The Throat (15 page)

"No," I said. "I didn't."

"So then I read your book and thought I might call just to see—"

"If I still thought that Damrosch was the man you call Blue Rose."

He nodded. That dead smile was fading, but he still looked as if a
fishhook had caught in his mouth. "And you said no."

"And so—" I paused, stunned by what I had just learned. "And so,
what it looks like is that Blue Rose is not only killing people in
Millhaven again, but killing them in the same places he used forty
years ago."

"That's the way it looks to me," Ransom said. "The question is, can
we get anyone else to believe it?"

"They'll believe it in a hurry after one more murder," I said. "The
third one was the exception I mentioned before— the doctor," said
Ransom.

"I thought you were talking about your wife."

He frowned at me. "Well, in the book, the third one was the doctor.
Big house on the east side."

"There won't be one on the east side," I said.

"Look at what's
happening
,"
Ransom said. "It'll be at the same
address. Where the doctor died."

"The doctor didn't die. That was one of the things I changed when I
wrote the book. Whoever tried to kill Buzz Laing, Dr. Laing, cut his
throat and wrote blue rose on his bedroom wall, but ran away without
noticing that he wasn't dead yet. Laing came to in time and managed to
stop the bleeding and get himself to a hospital."

"What do you mean, 'whoever tried to kill him'? It was Blue Rose."

I shook my head.

"Are you sure about this?"

"As sure as I can be without evidence," I said. "In fact, I think
the same person who cut Buzz Laing's throat also killed Damrosch and
set it up to look like suicide."

Ransom opened his mouth and then closed it again. "Killed Damrosch?"

I smiled at him—Ransom looked a little punchy. "Some information
about the Blue Rose case turned up a couple of years ago when I was
working on a book about Tom Pasmore and Lamont von Heilitz." He started
to say something, and I held up my hand. "You probably remember hearing
about von Heilitz, and I guess you went to school with Tom."

"I was a year behind him at Brooks-Lowood. What in the world could
he have to do with the Blue Rose murders?"

"He didn't have anything to do with them, but he knows who tried to
kill Buzz Laing. And who murdered William Damrosch."

"Who is this?" Ransom seemed furious with excitement. "Is he still
alive?"

"No, he's not. And I think it would be better for Tom to tell you
the story. It's really his story, for one thing."

"Will he be willing to tell it to me?"

"I called him before I left New York. He'll tell you what he thinks
happened to Buzz Laing and Detective Damrosch."

"Okay." Ransom nodded. He considered this. "When do I get to talk to
him?"

"He'd probably be willing to see us tonight, if you like."

"Could I hire him?"

Almost every resident of Millhaven over the age of thirty would
probably have known that Tom Pasmore had worked for a time as a private
investigator. Twenty years ago, even the Bangkok papers had run the
story of how an independent investigator, a self-styled "amateur of
crime" living in the obscure city of Millhaven, Illinois, had
brilliantly reinterpreted all the evidence and records in the case of
Whitney Walsh, the president of TransWorld Insurance, who had been shot
to death near the ninth hole of his country club in Harrison, New York.
A groundskeeper with a longstanding grudge against Walsh had been
tried, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Working on his
own and without ever leaving Millhaven, Tom Pasmore had succeeded in
identifying and locating the essential piece of evidence necessary to
arrest and convict the real murderer, a former employee. The innocent
man had been freed, and after he had told his story to a number of
newspapers and national magazines, it was learned that Tom Pasmore had
done essentially the same thing in perhaps a dozen cases: he had used
public information and trial records to get innocent men out of jail
and guilty ones in. The Walsh case had merely been the most prominent.
There followed, in the same newspapers and magazines, a number of lurid
stories about "The Real-Life Sherlock Holmes," each containing the
titillating information that the wizard habitually refused payment for
his investigations, that he had a fortune of something between ten and
twenty million dollars, that he lived alone in a house he seldom left,
that he dressed with an odd, old-fashioned formality. These revelations
came to a climax with the information that Tom Pasmore was the natural
son of Lamont von Heilitz, the man who had been the inspiration for the
radio character Lamont Cranston—"The Shadow." By the time all of this
had emerged, Tom ceased to give interviews. As far as anyone knew, he
also ceased to work—scorched into retirement by unwelcome publicity.
The press never unearthed another incident in which Tom Pasmore of
Millhaven, Illinois, intervened from afar to free an innocent man and
jail a guilty one for murder. Yet from my contact with him, I thought
it was almost certain that he continued his work anonymously, and that
he had created the illusion of retirement to maintain in absolute
darkness the secret the press had not discovered, that he had long been
the lover of a woman married into one of Millhaven's wealthiest
families.

Tom would never consent to being hired by John Ransom, and I told
him so.

"Why not, if he's willing to come over?"

"In the first place, he was never for hire. And ever since the Walsh
case, he's wanted people to think that he doesn't even work. And
secondly, Tom is not willing to 'come over.' If you want to see him,
we'll have to go to his house."

"But I went to school with him!"

"Were you friends?"

"Pasmore didn't have friends. He didn't want any." This suggested
another thought, and he turned his head from the study of his
interlaced hands to revolve his suspicious face toward mine. "Since
he's so insistent on keeping out of sight, why is he willing to talk to
me now?"

"He'd rather explain to you himself what happened to Buzz Laing and
Detective Damrosch. You'll see why."

Ransom shrugged and looked at his watch. "I'm usually back at the
hospital by now. Maybe Pasmore could join us for dinner?"

"We have to go to his house," I said.

He thought about it for a while. "So maybe we could have an audience
with His Holiness between visiting April and going for dinner? Or is
there something else about the sacred schedule of Thomas Pasmore that
you haven't told me yet?"

"Well, his day generally starts pretty late," I said. "But if you
point me toward the telephone, I'll give him some advance warning."

Ransom waved his hand toward the front of the room, and I remembered
passing a high telephone table in the entrance hall. I stood up and
left the room. Through the arch, I saw Ransom get up and walk toward
the paintings. He stood in front of the Vuillard with his hands in his
pockets, frowning at the lonely figures beneath the tree. Tom Pasmore
would still be asleep, I knew, but he kept his answering machine
switched on to take messages during the day. Tom's dry, light voice
told me to leave a message, and I said that Ransom and I would like to
see him around seven—I'd call him from the hospital to see if that was
all right.

Ransom spun around as I came back into the room. "Well, did Sherlock
agree to meet before midnight?"

"I left a message on his machine. When we're ready to leave the
hospital, I'll try him again. It'll probably be all right."

"I suppose I ought to be grateful he's willing to see me at all,
right?" He looked angrily at me, then down at his watch. He jammed his
hands into his trousers pockets and glared at me, waiting for the
answer to a rhetorical question.

"He'll probably be grateful to see you, too," I said.

He jerked a hand from his pocket and ran it over his thinning hair.
"Okay, okay," he said. "I'm sorry." He motioned me back toward the
entrance hall and the front door.

Once we were outside and on the sidewalk, I waited for John Ransom
to move toward his car. He turned left toward Berlin Avenue and kept
walking without pausing at any of the cars parked along the curb. I
hurried to catch up with him.

"I hope you don't mind walking. It's humid, but this is about the
only exercise I get. And the hospital isn't really very far."

"I walk all over New York. It's fine with me."

"If it's all right with you, we could even walk to Tom Pasmore's
house after we leave the hospital. He still lives on Eastern Shore
Road?"

I nodded. "Across the street from where he grew up."

Ransom gave me a curious look, and I explained that Tom had moved
long ago into the old von Heilitz house.

"So he's still right there on Eastern Shore Road. Lucky guy. I wish
I could have taken over my family's old house. But my parents moved to
Arizona when my father sold his properties in town."

We turned north to walk down Berlin Avenue, and traffic noises, the
sound of horns and the hiss of tires on asphalt, took shape in the air.
Summer school students from the college moved up the block in twos and
threes, heading toward afternoon classes.

Ransom gave me a wry glance. "He did all right on the deal, of
course, but I wish he'd held onto those properties. The St. Alwyn alone
went for about eight hundred thousand, and today it would be worth
something like three million. We get a lot more conventions in town
than we used to, and a decent hotel has a lot of potential."

"Your father owned the St. Alwyn?"

"And the rest of that block." He shook his head slowly and smiled
when he saw my expression. "I guess I assumed you knew that. It adds a
little irony to the situation. The place was run much better when my
father owned it, let me tell you. It was as good as any hotel anywhere.
But I don't think the fact that my father owned the place twenty years
ago has anything to do with April winding up in room 218, do you?"

"Probably not." Not unless his father's ownership of the hotel had
something to do with the first Blue Rose murders, I thought, and
dismissed the idea.

"I still wish the old man had held out until the city turned
around," said Ransom. "An academic salary doesn't go very far.
Especially an Arkham College salary."

"April must have more than compensated for that," I said.

He shook his head. "April's money is hers, not mine. I never wanted
to have the feeling that I could just dip into the money she made on
her own."

Ransom smiled at some memory, and the sunlight softened the
unhappiness in his face.

"I have an old Pontiac I bought secondhand for when I have to drive
somewhere. April's car is a Mercedes 500SL. She worked hard—spent all
night in her office sometimes. It was her money, all right."

"Is there a lot of it?"

He gave me a grim look. "If she dies, I'll be a well-off widower.
But the money didn't have anything to do with who she really was."

"It could look like a motive to people who don't understand your
marriage."

"Like the wonderful Millhaven police department?" He laughed—a
short, ugly bark. "That's just another reason for us to learn Blue
Rose's name. As if we needed one."

WE came around the bend past the third-floor patients' lounge, and a
short, aggressive-looking policeman in his twenties lounged out of one
of the doorways. His name tag read
MANGILOTTI
. He
checked his watch,
then gave Ransom what he thought was a hard look. I got a hard look,
too.

"Did she say anything, officer?" Ransom asked.

"Who's this?" The little policeman moved in front of me, as if to
keep me from entering the room. The top of his uniform hat came up to
my chin.

"I'm just a friend," I said.

Ransom had already stepped into the room, and the policeman turned
his head to follow him. Then he tilted his head and gave me another
glare. Both of us heard a woman inside the hospital room say that Mrs.
Ransom had not spoken yet.

The cop backed away and turned around and went into the room to make
sure he didn't miss anything. I followed him into the sunny white room.
Sprays of flowers in vases covered every flat surface—vases filled with
lilies and roses and peonies crowded the long windowsill. The odor of
the lilies filled the room. John Ransom and an efficient-looking woman
in a white uniform stood on the far side of the bed. The curtains
around the bed had been pushed back and were bunched against the wall
on both sides of the patient's head. April Ransom lay in a complex
tangle of wires, tubes, and cords that stretched from the bed to a bank
of machines and monitors. A clear bag on a pole dripped glucose into
her veins. Thin white tubes had been fed into her nose, and electrodes
were fastened to her neck and the sides of her head with white stars of
tape. The sheet over her body covered a catheter and other tubes. Her
head lay flat on the bed, and her eyes were closed. The left side of
her face was a single enormous blue-purple bruise, and another long
blue bruise covered her right jaw. Wedges of hair had been shaved back
from her forehead, making it look even broader and whiter. Fine lines
lay across it, and two nearly invisible lines bracketed her wide mouth.
Her lips had no color. She looked as if several layers of skin had been
peeled from the sections of her face left unbruised. She had only the
smallest resemblance to the woman in the newspaper photograph.

"You brought company today," said the nurse.

John Ransom spoke our names, Eliza Morgan, Tim Underhill, and we
nodded at each other across the bed. The policeman walked to the back
of the room and sat down beneath the row of windows. "Tim is going to
stay with me for a while, Eliza," John said.