The Throat (14 page)

"What does he look like? What did he do for a living? How does he
relax?"

"I think the only thing that distinguishes him physically, apart
from his being in excellent condition for his age, is that he looks
very respectable. And I think he might live down in that area where the
murders took place, because with one exception, he stuck with it."

"You mean, he lives in my old neighborhood?" The exception he had
mentioned must have been his wife.

"I think so. People see him, but they don't really notice him. As
for relaxing, I don't think he really can relax, so he wouldn't take
vacations or anything—probably couldn't really afford that, anyhow—but
I bet he was a gardener."

"And the phrase
Blue Rose
is related to his gardening?"

Ransom shrugged. "It's a funny choice of words—it's his way of
identifying himself. And I think gardening would suit this guy very
well—he could work out some of his tensions, he could indulge his
compulsion for order, and he can do it alone."

"So if we go down to the near south side and find a healthy-looking
but boring sixty-year-old man who has a neat flower garden in back of
his house, we'll have our man."

Ransom smiled. "That'll be him. Handle with care."

"After being Blue Rose for a couple of months forty years ago, he
managed to control himself until this year, when he snapped again."

Ransom leaned forward again, excited to have reached the core of all
his theorizing. "Maybe he wasn't in Millhaven during those years. Maybe
he had some job that took him here and there—maybe he sold ladies'
stockings or shoelaces or men's shirts." Ransom straightened up, and
his eyes burned into me. "But I think he was in the military. I think
he joined up to escape the possibility of arrest and spent all the time
between then and now in army bases all over the country and in Europe.
He would have been in Korea, he might even have been in Vietnam. He
probably spent some time in Germany. He
undoubtedly
lived on a lot of
those bases set outside small towns all over the South and the Midwest.
And every now and then, I bet he went out and killed somebody. I don't
think he ever stopped. I think he was a serial killer before we even
knew such things existed. Nobody ever connected his crimes, nobody ever
matched the data—Tim, they only began to think about doing that five or
six years ago. The FBI has never heard of this guy because nothing he
ever did was reported to them. He'd get off the base, persuade some
civilian to follow him into an alley or a hotel—he's a very persuasive
guy—and then he'd kill them."

As I listened to John Ransom, my eyes kept returning to the painting
I thought was a Vuillard. A middle-class family that seemed to consist
entirely of women, children, and servants moved through a luxuriant
back garden and sat beneath the spreading branches of an enormous tree.
Brilliant molten lemon yellow light streamed down through the intense
electric green of the thick leaves.

Ransom took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt. "You
seem fascinated by this room, especially the paintings." He was smiling
again. "April would be pleased. She picked most of them out. She
pretended that I helped her, but she did all the work."

"I am fascinated," I said. "Isn't that a Vuillard? It's a beautiful
painting." The other paintings and little sculptures in the room seemed
related to the Vuillard in some fashion, though they were clearly by
several different artists. Some were landscapes with figures, some had
religious themes, others were almost abstract. Most of them had a flat,
delicate, decorative quality that had been influenced, like Van Gogh
and Gauguin, but after them, by Japanese prints. Then I recognized that
a small painting of the descent from the Cross was by Maurice Denis,
and then I understood what April Ransom had done and was struck by its
sheer intelligence.

She had collected the work of the group called the Nabis, the
"prophets"—she had found paintings by Serusier, K.-X. Roussel, and Paul
Ranson, as well as Denis and Vuillard. Everything she had bought was
good, and all of it was related: it had a significant place in art
history, and because most of these artists were not well known in
America, their work would not have cost a great deal. As a collection,
it had a greater value than the pieces would have had individually, and
the pieces themselves would already be worth a good deal more than the
Ransoms had paid for them. And they were pleasing paintings—they
aestheticized pain and joy, grief and wonder, and made them graceful.

"There must be more Nabis paintings in this room than anywhere else
in the country," I said. "How did you find them all?"

"April was good at things like that," Ransom said, suddenly looking
very tired again. "She went to a lot of the families, and most of them
were willing to part with a couple of pieces. It's nice that you like
the Vuillard—that was our favorite, too."

It was the centerpiece of their collection: the most important
painting they owned, and also the most profound, the most mysterious
and radiant. It was an outright celebration of sunlight on leaves, of
the interaction of people in families and of people with the natural
world.

"Does it have a name?" I stood up to get a closer look.

"I think it's called
The Juniper
Tree."

I looked at him over my shoulder, but he gave no indication of
knowing that there was a famous Brothers Grimm story with that name,
nor that the name might have meant anything to me. He nodded,
confirming that I had heard him right. The coincidence of the
painting's name affected me as I went toward the canvas. The people
beneath the great tree seemed lonely and isolated, trapped in their
private thoughts and passions; the occasion that had brought them
together was a sham, no more than a formal exercise. They paid no
attention to the radiant light and the vibrant leaves, nor to the
shimmer of color which surrounded them, of which they themselves were a
part.

"I can see April when I look at that," Ransom said behind me.

"It's a wonderful painting," I said. It was full of heartbreak and
anger, and these feelings magically increased its radiance— because the
painting itself was a consolation for them.

He stood up and came toward me, his eyes on the painting. "There's
so much happiness in that canvas."

He was thinking of his wife. I nodded.

"You can help me, can't you?" Ransom asked. "We might be able to
help the police put a name to this man. By looking into the old
murders, I mean."

"That's why I'm here."

Ransom clamped his fist around my arm. "But I have to tell you, if I
find out who attacked my wife, I'll try to kill him—if I get anywhere
near him, I'll give him what he gave April."

"I can understand how you'd feel that way," I said.

"No, you can't." He dropped his hand and stepped closer to the
painting, gave it a quick, cursory glance, and began wandering back to
his chair. He put his hand on the stack of Vietnam novels. "Because you
never had the chance to know April. I'll take you to the hospital with
me tomorrow, but you won't really—you know, the person lying there in
that bed isn't—"

Ransom raised a hand to cover his eyes. "Excuse me. I'll get you
some more coffee."

He took my cup back to the table, and I took in the room again. The
marble fireplace matched the pinks and grays in the paintings on the
long walls, and one vivid slash of red was the same shade as the sky in
the Maurice Denis painting of the descent from the Cross. A pale,
enormous Paul Ranson painting of a kneeling woman holding up her hands
in what looked like prayer or supplication hung above the fireplace.
Then I noticed something else, the flat edge of a bronze plaque laid
flat on the marble.

I walked around the furniture to take a look at it, and John Ransom
came toward me with the mug as soon as I stood the plaque upright. "Oh,
you found that."

I read the raised letters on the surface of the bronze. "The
Association Award of the Financial Professionals of the City of
Millhaven is hereby given to April Ransom on the Occasion of the Annual
Dinner, 1991."

John Ransom sat down and held out his hand for the plaque. I
exchanged it for the coffee, and he stared at it for a second before
sliding it back onto the mantel. "The plaque is just a sort of
token—the real award is having your name engraved on a big cup in a
glass case in the Founder's Club."

Ransom raised his eyes to mine and blinked. "Why don't I show you
the picture that was taken the night she won that silly award? At least
you can see what she looked like. You'll come to the hospital with me,
too, of course, but in a way there's more of the real April in the
picture." He jumped up and went out into the hallway to go upstairs.

I walked over to the Vuillard painting again. I could hear John
Ransom opening drawers in his bedroom upstairs.

A few minutes later, he came back into the living room with a folded
section of the
Ledger
in one
hand. "Took me a while to find it—been
intending to cut out the photograph and stick it in an album, but these
days I can hardly get anything done." He gave me the newspaper.

The photograph took up the top right corner of the first page of the
financial section. John Ransom was wearing a tuxedo, and his wife was
in a white silk outfit with an oversized jacket over a low-cut top. She
was gleaming into the camera with her arms around a big engraved cup
like a tennis trophy, and he was nearly in profile, looking at her.
April Ransom was nearly as tall as her husband, and her hair had been
cropped to a fluffy blond helmet that made you notice the length of her
neck. She had a wide mouth and a small, straight nose, and her eyes
seemed very bright. She looked smart and tough and triumphant. She was
a surprise. April Ransom looked much more like what she was, a shrewd
and aggressive financial expert, than like the woman her husband had
described to me during the ride to Ely Place from the airport. The
woman in the photograph did not suffer from uselessly complicated moral
sensitivities: she bought paintings because she knew they would look
good on her walls while they quadrupled in value, she would never quit
her job to have a child, she was hardworking and a little merciless and
she would not be kind to fools.

"Isn't she beautiful?" Ransom asked. I looked at the date on the top
of the page, Monday, the third of June. "How long after this came out
was she attacked?"

Ransom raised his eyebrows. "The police found April something like
ten days after the awards dinner—that was on Friday, the thirty-first
of May. That unknown man was killed the next Wednesday. On Monday night
April never came home from the office. I went crazy, waiting for her.
Around two in the morning I finally called the police. They told me to
wait another twenty-four hours, and that she would probably come home
before that. I got a call the next afternoon, saying that they had
found her, and that she was unconscious but still alive."

"They found her in a parking lot, or something like that?" Ransom
placed the folded section of the newspaper on the coffee table next to
the stack of books. He sighed. "I guess I thought I must have told you.
A maid at the St. Alwyn found her when she went in to check on the
condition of a room." There was something like defiance in his eyes and
his posture, in the way he straightened his back, when he told me this.

"April was in a room at the St. Alwyn Hotel?"

Ransom jerked down the front of his suit jacket and smoothed his
tie. "The room where the maid found her had been empty all day, and
someone was due to take it on that night. April got up to that room, or
was
brought
up to that room,
conscious or not, without anyone seeing
her go into the hotel."

"So how did she get there?" I asked. I felt sorry for John Ransom
and asked my stupid question to buy time while I absorbed this
information.

"She flew. I don't have any idea how she got into the hotel, Tim.
All I know is that April would never have met any kind of boyfriend at
the St. Alwyn, because even if she had a boyfriend, which she did not,
the St. Alwyn is too seedy. She'd never go inside that place."

I thought: not unless she wanted a little seediness. "I know her—you
never met her. I've been married to her for fourteen years, and you've
only seen a picture of her. She would never have gone into that place."

Of course, John was right. He did know her, and I had been merely
drawing inferences from a newspaper photograph and what had seemed to
me the striking degree of calculation that had created her art
collection.

"Wait a second," I said. "What was the room number?"

"The maid found April in room 218. Room 218 of the St. Alwyn Hotel."
He smiled at me. "I wondered when you were going to get around to
asking that question."

It was the same room in which James Treadwell had been murdered,
also by someone who had signed the wall with the words blue rose.

"And your detective doesn't think that's significant?"

Ransom threw up his hands. "As far as the police are concerned,
nothing that happened back in 1950 has any connection to what happened
to my wife. William Damrosch got them all off the hook. He killed
himself, the murders ended, that's it."

"You said the first victim was found on Livermore Avenue." Ransom
nodded, fiercely. "Where on Livermore Avenue?"

"You tell me. You know where it was."

"In that little tunnel behind the St. Alwyn?"

Ransom smiled at me. "Well, that's where I'd bet they found the
body. The newspaper wasn't specific—they just said 'in the vicinity of
the St. Alwyn Hotel.' It never occurred to me that it might be the same
place where the first victim was found in the fifties until April,
until they found, um, until they found her. You know. In that room."
His smile had become ghastly—I think he had lost control over his face.
"And I couldn't be sure about anything, because all I had to go on was
your book,
The Divided Man
. I
didn't know if you'd changed any of the
places…"