The Throat (46 page)

He stood
up and took a look at the other computers, which were still searching.
Then he went to the table and picked up his drink. "Here's to
research." I raised my glass of water.

The
computer clicked, and information began appearing on the two monitors.

"Well,
what do you know?" Tom went back to his desk. "Births and Deaths is
talking to us." He leaned forward and began writing something on his
pad.

I got up
and looked over his shoulder.

WRITZMANN,
WILLIAM LEON 346 N 34TH STREET MILLHAVEN
birth:
4/16/48.

"We just
found a real person," Tom said. "If this is the mystery man following
John in the Elvee company car, I'd be surprised if he doesn't turn up
again."

"He
already has," I said, and told him what I had seen when I had driven
John Ransom and Alan Brookner to the morgue that afternoon.

"And you
didn't tell me until now?" Tom looked indignant. "You saw him at the
Green Woman, doing something really fishy, and then you keep it to
yourself? You just flunked Famous Detective School."

He
immediately sat down at the computer and began moving through another
series of complicated commands. The modem clucked to itself. It looked
to me as though he was calling up the city's registry of deeds.

"Well,
for one thing I wasn't sure it was him," I said. "And I forgot about it
once you started breaking into every office in the state."

"The
Green Woman closed down a long time ago," Tom said, still punching in
codes.

I asked
him what he was doing.

"I want
to see who owns that bar. Suppose it's—"

The
screen went blank for a half-second, and
RECEIVE
flashed on and off.
Tom whooped and clapped his hands.

THE
GREEN WOMAN TAPROOM 21B HORATIO STREET
 PURCHASED
01/07/1980
,
ELVEE HOLDINGS CORP
PURCHASE PRICE
$5,000
PURCHASED
05/21/1935
,
THOMAS
MULRONEY
PURCHASE PRICE $3,200

Tom
combed his fingers through his hair so that it looked like a haystack.
"Who are these people, and what are they doing?" He wrenched himself
away from the screen and grinned at me. "I don't have the faintest idea
where we're going, but we're certainly getting somewhere. And you
certainly saw our friend in the blue Lexus, you sure did, and I take
back every bad thing I ever said about you." He returned to the screen
and disarranged his hair a little more. "Elvee bought the Green Woman
Taproom, and look how little they paid for it. Maybe, do you think, we
could even say he, meaning William Writzmann? Writzmann laid out a
paltry five thousand. It was nothing but a leaky shell. What good is
it? What could he use it for?"

"It
looked like he was moving things into it," I said. "There were
cardboard boxes next to the car."

"Or
taking something out," Tom said. "The place was a shed. The only thing
it's good for is storage. Our boy Writzmann bought a
five-thousand-dollar shed. Why?"

All this
time, Tom was looking back and forth from the screen to me, torturing
his hair. "There's only one reason to buy the place.
It's the Green
Woman Taproom
. Writzmann is interested in the Green Woman."

"Maybe
he was Mulroney's nephew, and he was helping out the starving widow."

"Or
maybe he was very, very interested in the Blue Rose case. Maybe our
mysterious friend Writzmann has some connection to Blue Rose himself.
He can't be Blue Rose himself, he's too young, but he could be—"

Tom was
looking at me, a wild speculative delight shining out from his entire
face.

"His
son?" I asked. "You think Writzmann is the son of Blue Rose? On the
evidence that he bought a rundown bar and stored boxes in it?"

"It's a
possibility, isn't it?"

"Writzmann
was two years old at the time of the murders. That's pretty young, even
for Heinz Stenmitz."

"I'm not
so sure about that. You don't like thinking about someone molesting a
two-year-old child, but it happens. All you need is a Heinz Stenmitz."

"Do you
think this Writzmann murdered April because he found out about her
research? Maybe he even saw her looking around the bridge and the
taproom."

"Maybe,"
Tom said. "But why would he murder Grant Hoffman?" He frowned and ran
his hand through his soft blond hair, and it fell back into place. "We
have to find out what April was actually doing. We need her notes, or
her drafts, or whatever she managed to get done. But before that—"

He left
the desk, picked up one of the neat white stacks of copied pages and
handed it to me. "We have to start reading."

So for
another hour I sat in the comfortable leather chair, leafing through
the police files on the Blue Rose case, deciphering the handwriting of
half a dozen policemen and two detectives, Fulton Bishop and William
Damrosch. Bishop, who was destined for a long, almost sublimely corrupt
career in the Millhaven police department, had been taken off the case
after two weeks: his patrons had been protecting him from what they saw
as a kind of tar baby. I wished that they had let him investigate for
another couple of weeks. His small, tight handwriting was as easy to
read as print. His typed reports looked like a good secretary's.
Damrosch scribbled even when he was relatively sober and scrawled when
he was not. Anything he wrote after about two in the afternoon was a
hodgepodge in which whole words disappeared into wormy knots. He typed
the way an angry child plays piano. After ten minutes, my head hurt;
after twenty, my eyes ached.

By
the time I had gone through all the statements and reports, all I had
come up with was a sense that very few people had liked Robert
Bandolier. The only new thing I learned was that the killings had not
been savage mutilations, like the murder of Grant Hoffman and Walter
Dragonette's performances: Blue Rose's victims had been stabbed once,
neatly, in the heart, and then their throats had been cut. It was as
passionless as ritual slaughter.

"Well,
nothing jumped out at me, either," Tom said. "There are a few minor
points, but they can wait." He looked at me almost cautiously. "I
suppose you're about ready to go?"

"Well,
your coffee is going to keep me awake for a while," I said. "I could
stay a little longer."

Tom's
obvious gratitude at my willingness to stay made him seem like a child
left alone in a splendid house.

"How
about a little music?" he said, already getting up.

"Sure."

He
pulled a boxed set from the rows of CDs, removed one, and inserted the
disc in the player. Mitsuko Uchida began playing the Mozart piano
sonata in F. Tom leaned back into his leather couch, and for a time
neither of us spoke.

Despite
my exhaustion, I wanted to stay another half hour, and not merely to
give him company. I thought it was a privilege. I couldn't banish Tom's
sorrows any more than he could banish mine, but I admired him as much
as anyone I've ever known.

"I wish
we had discovered some disgruntled desk clerk named Lenny Valentine,"
he said.

"Do you
really think there's some connection between Elvee Holdings and the
Blue Rose murders?"

"I don't
know."

"What do
you think is going to happen?"

"I think
a dead body is going to turn up in front of the Idle Hour." He reached
for his drink and took another sip. "Let's talk about something else."

I forgot
I was tired, and when I looked at my watch I found that it was past two.

After we
had gone over what I was going to do the next day, Tom went to his desk
and picked up the book with the plain gray binding. "Do you think
you'll have time to look through this over the next few days?"

"What is
it?" I should have known that the book wasn't on his desk by accident.

"The
memoirs of an old soldier, published by a vanity press. I've been doing
a lot of reading about Vietnam, and there are some questions about what
John actually did during his last few months in the service."

"He was
at Lang Vei," I said. "There aren't any questions about that."

"I think
he was ordered to say he was there."

"He
wasn't at Lang Vei?"

Tom did
not answer me. "Do you know anything about a strange character named
Franklin Bachelor? A Green Beret major?"

"I met
him once," I said, remembering the scene in Billy's. "He was one of
John's heroes."

"Read
this and see if you can get John to talk about what happened to him,
but—"

"I know.
Don't tell him you gave me the book. Do you think he's going to lie to
me?"

"I'd
just like to find out what actually happened."

Tom
handed me the book. "It's probably a waste of time, but indulge me."

I turned
the book over in my hands and opened it to the title page. WHERE WE
WENT WRONG,
or The Memoirs of a
Plain Soldier,
by Col. Beaufort Runnel
(Ret.). I turned pages until I got to the first sentence.

I have
always loathed and detested deceit, prevarication, and dishonesty in
all their many forms.

"I'm
surprised he ever made it to colonel," I said, and then a coincidence I
trusted was meaningless occurred to me. "Lang Vei starts with the
initials LV," I blurted.

"Maybe
you didn't flunk out of Famous Detective School after all." He grinned
at me. "But I still hope we come across Lenny Valentine one of these
days."

He took
me downstairs and let me out into the warm night. What looked like
millions of stars hung in the enormous reaches of the sky. As soon as I
got to the sidewalk, I realized that for something like four hours, Tom
had nursed a single glass of malt whiskey.

The
lights were turned off in all the big houses along Eastern Shore Road.
Two blocks down from An Die Blumen, the taillights of a single car
headed toward Riverwood. I turned the corner into An Die Blumen with a
mind full of William Writzmann and an empty shell called the Green
Woman Taproom.

The long
empty street stretched out in front of me, lined with the vague shapes
of houses that seemed to melt together in the night. Street lamps at
wide intervals cast fuzzy circles of light on the cracked cement.
Everything before me seemed deceptively peaceful, not so much at rest
as in concealment. The scale of the black sky littered with stars made
me feel tiny. I shoved my hands into my pockets and began to walk
faster.

I had
gone half a block down An Die Blumen before I fully realized what was
happening to me—not a sudden descent of panic, but a gradual approach
of fear that felt different from the way the past usually invaded me.
No men in black flitted unseen across the landscape, no groans leaked
out of the earth. I could not tell myself that this was just another
bad one and sit down on someone else's grass until it went away. It
wasn't just another bad one. It was something new.

I
hurried along with my hands in my pockets, unconsciously huddled into
myself. I stepped down off a curb and walked across an empty street,
and the dread that had come over me slowly focused itself into the
conviction that someone or something was watching me. Somewhere in the
blanket of shadows on the other side of An Die Blumen, a creature that
seemed barely human followed me with its eyes.

Then,
with an absolute certainty, I knew: this was not just panic, but real.

I moved
down the next block, feeling the eyes claiming me from their hiding
place. The touch of those eyes made me feel appallingly dirty, soiled
in some way I could not bear to define —the being that looked through
those eyes knew that it could destroy me
secretly
, could give me a
secret wound
visible to no one
but itself and me.

I moved,
and it moved with me, sliding through the darkness across the street.
At times it lagged behind, leaning against an invisible stone porch and
smiling at my back. Then it melted through the shadows and passed among
the trees and effortlessly moved ahead of me, and I felt its gaze
linger oh my face.

I walked
down three more blocks. My palms and my forehead were wet. It was
concealed in the darkness in front of a building like a tall blank
tomb, breathing through nostrils the size of my fists, taking in
enormous gulps of air and releasing fumes.

I can't
stand this, I thought, and without knowing I was going to do it, I
walked across the street and went up the edge of the sidewalk in front
of the frame house. My knees shook. A tall shadow moved sideways in the
dark and then froze before a screen of black that might have been a
hedge Of rhododendrons and became invisible again. My heart thudded,
and I nearly collapsed. "Who are you?" I said. The front of the house
was a featureless slab. I took a step forward onto the lawn.

A dog
snarled, and I jumped. A section of the darkness before me moved
swiftly toward the side of the house. My terror flashed into anger, and
I charged up onto the lawn.

A light
blazed behind one of the second-floor windows. A black silhouette
loomed against the glass. The man at the window cupped his hands over
his eyes. Light, pattering footsteps disappeared down the side of the
house. The man in the window yelled at me.

I turned
and ran back across the street. The dog pushed itself toward a
psychotic breakdown. I ran as hard as I could down to the next corner,
turned, and pounded up the street.

When I
got to John's house, I waited outside the front door for my breathing
to level out. I was covered in sweat, and my chest was heaving. I
leaned panting against the door. I didn't think the man in the Lexus
could have moved that quietly or quickly, so who could it have been?