The Throat (99 page)

"I
told
you
that," John said.

"You didn't
think the VC had killed them. You thought Bachelor had done it. And
when you saw Bullock's ghost, you were positive. You were where you
thought he was all the time —you were at the point where you could see
through the world."

"That's where
I was," he said. "But I don't think that you've ever been there."

"Maybe not,
John. But the important thing is that you felt betrayed—and you were
right. So you wanted to do what you thought Bachelor would do."

"You better
know what you're talking about," John said. "You better not be throwing
out guesses."

"Bachelor had
already escaped by the time you got there. So you burned his camp to
the ground. Then you systematically killed everyone who had been left
behind, all of Bachelor's followers who were too young, too old, or too
feeble to go with him. How did you do it? One an hour, one every two
hours? At the end, you killed his child—put him on the ground and cut
him in half with your bayonet. Then you killed his wife. At the end,
you hacked her up and put her in the communal pot and ate some of her
flesh. You even cleaned her skull. You were
being
Bachelor, weren't
you?"

He glowered
at me, working his jaws. I saw that held-down anger surge into his
eyes, but this time he did not try to conceal it. "You don't really
have the right to talk about this, you know. It
doesn't
belong to you.
It belongs to people like
us
."

"But I'm not
wrong, am I?"

"That's not
really relevant," John said. "Nothing you say is really relevant."

"But it isn't
wrong," I said.

John threw up
his hands. "Look, even if all this happened, which no one in the normal
world would believe, because they could not even
begin
to comprehend
it, it just gives Bachelor more reason to want revenge on
me
."

"Bachelor
never worked that way," I said. "He couldn't. You were right about
him—he was always across the border, and every human concern but
survival was meaningless to him. After Lang Vo, he went through three
or four different identities. By the time he spent twelve years calling
himself Michael Hogan, all he cared about Franklin Bachelor was that
the world should keep thinking he was dead."

"What you're
saying just proves that
he killed my
wife
. If you don't see that, I
can't even talk to you."

"He didn't
kill her," I said. "He beat her up. Or he had Billy Ritz beat her up.
It amounts to the same thing."

"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 atmosphere 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.

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 usedthe 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.

"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.