The Throat (18 page)

"Who did you meet at Eagle Lake?" John asked. This was the privately
owned resort in northern Wisconsin to which a select portion of
Millhaven's society families went every summer.

"In order to tell you about this," Tom said, "I have to explain some
private things about my family. I want to ask you not to repeat what I
have to say."

John promised.

"Then let me tell you a story," Tom said.

"You probably remember meeting my mother now and then, at school
functions."

"I remember your mother," Ransom said. "She was a beautiful woman."

"And fragile. I'm sure you remember that, too. My mother would spend
whole days in her bedroom. Sometimes she'd cry for hours, and even she
didn't know why, she'd just stay up there and weep. I used to get so
angry with her for not being like anyone else's mother… Well, instead
of getting angry, I should have been thinking about what could have
made her be so helpless." Tom let that sink in for a moment, then
reached for his glass again. His pale lips made a round aperture for
the slightly larger sip of vodka. He hated having to tell this story, I
saw. He was telling it because he would have hated my telling it even
more, and because he thought that John Ransom ought to know it. He set
the glass down and said, "I suppose you knew something about my
grandfather."

John blinked. "Glendenning Upshaw? Of course. A powerful man." He
hesitated. "Passed away in your senior year. Suicide, I remember."

Tom glanced at me, for we both knew the real circumstances of his
grandfather's death. Then he looked back at John. "Yes, he was
powerful. He made a fortune in Millhaven, and he had some political
influence. He was a terrible man in almost every way, and he had a lot
of secrets. But there was one secret he had to protect above all the
others, because he would have been ruined if it ever came out. He
killed three people to protect this secret, and he nearly succeeded in
killing a fourth. His wife learned about it in 1923, and she drowned
herself in Eagle Lake—it destroyed her."

Tom looked down at his hands in his lap. He raised his eyes to mine,
briefly, and then looked at John Ransom. "My grandfather fired all his
servants when my mother was about two. He never hired any more, even
after his wife died. He couldn't afford to have anyone discover that he
was raping his daughter."

"Raping?" Ransom sounded incredulous.

"Maybe he didn't have to use force, but he forced or coerced my
mother into having sex with him from the time she was about two until
she was fourteen."

"And in all that time, no one found out?"

Tom took another swallow, I think from relief that he had finally
said it. "He went to great lengths to make sure that would never
happen. For obvious reasons, my mother went to the doctor he had always
used. In the early fifties, this doctor took on a young partner.
Needless to say, the young doctor, Buzz Laing, did not get my mother as
one of his patients."

"Okay, Buzz Laing," Ransom said. "Everybody always thought he was
the fourth Blue Rose victim, but Tim told me that he was attacked by
someone else. What did he do, find out about your mother?"

"Buzz took the office records home at night to build up backgrounds
on his patients. One night he just grabbed the wrong file. What he saw
there disturbed him, and he went back to his partner to discuss it.
Years before, the older doctor had recorded all the classic signs of
sexual abuse—vaginal bleeding, vaginal warts, change in personality,
nightmares. Et cetera, et cetera. It was all there in the records."

When Tom set his glass down, it was empty. Ransom pushed his own
glass toward him, and Tom added ice and vodka to it.

"So the older doctor called your grandfather," John Ransom said when
Tom had taken his seat again.

"One night Buzz Laing came home and went upstairs, and a big man
grabbed him from behind and almost cut his head off. He was left for
dead, but he managed to stop the bleeding and call for help. The man
who had tried to kill him had written blue rose on his bedroom wall,
and everyone assumed that Laing was the fourth victim."

"But what about William Damrosch? He had been Laing's lover. That
butcher, Stenmitz, had abused him. And the case ended when he killed
himself."

"If the case ended, why are you sitting here listening to ancient
history?"

"But how could your grandfather know about some detective's private
life?"

"He had a close friend in the police department. A sort of a
protege—they did each other a lot of good, over the years. This
character made sure he knew everything that might be useful to him, and
he shared whatever he found out with my grandfather. That was one of
his functions."

"So this cop—"

"Told my grandfather about Damrosch's history. My grandfather, good
old Glendenning Upshaw, saw how he could wrap everything up into one
neat little package."

"He killed Damrosch, too?"

"I think he followed him home one night, waited three or four hours
or however long he thought it would take Damrosch to get too drunk to
fight back, and then just knocked on his door. Damrosch let him in, and
my grandfather got his gun away from him and shot him in the head. Then
he printed blue rose on a piece of paper and let himself out. Case
closed."

Tom leaned back in the chair.

"And after that, the murders stopped."

"They stopped with the murder of Heinz Stenmitz."

Ransom considered this. "Why do you think Blue Rose stopped killing
people for forty years? Or do you even think it's the same person who
attacked my wife?"

"That's a possibility."

"Have you noticed that the new attacks took place on the same sites
as the old ones?"

Tom nodded.

"So he's repeating himself, isn't he?"

"If it's the same man," Tom said.

"Why do you say that? What are you thinking?"

Tom Pasmore looked as if he were thinking about nothing but getting
us out of his house. His head lolled against the back of the chair. I
thought he wanted us to leave so that he could get to work. His day was
just beginning. He surprised me by answering Ransom's question. "Well,
I always thought it might have something to do with place."

"It has something to do with place, all right," Ransom said. He set
down his empty glass. There was a band of red across his cheekbones.
"It's his neighborhood. He kills where he lives."

"No one knows the identity of the man on Livermore Avenue, is that
right?"

"Some homeless guy who thought he was going to get a handful of
change."

Tom nodded in acknowledgment rather than agreement. "That's a
possibility, too."

"Well, sure," John Ransom said.

Tom nodded absentmindedly.

"I mean, who goes unidentified these days? Everybody carries credit
cards, cards for automatic teller machines, driver's licenses…"

"Yes, it makes sense, it makes sense," Tom said. He was still
staring at some indeterminate point in the middle of the room.

Ransom shifted forward on the couch. He rocked his empty glass back
and forth on the table for a moment. He raised his eyes to the
paintings Lamont von Heilitz had bought in Paris sixty years ago.
"You're not really retired, are you, Tom? Don't you still do a little
work here and there, without telling anybody about it?"

Tom smiled—slowly, almost luxuriantly.

"You do," Ransom said, though that was not what I thought the
strange inward smile meant.

"I don't know if you would call it work," Tom said. "Sometimes
something catches my attention. I hear a little music."

"Don't you hear it now?"

Tom focused on him. "What are you asking me?"

"We've known each other a long time. When my wife is beaten and
stabbed by a man who committed Millhaven's most notable unsolved
murders, I would think you couldn't help but be interested."

"I was interested enough to invite you here."

"I'm asking you to work for me."

"I don't take clients," Tom said. "Sorry."

"I need your help." John Ransom leaned toward Tom with his hands
out, separated by a distance roughly the length of a football. "You
have a wonderful gift, and I want that gift working for me." Tom seemed
hardly to be listening. "On top of everything else, I'm giving you the
chance to learn the name of the Blue Rose murderer."

Tom slumped down in his chair so that his knees jutted out and his
chin rested on his chest. He brought his joined hands beneath his lower
lip and regarded Ransom with a steady speculation. He seemed more
comfortable, more actually present than at any other time during the
evening.

"Were you considering offering me some payment for this assistance?"

"Absolutely," John Ransom said. "If that's what you want."

"What sort of payment?"

Ransom looked flustered. He glanced at me as if asking for help and
raised his hands. "Well, that's difficult to answer. Ten thousand
dollars?"

"Ten thousand. For identifying the man who attacked your wife. For
getting the man you call Blue Rose behind bars."

"It could be twenty thousand," John said. "It could even be thirty."

"I see." Tom pushed himself back into an upright position, placed
his hands on the arms of his chair, and pushed himself up. "Well, I
hope that what I told you will be of some help to you. It's been good
to see you again, John."

I stood up, too. John Ransom stayed seated on the couch, looking
back and forth between Tom and me. "That's it? Tom, we were talking
about an offer. Please tell me you'll consider it."

"I'm afraid I'm not for hire," Tom said. "Not even for the splendid
sum of thirty thousand dollars."

Ransom looked completely baffled. Reluctantly, he pushed himself up
from the couch. "If thirty thousand isn't enough, tell me how much you
want. I want you on my team."

"I'll do what I can," Tom said. He moved toward the maze of files
and the front door.

Ransom stood his ground. "What does that mean?"

"I'll check in from time to time," Tom said.

Ransom shrugged and shoved his hands in his pockets. He and I went
around opposite sides of the glass table toward Tom. For the first time
I looked down at the stacks of books beside the bottles and the ice
bucket and was surprised to see that, like the books on John Ransom's
table, nearly all of them were about Vietnam. But they were not
novels—most of the books on the table seemed to be military histories,
written by retired officers.
The US
Infantry in Vietnam. Small Unit
Actions in Vietnam, 1965-66. History of the Green Berets.

"I wanted you to know how I felt," Ransom was saying. "I had to give
it a try."

"It was very flattering," Tom said. They were both working their way
toward the door.

I caught up with them just as Ransom looked back over his shoulder
to see the paintings on the long back wall. "And if you're ever
interested in selling some of your art, I hope you'll speak to me
first."

"Well," Tom said. He opened the door to scorching heat and the end
of daylight. Above the roofs of the lakefront houses, the moon had
already risen into a darkening sky in which a few shadowy clouds
drifted in a wind too far up to do us any good.

"Thanks for your help," said John Ransom, holding out his hand. Tom
took it, and Ransom raised one shoulder and grimaced, squeezing hard to
show his gratitude.

"By the way," Tom said, and Ransom relaxed his grip. Tom pulled back
his hand. "I wonder if you've been thinking about the possibility that
the attack on your wife was actually directed at you?"

"I don't see what you mean." John Ransom probed me with a look,
trying to see if I had made sense of this question. "You mean Blue Rose
thought April might be me?"

"No." Tom smiled and leaned against the door frame. "Of course not."
He looked across the street, then up and down, and finally at the sky.
Outside, in the natural light, his skin looked like paper that had been
crumpled, then smoothed out. "I just wondered if you could think of
someone who might want to get at you through your wife. Someone who
wanted to hurt you very badly."

"There isn't anyone like that," Ransom said.

Down the block, a small car turned the corner onto Eastern Shore
Road, came some twenty feet in our direction, then swung over to the
side of the road and parked. The driver did not leave the car.

"I don't think Blue Rose could know anything about April or me,"
said Ransom. "That's not how these guys work."

"I'm sure that's right," Tom said. "I hope everything turns out well
for you, John. Good-bye, Tim." He gave me a little wave and waited for
us to move down onto the walk. He waved again, smiling, and closed his
door. It was like seeing him disappear into a fortress.

"What was that about?" Ransom asked.

"Let's get some dinner," I said.

John Ransom spent most of dinner complaining. Tom Pasmore was one of
those geniuses who didn't seem too perceptive. Tom was a drunk who
acted like the pope. Sat all day in that closed-up house and pounded
down the vodka. Even back in school, Pasmore had been like the
Invisible Man, never played football, hardly had any friends—this
pretty girl, this knockout, Sarah Spence, long long legs, great body,
turned out she had a kind of a
thing
for old Tom Pasmore, always
wondered how the hell old Tom managed that…

I didn't tell Ransom that I thought Sarah Spence, now Sarah
Youngblood, had been the driver of the car that had turned the corner
and pulled discreetly up to the curb thirty feet from Tom Pasmore's
house as we were leaving. I knew that she visited Tom, and I knew that
he wished to keep her visits secret, but I knew nothing else about
their relationship. I had the impression that they spent a lot of time
talking to each other—Sarah Spence Youngblood was the only person in
the whole of Millhaven who had free access to Tom Pasmore's house, and
in those long evenings and nights after she slipped through his front
door, after the bottles were opened and while the ice cubes settled in
the brass bucket, I think he talked to her—I think she had become the
person he most needed, maybe the only person he needed, because she was
the person who knew most about him.