The Throat (57 page)

I got
nervously out of the car. I did not think denial would do much good
against Sonny. He towered over his patrol car, watching us coldly.

"Hello,
Sonny," I said, and his face hardened. I remembered that Sonny had good
reason to dislike me.

He
looked from me to John and back. "Where is it?" he asked.

John
couldn't help taking a quick look back at the Pontiac.

"You
have it in the car?"

"There's
a reason for everything," John said. "Don't fly off the handle until
you hear our side of the story."

"Get it
for me, please. Sergeant Hogan wants it back today."

John
started walking back to the Pontiac, and as Sonny's last sentence sank
in, his steps became slower. I thought he nearly staggered. "Oh, did I
say it was in the car?" He stopped and turned around.

"What
does Sergeant Hogan want you to give him?" I asked.

Sonny
looked from me to John and back to me. He stood up even straighter. His
chest looked about two axe handles wide. "An old case file. Will you
get it for me, sir, wherever it happens to be?"

"Ah,"
John said. "Yes. You saw it last, didn't you, Tim?"

Sonny
focused on me.

"Wait
right here," I said, and started up the path with John right behind me.
I waited by the door while John fumbled for his key. Sonny crossed his
arms and managed to lean against the patrol car without folding it in
half.

As soon
as we got inside, John let out a whoop of laughter. He was happier than
I had seen him during all the rest of my stay in Millhaven.

"After
that speech about denying everything, you were all set to hand him the
gun."

"Trust
me," he said. "I would have figured something out." We started up the
stairs. "Too bad Hogan didn't wait another couple of hours before
sending Baby Huey over. I wanted to look at the file."

"You
still can," I said. "I made a copy."

John
followed me up to the third floor and stood in the door of his study
while I reached under the couch and pulled out the satchel. I wiped off
some of the dust with my hands and opened the satchel to take out the
thick bundle of the copy. I handed this to John.

He
winked at me. "While I start reading this, why don't you stop off and
see how Alan is doing?"

Sonny
was still leaning against the car with his arms crossed when I closed
the door. His immovability powerfully communicated the message that I
was worth no extra effort. When I held the satchel out toward him, he
uncoiled and took it from me in one motion.

"Thank
Paul Fontaine for me, will you?"

Sonny's
reply consisted of getting into the patrol car and placing the satchel
on the seat beside him. He pushed the key into the ignition.

"In the
long run," I said, "you did everybody a favor by talking to me that
day."

He
regarded me from what seemed a distance of several miles. He didn't
even bother getting me into focus.

"I owe
you one," I said. "I'll pay you back when I can."

The
expression in his eyes changed for something like a nanosecond. Then he
turned the key and whipped the patrol car around into a U-turn and sped
away toward Berlin Avenue.

Talking
softly, Eliza Morgan led me to the living room. "I just got him settled
down with lunch in front of the TV. Channel Four is having a discussion
with the press, and then they're showing live coverage of the march
down Illinois Avenue."

"So
that's where all the reporters went," I said.

"Would
you like some lunch? Mushroom soup and chicken salad sandwich? Oh,
there he goes."

Alan's
voice came booming down the hall. "What the dickens is going on?"

"I'm
starved," I told Eliza. "Lunch sounds wonderful."

I
followed her as far as the living room. Alan was seated on the
chesterfield, threatening to upset the wooden tray on his lap as he
twisted to look at me. A small color television on a wheeled stand
stood in the middle of the room. "Ah, Tim," Alan said. "Good. You don't
want to miss this."

I sat
down, taking care not to upset his tray. Beside the bowl of soup and a
small plate containing the crusts of what had been a sandwich stood a
bud vase with a pink, folded rose. A linen napkin was flattened across
Alan's snowy white shirt and dark red tie. He leaned toward me. "Did
you see that woman? That's Eliza. You can't have her. She's mine."

"I'm
glad you like her."

"Splendid
woman."

I
nodded. Alan leaned back and started on his soup.

Geoffrey
Bough, Isobel Archer, Joe Ruddier, and three reporters I did not
recognize sat at a round table under Jimbo's kindly, now slightly
uncertain gaze.

"—extraordinary
number of brutal murders in a community of this size," Isobel purred,
"and I wonder at the sight of Arden Vass parading himself in front of
television cameras during the funerals of persons whose murders may as
yet be unsolved, despite—"

"Despite
what, get your foot out of your mouth,
"Joe
Ruddier yelled, his red face exploding up from his collar without the
usual buffer provided by the neck.

"—despite
the ridiculous readiness of certain of my colleagues to believe
everything they're told," Isobel smoothly finished.

Eliza
Morgan handed me a tray identical to Alan's, but without a rose. A
delicious odor of fresh mushrooms drifted up from the soup. "There's
more, if you'd like." She crossed in front of me to sit in a chair near
Alan.

Jimbo
was trying to wrestle back control of the panel. Joe Ruddier was
bellowing, "
If you don't like it
here, Miss Archer, try it in Russia,
see how far you get!
"

"I guess
it's interesting to imagine, Isobel," said Geoffrey Bough, but got no
further.

"Oh, we
d all imagine that, if we could!"yelled
Ruddier.

"Miss
Archer," Jimbo desperately interposed, "in the light of the widespread
civic disturbance in our city these days, can you think it is
responsible to bring further criticism against—"

"Exactly!
"Ruddier
bellowed.

"Is it
responsible not to?" Isobel asked.

"I'd
shoot myself right now if I thought it would protect one good cop!"

"What an
interesting concept," Isobel said, with great sweetness. "More to the
point, and for the moment setting aside the two recent Blue Rose
murders, let's consider the murder of Frank Waldo, a local businessman
with an interesting reputation—"

"I'm
afraid you're getting off the subject, Isobel."

"We'll
get 'em and put 'em away! We always do!"

"We
always put somebody away." Isobel turned, grinning Geoffrey Bough into
a smoking ruin with a glance.

"Who?" I
asked. "What was that?"

"Are you
done, Alan?" Eliza asked. She stood up to remove his tray.

"Who did
she say was killed?" I asked.

"A man
named Waldo," Eliza said, returning to the room. "I read about it in
the
Ledger
, one of the back
pages."

"Was he
found dead on Livermore Avenue? Outside a bar called the Idle Hour?"

"I think
they found him at the airport," she said. "Would you like to see the
paper?"

I had
read only as far as the article about the fire in Elm Hill. I said that
I would, yes, and Eliza left the room again to bring me the folded
second section.

The
mutilated body of Francis (Frankie) Waldo, owner and president of the
Idaho Wholesale Meat Co., had been found in the trunk of a Ford Galaxy
located in the long-term parking garage at Millhaven airport at
approximately three o'clock in the morning. An airport employee had
noticed blood dripping from the trunk. According to police sources, Mr.
Waldo was nearing criminal indictment.

I
wondered what Billy Ritz had done to make Waldo look so happy and what
had gone wrong with their arrangement.

"Oh,
Tim, I suppose you'd be interested in that thing April was writing? The
bridge project?"

Alan was
looking at me hopefully. "You know, the history piece about the old
Blue Rose murders?"

"It's
here?" I asked.

Alan
nodded. "April used to work on it in my dining room, off and on. I
guess John hardly let her work on it at home, but she could always tell
him she was coming over here to spend time with the old man."

I
remembered the dust-covered papers on Alan's dining room table.

"I plain
forgot about the whole thing," he said. "That cleaning woman, she must
have thought they were my papers, and she just picked 'em up, dusted
underneath, and put 'em back. Eliza asked me about them yesterday."

"I'll
get them for you, if you like," Eliza said. "Have you had enough to
eat?"

"Yes, it
was wonderful," I said, and lifted the tray and hitched forward.

In
seconds, Eliza returned with a manila folder in her hands.

The
manuscript was not the chronological account of the Blue Rose murders I
had assumed it would be, given my stereotypical preconceptions
concerning the sorts of books likely to be written by stockbrokers.
April Ransom's manuscript was an unclassifiable mix of genres.
The
Bridge Project
was the book's actual title, not merely a
convenient
reference. It was clear that April intended this title to mean that the
book itself was a bridge of sorts—between historical research and
journalism, between event and setting, between herself and the boy in
the painting called
The Juniper Tree
,
between the reader and William
Damrosch. She had taken an epigraph from Hart Crane.

As though a god were
issue of the strings…

April
had begun by examining the history of the Horatio Street bridge. In
1875, one citizen had complained in the columns of the
Ledger
that a
bridge connecting Horatio Street to the west side of the Millhaven
River would carry the infections of crime and disease into healthy
sections of the city. One civic leader referred to the bridge as "That
Ill-Starred Monstrosity which has supplanted an honest Ferryman."
Immediately upon completion, the bridge had been the site of a hideous
crime, the abduction of an infant from a carriage by a wild, ragged
figure on horseback. The man boarded the carriage, snatched the child
from its nurse, and then remounted his horse, which had kept pace. The
kidnapper had spun his mount around and galloped off into the warren of
slums and tenements on the east side of the river. Two days later, an
extensive police search discovered the corpse on a crude altar in the
Green Woman's basement. The abductor was never identified.

April
had uncovered the old local story of the ancient man with battered
white wings discovered in a packing case on the riverbank by a band of
children who had stoned him to death, mocking the creature's terrible,
foreign cries as the stones struck him. I too had run across the story,
but April had located old newspaper accounts of the legend and related
the angel figure to the epidemic of influenza which had killed nearly a
third of the Irish population that lived near the bridge. Nonetheless,
she reported, an individual known only as M. Angel had been listed in
police documents from 1911 as a death, from stoning and had
subsequently been buried in the city's old potter's field (now vanished
beneath a section of the east-west freeway).

The
Green Woman Taproom, originally the ferryman's shanty, made frequent
appearances in the police documents of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Apart from being the scene of the occasional
brawls, stabbings, and shootings not uncommon in rough taverns of the
period, the Green Woman had distinguished itself as the informal
headquarters of the Illuminated Ones, the most vicious gang in the
city's history. The leaders of the Illuminated Ones, said to be the
same men who as children had killed the mysterious M. Angel, organized
robberies and murders throughout Millhaven and were said to have
controlled criminal activity in both Milwaukee and Chicago. In 1914,
the taproom burned down in a suspicious fire, killing three of the five
leaders of the Illuminated Ones. The remaining two appeared to divert
themselves into legal activity, bought vast houses on Eastern Shore
Drive, and became active in Millhaven politics.

It was
from the steps of the rebuilt Green Woman Taproom that a discharged
city clerk shot and wounded Theodore Roosevelt; and the psychotic city
employee who shot at, but failed to hit, Dwight D. Eisenhower, stepped
out from the shadows of the Green Woman when he raised his pistol.

The god
who had issued from these strings, April Ransom implied, spoke most
clearly through the life and death of William Damrosch, originally
named Carlos Rosario. As an infant, he had been carried to the foot of
the Horatio Street bridge by his mother, who had been summoned there by
her murderer.

For
weeks after the discovery of the living baby and the dead woman on the
frozen riverbank beneath the Green Woman, wrote April, the old legend
of the winged man resurfaced, changed now to account for the death of
Carmen Rosario: this time the angel was robust and healthy instead of
weakened by age, his golden hair flowed in the dark February wind, and
he killed instead of being killed.

How did
April know that the old legend had returned? On the second Sunday
following the discovery of the infant, two churches in Millhaven,
Matthias Avenue Methodist and Mt. Horeb Presbyterian, had advertised
sermons entitled, respectively, "The Angel of Death, A Scourge to the
Sinful" and "The Return of Uriel." An editorial in the
Ledger
advised
residents of Millhaven to remember that crimes of violence have human,
not supernatural, origins.