The Throat (50 page)

"A man
like Billy has to be regular," Glenroy said. "You have to be able to
find him."

A police
car came up from the bottom of Widow Street and parked in front of the
old redbrick apartment building on the other side of the pawnshop. One
of the uniforms in the car got out and walked up the block to the
grocery store. It was Sonny Berenger, the cop who looked like a moving
blue tree. The door of the Home Plate swung open, and a barrel of a man
in a white shirt and gray trousers stepped outside and leaned against
the front of the bar. Sonny walked past without looking at him.

"Is that
him?"

"No,
that's a guy named Frankie Waldo. He's in the wholesale meat business.
Idaho Meat. Except for a couple of years, Idaho used to supply all the
meat used in this hotel, back when we had room service. But Billy's
late, see, and Frankie wants to talk to him. He's wondering where he
is."

Frankie
Waldo stared at the entrance of the St. Alwyn until Sonny came back out
of the grocery store with two containers of coffee. Before Sonny
reached him, Waldo went back into the bar. Sonny returned to his car. A
van and a pickup truck went by and turned onto Livermore. The patrol
car left the curb and rolled up the street.

"Here he
comes," Glenroy said. "Now look out for Frankie."

I saw
the top and brim of a dark gray hat tilted back on the head of a man
who was crossing the sidewalk in front of the hotel's entrance. Frankie
Waldo popped out of the bar again and held the door open. Billy Ritz
stepped down off the curb and began moving across Widow Street. He was
wearing a loose wide-shouldered gray suit, and he walked without
hurrying, almost indolently.

Ritz
went up to Waldo and said something that made the other man seem almost
to melt with relief. Waldo clapped Ritz on the back, and Ritz marched
through the open door like a crown prince. Waldo was after him before
the door swung shut.

"See,
Billy spread some goodwill." Glenroy moved back from the window.
"Anyhow, this is about as close as you want to get to Billy Ritz."

"Maybe
he told him the St. Alwyn is going to start delivering room service
again."

"I wish
they would." We moved away from the window, and Glenroy Breakstone gave
me a look that said I had already taken up enough of his time.

I began
to go toward the door, and a stray thought came to me. "I guess it was
the Idaho Meat Company that sold meat to the hotel at the time of the
Blue Rose murders?"

He
smiled. "Well, it was supposed to be. But you know who really did it."

I asked
him what he meant.

"Remember
I said the managers worked a few angles? Lambert got a cut on the
laundry work, and Bad Bob worked out a deal on the meat. Ralph Ransom
never found out about it. Bob got phony bills printed up, and they were
all marked paid by the time they crossed Ralph's desk."

"How did
you find out about it?"

"Nando
told me, one night when he was loaded. Him and Eggs used to unload the
truck every morning, right at the start of their shift. But you knew
that already, right?"

"How
could I?"

"Didn't
you say that the St. Alwyn connected all the Blue Rose victims?"

Then I
saw what he was talking about. "The local butcher who took over the
meat contract was Heinz Stenmitz?"

"Sure it
was. How else could he be connected to the hotel?"

"Nobody
ever said anything about it to the police."

"No
reason to."

I
thanked Glenroy and took a step toward his door, but he did not move.
"You never asked me what I thought about the way James died. That's the
reason I let you come up here in the first place."

"I
thought you let me come up because I knew who wrote 'Lush Life.' "

"Everybody
ought to know who wrote 'Lush Life,' " he said. "Are you interested, or
not? I can't tell you who was fired right around then, and I can't tell
you where to find Bob Bandolier, but I can tell you what I know about
James. If you have the time."

"Please,"
I said. "I should have asked."

He took
a step toward me. "Damn right. Listen to me. James was killed in his
room, right? In his bed, right? Do you know what he was wearing?"

I shook
my head, cursing myself for not having read the police reports more
carefully.

"Nothing
at all. You know what that means?" He did not give me time to answer.
"It means he got up out of bed to open his door. He knew whoever was
out there. James might have been young, but he wasn't a fool about
anything but one thing. Pussy. James did want to fuck just about
anything good-looking that came his way. There used to be some pretty
maids in this hotel, and James got tight with one of them, a girl named
Georgia McKee, during the time we were playing at the Black and Tan."

"When
was that?"

"September
1950. Two months before he got killed. He dropped her, just like he
dropped every other girl he used to run with. He started seeing a girl
who worked at the club. Georgia used to come around and make trouble,
until they barred her from the club. She wanted James
back
." He was
making sure that I understood what he was saying. "I always thought
that Georgia McKee went into James's room and killed him and made it
look like the same person who did that whore did him, too. He
opened
the door
. Or she let herself in with her key. Either way. James
wouldn't make any fuss, if he thought she was coming back to go to bed
with him."

"You
never told the police?"

"I told
Bill Damrosch, but by that time, Georgia McKee was out of here."

"What
happened to her?"

"Right
after James got killed, she quit the hotel and moved to Tennessee. I
guess she had people there. Tell you the truth, I hope she got knifed
in a bar."

After
that, the two of us stood facing each other for a couple of seconds.

"James
should have had more life," Glenroy finally said. "He had something to
offer."

It was
still too early to call Tom Pasmore, so I asked the desk clerk if he
had a Millhaven directory. He went into his office and came back with a
fat book. "How's Glenroy doing today?"

"Fine,"
I said. "Isn't he always?"

"No, but
he's always Glenroy," the clerk said.

I
nodded, and leafed through the book to the S's. David Sunchana was
listed at an address on North Bayberry Lane, which sounded like it
belonged in Elm Hill. I wrote down the number on the paper Tom had
given me, and then, on an afterthought, looked up Oscar Writzmann on
Fond du Lac Drive. Maybe he would be able to tell me something about
the mysterious William Writzmann.

From the
pay phone in the St. Alwyn's lobby, I dialled the Sunchanas' number and
let it ring a long time before I hung up. They must have been the only
people in Elm Hill who didn't have an answering machine.

I went
outside and began walking back toward Bob Bandolier's old house. He
must have known something, I thought— maybe he had seen Georgia McKee
coming out of James Treadwell's room and blackmailed her instead of
turning her over to the police.

I turned
into South Seventh, looking down, and walked past the Millhauser place
before I saw Frank Belknap waving at me from his front lawn. He
motioned for me to stay where I was and began walking quickly down the
block. When he got closer, he looked back at his front porch and then
motioned me backward, toward Livermore. "Told Hannah I was going out
for a walk," he said. "Went up and down the street four times, waiting
for you to come back."

He
jerked his head toward the avenue, and we walked far enough so he could
be sure his wife wouldn't see him talking to me.

"What is
it?" I asked.

He was
still fighting with himself. "I met that soldier, the one who threw the
Dumkys out of the house next door. He came back the day after to check
on the place. Hannah was out shopping. I went out to talk to the fella
when I saw him leaving, and he was worse than rude, mister. Tell you
the truth, he scared me. He wasn't big, but he looked dangerous—that
fella would have killed me in a minute, and I knew it."

"What
happened? Did he threaten you?"

"Well,
he did." Belknap frowned at me. "I think that fella had just got back
from Vietnam, and I don't think there was anything he wouldn't have
done. I respect our soldiers, I want you to know, and I think what we
did to those boys was a damn shame. But this fella, he was something
special."

"What
did he say to you?"

"He said
I had to forget I ever saw him. If I ever let on anything about him or
his doings, he'd burn my house down. And he meant it. He looked like
he'd burned down a few houses in his time, like you saw them on the
news, with their Zippos." Frank moved closer to me, and I could smell
his stale breath. "See, he said there'd never be any trouble as long as
I acted like he didn't exist."

"Oh," I
said. "I see."

"You get
the picture?"

"He's
the man Hannah sees at night," I said.

He
nodded wildly, as if his head were on a,ball bearing. "I keep telling
her she's making it all up. Maybe it's not him—that was all the way
back in '73, when he warned me off. But I tell you one thing, if it is
him, I don't know what he's doing in there, but he sure as hell isn't
crying."

"Thanks
for telling me," I said.

He
looked at me doubtfully, wondering if he had made a mistake. "I was
thinking you might know who he is."

"He was
in uniform when you met him?"

"Sure. I
kind of had the feeling he didn't have civilian clothes yet."

"What
kind of uniform was it?"

"He had
on a jacket with brass buttons, but all the stuff, the insignia was
torn off."

That was
no help. "And then there was no sign of him until Hannah saw him in the
house at night."

"I was
hoping he died. Maybe it's someone else she sees in there?"

I said
that I didn't know, and he walked slowly back to his house. He looked
back at me a couple of times, still wondering if he'd done the right
thing.

I got
into the white Pontiac and drove back onto Livermore and through the
shadow of the valley. I left the freeway at the Elm Hill turnoff and
drove randomly through a succession of quiet streets, looking for
Bayberry Lane. In Elm Hill, they liked two-story imitation colonials
and raised ranch houses with elaborate swing sets in the long backyards
and ornate metal nameplates on posts next to the driveway—
THE
HARRISONS. THE BERNHARDTS. THE REYNOLDS
. Almost all of the
mailboxes were half the size of garbage cans and decorated with painted
ducks in flight, red barns by millponds, or leaping salmon. At the
center of Elm Hill, I drove into the parking lot of a semicircle of
gray colonial shops. You could tie your car to a hitching rail, if you
had a rope. Across the street was the hill where the elms had grown.
Now it had a historical marker and two intersecting paths with granite
benches. I bought a map at the Booky, Booky Bookshoppe and took it
across the street to one of the benches. Bayberry Lane began just
behind the shopping center at Town Hall, curved around a pond and
wandered for about half a mile until it intersected Plum Barrow Way,
which banged straight north back to the freeway.

The
first half-dozen houses closest to squat Town Hall, modest, rundown
wooden boxes with added porches, were the oldest buildings I had seen
in Elm Hill, dating from the twenties and thirties. Once Bayberry Lane
got past the pond, I was back among the white and gray colonials. I
kept checking the addresses as the numbers went up. Finally I came to a
long straight line of oak trees that had once marked the boundary of a
farm.

On the
other side of the oak border stood a two-story, slightly ramshackle
farmhouse with a screen porch, utterly out of character with the rest
of the neighborhood. Two gray propane tanks clung to the side of the
house, and a rutted driveway went straight from me road to a leaning
clapboard garage with a hinged door. The fading number on the plain
mailbox matched the number on my piece of paper. The Sunchanas had
bought the original farmhouse on this land and then watched an
optimistic re-creation of Riverwood grow up around them. I drove up the
ruts until I was in front of the garage, turned off the engine, and got
out of the car.

I walked
along the screen porch and tried the door, which opened. I stepped onto
the long narrow porch. Sunbleached wicker chairs stood beneath a window
in the middle of the porch. I knocked on the front door. There was no
answer. I knew there wouldn't be. After all, I was just getting away
from the Ransoms. I turned around and saw a man staring at me from
beside the straight row of oaks across the street.

The mesh
of the screen door turned him into a standing arrangement of black
dots. I felt an instant of absolute threat, and without thinking about
it at all, moved sideways and crouched next to one of the wicker
chairs. The man had not moved, but he was gone.

I stood
up, slowly. My nerves shrieked. The man had vanished into the column of
oaks. I went back out the screen door and walked toward Bayberry Lane,
looking for movement in the row of great trees. It could have been a
neighbor, I thought, wondering what I was doing on the Sunchanas' porch.

But I
knew it wasn't any neighbor.

There
was no movement in the row of oak trees. I walked across the street on
a diagonal, so that I could see between the trees. About six feet of
grass separated them. There wasn't another human being in sight. The
row of oaks ended at the street behind Bayberry, which must have been
the property line of the old farm. Out of sight in the tangled lanes of
eastern Elm Hill, a car started up and accelerated away. I turned
toward the noise, but all I saw were swing sets and the backs of
houses. My heart was still pounding.