The Throat (39 page)

There
was a moment of silence. Separately, Marjorie Ransom and Alan Brookner
came down the center aisle. Marjorie said a few words to Alan. He
nodded uncertainly, as if he had not really heard her.

I poured
coffee for them. For a moment we all wordlessly regarded the coffin.

"Nice
flowers," Ralph said.

"I just
said that," said Marjorie. "Didn't I, Alan?"

"Yes,
yes," Alan said. "Oh John, I haven't asked you about what happened at
police headquarters. How long were you interrogated?"

John
closed his eyes. Marjorie whirled toward Alan, sloshing coffee over her
right hand. She transferred the cup and waved her hand in the air,
trying to dry it. Ralph gave her a handkerchief, but he was looking
from John to Alan and back to John.

"You
were interrogated?"

"No,
Dad. I wasn't interrogated."

"Well,
why would the police want to talk to you? They already got the guy."

"It
looks as though Dragonette gave a false confession."

"What?"
Marjorie said. "Everybody knows he did it."

"It
doesn't work out right. He didn't have enough time to go to the
hospital for the change of shift, go to the hardware store and buy what
he needed, then get back home when he did. The clerk who sold him the
hacksaw said they had a long conversation. Dragonette couldn't have
made it to the east side and back. He just wanted to take the credit."

"Well,
that man must be crazy," Marjoiiie said.

For the
first time that day, Alan smiled.

"Johnny,
I still don't get why the police wanted to question you," said his
father.

"You
know how police are. They want to go over and over the same ground.
They want me to remember everybody I saw on my way into the hospital,
everybody I saw on the way out, anything that might help them."

"They're
not trying to—"

"Of
course not. I left the hospital and walked straight home. Tim heard me
come in around five past eight." John looked at me. "They'll probably
want you to verify that."

I said I
was glad I could help.

"Are
they coming to the funeral?" Ralph asked.

"Oh,
yeah," John said. "Our ever-vigilant police force will be in
attendance."

"You
didn't say a word about any of this. We wouldn't have known anything
about it, if Alan hadn't spoken up."

"The
important thing is that April is gone," John said. "That's what we
should be thinking about."

"Not who
killed her?" Alan boomed, turning each word into a cannonball.

"Alan,
stop
yelling
at me," John
said.

"The man
who did this to my daughter is
garbage
!"
Through some natural extra
capacity, Alan's ordinary speaking voice was twice as loud as a normal
person's, and when he opened it up, it sounded like a race car on a
long straight road. Even now, when he was nearly rattling the windows,
he was not really trying to shout. "
He
does not deserve to live!"

Blushing,
John walked away.

Just
Call Me Joyce peeked in. "Is anything wrong? My goodness, there's
enough noise in here to wake the know you what."

Alan
cleared his throat. "Guess I make a lot of noise when I get excited."

"The
others will be here in about fifteen minutes." Joyce gave us a
thoroughly insincere smile and backed out. Her father must have been
hovering in the hallway. Clearly audible through the door, Joyce said,
"Didn't these people ever hear of Valium?"

Even
Alan grinned, minutely.

He
twisted around to look for John, who was winding back toward us, hands
in his pockets like his father, his eyes on the pale carpet. "John, is
Grant Hoffman coming?"

I
remembered Alan asking about Hoffman when he was dressed in filthy
shorts and roaches scrambled through the pizza boxes in his sink.

"I have
no idea," John said.

"One of
our best Ph.D. candidates," Alan said to Marjorie.

"He
started off with me, but we moved him over to John two years ago. He
dropped out of sight—which is odd, because Grant is an excellent
student."

"He was
okay," John said.

"Grant
usually saw me after his conferences with John, but last time, he never
showed up."

"Never
showed up for our conference on the sixth, either," John said. "I
wasted an hour, not to mention all the time I spent going to and fro on
the bus."

"He came
to your house?" I asked Alan.

"Absolutely,"
Alan said. "About once a week. Sometimes, he gave me a hand with
cleaning up the kitchen, and we'd gab about the progress of his thesis,
all kinds of stuff."

"So call
the guy up," Ralph said to his son.

"I've
been a little busy," John said. "Anyhow, Hoffman didn't have a
telephone. He lived in a single room downtown somewhere, and you had to
call him through his landlady. Not that I ever called him." He looked
at me. "Hoffman used to teach high school in a little town downstate.
He saved up some money, and he came here to do graduate work with Alan.
He was at least thirty."

"Do
graduate students disappear like that?"

"Now and
then they slink away."

"People
like Grant Hoffman don't slink away," Alan said.

"I don't
want to waste my time worrying about
Grant
Hoffman
. There must be
people who would notice if he got hit by a bus, or if he decided to
change his name and move to Las Vegas."

The door
opened. Just Call Me Joyce led a number of men in conservative gray and
blue suits into the chapel. After a moment a few women, also dressed in
dark suits but younger than the men, became visible in their midst.
These new arrivals moved toward John, who took them to his parents.

I sat
down in a chair on the aisle. Ralph and one of the older brokers, a man
whose hair was only a slightly darker gray than his own, sidled off to
the side of the big room and began talking in low voices.

The door
clicked open again. I turned around on my seat and saw Paul Fontaine
and Michael Hogan entering the room. Fontaine was carrying a beat-up
brown satchel slightly too large to be called a briefcase. He and Hogan
went to different sides of the room. That powerful and unaffected
natural authority that distinguished Michael Hogan radiated out from
him like an aura and caused most of the people in the room, especially
the women, to glance at him. I suppose great actors also have this
capacity, to automatically draw attention toward themselves. And Hogan
had the blessing of looking something like an actor without at all
looking theatrical—his kind of utterly male handsomeness, cast in the
very lines of reliability, steadiness, honesty, and a tough
intelligence, was of the sort that other men found reassuring, not
threatening. As I watched Hogan moving to the far side of the room
under the approving glances of April's mourners, glances he seemed not
to notice, it occurred to me that he actually was the kind of person
that an older generation of leading men had impersonated on screen, and
I was grateful that he was in charge of April's case.

Less
conspicuous, Fontaine poured coffee for himself and sat behind me. He
dropped the satchel between his legs.

"The
places I run into you," he said.

I did
not point out that I could say the same.

"And the
things I hear you say." He sighed. "If there's one thing the ordinary
policeman hates, it's a mouthy civilian."

"Was I
wrong?"

"Don't
push your luck." He leaned forward toward me. The bags under his eyes
were a little less purple. "What's your best guess as to the time your
friend Ransom got home from the hospital on Wednesday morning?"

"You
want to check his alibi?"

"I might
as well." He smiled. "Hogan and I are representing the department at
this municipal extravaganza."

Cops and
cop humor.

He
noticed my reaction to his joke, and said, "Oh, come on. Don't you know
what's going to happen here?"

"If you
want to ask me questions, you can take me downtown."

"Now,
now. You know that favor you asked me to do?"

"The
lost license number?"

"The
other favor." He slid the scuffed leather satchel forward and snapped
it open to show me a thick wad of typed and handwritten pages.

"The
Blue Rose file?"

He
nodded, smiling like a big-nosed cat.

I
reached for the satchel, and he slid it back between his legs. "You
were going to tell me what time your friend got home on Wednesday
morning."

"Eight
o'clock," I said. "It takes about twenty minutes to walk back from the
hospital. I thought you said this was going to be hard to find."

"The
whole thing was sitting on top of a file in the basement of the records
office. Someone else was curious, and didn't bother putting it back."

"Don't
you want to read it first?"

"I
copied the whole damn thing," he said. "Get it back to me as soon as
you can."

"Why are
you doing this for me?"

He
smiled at me in his old way, without seeming to move his face. "You
wrote that stupid book, which my sergeant adores. And I shall have no
other sergeants before him. And maybe there's something to this
ridiculous idea after all."

"You
think it's ridiculous to think that the new Blue Rose murders are
connected to the old ones?"

"Of
course it's ridiculous." He leaned forward over the satchel. "By the
way, will you please stop trying to be helpful in front of the cameras?
As far as the public is concerned, Mrs. Ransom was one of Walter's
victims. The man on Livermore Avenue, too."

"He's
still unidentified?"

"That's
right," Fontaine said. "Why?"

"Have
you ever heard of a missing student of John's named Grant Hoffman?"

"No. How
long has he been missing?"

"A
couple of weeks, I think. He didn't turn up for an appointment with
John."

"And you
think he could be our victim?"

I
shrugged.

"When
was the appointment he missed, do you know?"

"On the
sixth, I think."

"That's
the day after the body was found." Fontaine glanced over at Michael
Hogan, who was talking with John's parents. Her face toward the
detective, Marjorie was drinking in whatever he was saying. She looked
like a girl at a dance.

"Do you
happen to know how old this student was?"

"Around
thirty," I said, wrenching my attention away from the effect Michael
Hogan was making on John's mother. "He was a graduate student."

"After
the funeral, maybe we'll—" He stopped talking and stood up. He patted
my shoulder. "Get the file back to me in a day or two."

He
passed down the row of empty chairs and went up to Michael Hogan. The
two detectives parted from the Ransoms and walked a few feet away.
Hogan looked quickly, assessingly at me for a long second in which I
felt the full weight of his remarkable concentration, then at John. I
still felt the impact of his attention. Rapt, Marjorie Ransom continued
to stare at the older detective until Ralph tugged her gently back
toward the gray-haired broker, and even then she turned her head to
catch sight of him over her shoulder. I knew how she felt.

Someone
standing beside me said, "Excuse me, are you Tim Underhill?"

I looked
up at a stocky man of about thirty-five wearing thick black glasses and
a lightweight navy blue suit. He had an expectant expression on his
broad, bland face.

I nodded.

"I'm
Dick Mueller—from Barnett? We talked on the phone? I wanted to tell you
that I'm grateful for your advice—you sure called it. As soon as the
press found out about me and, ah, you know, they went crazy. But
because you warned me what was going to happen, I could work out how to
get in and out of the office."

He sat
down in front of me, smiling with the pleasure of the story he was
about to tell me. The door clicked open again, and I turned my head to
see Tom Pasmore slipping into the chapel behind a young man in jeans
and a black jacket. The young man was nearly as pale as Tom, but his
thick dark hair and thick black eyebrows made his large eyes blaze. He
focused on the coffin as soon as he got into the big room. Tom gave me
a little wave and drifted up the side of the room.

"You
know what I go through to get to work?" Mueller asked.

I wanted
to get rid of Dick Mueller so that I could talk to Tom Pasmore.

"I asked
Ross Barnett if he wanted me to—"

I broke
into the account of How I Get to My Office. "Was Mr. Barnett going to
send April Ransom out to San Francisco to open another office, some
kind of joint venture with another brokerage house?"

He
blinked at me. His eyes were huge behind the big square lenses. "Did
somebody tell you that?"

"Not
exactly," I said. "It was more of a rumor."

"Well,
there was some talk a while ago about moving into San Francisco." He
looked worried now.

"That
wasn't what you meant about the 'bridge deal'?"

"Bridge
deal?" Then, in a higher tone of voice: "Bridge deal?"

"You
told me to tell your secretary—"

He
grinned. "Oh, you mean the bridge project. Yeah. To remind me of who
you were. And you thought I meant the Golden Gate Bridge?"

"Because
of April Ransom."

"Oh,
yeah, no, it wasn't anything like that. I was talking about the Horatio
Street bridge. In town here. April was nuts about local history."

"She was
writing something about the bridge?"

He shook
his head. "All I know is, she called it the bridge project. But listen,
Ross"—he looked sideways and tilted his head toward the
prosperous-looking gray-haired man who had been talking with Ralph
Ransom—"worked out this great little plan."