The Throat (26 page)

"Christ wouldn't have
dropped the ball," I said, mystifying the other men.

"Jesus stands facing the
goalposts," Bastian said. He was looking upward, holding one hand on
his heart and pointing toward an invisible horizon with the other.

"In his heart is a powerful
will to win. He knows the odds are against him, but he also knows that
at the end of the day, victory will be his." I knew this even better
than Bastian, having had to listen to it day after day for three years.

"Righteousness is a—is a
what?" Bastian looked straight up at the fluorescent lights.

"Righteousness is a mighty—"

"
A mighty fire!
"
Bastian yelled, sounding a lot more like Mr.
Schoonhaven than I did. He was still pointing at the distant goalposts
with his hand clamped to his heart.

"That was it," I said. "It
came with hamburgers and Hawaiian Punch."

"Well, now that we're
prepared," Fontaine said. "Bastian, get Dragonette out of the cell and
put him in Number One. The rest of you who are coming, let's move,
okay?"

At last I understood that he
had not been trying to leave me behind when he came sprinting into the
building. In spite of his exhaustion, he had been excited by the
upcoming interrogation. His urgency was the expression of an intense
desire to get into that room.

He moved toward the door,
and the black detective and the big man with the energetic mustache
stood up to follow. Bastian left the room through a side door and went
down the long corridor I had briefly glimpsed.

The rest of us began moving
down toward the front of the building. The hallway was slightly cooler
than the squad room. "First things first," Fontaine said, and ducked
into a room with an open door. Tube lighting fell on two formica-topped
tables and a number of assorted chairs. Three men drinking coffee at
one of the tables looked up at Fontaine. "You were at the hospital?"
one of them asked.

"Just got back." Fontaine
went up to one of two coffee machines, took a thick paper cup off a
stack, and poured hot black coffee into it.

"How's Mangelotti?"

"We could lose him." He
sipped from the coffee. I poured for myself.

On the side wall of the
coffee room hung a big rectangle of white paper covered with names
written in red or black marker. It was divided into three sections,
corresponding to the three homicide shifts. Lieutenant Ross McCandless
commanded the first shift. Michael Hogan and William Greider were his
detective sergeants. From the list of names written in black and red
marker beneath Hogan's,
April
Ransom
jumped out at me. It
was written
in red marker.

The other two detectives
helped themselves to coffee and introduced themselves. The black
detective was named Wheeler, the big man Monroe. "You know what bugs me
about those people out in front?" Monroe asked me. "If they had any
sense, they'd be cheering because we got this guy behind bars."

"You mean you want
gratitude?" Fontaine drew another cup of coffee and led the three of us
out of the lounge. Over his shoulder, he said, "I'll tell you one good
thing, anyhow. There's going to be a mile of black ink on the board in
a couple of hours."

On the other side of the
lounge we entered the new part of the building. The floor was gray
linoleum and the walls were pale blue with clear glass windows. The air
conditioning worked, and the corridor felt almost cool. The three of us
rounded a corner, and John Ransom looked up from a plastic chair pushed
against one of the blue walls. He looked no more rested than Fontaine.
John was wearing khaki pants and a white dress shirt, and he had
obviously showered and shaved just before or after he had learned that
his wife had been murdered. He looked like a half-empty sack. I
wondered how long he had been sitting by himself.

"God, Tim, I'm glad you're
here," he said, jumping up. "So you know? They told you?"

"Detective
Fontaine told me what happened." I did not want to tell him that I had
seen April's body being taken from her room. "John, I'm so sorry."

Ransom held up his
hands as if to capture something. "It's unbelievable. She was getting
better—this guy, this monster, found out she was getting better—"

Fontaine stepped
before him. "We're going to let you and your friend observe a portion
of my interrogation. Do you still want to do it?"

Ransom nodded.

"Then let me show you where
you'll be sitting. Want any coffee?"

Ransom shook his head, and
Fontaine took us past the glass wall of a vast darkened room where a
few people sat smoking as they waited to be questioned.

He nodded for Wheeler to
open a blond wooden door. Six or seven feet down the corridor an
identical door bore a dark blue plaque with the white numeral 1 at its
center. Fontaine waved me in first, and I stepped into a dark chamber
furnished with six chairs at a wooden table. In front of the table, a
window looked into a larger, brighter room where a slim young man in a
white T-shirt sat at a slight angle to a gray metal table. He was
sliding a red aluminum ashtray aimlessly back and forth across the
table. His face was without any expression at all.

I sat down in the last
chair, and Detective Wheeler entered and took the chair beside me. John
Ransom followed him. He made an involuntary grunt when he saw Walter
Dragonette, and then he sat down beside the black detective. Monroe
stepped inside and sat down on the other side of Ransom. Everything had
been choreographed so that a couple of detectives would be able to
restrain Ransom, if it turned out to be necessary.

Fontaine stepped inside.
"Dragonette can't see or hear you, but please don't make any loud
noises or touch the glass. All right?"

"Yes," Ransom said.

"I'll come back when the
first part of the interrogation is over."

He stepped outside, and
Wheeler stood up and closed the door. Walter Dragonette looked like a
man killing time in an airport. Every now and then he smiled at the
ting-ting-ting
of the flimsy
ashtray as he tapped it against the table.
A key turned in the door behind him, and he stopped toying with the
ashtray to look over his shoulder.

A uniformed officer let in
Paul Fontaine. He held a file clamped under his arm and a container of
coffee in each hand.

"Hello, Walter," Fontaine
said.

"Hi! I remember you from
this morning." Walter sat up straight and folded his hands together on
the table. He twisted to watch Fontaine go to the end of the table. "Do
we finally get to talk now?"

"That's right," Fontaine
said. "I brought you some coffee."

"Oh thanks, but I don't
drink coffee." Dragonette gave his torso a curious little shake.

"Whatever you say." Fontaine
removed the plastic top from one container and dropped it into a
wastebasket. "Sure you won't change your mind?"

"Caffeine's bad for you,"
said Dragonette.

"Smoke?" Fontaine placed a
nearly full packet of Marlboros on the table.

"No, but it's fine with me
if you want to."

Fontaine raised his eyebrows
and tapped a cigarette from the pack.

"I just want to say one
thing right at the start of this," said Dragonette.

Fontaine lit the cigarette
with a match and blew out smoke, extinguishing the match and quieting
Dragonette with a wave of the hand. "You will be able to say everything
you want to, Walter, but first we have to take care of some details."

"I'm sorry."

"That's all right, Walter.
Please give me your name, address, and date of birth."

"My name is Walter Donald
Dragonette, and my address is 3421 North Twentieth Street, where I have
resided all of my life since being born on September 20, 1965."

"And you have waived the
presence of an attorney."

"I'll get a lawyer later. I
want to talk to you first."

"The only other thing I have
to say is that this conversation is being videotaped so that we can
refer to it later."

"Oh, that's a good idea."
Dragonette looked up at the ceiling, and then over his shoulder, and
grinned and pointed at us. "I get it! The camera's behind that mirror,
isn't it?"

"No, it isn't," Fontaine
said.

"Is it on now? And are you
sure it's working?"

"It's on now," Fontaine said.

"So now we can start?"

"We're starting right now,"
Fontaine said.

The following is a record of
the conversation that followed.

    
WD
: Okay. I have one
thing I want to say right away, because it's important that you know
about this. I was sexually abused when I was just a little boy, seven
years old. The man who did it was a neighbor down the street, and his
name was Mr. Lancer. I don't know his first name. He moved away the
year after that. But he used to invite me into his house, and then
he'd, you know, he'd do things to me. I hated it. Anyhow, I've been
thinking about things, about why I'm here and all, and I think that's
the whole explanation for everything, right there, Mr. Lancer.

PF
: Did you
ever tell anyone about Mr. Lancer? Did you ever tell your mother?

WD
: How could
I? I hardly even know how to describe it to myself! And besides that, I
didn't think my mother would believe me. Because she liked Mr. Lancer.
He helped keep up the tone of the neighborhood. Do you know what he
was? He was a photographer, and he took baby pictures, and pictures of
children. You bet he did. He took pictures of me without my clothes on.

PF
: Is that
all he did?

WD
: Oh, no.
Didn't I say he abused me? Well, that's what he did. Sexually. That's
the really important part. He made me play with him. With his, you
know, his thing. I had to put it in my mouth and everything, and he
took pictures. I wonder if those pictures are in magazines.
He
had
magazines with pictures of little boys.

PF
: You took
pictures, didn't you, Walter?

WD:
Did you
see them? The ones in the envelope?

PF
: Yes.

WD
: Well, now
you know why I took them.

PF
: Was that
the only reason you took pictures?

WD
: I don't
know. I sort of had to do that. It's important to remember things, it's
very important. And then there was one other reason.

PF:
What was
it?

WD
: Well, I
could use them to decide what I was going to eat. When I got home from
work. That's why I sometimes called the pictures, the envelope of
pictures, the "menu." Because it was like a list of what I had. I was
always going to get the pictures organized into a nice scrapbook, with
the names and everything, but you got me before I got around to it.
That's okay, though. I'm not mad or anything. It was really just having
the pictures, really, not putting them in a book.

PF
: And help
you pick out what you were going to eat.

WD
: It was
the menu. Like those restaurants that have pictures of the food. And
besides, you can wander down Memory Lane, and have those experiences
again. But even after you sort of used up the picture, it's still a
trophy—like an animal head you put on a wall. Because a long time ago,
I figured out that that's what I was, a hunter. A predator. Believe me,
I wouldn't have chosen it, there's a lot of work involved, and you have
to have incredible secrecy, but it chose me and there it was. You can't
go back, you know.

PF
: Tell me
about when you figured out that you were a predator. And I want to hear
about how you got interested in the old Blue Rose murders.

WD
: Oh. Well,
the first thing was, I read this book called
The Divided Man
, and it
was about this screwed-up cop who found out that he killed people and
then he killed himself. The book was about Millhaven! I knew all the
streets! That was really interesting to me, especially after my mother
told me that the whole thing was real. So I learned from her that there
used to be this man who killed people and wrote blue rose on the wall,
or whatever, near the bodies. Only it wasn't the policeman.

PF:
It wasn't?

WD
: Couldn't
be, never ever. No way. No. Way. That detective in the book, he wasn't
a predator at all. I knew that—I just didn't know what you called it,
yet. But whoever it really was, he was like my real dad. He was like
me, but before me. He hunted them down, and he killed them. Back then,
the only things I killed were animals, just for practice, so I could
see what it was like. Cats and dogs, a lot of cats and dogs. You could
use a knife, and it was pretty easy. The hard part was getting the
skeletons clean. Nobody really knows how much work that is. You really
have to
scrub
, and the smell
can get pretty bad.

PF
: You
thought that the Blue Rose murderer was your father?

WD
: No, I
thought he was my
real
dad.
No matter whether he was my actual father
or not. My mother never told me much about my dad, so he could have
been anybody. But after I read that book and found out how real it was,
I knew I was like that man's real son, because I was like following in
his footsteps.

PF
: And so, a
couple of weeks ago, you decided to copy what he had done?

WD
: You
noticed? I wasn't sure anyone would notice.

PF
: Notice
what?

WD
: You know.
You almost said it.