The Throat (20 page)

He cocked his big oval head. "Well, Tim Underhill. I read one of
your books.
The Divided Man
.
It was crappy. It was ridiculous. I liked
it."

"Thanks," I said.

"Now, what was it you came here to tell Mr. Ransom, unless it is
something you would prefer to conceal from our efficient police
department?"

I looked at him. "Will you write down a license number for me?"

"Thompson," he said, and the young policeman took out his pad.

I read the license number of the man's car from the page in my
notebook. "It's a blue Lexus. The owner followed John and me all day
long. When I stopped him in the lobby downstairs, he flashed a toy
badge and said he was a policeman. He ran away just before you got
here."

"Uh huh," said Fontaine. "That's interesting. I'll do something
about that. Do you remember anything about this man? Anything
distinguishing?"

"He's a gray-haired guy with a ponytail. Gold post earring in his
left ear. About six-two and probably two hundred and thirty pounds. Big
belly and wide hips, like a woman's hips. I think he was wearing an
Armani suit."

"Oh, one of the Armani gang." He permitted himself to smile. He took
the paper with the license number from Thompson and put it in his
jacket pocket.

"
Following
me?" John asked.

"I saw him here this afternoon. He trailed us to Eastern Shore
Drive, then down to Jimmy's. He was going to come up to this floor, but
I stopped him in the lobby."

"That was a pity," Fontaine said. "Did this character really say
that he was a policeman?"

I tried to remember. "I think he said that he was with the police."

Fontaine pursed his mouth. "Sort of like saying you're with the
band."

"He showed me one of those little gold badges."

"I'll look into it." He turned away from me. "Thompson, visiting
hours are over. We are going to wait around to see if Mrs. Ransom comes
out of her coma and says anything useful. Mr. Underhill can wait in the
lounge, if he likes."

Thompson gave me a sharp look and stepped back from the bed.

"John, I'll wait for you at home," I said.

He smiled weakly and pressed his wife's hand. Thompson came around
the end of the bed and gestured almost apologetically toward the door.

Thompson followed me out of the door. We went past the nurses'
station in silence. The two women behind the counter pretended
unsuccessfully not to stare.

Thompson did not speak until we had almost reached the elevators. "I
just wanted to say," he began, then looked around to make sure that
nobody was listening. "Don't get Detective Fontaine wrong. He's crazy,
that's all, but he's a great detective. In interrogation rooms, he's
like a genius."

"A crazy genius," I said, and pushed the button.

"Yeah." Officer Thompson looked a bit embarrassed. He put his hands
behind his back. "You know what we call him? He's called Fantastic Paul
Fontaine. That's how good he is."

"Then he ought to be able to find out who owns that blue Lexus," I
said.

"He'll find out," Thompson said. "But he might not tell you he found
out."

I let myself into the house and groped for a light switch. A hot red
dot on the answering machine blinked on and off from the telephone
stand, signaling that calls had been recorded. The rest of the
downstairs was a deep, velvet black. Central air conditioning made the
interior of Ransom's house feel like a refrigerator. I found a switch
just beside the frame and turned on a glass-and-bronze overhead lamp
that looked as if it had been made to hold a candle. Then I closed the
door. A switch next to the entrance to the living room turned on most
of the lamps inside the room. I went in and collapsed onto a sofa.

Eventually I went up to the guest room. It looked like a room in a
forty-dollar-a-night hotel. I hung my clothes in the closet beside the
door. Then I brought two books back downstairs,
The Nag Hammadi
Library
and a paperback Sue Grafton novel. I picked a chair facing the
fireplace and opened the book of gnostic texts and read for a long
time, waiting for John Ransom to bring good news home from the hospital.

Around eleven I decided to call New York and see if I could talk to
a man named An Vinh, whom I had first met in Vietnam.

Six years ago, when my old friend Tina Pumo was killed, he left
Saigon, his restaurant, to Vinh, who had been both chef and assistant
manager. Vinh eventually gave half of the restaurant to Maggie Lah,
Tina's old girlfriend, who had taken over its management while she
began work on her Philosophy M.A. at NYU. We all lived above the
restaurant, in various lofts.

I hadn't seen Vinh for two or three days, and I missed his cool
unsentimental common sense.

It was eleven o'clock in Millhaven, midnight in New York. With any
luck, Vinh would have turned the restaurant over to the staff and gone
upstairs for an hour or so, until it was time to close up and balance
the day's receipts. I went into the foyer and dialed Vinh's number on
the telephone next to the blinking answering machine. After two rings,
I got the clunk of another machine picking up and heard Vinh's terse
message:
Not home
. Buzzing
silence, and the chime of the tone. "Me," I
said. "Having wonderful time, wish you were here. I'll try you
downstairs."

Maggie Lah answered the telephone in the restaurant office and burst
into laughter at the sound of my voice. "You couldn't take your
hometown for even half a day? Why don't you come back here, where you
belong?"

"I'll probably come back soon."

"You found everything out in one day?" Maggie laughed again. "You're
better than Tom Pasmore, you're better than
Lamont von Heilitz
"

"I didn't find anything out," I said. "But April Ransom seems to be
getting better."

"You can't come home until you find something out," she said. "Too
humiliating. I suppose you want Vinh. He's standing right here, hold
on."

In a second I heard Vinh's voice saying my name, and at once I felt
more at peace with myself and the world I was in. I began telling him
what had happened during the day, leaving nothing out—someone like Vinh
is not upset by the appearance of a familiar ghost.

"Your sister is hungry," he said. "That's why she shows herself to
you. Hungry. Bring her to the restaurant, we take care of that."

"I know what she wants, and it isn't food," I said, but his words
had suddenly reminded me of John Ransom seated in the front seat of a
muddy jeep.

"You in a circus," Vinh said. "Too old for the circus. When you were
twenty-one, twenty-two, you love circuses. Now you completely
different, you know. Better."

"You think so?" I asked, a little startled.

"Totally," Vinh said, using the approximate English that served him
so well. "You don't need the circus anymore." He laughed. "I think you
should go away from Millhaven. Nothing there for you anymore, that's
for sure."

"What brought all this on?" I asked.

"Remember how you used to be? Loud and rough. Now you don't puff
your chest out. Don't get high, go crazy, either."

I had that twinge of pain you feel when someone confronts you with
the young idiot you used to be. "Well, I was a soldier then."

"You were a circus bear," Vinh said, and laughed. "
Now
you a
soldier."

After a little more conversation, Vinh gave the phone to Maggie, and
she gave me a little more trouble, and then we hung up. It was nearly
twelve. I left one of the lights burning and took the Sue Grafton novel
upstairs with me.

The front door slammed shut and woke me up. I sat up in an
unfamiliar bed. What hotel was this, in what city? I could hear someone
climbing the stairs. The sneering face of the gray-haired man with the
ponytail swam onto my inner screen. I could identify him, and he was
going to try to kill me as he had tried to kill April Ransom. The heavy
footsteps reached the landing. I rolled off the bed. My mouth was dry
and my head pounded. Adrenaline sparkled through my body. I stationed
myself behind the door and braced myself.

The footsteps thudded toward my door and went past it without even
hesitating. A second later, another door opened and closed.

And then I remembered where I was. I heard John Ransom groan as he
fell onto his bed. I unpeeled myself from the wall.

It was a few minutes past eight o'clock in the morning.

I knocked on Ransom's bedroom door. A barely audible voice told me
to come in.

I pushed open the door and stepped inside the dark room. It was more
than three times the size of the guest room. Beyond the bed, on the
opposite side of the room, a wall of mirrors on closet doors dimly
reflected the opening door and my shadowy face. His suit jacket lay
crumpled on the floor next to the bed. Ransom lay face-down across the
mattress. Garish suspenders made a bright Y across his back.

"How is she doing?" I asked. "Is she out of the coma?"

Ransom rolled onto his side and blinked at me as if he were not
quite sure who I was. He pursed his lips and exhaled, then pushed
himself upright. "God, what a night." He bent forward and pulled off
his soft brown wingtips. He tossed them toward the closet, and they
thudded onto the carpet. "April's doing a lot better, but she's not out
of the woods yet." He shrugged his shoulders from beneath his
suspenders and let them droop to his sides.

Ransom smiled up at me, and I realized how tired he looked when he
was not smiling. "But things look good, according to the doctor." He
untied his tie and threw it toward a sofa. The tie fell short and
fluttered onto the rose-colored carpet. "I'm going to get a few hours'
sleep and then go back to Shady Mount." He grunted and pushed himself
to the bottom end of the bed.

Two enormous paintings hung on facing walls, a male nude lying on
lush grass, a female nude leaning forward against a tree on
outstretched arms, both figures outlined in the Nabis manner. They were
the most sensual Nabis paintings I had ever seen. John Ransom saw me
looking back and forth from one to the other, and he cleared his throat
as he unbuttoned his shirt.

"You like those?"

I nodded.

"April bought them from a local kid last year. I thought he was kind
of a hustler." He threw his shirt onto the floor, dropped his keys,
change, and bills onto an end table, unbuckled his belt, undid his
trousers and pushed them down. He pulled his legs out of them, yanked
off his socks, and half-scooted, half-crawled up the bed. A sour,
sweaty odor came from his body. "I'm sorry, but I'm really out."

He began to scoot under the light blanket and the top sheet. Then he
stopped moving, kneeling on the bed and holding up the covers. His
belly bulged over the top of his boxer shorts. "You want to use the
car? You could look around in Pigtown, see if it looks any—"

He flopped onto his sheets and smacked his hand on his forehead.
"I'm sorry, Tim. I'm even more tired than I thought."

"It's okay," I said. "Even the people who live there call it
Pigtown."

This was not strictly true—the people who lived in my old
neighborhood had always resented the name—but it seemed to help him.
"Good for them," he said. He groped for the pulled-back sheet and
tugged it up. Then he rolled his head on the pillow and looked at me
with bloodshot eyes. "White Pontiac."

"I guess I will take a look around," I said.

Ransom closed his eyes, shuddered, and fell asleep.

On the way to my old neighborhood, I realized that I wanted to go
somewhere else first and turned Ransom's white Pontiac onto Redwing
Avenue and drove past traces of the old Millhaven—neighborhood bars in
places that were not real neighborhoods anymore. Blistering morning sun
seemed to wish to push the low wood and stone buildings down into the
baking sidewalks. Millhaven, my Millhaven, was thinning out all around
me, disappearing into a generic midwestern cityscape.

I would have been less convinced of the disappearance of the old
Millhaven if I had turned on the radio and heard Paul Fontaine and
Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan announcing the arrest of the
soon-to-be-notorious serial killer Walter Dragonette, the Meat Man, but
I left the radio off and remained ignorant of his name for another few
hours.

Two or three miles went by in a blur of traffic and concrete on the
east-west expressway. Ahead of me, the enormous wedding cake of the
baseball stadium grew larger and larger, and I turned off on the exit
just before it. This early in the morning, only the groundskeepers'
cars stood in the vast parking lot. Two blocks past the stadium, I
turned in through the open gates of Pine Knoll Cemetery and parked near
the gray stone guardhouse. When I got out, the heat struck me like a
lion's breath. Rows of differently sized headstones stretched off
behind the guard's office like a messy Arlington. Furry hemlock trees
ranged along the far end. White gravel paths divided the perfect grass.
Sprinklers whirled glittering sprays of water in the distance. Thirty
feet away, an angular old man in a white shirt, black tie, black
trousers, and black military hat puttered through the rows of
headstones, picking up beer cans and candy wrappers left behind by
teenagers who had climbed into the cemetery after the baseball game
last night.

The graves I wanted lay in the older section of Pine Knoll, near the
high stone wall that borders the left side of the cemetery. The three
headstones stood in a row: Albert Hoover Underhill, Louise Shade
Underhill, April Shade Underhill. The first two headstones, newer than
April's, still looked new, bone-dry in the drenching sun. All three
would have been warm to the touch. The grass was kept very short, and
individual green blades glistened in the sun.