The Throat (35 page)

"You can have a lawyer
present, if you insist."

"Fontaine changed his mind,"
I said. "He went over the tape, and he didn't like that flimsy
confession."

The two detectives did not
bother to answer me. Monroe said, "We'd appreciate your cooperation,
Mr. Ransom."

Ransom turned to me. "Do you
think I should call a lawyer?"

"I would," I said.

"I don't have anything to
worry about." He turned from me to Wheeler and Monroe. "Let's get it
over with."

The three of them stood up,
and, a moment later, so did I.

"Oh, my God," John said. "We
were supposed to see Alan."

The two cops looked back and
forth between us.

"Will you go over there?"
John asked. "Explain everything, and tell him I'll see him as soon as I
can."

"What do you mean, explain
everything?"

"About April," he said.

Monroe smiled slowly.

"Don't you think you ought
to do that yourself?"

"I would if I could," John
said. "Tell him I'll talk to him as soon as I can. It'll be better this
way."

"I doubt that," I said.

He sighed. "Then call him up
and tell him that I had to go in for questioning, but that I'll come
over as soon as I can this afternoon."

I nodded, and the detectives
went outside with John. Geoffrey Bough and his photographer trotted
forward, expectant as puppies. The camera began firing with the
clanking, heavy noise of a round being chambered. When Monroe and
Wheeler assisted Ransom into their car, not neglecting to palm the top
of his head and shoehorn him into the backseat, Bough looked back at
the house and bawled my name. He started running toward me, and I
closed and locked the door.

The bell rang, rang, rang. I
said, "Go away."

"Is Ransom under arrest?"

When I said nothing,
Geoffrey flattened his face against the slit of window beside the door.

Alan Brookner answered after
his telephone had rung for two or three minutes. "Who is this?"

I told him my name. "We had
some drinks in the kitchen."

"I have you now! Good man!
You coming here today?"

"Well, I was going to, but
something came up, and John won't be able to make it for a while."

"What does that mean?" He
coughed loudly, alarmingly, making ripping sounds deep in his chest.
"What about the Bloody Marys?" More terrible coughing followed. "Hang
the Bloody Marys, where's John?"

"The police wanted to talk
to him some more."

"You tell me what happened
to my daughter, young man. I've been fooled with long enough."

A fist began thumping
against the door. Geoffrey Bough was still gaping at the slit window.

"I'll be over as soon as I
can," I said.

"The front door ain't
locked." He hung up.

I went back through the
arch. The telephone began to shrill. The doorbell gonged.

I passed through the kitchen
and stepped out onto Ransom's brown lawn. The hedges met a row of arbor
vitae like Christmas trees. Above them protruded the peaks and gables
of a neighboring roof. A muted babble came from the front of the house.
I crossed the lawn and pushed myself into the gap between the hedge and
the last arbor vitae. The light disappeared, and the lively, pungent
odors of leaves and sap surrounded me in a comfortable pocket of
darkness. Then the tree yielded, and I came out into an empty,
sun-drenched backyard.

I almost laughed out loud. I
could just walk away from it, and I did.

This sense of escape
vanished as soon as I walked up the stone flags that bisected Alan
Brookner's overgrown lawn.

I turned the knob and
stepped inside. A taint of rotting garbage hung in the air like
perfume, along with some other, harsher odor.

"Alan," I called out. "It's
Tim Underhill."

I moved forward over a thick
layer of mail and passed into the sitting room or library, or whatever
it was. The letters John had tossed onto the chesterfield still lay
there, only barely visible in the darkness. The lights were off, and
the heavy curtains had been drawn. The smell of garbage grew stronger,
along with the other stink.

"Alan?"

I groped for a light switch
and felt only bare smooth wall, here and there very slightly gummy.
Something small and black rocketed across the floor and dodged behind a
curtain. A few more plates of half-eaten food lay on the floor.

"Alan!"

A low growl emerged from the
walls. I wondered if Alan Brookner were dying somewhere in the house—if
he'd had a stroke. The enormously selfish thought occurred to me that I
might not have to tell him that his daughter was dead. I went back out
into the corridor.

Dusty papers lay heaped on
the dining room table. It looked like my own worktable back at John's
house. A chair stood at the table before the abandoned work.

"Alan?"

The growl came from farther
down the hallway.

In the kitchen, the smell of
shit was as loud as an explosion. A few pizza boxes had been stacked up
on the kitchen counter. The drawn shades admitted a hovering, faint
illumination that seemed to have no single source. The tops of glasses
and the edges of plates protruded over the lip of the sink. In front of
the stove lay a tangled blanket of bath towels and thinner kitchen
towels. A messy, indistinct mound about a foot high and covered with a
mat of delirious flies lay on top of the towels.

I groaned and held my right
hand to my forehead. I wanted to get out of the house. The stench made
me feel sick and dizzy. Then I heard the growl again and saw that
another being, a being not of my own species, was watching me.

Beneath the kitchen table
crouched a hunched black shape. From it poured a concentrated sense of
rage and pain. Two white eyes moved in the midst of the blackness. I
was standing in front of the Minotaur. The stench of its droppings
swarmed out at me.

"You're in trouble," the
Minotaur rumbled. "I'm an old man, but I'm nobody's pushover."

"I know that," I said.

"Lies drive me crazy.
Crazy
"
He shifted beneath the table, and the cloth fell away from his head. A
white scurf of his whiskers shone out from beneath the table. The
furious eyes floated out toward me. "You are going to tell me the
truth. Now."

"Yes," I said.

"My daughter is dead, isn't
she?"

"Yes."

A jolt like an electric
shock straightened his back and pushed out his chin. "An auto accident?
Something like that?"

"She was murdered," I said.

He tilted his head back, and
the covering slipped to his shoulders. A grimace spread his features
across his face. He looked as if he had been stabbed in the side. In
the same terrible whisper, he asked, "How long ago? Who did it?"

"Alan, wouldn't you like to
come out from under that table?"

He gave me another look of
concentrated rage. I knelt down. The buzzing of the flies suddenly
seemed very loud.

"Tell me how my daughter was
murdered."

"About a week ago, a maid
found her stabbed and beaten in a room at the St. Alwyn Hotel."

Alan let out a terrible
groan.

"Nobody knows who did that
to her. April was taken to Shady Mount, where she remained in a coma
until this Wednesday. She began to show signs of improvement. On
Thursday morning, someone came into her room and killed her."

"She never came out of the
coma?"

"No."

He opened his Minotaur eyes
again. "Has anyone been arrested?"

"There was a false
confession. Come out from under the table, Alan."

Tears glittered in the white
scurf on his cheeks. Fiercely, he shook his head. "Did John think I was
too feeble to hear the truth? Well, I'm not too damn feeble right now,
sonny."

"I can see that," I said.
"Why are you sitting under the kitchen table, Alan?"

"I got confused. I got a
little lost." He glared at me again. "John was supposed to come over. I
was finally going to get the truth out of that damned son-in-law of
mine." He shook his head, and I got the Minotaur eyes again. "So where
is he?"

Even in this terrible
condition, Alan Brookner had a powerful dignity I had only glimpsed
earlier. His grief had momentarily shocked him out of his dementia. I
felt achingly sorry for the old man.

"Two detectives showed up
when we were about to leave. They asked John to come down to the
station for questioning," I said.

"They didn't arrest him."

"No."

He pulled the cloth up
around his shoulders again and held it tight at his neck with one hand.
It looked like a tablecloth. I moved a little closer. My eyes stung as
if I had squirted soap into them.

"I knew she was dead." He
slumped down into himself, and for a moment had the ancient monkey look
I had seen on my first visit. He started shaking his head.

I thought he was about to
disappear back into his tablecloth. "Would you like to come out from
under the table, Alan?"

"Would you like to stop
patronizing me?" His eyes burned out at me, but they were no longer the
Minotaur's eyes. "Okay. Yes. I want to come out from under the table."
He scooted forward and caught his feet in the fabric. Struggling to
free his hands, he tightened the section of cloth across his chest.
Panic flared in his eyes.

I moved nearer and reached
beneath the table. Brookner battled the cloth. "Damn business," he
said. "Thought I'd be safe —got scared."

I found an edge of material
and yanked at it. Brookner shifted a shoulder, and his right arm
flopped out of the cloth. He was holding his revolver. "Got it now," he
said. "You bet. Piece of cake." He wriggled his other shoulder out of
confinement, and the cloth drooped to his waist. I took the gun away
from him and put it on the table. He and I both pulled the length of
fabric away from his legs, and Alan got one knee under him, then the
other, and crawled forward until he was out from under the table. The
tablecloth came with him. Finally, he accepted my hand and levered
himself up on one knee until he could get one foot, covered with a
powder-blue tube sock, beneath him. Then I pulled him upright, and he
got his other foot, in a black tube sock, on the cloth. "There we go,"
he said. "Right as rain." He tottered forward and let me take his
elbow. We shuffled across the kitchen toward a chair. "Old joints
stiffened up," he said. He began gingerly extending his arms and gently
raising his legs. Glittering tears still hung in his whiskers.

"I'll take care of that mess
on the floor," I said.

"Do what you like." The wave
of pain and rage came from him once more. "Is there a funeral? There
damn well better be, because I'm going to it." His face stiffened with
anger and the desire to suppress his tears. The Minotaur eyes flared
again. "Come on, tell me."

"There's a funeral tomorrow.
One o'clock at Trott Brothers. She'll be cremated."

The fierce grimace flattened
his features across his face again. He hid his face behind his knotted
hands and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and wept noisily.
His shirt was gray with dust and black around the rim of the collar. A
sour, unwashed smell came up from him, barely distinguishable in the
reek of feces.

He finally stopped crying
and wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I knew it," he said, looking up at
me. The lids of his eyes were pink and inflamed.

"Yes."

"That's why I wound up
here." He wiped most of the tears out of his silken white whiskers. A
shadow of pain and confusion nearly as terrible as his grief passed
over his face.

"April was going to take
me—there was this place—" The sudden anger melted into grief again, and
his upper body shook with the effort of trying to look ferocious while
he wanted to cry.

"She was going to take you
somewhere?"

He waved his big hands in
the air, dismissing the whole topic.

"What's the reason for
this?" I indicated the buzzing mound on the towels.

"Improvised head. The one
down here got blocked up or something, damn thing's useless, and I
can't always get upstairs. So I laid down a bunch of towels."

"Do you have a shovel
somewhere around the place?"

"Garage, I guess," he said.

I found a flat-bottomed coal
shovel in a corner of a garage tucked away under the oak trees. On the
concrete slab lay a collection of old stains surrounded by an ancient
lawnmower, a long-tined leaf rake, a couple of broken lamps, and a pile
of cardboard boxes. Framed pictures leaned back to front against the
far wall. I bent down for the shovel. A long stripe of fluid still
fresh enough to shine lay on top of the old stains. I touched it with a
forefinger: slick, not quite dry. I sniffed my finger and smelled what
might have been brake fluid.

When I came back into the
kitchen, Alan was leaning against the wall, holding a black garbage
bag. He straightened up and brandished the bag. "I know this looks bad,
but the toilet wouldn't work."

"I'll take a look at it
after we get this mess out of the house."

He held the bag open, and I
began to shovel. Then I tied up the bag and put it inside another bag
before dropping it into the garbage can. While I mopped the floor, Alan
told me twice, in exactly the same words, that he had awakened one
morning during his freshman year at Harvard to discover that his
roommate had died in the next bed. No more than a five-second pause
separated the two accounts.

"Interesting story," I said,
afraid that he was going to tell me the whole thing a third time.

"Have you ever seen death
close up?"

"Yes," I said.

"How'd you come to do that?"

"My first job in Vietnam was
graves registration. We had to check dead soldiers for ID."