wife.”

  He swung himself around slowly, the contempt in his eyes all mixed up with rage. He couldn’t tell the difference anymore. His own bitterness had poisoned him so deeply that he was like a scorpion that had stung itself and kept on stinging. “Sure. Yeah. If you choose to put it that way.”

  He smoldered away for a second, waiting for me to criticize or condemn him—to prove once and for all that I did not understand. When I said nothing, he whirled around again and moved closer to the wall of paintings. For a monent, I thought that he was going to rip one of them off the wall and tear it to shreds in his hands. Instead, he thrust his hands into his pockets, turned away from the paintings, and marched toward the fireplace.

  I got a single burning glance. “Do you know what my life has been like? Can you even begin to imagine my life? Those two people—” He got to the fireplace and whirled to face me again. His face was stretched tight with the sheer force of his emotions. “The fabulous Brookners. You know what they did to me? They put me in a box and nailed it shut. They rammed me into a coffin. And then they jumped up on the lid, just to make sure I’d never get out. They had a high old time, up on top of my coffin. Do you even begin to imagine that those two people knew anything about decency? About respect? About honor? They turned me into a babysitter.”

  “Decency,” I said. “Respect. Honor.”

  “That’s right. Am I making sense to you? Do you begin to get the point?”

  “In a way,” I said, wondering if he were going to make another rush at me. “I can see how you’d feel like Alan’s babysitter.”

  “Oh, first I was April’s. In those days, I was just Alan’s little flunky. Later, I got to be his babysitter, and by then my wonderful wife was jumping into bed with that sleazy kid.”

  “Which was indecent,” I said. “Unlike luring your own graduate student into a brick alley and tearing him to pieces.”

  John’s face darkened, and he stepped forward and kicked at one of the wooden legs of the coffee table. The leg split in half, and the table canted over toward him, spilling books onto the floor. John smiled down at the mess, clearly contemplating giving the books a separate kick of their own, and then changed his mind and moved to the mantelpiece. He gave me a look of utter triumph and utter bitterness, picked up the bronze plaque, raised it over his head, and slammed it down onto the edge of the mantel. A chunk of veiny pink marble dropped to the floor, leaving a ragged, chewed-looking gap in the mantel. Breathing hard, John gripped the plaque and looked around his living room for a target. Finally, he picked out the tall lamp near the entrance, cocked back his right arm, and hurled the plaque at the lamp. It sailed past the lamp and clattered against the wall, where it left a dark smudge and a dent before dropping to the floor.

  “Get out of my house.”

  “I want to say one more thing, John.”

  “I can’t wait.” He was still breathing hard, and his eyes looked as if they had stretched and lengthened in his skull.

  “No matter what you say, we used to be friends. You had a quality I liked a lot—you took risks because you believed that they might bring you to some absolutely new experience. But you lost the best part of yourself. You betrayed everything and everybody important to you for enough money to buy a completely pointless life. I think you sold yourself out so that you could keep up the kind of life your parents always had, and you have scorn even for them. The funny thing is, there’s still enough of the old you left alive to make you drink yourself to death. Or destroy yourself in some quicker, bloodier way.”

  He grimaced and looked away, balling his hands. “It’s easy to make judgments when you don’t know anything.”

  “In your case,” I said, “there isn’t all that much to know.”

  He stood hunched into himself like a zoo animal, and I stood up and walked away. The at
mosphere in the house was as rank as a bear’s cage. I got to the front door and opened it without looking back. I heard him get to his feet and move toward the kitchen and his freezer. I closed the door behind me, shutting John Ransom up in what he had made for himself, and walked out into a sunny world that seemed freshly created.

  5

  TOM WAS SITTING IN FRONT of his computer when I got back to his house, scratching his head and looking back and forth from the screen to a messy pile of newspaper clippings on his desk. Across the room, the copy machine ejected sheet after sheet into five different trays. There was already a foot-high stack of paper in each of the trays. He looked up at me as I leaned into the room. “So you saw John.” It wasn’t a question.

  He nodded—he knew all about John Ransom. He had known the first time John came into his house. “The papers will all be copied in another couple of hours. Will you give me a hand writing the note and wrapping the parcels?”

  “Sure,” I said. “What are you doing now?”

  “Messing around with a little murder in Westport, Connecticut.”

  “Play on,” I said. “I have to get some sleep.”

  Two hours later, I yawned myself back downstairs and used the office telephone to book my return flight to New York while the last of the sheets pumped out of the copy machine.

  Tom swiveled his chair toward me. “What should we say in the letter that goes along with the papers?”

  “As little as possible.”

  “Right,” Tom said, and clicked to a fresh screen.

  I thought you should see this copy of the bundle of papers I found in the garbage can behind my store yesterday evening. Four other people are also getting copies. The originals are destroyed, as they smelled bad. The man who wrote these pages claims to have killed lots of people. Even worse, he makes it clear that he is a police officer here in town. I hope you can put him away for good. Under the circumstances, I choose to remain anonymous.

  “A little fancy,” I said.

  “I never claimed to be a writer.” Tom set the machine to print out five copies and then went down to his kitchen and returned with big sheets of butcher’s paper and a ball of string. We tied up each of the stacks of copied papers, wrapped them in two sheets of the thick brown paper, and tied them up again. We printed the names and working addresses of Isobel Archer, Chief Harold Green, and Geoffrey Bough on three packages. On the fourth, Tom printed BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE UNIT, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, QUANTICO, VIRGINIA.

  “What about the fifth one?” I asked.

  “That’s for you, if you want it. I’d like to keep the originals.”

  I printed my own name and address on the final parcel.

  Millhaven’s central post office looks like an old railroad station, with a fifty-foot ceiling and marble floors and twenty windows in a row like the ticket booths at Grand Central. I took two of the fat parcels up to one of them, and Tom carried two shopping bags with the others to the window beside mine. The man behind the counter asked if I was really sure I wanted to mail these monsters. I wanted to mail them. What were they, anyhow? Documents. Did I want the printed matter rate? “Send them first class,” I said. He hoisted them one by one onto his scale and told me my total was fifty-six dollars and twenty-seven cents. And I was a damn fool, his manner said. When Tom and I left, the clerks were passing long spools of stamps across the wet pads on their counters.

  We went back out into the heat. The Jaguar sat at a meter down a long length of marble steps. I asked Tom if he would mind taking me somewhere to see an old friend.

  “As long as you introduce me to him,” Tom said.

  6

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK, we were sitting downstairs in the enormous room in front of a television set Tom had wheeled out of the apparent chaos of file cabinets and office furniture. I was holding a glass of cold Ginseng-Up, three bottles of which I had discovered in Tom’s refrigerator. I liked Ginseng-Up. You don’t often find a drink that tastes like fried dust.

  Alan Brookner had gained back nearly all of his weight, he was clean-shaven and dressed in a houndstooth jacket with a rakish ascot, his gold cufflinks were in place, and he’d had a haircut. I introduced him to Tom Pasmore, and he introduced us to Sylvia, Alice, and Flora. Sylvia, Alice, and Flora were widows in their late seventies or early eighties, and they looked as if they’d spent the past forty of those years shuttling between the hairdressing salon, yoga classes, and the spa where they had facials and herbal wraps. Because none of them wanted to leave either of the others alone with Alan, they left together.

  “I have to hand it to John,” Alan had said. “He found a place where I have to work to be lonely.” His voice carried across Golden Manor’s vast, carpeted lounge, but none of the white-haired people having tea and cucumber sandwiches in the other chairs turned their heads. They were already used to him.

  “It’s a beautiful place,” I said.

  “Are you kidding? It’s gorgeous,” Alan boomed. “If I’d known about this setup, I would have moved in years ago. I even got Eliza Morgan an administrative job on the staff here—those girls are all jealous of her.” He lowered his voice. “Eliza and I have lunch together every day.”

  “Do you see much of John?”

  “He came twice. That’s all right. I make him uncomfortable. And he didn’t appreciate what I did after I came to my senses, or whatever is still left of my senses. So he doesn’t waste time on me, and that’s fine. I mean it, it’s hunky-dory. John is a little childish sometimes, and he has the rest of his life to think about.”

  Tom asked him what he had done.

  “Well, after I got acclimated here, I put my finances back in the hands of my lawyer. You have to be a man my age to understand my needs—you might not know this, but John has a tendency to get a little wild, to take risks, and all I want is a good income on my money. So I replaced him as my trustee, and I think he resented that.”

  “I think you did the right thing,” I said, and Alan’s dark, icy eyes met mine.

  Tom excused himself to go to the bathroom.

  “I think about John from time to time,” Alan said, lowering his voice again. “I wonder if he and April would have stayed married. I wonder about who he really is.”

  I nodded.

  “Alan, there will probably be something on the news tonight that relates to April’s death. That’s all I can say. But it’s likely to wind up being a big story.”

  “About time,” Alan said.

  I sipped my Ginseng-Up. Jimbo took off his glasses and looked out through the screen like Daddy bringing home news about a layoff at the plant. He informed us that a distinguished homicide detective had been found dead this morning in circumstances suggesting that the recent upheavals in the Millhaven police department may not be over. Suicide could not be ruled out. Now to Isobel Archer, with the rest of the story.

  Isobel stood up in front of the cordoned-off Beldame Oriental and told us that an anonymous tip about a gunshot had brought her here, to an abandoned theater near the site of the murders of April Ransom and Grant Hoffman, where she had persuaded the Reverend Clarence Edwards, the clergyman who rented the theater for Sunday services of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, to look inside. In the basement she had discovered the body of Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan, dead of what appeared to be a single gunshot wound to the head. Beside Sergeant Hogan’s body had been written the words BLUE ROSE.

  What she said next made me want to stand up and cheer.

  “This matter is now under intensive investigation by the Millhaven Police Department, but older residents of the city will note the chilling similarities between this scene and the 1950 death of Detective William Damrosch, recently exonerated in the Blue Rose murders of that year. Perhaps this time, forty years will not have to pass before the truth is known.”

  Tom turned to me. “Well, I’ll keep you in touch, of course, but I bet you’ll be able to read all about it in The New York Times.”

  “Here’s to Isobel
,” I said, and we clinked glasses.

  Long after the news was over, we went out to dinner at a good Serbian restaurant on the South Side—an unpretentious place with checked tablecloths, low lighting, and friendly, solicitous waiters, all of them brothers and cousins, who knew Tom and took a clear, quiet pride in the wonderful food their fathers and uncles prepared in the kitchen. I ate until I thought I’d burst, and I told Tom about the letter I was going to write. He asked me to send him a copy of the reply, if I ever got one. I promised that I would.

  And when we got back to his house, Tom said, “I know what we should put on,” and got up to pluck from the shelf a new recording of A Village Romeo and Juliet conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras. The music took us on the long walk to the Paradise Gardens. Where the echoes dare to wander, shall we two not dare to go?

  At two o’clock, midday for Tom, we said good night and went to our separate rooms, and before noon the next day, after another long session of cathartic talk, we embraced and said our good-byes at Millhaven Airport. Before I went through the metal detector and walked to my gate, I watched him walk easily, almost athletically, away down the long corridor, knowing that there was nowhere he would not dare to go.

  PART

  EIGHTEEN

  THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

  1

  IRETURNED TO MY LIFE, the life I remembered. I worked on my book, saw my friends, took long walks that filled my notebook, read and listened to lots of music. I wrote and mailed the letter I had been thinking about, never really expecting a reply. I had been gone so short a time that only Maggie Lah had even noticed that I had been away, but Vinh and Michael Poole knew that my old habits, those that spoke of peace and stability, had returned, and that I no longer paced and churned out pages all through the night. Intuitive Maggie said, “You were in a dark place, and you learned something there.” Yes, I said, that’s right. That’s just what happened. She put her arms around me before leaving me to my book.