The Throat (100 page)

We went back
out into the heat. The Jaguar sat at a meter down a long length of
marble steps. I asked Tom if he would mind taking me somewhere to see
an old friend.

"As long as
you introduce me to him," Tom said.

At five
o'clock, we were sitting downstairs in the enormous room in front of a
television set Tom had wheeled out of the apparent chaos of file
cabinets and office furniture. I was holding a glass of cold
Ginseng-Up, three bottles of which I had discovered in Tom's
refrigerator. I liked Ginseng-Up. You don't often find a drink that
tastes like fried dust.

Alan Brookner
had gained back nearly all of his weight, he was clean-shaven and
dressed in a houndstooth jacket with a rakish ascot, his gold cufflinks
were in place, and he'd had a haircut. I introduced him to Tom Pasmore,
and he introduced us to Sylvia, Alice, and Flora. Sylvia, Alice, and
Flora were widows in their late seventies or early eighties, and they
looked as if they'd spent the past forty of those years shuttling
between the hairdressing salon, yoga classes, and the spa where they
had facials and herbal wraps. Because none of them wanted to leave
either of the others alone with Alan, they left together.

"I have to
hand it to John," Alan had said. "He found a place where I have to work
to be lonely." His voice carried across Golden Manor's vast, carpeted
lounge, but none of the white-haired people having tea and cucumber
sandwiches in the other chairs turned their heads. They were already
used to him.

"It's a
beautiful place," I said.

"Are you
kidding? It's gorgeous," Alan boomed. "If I'd known about this setup, I
would have moved in years ago. I even got Eliza Morgan an
administrative job on the staff here—those girls are all jealous of
her." He lowered his voice. "Eliza and I have lunch together every day."

"Do you see
much of John?"

"He came
twice. That's all right. I make him uncomfortable. And he didn't
appreciate what I did after I came to my senses, or whatever is still
left of my senses. So he doesn't waste time on me, and that's fine. I
mean it, it's hunky-dory. John is a little childish sometimes, and he
has the rest of his life to think about."

Tom asked him
what he had done.

"Well, after
I got acclimated here, I put my finances back in the hands of my
lawyer. You have to be a man my age to understand my needs—you might
not know this, but John has a tendency to get a little wild; to take
risks, and all I want is a good income on my money. So I replaced him
as my trustee, and I think he resented that."

"I think you
did the right thing," I said, and Alan's dark, icy eyes met mine.

Tom excused
himself to go to the bathroom.

"I think
about John from time to time," Alan said, lowering his voice again. "I
wonder if he and April would have stayed married. I wonder about who he
really
is
."

I nodded.

"Alan, there
will probably be something on the news tonight that relates to April's
death. That's all I can say. But it's likely to wind up being a big
story."

"About time,"
Alan said.

I sipped my
Ginseng-Up. Jimbo took off his glasses and looked out through the
screen like Daddy bringing home news about a layoff at the plant. He
informed us that a distinguished homicide detective had been found dead
this morning in circumstances suggesting that the recent upheavals in
the Millhaven police department may not be over. Suicide could not be
ruled out. Now to Isobel Archer, with the rest of the story.

Isobel stood
up in front of the cordoned-off Beldame Oriental and told us that an
anonymous tip about a gunshot had brought her here, to an abandoned
theater near the site of the murders of April Ransom and Grant Hoffman,
where she had persuaded the Reverend Clarence Edwards, the clergyman
who rented the theater for Sunday services of the Congregation of the
Holy Spirit, to look inside. In the basement she had discovered the
body of Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan, dead of what appeared to be a
single gunshot wound to the head. Beside Sergeant Hogan's body had been
written the words
BLUE ROSE
.

What she said
next made me want to stand up and cheer.

"This matter
is now under intensive investigation by the Millhaven Police
Department, but older residents of the city will note the chilling
similarities between this scene and the 1950 death of Detective William
Damrosch, recently exonerated in the Blue Rose murders of that year.
Perhaps this time, forty years will not have to pass before the truth
is known."

Tom turned to
me. "Well, I'll keep you in touch, of course, but I bet you'll be able
to read all about it in
The New York
Times."

"Here's to
Isobel," I said, and we clinked glasses.

Long after
the news was over, we went out to dinner at a good Serbian restaurant
on the South Side—an unpretentious place with checked tablecloths, low
lighting, and friendly, solicitous waiters, all of them brothers and
cousins, who knew Tom and took a clear, quiet pride in the wonderful
food their fathers and uncles prepared in the kitchen. I ate until I
thought I'd burst, and I told Tom about the letter I was going to
write. He asked me to send him a copy of the reply, if I ever got one.
I promised that I would.

And when we
got back to his house, Tom said, "I know what we should put on," and
got up to pluck from the shelf a new recording of
A Village Romeo and
Juliet
conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras. The music took us on
the
long walk to the Paradise Gardens.
Where
the echoes dare to wander,
shall we two not dare to go?

At two
o'clock, midday for Tom, we said good night and went to our separate
rooms, and before noon the next day, after another long session of
cathartic talk, we embraced and said our good-byes at Millhaven
Airport. Before I went through the metal detector and walked to my
gate, I watched him walk easily, almost athletically, away down the
long corridor, knowing that there was nowhere he would not dare to go.

I returned to
my life, the life I remembered. I worked on my book, saw my friends,
took long walks that filled my notebook, read and listened to lots of
music. I wrote and mailed the letter I had been thinking about, never
really expecting a reply. I had been gone so short a time that only
Maggie Lah had even noticed that I had been away, but Vinh and Michael
Poole knew that my old habits, those that spoke of peace and stability,
had returned, and that I no longer paced and churned out pages all
through the night. Intuitive Maggie said, "You were in a dark place,
and you learned something there." Yes, I said, that's right. That's
just what happened. She put her arms around me before leaving me to my
book.

The New York
Times
brought news of the
upheavals in Millhaven. Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan first appeared
on page A6, and within two days had moved to A2. The next day, there
was another story on A2, and then he landed on the front page and
stayed there for a week. Tom Pasmore sent me bundles of the
Ledger
, two
or three issues wrapped up in a parcel the size of a pre-Christmas
Sunday
Times
, and Geoffrey
Bough and a lot of other Millhaven reporters
filled in the details my own newspaper left out. Once the extent of
Hogan's crimes became known, Ross McCandless and several other police
officials retired. Merlin Waterford was forced out of office and
replaced by a liberal Democrat of Norwegian stock who had been a Rhodes
scholar and had a surprisingly good relationship with the
African-American community, largely, I thought, because he had never,
ever said anything even faintly stupid.

Some of the
less lurid portions of Michael Hogan's diarylike notes were printed in
first the
Ledger
, then the
Times.
Then some of what Hannah
Belknap
would call the gooshier sections were printed.
People,
Time,
and
Newsweek
all ran long stories
about Millhaven and Hogan, Hogan and
Walter Dragonette, Hogan and William Damrosch. The FBI announced that
Hogan had murdered fifty-three men and women, in Pensacola, Florida,
where he had been known as Felix Hart, Allerton, Ohio, where he had
been Leonard "Lenny" Valentine, and Millhaven. There were short,
carefully censored stories about his career as Franklin Bachelor.
Demonstrators packed into Armory Place all over again, marches filled
Illinois Avenue, photographs of Hogan's victims filled the newspapers
and magazines. From the cell where he was waiting for his trial, Walter
Dragonette told a reporter that in his experience Detective Sergeant
Hogan had always been a gentleman, and it was time for the healing to
begin.

After a great
deal of legal wrangling, eighteen innocent men were released from the
jails where they had been serving life sentences. Two innocent men in
Florida had already been executed. All eighteen, along with the
families of the two dead men, filed monumental lawsuits against the
police departments responsible for the arrests.

In September,
a consortium of publishers announced that they were bringing out
The
Confessions of Michael Hogan
as a mass-market paperback, profits
to go
to the families of the victims.

In October I
finished the first draft of
The
Kingdom of Heaven
, looked around, and
noticed that the sun still beat down on the Soho sidewalks, the
temperature was still in the high seventies and low eighties, and that
the young market traders, in the restaurants and coffee shops on the
weekends were beginning to look like Jimbo on my last evening in my
hometown. Daddy had come home with ominous news about layoffs. Some of
the young men in the carefully casual clothes were wearing stubbly
three-day beards and chain-smoking unfiltered Camels. I began rewriting
and editing
The Kingdom of Heaven
,
and by early December, when I
finished the book, delivered it to my agent and my publisher, and gave
copies to my friends, the temperatures had fallen only as far as the
mid-forties.

A week later,
I had lunch at Chanterelle with Ann Folger, my editor. No bohemian, Ann
is a crisp, empathic blond woman in her mid-thirties, good company and
a good editor. She had some useful ideas about improving a few sections
of the book, work that I could do in a couple of days.

Happy about
our conversation and fonder than ever of Ann Folger, I walked back to
my loft and dragged out of the closet where I had hidden it my own copy
of
The Confessions of Michael Hogan
—the
parcel with my name and address
on it that Tom Pasmore had mailed, one window away from me in
Millhaven's central post office. It had never been opened. I carried it
downstairs and heaved it into the Saigon dumpster. Then I went back
upstairs and began work on the final revisions.

The next day
was Saturday, and December was still pretending to be mid-October. I
got up late and put on a jacket to go out for breakfast and a walk
before finishing the revisions. Soho doesn't get as relentless about
Christmas as midtown Manhattan, but still I saw a few Santas and
glittery trees sprayed with fake snow in shop windows, and the sound
system in the cafe where I had an almond croissant and two cups of
French Roast coffee was playing a slow-moving baroque ecstasy I
eventually recognized as Corelli's Christmas Concerto. And then I
realized that I was in the cafe where I'd been just before I saw Allen
Stone getting out of his car. That seemed to have happened years, not
months, before—I remembered those weeks when I had written twenty pages
a night, almost three hundred pages altogether, and found that I was
mourning the disappearance of that entranced, magical state. To find it
again, if it could be found without the disturbance that had surrounded
it, I'd have to write another book.

When I got
back to my loft, the telephone started ringing as soon as I pushed the
key into the lock. I opened the door and rushed inside, peeling off my
jacket as I went. The answering machine picked up before I got to the
desk, and I heard Tom Pasmore's voice coming through its speaker. "Hi,
it's me, the Nero Wolfe of Eastern Shore Drive, and I have some mixed
news for you, so—"

I picked up.
"I'm here," I said. "Hello! What's this mixed news? More amazing
developments in Millhaven?"

"Well, we're
having a three-day snowstorm. Counting the wind chill factor, it's
eighteen below here. How is your book coming along?"

"It's done,"
I said. "Why don't you come here and help me celebrate?"

"Maybe I
will. If it ever stops snowing, I could come for the holidays. Do you
mean it?"

"Sure," I
said. "Get out of that icebox and spend a week in sunny New York. I'd
love to see you." I paused, but he did not say anything, and I felt a
premonitory chill. "All the excitement must be over by now, isn't it?"

"Definitely,"
Tom said. "Unless you count Isobel Archer's big move—she got a network
job, and she's moving to New York in a couple of weeks."

"That can't
be the mixed news you called about."

"No. The
mixed news is about John Ransom." I waited for it.

Tom said, "I
heard it on the news this morning—I usually listen to the news before I
go to bed. John died in a car crash about two o'clock last night. It
was the middle of the storm, and he was all alone on the east-west
expressway. He rammed right into an abutment. At first they thought it
was an accident, a skid or something, but he turned out to have about
triple the legal alcohol level in his blood."