The Throat (45 page)

"Now we
just wait around?"

"Well,
I'd like to take a look through the file," Tom said. "But before we do
that, let's talk a little bit about the idea of
place
." He swallowed a
little more whiskey, stood up, and walked over to his couch and sat
down. I took the chair beside the chesterfield. His eyes almost snapped
with excitement, and I wondered how I could ever have thought they
looked washed out. "If William Damrosch didn't unite the Blue Rose
victims, what did?"

During
the brief moment in which Tom Pasmore and I waited for the other to
speak, I would have sworn that we were thinking the same thing.

Finally
I broke the silence. "The St. Alwyn Hotel."

"Yes,"
Tom said softly.

"When
Lamont and I got off the plane from Eagle Lake, we went to the St.
Alwyn. We stayed there the last night of his life. The St. Alwyn was
where the murders happened—in it, behind it, across the street."

"What
about Heinz Stenmitz? His shop was five or six blocks from the St.
Alwyn. And there wasn't any connection between Stenmitz and the hotel."

"Maybe
there was a connection we don't know yet," Tom said. "And think about
this, too. How much time elapsed between the murder of Arlette Monaghan
and James Treadwell? Five days. How much time between Treadwell and
Monty Leland? Five days. How much time between Monty Leland and Heinz
Stenmitz? Almost two weeks. More than twice the time that separated the
first three murders. Do you make anything of that?"

"He
tried to stop, but couldn't. In the end, he couldn't restrain
himself—he had to go out and kill someone again." I looked at Tom
glinting at me and tried to imagine what he was thinking. "Or maybe
someone else killed Stenmitz—maybe it was like Laing, a copycat murder,
for entirely different motives."

He
smiled at me almost proudly, and despite myself, I felt gratified that
I had guessed what he was thinking.

"I guess
that's possible," Tom said, and I knew that I had not followed his
thinking after all. My pride curdled. "But I think my grandfather was
Blue Rose's only imitator."

"So what
are you saying?"

"I think
you were half right. It was the same man, but with a different motive."

I
confessed that I was lost.

Tom
leaned forward, eyes still snapping with excitement. "Here we have a
vindictive, ruthless man who does everything according to plan. What's
his motive for the first three murders? A grudge against the St. Alwyn?"

I nodded.

"Once
every five days for fifteen days, he kills someone in the immediate
vicinity of the St. Alwyn, once actually
inside
the St. Alwyn. Then he
stops. By this time, how many people do you suppose are staying in the
St. Alwyn? It must be like a ghosttown."

"Sure,
but…" I shut up and let him say what he had to.

"And
then he kills Stenmitz. And who was Heinz Stenmitz? Pigtown's friendly
neighborhood sex criminal. The other three victims could have been
anybody—they were pawns. But when somebody goes out of his way to kill
a molester of little boys, an active chickenhawk, I think
that is not a
random murder
."

He
leaned back, finished. His eyes were still blazing.

"So what
you need," I said, "is a vindictive, ruthless man who has a grudge
against the St. Alwyn—and—"

"And—"

"And a
son."

"And a
son," Tom said. "You've got it. The kind of man we're talking about
couldn't stand anybody violating his own child. If he found out about
it, he'd have to kill the man who did it. The reason nobody ever
thought of this before is that it looked as though that was exactly the
reason that Stenmitz had been killed." He laughed. "Of course it was
the reason he was killed! It just wasn't Damrosch who killed him!"

We
looked at each other for a moment, and then I laughed, too.

"I think
we know a lot about Blue Rose," Tom said, still smiling at his own
vehemence. "He didn't stop because my grandfather had just guaranteed
his immunity from arrest by killing William Damrosch. We've been
assuming that all along, but, now that I have Blue Rose in a kind of
focus, I think he stopped because he was finished—he was finished even
before he murdered Heinz Stenmitz. He accomplished what he set out to
do— he paid back the St. Alwyn for whatever it did to him. If he
thought the St. Alwyn had still owed him something, he would have gone
on leaving a fresh corpse draped around the place every five days until
he was satisfied."

"So what
set him off all over again two weeks ago?"

"Maybe
he started brooding about his old grudge and decided to make life
miserable for the son of his old employer."

"And
maybe he won't stop until he kills John."

"John is
certainly the center of these new murders," Tom said. "Which puts you
pretty close to that center, if you haven't noticed."

"You
mean Blue Rose might decide to make me his next victim?"

"Hasn't
it occurred to you that you might be in some danger?"

It
sounds stupid, but it had not occurred to me, and Tom must have seen
the doubt and consternation I felt.

"Tim, if
you want to go back to your life, there's no reason not to. Forget
everything we talked about earlier. You can tell John that you have to
meet a deadline, fly home to New York, and go back to your real work."

"Somehow,"
I said, trying to express what I had never put into words until this
moment, "my work seems related to everything we've been talking about.
Every now and then I get the feeling that some answer, some
key
, is all
around me, and that all I have to do is open my eyes." Tom was looking
at me very intently, not betraying anything. "Besides, I want to learn
Blue Rose's name. I'm not going to run out now. I don't want to go back
to New York and get a phone call from you a week from now telling me
John was found knifed to death outside the Idle Hour."

"As long
as you remember that this isn't a book."

"It
isn't
Little Women,
anyhow,"
I said.

"Okay."
He looked across the room at the monitor on his desk, where
SEARCHING
still pulsed on and off. "Tell me about Ralph Ransom."

After I
described my conversation with John's father at the funeral, Tom said,
"I didn't know your father used to work at the St. Alwyn."

"Eight
years," I said. "He ran the elevator. He was fired not too long after
the murders ended. His drinking got worse after my sister was killed.
About a year later, he straightened himself out and got a job on the
assembly line at the Glax Corporation."

"Your
sister?" Tom said. "You had a sister who was killed? I didn't know
about that." He looked at me hard, and I saw consciousness come into
his face. "You mean that she was murdered."

I
nodded, too moved by the speed and accuracy of his intelligence to
speak.

"Did
this happen near your house?" He meant: did it happen near the hotel?

I told
him where April was murdered.

"When?"

I
thought he already knew, but I told him the date and then said that I
had been running across the street to help her when I was hit by the
car. Tom knew all about that, but he had known nothing else.

"Tim,"
he said, and blinked. I wondered what was going through his mind.
Something had amazed him. He began again. "That was five days before
Arlette Monaghan's murder." He sat there looking at me with his mouth
open.

I felt
as if my mouth, too, was hanging open. I had always been secretly
convinced that Blue Rose was my sister's murderer, but until this
moment I had never thought about the sequence of the dates.

"That's
why you're in Millhaven," he said. Then he stared blindly at the table
and said it to himself: "That's why he's in Millhaven." He turned
almost wonderingly to me again. "You didn't come back here for John's
sake, you wanted to find out who killed your sister."

"I came
back to do both," I said.

"And you
saw him," Tom said. "By God, you actually saw Blue Rose."

"For
about a second. I never saw his face—just a shape."

"You
devil. You dog. You—you're a deep one." He was shaking his head. "I'm
going to have to keep my eye on you. You've been sitting on this
information since you were seven years old, and you don't come up with
it until now." He put a hand on top of his head, as if it might
otherwise fly off. "All this time, there was another Blue Rose murder
that no one knew about. He didn't get to write his slogan, because you
came along and got run over. So he waited five days and did it all over
again." He was looking at me with undiminished wonder. "And afterward
no one would ever connect your sister with Blue Rose because she didn't
tie in with Damrosch in any way. You didn't even put it in your book."

He took
his hand off the top of his head and examined me. "What else have you
got locked up there inside yourself?"

"I think
that's it," I said.

"What
was your sister's name?"

"April,"
I said.

He was
staring at me again. "No wonder you had to come. No wonder you won't
leave."

"I'll
leave when I learn who he was."

"It must
be like—like all the rest of your childhood was haunted by some kind of
monster. For you, there was a real bogeyman."

"The
Minotaur," I said.

"Yes."
Tom's eyes were glowing with intelligence, sympathy, and some other
quantity, something like appreciation. Then the computer made a
clicking sound, and both of us looked at the screen. Lines of
information were appearing on the gray background. We stood up and went
to the desk.

BELINSKI,
ANDREW THEODORE 146 TURNER ST VALLEY HILL BIRTH: 6/1/1940 DEATH:
6/8/1940.
    CONCLUSION
BELINSKI SEARCH.
CASEMENT,
LEON CONCLUSION CASEMENT SEARCH.

"We must
have been talking when the Belinski information came through. This
Andrew Belinski was never an officer of Elvee Holding, though—he was a
week old when he died, which is the only reason his death date got into
the computer. When they're that close, they usually punch them in. And
there's nothing on the computer for Leon Casement. We should be getting
Writzmann through in about ten minutes."

We
turned away from the machine. I went back to the chair and poured
Poland water from a bottle on the coffee table into a glass and added
ice from the bucket. Tom was walking backward and forward in front of
the table with his hands in his pockets, sneaking little looks at me
now and then.

Finally
he stopped pacing. "Your father probably knew him."

That was
right, I realized—my father had probably known the Minotaur.

"Ralph
Ransom couldn't think of anyone else he fired around that time? I think
we ought to start with that angle, until we come up with something
else. He or one of his managers fired this guy—the Minotaur. And in
revenge, the Minotaur set out to ruin the hotel. If you start asking
about that, and there was some other motive, it will probably come up."

"You're
asking people to remember a long way back."

"I
know." He went to the second workstation and sat on the chair in front
of the computer. "What was that day manager's name again?"

"Bandolier,"
I said. "Bob Bandolier."

"Let's
see if he's still in the book." Tom called up the directory on the
other machine and scrolled down the list of names beginning with B. "No
Bandolier. Maybe he's in a nursing home, or maybe he moved out of town.
Just for the fun of it, let's look for good old Glenroy."

The blur
of names rolled endlessly up the screen for a minute. "This takes too
long. I'll access it directly." He made the screen go blank except for
the directory code and punched in

BREAKSTONE,
GLENROY
and
ENTER
.

The
machine ticked, and the name, address, and telephone number appeared on
the screen,
BREAKSTONE, GLENROY
670 LIVERMORE
AVE 542-5500.

He
winked at me. "Actually, I knew he was still living at the St. Alwyn. I
just wanted to show off. Didn't John's father say that Breakstone knew
everybody at the hotel? Maybe you can get him to talk to you." He wrote
down the saxophone player's telephone number on a piece of paper, and I
walked over to get it from him.

"Hold
on, let's find out where this wonderful manager was living when the
murders were committed."

I stood
behind him while he ordered up the Millhaven directory for 1950 and
then jumped to the B listings. He found the address in five seconds.

BANDOLIER,
ROBERT 17 S SEVENTH ST LIV
ermore
2-4581
.

"Old Bob
had a short commute, didn't he? He lived about a block away from the
hotel."

"He
lived right behind us," I said.

"Maybe
we can work out how long he was there." Tom called up the directory for
1960. Bandolier, Robert was still living on South Seventh Street. "Good
stable guy." He called up the 1970 directory and found him still there,
same address but with a new telephone number. In 1971, still there, but
with yet another new telephone number. "Something funny happened here,"
Tom said. "Why do you change your phone number? Crank calls? Avoiding
someone?"

By 1975,
he was out of the book. Tom worked backward through 1974, and 1973, and
found him again in 1972. "So he moved out of town or into a nursing
home or, if our luck just left us, died sometime in 1972." He wrote the
address down on the same slip of paper and handed it to me. "Maybe you
could go to the house and talk to whoever lives there now. It might be
worth asking some of his old neighbors, too. Somebody'll know what
happened to him."