The Throat (48 page)

"The man
liked quiet. He'd be firm, but not rude."

"And his
upstairs tenants, the Sunchanas, were nice folks, foreigners, but nice.
We didn't really know them either, of course, no more than to say hello
to. Sunchanas stuck to themselves."

"Talked
a little bit funny," Frank said. "Foreign. She was one pretty woman,
though."

"Would
they know how I could get in touch with Mr. Bandolier?"

The
Belknaps smiled at each other. "Sunchanas didn't get on with Mr.
Bandolier," Hannah said. "There was bad blood there. The day they moved
out, they were packing boxes into a trailer. I came out to say
good-bye. Theresa said she hoped she'd never have to see Mr. Bandolier
again in all her life. She said they had a tiny little nest egg saved
up, and they put a downpayment on a house way on the west side. When
Dumkys left, one of the girls told me a young man in a military uniform
came around and told them they'd have to pack up and leave. I told her
the army didn't act like that in the United States of America, but she
wasn't a real intelligent child."

"She
didn't know who the soldier was?"

"He just
turned up and made them skedaddle."

"There's
no sense to it, except that Mr. Bandolier could do things that way,"
Frank said. "What I thought was, Mr. Bandolier wanted to live there by
himself, and he got some fellow to come along and scare off his
tenants. So I reckoned we'd be seeing Mr. Bandolier back here. Instead,
the place stayed empty ever since. Mr. Bandolier still owns it, I
believe—never saw a
FOR SALE
sign on the place."

I
thought about it for a moment while I finished my lemonade. "So the
house has been empty all this time? Who cuts the grass?"

"We all
do, taking turns."

"You've
never seen that soldier the Sunchanas told you about?"

"No,"
Frank said.

"Well,"
Hannah said.

"Oh,
that old foolishness."

"You
have
seen him?"

"Hannah
didn't see anything."

"It
might not have been a
soldier
,"
Hannah said. "But it isn't just
foolishness, either."

I asked
her what she had seen, and Frank made a disgusted noise.

Hannah
pointed at him. "He doesn't believe me because he never saw him. He
goes to sleep at nine every night, doesn't he? But it doesn't matter if
he believes me, because I know. I get up in the middle of the night,
and I saw him."

"You saw
someone going into the house?"

"
In
the
house, mister."

"Hannah's
ghost," Frank said.

"I'm the
one who saw him, and he wasn't a ghost. He was just a man." She turned
away from Frank, toward me. "Every two or three nights, I get up
because I can't sleep. I come downstairs and read."

"Tell
him what you read," Frank said.

"Well,
it's true, I like those scary books." Hannah smiled to herself, and
Frank grinned at me. "I got a whole collection of them, and I get new
ones at the supermarket. I always got one going, like now I'm reading
Red Dragon
, you know that one?
I like those real gooshy ones."

Frank
covered his mouth and cackled.

"But
that doesn't mean I made it all up. I saw that man walking around in
the living room next door."

"Just
walking around in the dark," Frank said.

"Yep."

"Sometimes
he has a little flashlight, but most times, he just goes in there and
walks around for a while and sits down. And—"

"Go on,"
Frank said. "Say the rest."

"And he
cries." Hannah looked at me defiantly. "I use this little tiny light to
read by, and from where I'm sitting in my chair, I can see him through
the window on the side of the house— there's only a net curtain on that
window over there. He's there maybe one night every two weeks. He walks
around the living room. Sometimes he disappears into some other room,
and I think he's gone. But then I look up later, and he's sitting down,
talking to himself or crying."

"He
never noticed your light?"

"Those
red dragons probably don't see real good," Frank said.

"It's
little," she said. "Like a pinpoint."

"You
never saw him go into the house?"

"I think
he goes around the far side and comes in the back," she said.

"Probably
he comes down the chimney."

"Did you
ever call the police?"

"No."
For the first time, she seemed embarrassed.

"
Tears
from Beyond the Grave
,"Frank
said, "by I. B. Looney."

"Welders
are all that way," Hannah said. "I don't know why, but they all think
they're comedians."

"Why
didn't you call the police?"

"I think
it's one of those poor little Dumkys, all grown up now, come back to a
place where he used to be happy."

"Hillbillies
don't act like that," Frank said. "And hillbillies is what they were.
Even the little ones got so drunk they passed out on the lawn." He
grinned at his wife again. "She liked them because they called her
ma'am."

She gave
him a disapproving look. "There's a big difference between being
ignorant and being bad."

"Did you
ever ask other people on the street if they saw him, too?"

She
shook her head. "There's nobody in this neighborhood is up at night
except me."

"Mr.
Bandolier lived alone?"

"He did
everything alone," Frank said. "He was a whole separate country."

"Maybe
it's him," I said.

"You'd
need a microscope to find any tears in Mr. Bandolier," Frank said, and
for once his wife seemed to agree with him.

Before I
left, I asked Hannah Belknap to call me the next time she saw the man
in the house next door. Frank pointed out the houses of the two other
couples who had been on the block since the Belknaps had moved in, but
he didn't think they'd be able to help me find Robert Bandolier.

One of
these couples lived up at the end of the block and had only the vaguest
memories of their former neighbor. They thought he was, in their words,
"a stuck-up snob with his nose in the air," and they had no interest in
talking about him. They still resented his renting to the Dumkys. The
other couple, the Millhausers, lived two houses up from Livermore, on
the other side of the street. Mr. Millhauser came outside the screen
door to talk to me, and his wife shouted from a wheelchair stationed
far back in a gloomy hallway. They shared the universal dislike of Bob
Bandolier. It was a shame that house just sat empty year after year,
but they too had no wish to see more of the Dumkys. Mrs. Millhauser
bawled that she thought the Sunchanas had moved to, what was that place
called, Elm Hill? Elm Hill was a suburb on Millhaven's far west side.
Mr. Millhauser wanted to get back inside, and I thanked him for talking
to me. His wife shouted, "That Bandolier, he was handsome as Clark
Gable, but no good! Beat his wife black and blue!" Millhauser gave me a
pained look and told her to mind her own business. "And you might as
well mind yours, mister," he said to me. He went back inside his house
and slammed the door.

I left
the car on South Seventh and walked toward the St. Alwyn through the
steaming day. Everything I had heard in the past two days went spinning
through my head. The farther I got from South Seventh Street, the less
I believed that Hannah Belknap had seen anyone at all. I decided to
give myself the pleasure of meeting Glenroy Breakstone even though it
would probably turn out to be another blind alley, and after that I
would try to find the Sunchanas.

My
stomach growled, and I realized that I hadn't eaten anything since
dinner with the Ransoms at Jimmy's, last night. Glenroy Breakstone
could wait until after lunch—he was probably still in bed, anyhow. I
got a
Ledger
from a
coin-operated dispenser on the corner of Livermore
and Widow Street and carried it through the street entrance of Sinbad's
Cavern.

The
restaurant had relaxed since the morning of Walter Dragonette's arrest.
Most of the booths were filled with neighborhood people and hotel
residents eating lunch, and the young woman behind the bar was pulling
draft beers for workmen covered in plaster dust. The waitress I had
spoken to that morning came out of the kitchen in her blue cocktail
dress and high heels. There was a lively buzz of conversation. The
waitress waved me toward a table in a rear corner of the room. At a
table directly across the room, four men ranging in age from over fifty
to about twenty sat around a table, drinking coffee and paying no
attention to one another. They were very much like the different men
who had been at the same table on the day of April Ransom's murder. One
of them wore a summer suit, another a hooded sweatshirt and dirty
trousers. The youngest man at the table was wearing baggy jeans, a mesh
undershirt, and a heavy gold chain around his neck. They ignored me,
and I opened my paper.

Millhaven
was still tearing itself apart. Half of the front page dealt with the
protest meetings at Armory Place. The Reverend Al Sharpton had appeared
as promised and declared himself ready to storm City Hall by himself if
the policemen who had failed to respond to calls from Walter
Dragonette's neighbors were not put on suspension or dismissed.
Pictures of the chief and Merlin Waterford orating at April Ransom's
funeral, complete with full texts of both remarks, filled the top of
the next page. All three editorials blasted Waterford and the
performance of the police department.

While I
read all of this and ate a club sandwich, I gradually began to notice
what the men across the room were doing. At intervals, they stood up
and disappeared through an unmarked door in the wall behind their
table. When one came out, another went in. I caught glimpses of a gray
hallway lined with empty metal kegs. Sometimes the man coming back out
left the restaurant, sometimes he went back to the table and waited.
The men smoked and drank coffee. Whenever one of the original men left,
another came in from outside and took his place. They rarely spoke.
They did not look arrogant enough to be mobsters or furtive enough to
be drug dealers making pickups.

When I
left, only the man with the gold chain was left of the original four,
and he had already been once in and out of the back room. None of them
looked at me when I paid up and left through the arched door into the
St. Alwyn's lobby.

I forgot
about them and went up to the desk clerk to ask if Glenroy Breakstone
was in his room.

"Yeah,
Gienroy's up there," he said and pointed to a row of house phones. One
old man in a gray suit with fat lapels sat on the long couch in the
lobby, smoking a cigar and mumbling to himself. The clerk told me to
dial 925.

A thick,
raspy voice said, "You have reached Glenroy Breakstone's residence. He
is home. If you have a message, now's the time."

"Mr.
Breakstone?"

"Didn't
I say that? Now it's your turn."

I told
him my name and said that I was downstairs in the lobby. I could hear
the sound of Nat "King" Cole singing "Blame It on My Youth" in the
background. "I was hoping that I could come up to see you."

"You
some kind of musician, Tim Underhill?"

"Just a
fan," I said. "I've loved your playing for years, and I'd be honored to
meet you, but what I wanted to talk about with you was the man who used
to be the day manager here in the fifties and sixties."

"You
want to talk about Bad Bob Bandolier?" I had surprised him, and he
laughed. "Man, nobody wants to talk about Bad Bob anymore. That subject
is talked
out
."

"It has
to do with the Blue Rose murders," I said.

There
was a long pause. "Are you some kind of reporter?"

"I could
probably tell you some things you don't know about those murders. You
might be interested, if only for James Treadwell's sake."

Another
pause while he considered this. I was afraid that I had gone too far,
but he said, "You claim you're a jazz fan?"

I said
that I was.

"Tell me
who played the tenor solo on Lionel Hampton's 'Flyin' Home,' who played
tenor for the Billy Eckstine band with Charlie Parker, and the name of
the man who wrote 'Lush Life.' "

"Illinois
Jacquet, I think both Gene Ammons and Dexter Gordon, and Billy Stray
horn."

"I
should have asked you some hard questions. What was Ben Webster's
birthday?"

"I don't
know."

"I don't
know, either," he said. "Pick up a pack of Luckies at the desk before
you come up."

Before I
had taken three steps back toward the desk, the clerk was already
holding out a pack of Lucky Strikes. He waved away the bills I offered
him. "Glenroy's got an account, but I almost never charge him for
cigarettes. What the hell, he's Glenroy Breakstone."

"Don't I
know it," I said.

On the
St. Alwyn's top floor, the dull black door of 925 stood at the end of
the long corridor to the right of the elevators. Patterned yellow paper
covered the walls. I knocked on the door, and a wiry man of about
five-eight with tight, close-cropped white hair and bright, curious
eyes opened it and stood before me. He was wearing a black sweatshirt
that said
LAREN JAZZFEST
across its front and loose
black trousers. His face was thinner and his cheekbones sharper than
when he had recorded
Blue Rose
.
He held out his hand for the cigarettes
and smiled with strong white teeth. I could hear Nat Cole singing
behind him.

"Get in
here, now," he said. "You got me more interested than an old man ought
to be." He tossed the pack onto a table and shooed me into the room.

Sun
streaming in the big windows at the front of the room fell on a long,
colorful Navaho rug, a telescope on a black metal mount, an octagonal
table stacked with sheet music, compact discs, and paperback books.
Just out of the sunlight, a group of chairs faced a fifteen-foot-long
hotel dresser unit flanked with speakers. Two large, framed posters
hung on the exposed wall, one for the Grand Parade du Jazz in Nice, the
other for a concert at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Glenroy
Breakstone's name figured prominently on both. Framed photographs were
propped against his shelves of records—a younger Breakstone in a
dressing room with Duke Ellington, with Benny Carter and Ben Webster,
playing side by side on a stage with Phil Woods and Scott Hamilton.