The Throat (25 page)

"So Dragonette knew that she
was about to come out of her coma?"

He nodded. "Walter called to
ask about her condition this morning. It must have been the last thing
he did before he left home. Doesn't that make you feel all warm and
happy on the inside?" His eyes had gotten a little wild, and red lines
threaded through the whites. He mimed picking up a telephone. "Hello, I
just wanted to see how my dear lovely friend April Ransom is getting
along, yes yes… Oh, you don't say, really, well, isn't that sweet? In
that case, I'll just be popping in to pay her a little social call, oh
my yes indeedy, as soon, that is, as I cut the head off the guy on my
living room floor, so you go ahead and make sure that she'll be alone,
and if you can't arrange that, please see that nobody but Officer
Mangelotti is alone in the room with her, yes, that's
M-A-N-G-E-L-O-DOUBLE T-I—
"

He did not stop so much as
strangle on his own emotions. The other policemen watched him
surreptitiously. In his wheelchair, Mangelotti heard every word, and
flinched at the spelling of his name. He looked like a slaughterhouse
cow.

"I don't get it," I said.
"He went to all that trouble to protect himself, and the second you
guys get out of your cars and wave your guns at him, he says, Well, I
didn't just kill everybody inside there, I also knifed those Blue Rose
people. And then he was so lucky—to get here exactly when the nurse
went out of the room. It seems a little unlikely."

Fontaine reared back and
widened his bloodshot eyes. "You want to talk about
unlikely
? Unlikely
doesn't count anymore."

"No, but it confuses the
civilians," said a voice behind me. I turned around to see the man in
the pinstriped suit who had followed April Ransom's body out of her
room. Deep vertical lines cut down his face on either side of his thin
forties mustache. His light brown hair was combed straight back,
exposing deep indentations in his hairline. He had looked familiar to
me earlier because I had seen his picture in the paper that morning. He
was Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan, Fontaine's superior.

Hogan put his hand on
Fontaine's elbow.

"This is the guy who wanted
to meet you," Fontaine said.

I sensed immediately that I
was in the presence of a real detective, someone even Tom Pasmore would
respect. Michael Hogan possessed a powerful personal authority. Hogan
had the uncomplicated masculinity of old movie stars like Clark Gable
or William Holden, both of whom he resembled in a generalized,
real-world fashion. You could see Hogan commanding a three-masted
schooner through a heavy storm or sentencing mutineers to death on the
yardarm. His offhand remark about "civilians" seemed perfectly in
character.

What I was most conscious of
at the moment when Michael Hogan shook my hand was that I wanted his
approval—that most abject, adolescent desire.

And then, in the midst of
the crowd of policemen and hospital staff, he did an astonishing thing.
He gave me his approval.

"Didn't you write
The
Divided Man
?" I barely had time to nod before he said, "That was
a very
perceptive book. Ever read it, Paul?"

As amazed as myself,
Fontaine said, "Read it?"

"About the last word on the
Blue Rose business."

"Oh, yes," said Fontaine.
"Yes."

"It was the last word before
Walter Dragonette came along," I said.

Hogan smiled at me as if I
had said something clever. "Nobody is very happy about Mr. Dragonette,"
Hogan said, and changed the subject without losing any of his
remarkable civility. "I suppose you came here to find your friend
Ransom."

"I did, yes," I said. "I
tried calling him, but all I got was the machine. Does he know—he does
know what happened, doesn't he?"

"Yes, yes, yes," Hogan said,
sounding like an ancient uncle rocking in front of a fire. "After Paul
and I got the call about his wife, we got him at home."

"You heard April had been
killed before Dragonette confessed to doing it?" I asked. I didn't
quite know why, but this seemed important.

"That's probably enough,"
said Paul Fontaine. Before I saw the implications of my question, he
sensed an implied criticism. "We've got work to do, Mr. Underhill. If
you'd like to see your friend—"

Hogan had immediately
understood the nature of this criticism. He raised his eyebrows and
broke into what Fontaine was saying. "We usually hear about crimes
before we get confessions."

"I know that," I said. "It's
more that I was wondering if Walter Dragonette heard about this crime
before he confessed to it."

"It was a good clean
confession," Fontaine said.

Fontaine was beginning to
look irritated, and Hogan moved to mollify him. "He knew where she was
being held. That information was never released. There are eight
hospitals in Millhaven. When we asked Dragonette the name of the
hospital where he had killed April Ransom, he said Shady Mount."

"Did he know her room
number?"

"No," Hogan said, and at the
same time Fontaine said, "Yes."

"Paul means he knew the
floor she was on," Hogan said. "He wouldn't know that unless he'd been
here."

"Then how did he know where
to find her in the first place?" I asked. "I don't suppose the
switchboard gave out information about her."

"We really haven't had the
time to fully interrogate Mister Dragonette," said Hogan.

The uniformed officers
moving back and forth between April Ransom's room slowed down as they
passed us.

"You could meet your friend
Ransom down on Armory Place," Hogan said. "He's waiting for Paul to
begin Dragonette's interrogation. And Paul, I think you could usefully
start matters down there."

He turned back to me. "You
know where Armory Place is?"

I nodded.

"Follow Paul and park in the
police lot. You and Mister Ransom could watch some of the
interrogation." He asked Fontaine, "Is that okay with you?"

Fontaine nodded.

Downstairs, an elderly woman
seated at a computer on one of the desks behind the counter looked up
at us and twitched as if her chair had just given her an electric
shock. April Ransom's murder had unsettled the entire hospital.
Fontaine said he would wait for me at the entrance to the hospital
parking lot.

"I know how to get to police
headquarters," I reminded him.

"Yeah, but if you try to get
into the lot without me, somebody might mistake you for a reporter," he
said.

I trotted across the street
and went up the block. Before I could put the key into the Pontiac's
door, a heavyset man in Bermuda shorts and a blue button-down shirt
came rushing out of the front door of the house with the flag and the
yellow ribbon. "Just hold it right there," he shouted. "I got something
to say to you."

I unlocked the door and
waited for him to cross his lawn. He had a big belly and thin hairy
legs, and his bulldog face was flushed pink. He came within ten feet of
me and jabbed his finger at me. "Do you see any signs saying hospital
parking on this street? The parking places on this street are not for
you people —you can park at the meters, or go around to the hospital
lot. I am sick and tired of being abused."

"Abused? You don't know what
the word means." I opened the car door.

"Wait up there." He circled
around the front of my car, still pointing at my chest.
"These—are—our—spaces. I paid a lot of money to live in this
neighborhood, and people like you treat it like a public park. This
morning, some guy was sitting on my lawn—on my lawn! He got out of his
car and he sat down on my lawn, like he owned it, and then he went over
to the hospital!"

"Your yellow ribbon made him
feel at home," I said, and got into the car.

"What the hell is that
supposed to mean?"

"He thought it was a free
country." I started the car while he told me all about freedom. He was
a patriot, and he had a lot of thoughts on the subject that people like
me wouldn't understand.

Fontaine's blue sedan led me
downtown through a city that seemed deserted. The illusion of emptiness
vanished as soon as we drove past the entrance to Armory Place. The
newspaper articles had already brought perhaps a hundred people to the
front of police headquarters. Signs bristled up over their heads. The
crowd spilled down the wide steps of the huge gray building and flowed
out onto the wide plaza between it and city hall. At the top of the
steps, a man diminished by distance shouted into a bullhorn. Camera
crews wound through his audience, recording it all for the evening news.

The blue sedan turned right
at the end of the plaza, and a block later turned right again into an
unmarked lane. A sign announced
NO ACCESS POLICE VEHICLES ONLY.

Red brick walls hemmed in
the narrow lane. I followed Fontaine's car into a wide rectangular
parking lot crowded with police cars. Uniformed officers dwarfed by the
high walls leaned against the cars, talking. The back of the police
headquarters loomed on the opposite side of the lot. A few policemen
turned their heads when the Pontiac came in. When I pulled into an
empty space alongside Fontaine, two of them appeared at my door.

Fontaine got out of his car
and said, "Don't shoot him, he's with me."

Without looking back, he
took off toward a black metal door in the rear of the headquarters
building. The two cops stepped aside, and I hurried after him.

Like an old grade school,
the police building was a warren of dark corridors with scuffed wooden
floors, rows of doors with pebbled glass windows, and clanging
staircases. Fontaine charged ahead past a crowded bulletin board and
the open door to a locker room. A half-naked man sitting on a bench
called out, "How's Mangelotti?"

"Dead," Fontaine said.

He double-jumped up a
staircase and banged open a door marked homicide. I followed him into a
room where half a dozen men seated at desks froze at the sight of me.
"He's with me," Fontaine said. "Let's get down to business and
interrogate that piece of batshit right now." The men had already
stopped paying attention to me. "Let's give him the chance to explain
himself." Fontaine took off his suit jacket and put it over the back of
a chair. Files and loose papers lay stacked on his desk. "Let's wrap up
every unsolved murder on our books and start all over again with a
clean slate. And then everybody will go home happy."

He rolled up his sleeves.
The room smelled of sweat and stale cigarette smoke. It was a little
bit hotter than the street. "Now don't lose your head," said a man at
the back of the room.

"That's good," Fontaine said.

"Say, Paul," said a
detective with a round, chubby face who looked up at him from the next
desk, "did it ever occur to you, and I'm sure it did, that your
prisoner in there gave a whole new meaning to the expression, to give
good head?"

"I'm grateful to you for
that insight," Fontaine said. "When he starts to get hungry, I'll send
one of you in to work things out with him."

"Paul, is it my imagination,
or is there a strange smell in here?" He sniffed the air.

"Ah, the smell," Fontaine
said. "Do you know what our friend said when this odor was pointed out
to him?"

"If you're not part of the
solution, you're part of the problem?" said the other policeman.

"Not quite. He said, and I
quote,
I've been meaning to do
something about that.
"

Every man in the room
cracked up. Fontaine regarded them stoically, as if he were resigned to
their childishness. "Gentlemen, gentlemen. I am using the suspect's
exact words. He is a person of good intentions. The man fully intended
to do something about the smell, which was as offensive to him as it
was to his neighbors." He raised his arms in mock appeal and slowly
turned around in a complete circle.

A hidden connection that had
struck me almost since I had walked into the detectives' office finally
surfaced: these men reminded me of the body squad. The homicide
detectives were as caustic and exclusionary as Scoot and Ratman and the
others, and their humor was as corrosive. Because they handled death
all day long, they had to make it funny.

"Are we set up for taping in
Number One?" Fontaine asked.

"Are you kidding?" asked the
detective with the chubby face. Short blond hair like feathers stuck
flat to his head, and his peaceful blue eyes were set as far apart as
an ox's. "That baby is set to go."

"Good," Fontaine said.

"Can we, uh, watch this, if
we want to?" asked the blond detective.

"I like to watch," intoned a
broad-shouldered detective with a heavy mustache that frothed over his
upper lip. "I want to watch."

"You are free to join Mr.
Underhill and Mr. Ransom in the booth," Fontaine said, with as much
dignity as possible.

"Show time," said the
detective across the room who had advised Fontaine not to lose his
head. He was a slim man with skin the color of light coffee and an
almost delicate, ironic face. Alone of all the men in the room, he
still had on his suit jacket.

"My colleagues, the ghouls,"
Fontaine said to me.

"These guys remind me of
Vietnam."

Something within Fontaine
slowed down by an almost imperceptible degree. "You were there? That's
how you know Ransom?"

"I met him there," I said.
"But I knew him from Millhaven." ,

"You go to Brooks-Lowood,
too?"

"Holy Sepulchre," I said. "I
grew up on South Sixth Street."

"Bastian there is from your
part of town."

Bastian was the corrupt
cherub with feathery blond hair and wide-set blue eyes. "I used to go
to those athletes' suppers at your school," he said. "When I played
football at St. Ignatius. I remember your coach. A real character."