The Throat (62 page)

"Exactly," I
said. "That asshole, Bob Bandolier."

"I met him a
couple of times when I was a little boy. The guy was completely phony.
You know how when you're a kid you can sometimes see things really
clearly? I was in my father's office, and a guy with a waxy little
mustache and slicked-down hair comes in. Meet the most important man in
this hotel, my father says to me.
I
just do my job, young man
, he says
to me— and I can see that he does think he's the most important man in
the hotel. He thinks my father's a fool."

"All killers
can't be as congenial as Walter Dragonette."

"
That
guy,"
John said again. "Anyhow, you were brilliant, coming up with that
sister."

"I was
telling them the truth. He murdered my sister first."

"And you
never told me?"

"John, it
just never—"

He muttered
something and moved away from me to lean against the door, indications
that he was about to descend into the same wrathful silence of the
journey out to the suburbs.

"Why should
you be upset?" I asked. "I came here from New York to help you with a
problem—"

"No. You came
here to help yourself. You can't concentrate on the problems of another
person for longer than five seconds, unless you have some personal
interest in the matter. What you're doing has nothing to do with me.
It's all about that book you're writing."

I waited
until my impatience with him died down. "I suppose I should have told
you about my sister when you first called. I wasn't hiding it from you,
John. Even I couldn't really be sure that the man who had killed her
had done the other murders."

"And now you
know."

"Now I know,"
I said, and felt a return of that enormous relief, the satisfaction of
being able to put down a weight I had carried for four decades.

"So you're
done, and you might as well go back home."

He flicked
his eyes in my direction before looking expressionlessly out the car
window again.

"I want to
know who killed your wife. And I think it might be safer if I stay with
you for a while."

He shrugged.
"What are you going to do, be my bodyguard?"

"I don't
think anybody is going to try to take me to the Green Woman and tie me
up in a chair. I can protect myself from Bob Bandolier. I know what he
looks like, remember?"

"I'd like to
see what else I can turn up," I said.

"I guess
you're pretty much free to do whatever you want."

"Then I'd
like to use your car this evening."

"For what? A
date with that gray-haired crumpet?"

"I ought to
talk to Glenroy Breakstone again."

"You sure
don't mind wasting your time," he said, and that was how we left it for
the rest of the drive back to Ely Place.

John pulled
the Colt out from under the seat and took it into the house with him.

I made a
right turn at the next corner, went past Alan's house, and saw him
walking up the path to his front door beside Eliza Morgan. It was
getting a little cooler by now, and she must have taken him for a walk
around the block. He was waving one arm in big circles, describing
something, and I could hear the boom of his voice without being able to
distinguish the words. They never noticed the Pontiac going down the
street behind them. I turned right again at the next corner and went
back
to Berlin Avenue to go back downtown to the east-west expressway.

Before I saw
Glenroy I wanted to fulfill an obligation I had remembered in the midst
of the quarrel with John.

At the time I
had spoken to Byron Dorian, my motive for suggesting a meeting had been
no more than my sense that he needed to talk; now I actively wanted to
talk to him. The scale of what April Ransom had been trying to do in
The Bridge Project had given me a jolt. She was discovering her
subject, watching it unfold, as she rode out farther and farther on her
instincts. She was really writing, and that the conditions of her life
meant that she had to do this virtually in secret, like a Millhaven
Emily Dickinson, made the effort all the more moving. I wanted to honor
that effort—to honor the woman sitting at the table with her papers and
her fountain pen.

Alan Brookner
had been so frustrated by his inability to read April's manuscript that
he had tried to flush thirty or forty pages down the toilet, but what
was left was enough to justify a trip to Varney Street.

I had been
relying on my memory to get me there, but once I turned off the
expressway, I realized that I had only a general idea of its location,
which was past Pine Knoll Cemetery, south of the stadium. I drove past
the empty stadium and then the cemetery gates, checking the names on
the street signs. One Saturday a year or two after my sister's death,
my father had taken me out to Varney Street to buy a metal detector he
had seen advertised in the
Ledger
—he
was between jobs, still drinking
heavily, and he thought that if he swept a metal detector over the east
side beaches, he could find a fortune. Rich people didn't bother
picking up the quarters and half dollars that dropped out of their
pockets. It was all lying there to be picked up by a clever
entrepreneur like Al Underhill. He had steered his car to Varney Street
unhesitatingly—we had gone past Pine Knoll, made a turn, perhaps
another. I remembered a block of shops with signs in a foreign language
and overweight women dressed in black.

Varney Street
itself I remembered as one of the few Millhaven neighborhoods a step
down from Pigtown, a stretch of shabby houses with flat wooden fronts
and narrow attached garages. My father had left me in the car, entered
one of the houses, and come out twenty minutes later, gloating over the
worthless machine.

I turned a
corner at random, drove three blocks while checking the street signs,
and found myself in the same neighborhood of little shops I had first
seen with my father. Now all the signs were in English. Spools of
thread in pyramids and scissors suspended on lengths of string filled
the dusty window of a shop called Lulu's Notions. The only people in
sight were on a bench in the laundromat beside it. I pulled into an
empty place behind a pickup truck, put a quarter in the meter, and went
into the laundromat. A young woman in cutoff shorts and a Banana
Republic T-shirt went up to the plate-glass window and pointed through
houses at the next street down.

I went to the
back of the laundromat, took the paper on which I had written Dorian's
phone number and address from my wallet, and dialed the number.

"You're who?"
he asked.

I told him my
name again. "We spoke on the phone once when you called the Ransom
house. I'm the person who told you that she had died."

"Oh. I
remember talking to you."

"You said I
might come to your place to talk about April Ransom."

"I don't
know… I'm working, well, I'm sort of trying to work…"

"I'm just
around the corner, at the laundromat."

"Well, I
guess you could come over. It's the third house from the corner, the
one with the red door."

The
dark-haired, pale young man I had seen at April's funeral cracked open
the vermillion door in the little brown house and leaned out, gave me a
quick, nervous glance, and then looked up and down the block. He was
dressed in a black T-shirt and faded black jeans. He pulled himself
back inside. "You're a friend of John Ransom's, aren't you? I saw you
with him at the funeral."

"I saw you
there, too."

He licked his
lips. He had fine blue eyes and a handsome mouth. "Look, you didn't
come here to make trouble or anything, did you? I'm not sure I
understand what you're doing."

"I want to
talk about April Ransom," I said. "I'm a writer, and I've been reading
her manuscript, 'The Bridge Project.' It was going to be a wonderful
book."

"I guess you
might as well come in." He backed away.

What had been
the front room was a studio with drop cloths on the floor, tubes of
paint and a lot of brushes in cans strewn over a paint-spattered table,
and a low daybed. At its head, large, unframed canvases were stacked
back to front against the wall, showing the big staples that fastened
the fabric to the stretchers; others hung in an uneven row along the
opposite wall. An opening on the far side of the room led into a dark
kitchen. Tan drop cloths covered the two windows at the front of the
house, and a smaller cloth that looked like a towel had been nailed up
over the kitchen window. A bare light bulb burned on a cord in the
middle of the room. Directly beneath it, a long canvas stood on an
easel.

"Where did
you find her manuscript? Did John have it?"

"It was at
her father's house. She used to work on it there."

Dorian moved
to the table and began wiping a brush with a limp cloth. "That makes
sense. You want some coffee?"

"That would
be nice."

He went into
the kitchen to pour water into an old-fashioned metal percolator, and I
walked around the room, looking at his paintings.

Nothing like
the nudes in the Ransoms' bedroom, they resembled a collaboration
between Francis Bacon and panels from a modernist graphic novel. In all
of the paintings, dark forms and figures, sometimes slashed with white
or brilliant red, moved forward out of a darker background. Then a
detail jumped out at me from the paintings, and I grunted with
surprise. A small, pale blue rose appeared in each of the paintings: in
the buttonhole of the suit worn by a screaming man, floating in the air
above a bloody corpse and a kneeling man, on the cover of a notebook
lying on a desk beside a slumped body, in the mirror of a crowded bar
where a man in a raincoat turned a distorted face toward the viewer.
The paintings seemed like responses to April's manuscript, or visual
parallels to it.

"Sugar?"
Dorian called from the kitchen. "Milk?" I realized that I had not eaten
all day, and asked for both. He came out of the kitchen and gave me, a
cup filled to the top with sweet white coffee. He turned to look at the
paintings with me and raised his cup to his lips. When he lowered the
cup, he said, "I've spent so much time with this work, I hardly know
what it looks like anymore. What do you think?"

"They're very
good," I said. "When did you change your style?"

"In art
school, this was at Yale, I was interested in abstraction, even though
no one else was, and I started getting into that flat, outlined,
Japanese-y Nabi kind of work right around the time I graduated. To me,
it was a natural outgrowth of what I was doing, but everybody hated
it." He smiled at me. "I knew I wouldn't have a chance in New York, so
I came back here to Millhaven, where you can live a lot cheaper."

"John said
that a gallery owner gave your name to April." He looked away abruptly,
as if this was an embarrassing subject. "Yeah, Carol Judd, she has a
little gallery downtown. Carol knew my work because I took my slides in
when I first got back. Carol always liked me, and we used to talk about
my having a show there sometime." He smiled again, but not at me, and
the smile faded back into his usual earnestness when I asked another
question.

"So that was
how you first met April Ransom?" He nodded, and his eyes drifted over
the row of paintings. "Uh huh. She understood what I was after." He
paused for a second. "There was a kind of appreciation between us right
from the start. We talked about what she wanted, and she decided that
instead of buying any of the work I'd already done, she would
commission two big paintings. So that's how I got to know her."

He took his
eyes off the paintings, set his cup on the table covered with paints
and brushes, and swung around a sway-backed chair in front of the easel
so that it faced the bed. Two tapestry cushions were wedged into the
tilted back support. When I sat down, the cushions met my back in all
the right places.

Dorian sat on
the camp bed. Looking at his paintings had comforted him, and he seemed
more relaxed.

"You must
have spent a lot of time talking with her," I said.

"It was
wonderful. Sometimes, if John was out of town or teaching late, she'd
invite me to her house so I could just sit in front of all those
paintings she had."

"Didn't she
want you to meet John?"

He pursed his
lips and narrowed his eyes, as if he were working out a problem. "Well,
I did meet John, of course. I went there for dinner twice, and the
first time was all right, John was polite and the conversation was
fine, but the second time I went, he barely spoke to me. It seemed like
their paintings were just possessions for him—like sports cars, or
something."

I had the
nasty feeling that, for John, having Byron Dorian around the house
would have been something like an insult. He was young and almost
absurdly good-looking while appearing to be entirely without
vanity—John would have accepted him more easily if his looks had been
undermined by obvious self-regard.

Then
something else occurred to me, something I should have understood as
soon as I saw the paintings on the walls.

"You're the
one who got April interested in the Blue Rose case," I said. "You were
the person who first told her about William Damrosch."

He actually
blushed.

"That's what
all these paintings are about—Damrosch."

His eyes flew
to the paintings again. This time, they could not comfort him. He
looked too anguished to speak.

"The boy in
the Vuillard painting reminded you of Damrosch, and you told her about
him," I said. "That doesn't make you responsible for her death."

This
sentence, intended to be helpful, had the opposite effect.