The Throat (63 page)

Like a girl,
Dorian pushed his knees together, propped his elbow on them, and
twisted sideways with his chin in his hand. An almost visible cloud of
pain surrounded him.

"I'm
fascinated by Damrosch, too," I said. "It's hard not to be. When I was
in Vietnam, I wrote two novels in my head, and the second,
The Divided
Man
, was all about Damrosch."

Dorian shot
me a blue-eyed glance without altering his posture. "I must have looked
at that boy in the Vuillard three or four times before I really saw
him—it's so subtle. At first, you just take him for granted, and then
the way he's looking out at you takes over the whole painting."

He paused to
struggle with his feelings. "That's how we started talking about Bill
Damrosch and everything. She was excited about the idea of the
bridge
,
that he was found under a bridge. That sort of ignited her."

I asked him
how he had first become interested in Damrosch's story.

"Oh, I heard
about him from my father. Lots and lots of times. They were partners
for a long time. My dad didn't get on very well with his first wife, so
he spent a lot of time with Bill Damrosch. I guess you could say he
loved him—he used to say he tried everything he could think of to stop
Bill from drinking, but he couldn't, so he started drinking with him."
He gave me a frank look. "My father was an alcoholic, but after Bill
died, he straightened himself out. In the sixties, when he was getting
close to retirement age, he met my mother in a grocery store. Even she
says she picked him up. She was twenty-five years younger, but they got
married, and a year later I happened along, not exactly according to
plan, I gather."

It made
sense, if Dorian took after his father—as long as he didn't get fat,
women would be trying to pick him up for the next three decades.

"Your father
must have been disturbed about the outcome of the Blue Rose case."

He gave me a
fierce look. "What outcome? You mean the junk in the papers? That drove
him crazy. He almost quit the force, but he loved the work too much."
He had calmed down, and now I was getting the frank, level look again.
This time there was a touch of censure in it. "He hated your book, by
the way. He said you got everything wrong."

"I guess I
did."

"What you did
was irresponsible. My father knew that Bill Damrosch never killed
anybody. He was set up."

"I know that
now," I said.

Dorian hooked
one foot around his other ankle and started looking stricken again. "I
should never have mentioned Damrosch to her. That's how everything
started."

"The only
people who knew what she was doing with her spare time were one or two
brokers at Barnett and the police."

"I told her
she should write to the police department."

"It should
have worked." I told him what Paul Fontaine had done for me.

Outrage and
scorn darkened his face. "Then they're as fucked up as my father said
they were. That doesn't make any sense. They should have let her see
those records." He glared at the paint-spattered floor for a couple of
seconds. "My dad told me he didn't like what happened to the force
after he retired— all the new people, like Fontaine. He didn't like the
way they worked. He didn't trust their methods. Except for Mike Hogan.
My dad thought Mike Hogan was a real cop, and he had a lot of respect
for him." Dorian looked suspiciously back up at me.

"So your
father was still alive when Fontaine and Hogan joined the force." He
was describing any veteran's natural resentment of a brilliant new
arrival.

"He's still
alive, period. My father is eighty-five, and he's as strong as an ox."

"If it's any
consolation, Paul Fontaine told me that he liked my book because it was
so ridiculous."

"I'll tell
him that." He flashed me a nice white smile. "No, on second thought,
maybe I won't."

"Do you think
I could talk to your father?"

"I guess."
Dorian rubbed his face and looked at me grudgingly for a moment before
reaching down behind the end of the day bed to pick up a spiral
notebook with a ballpoint pen clipped into its metal rings. He flipped
to an empty page and wrote something down. Then he ripped out the page
and walked across the floor to hand it to me.

He had
printed the name George Dubbin above an address and telephone number.

"George
Dubbin?"

"That's his
name." Dorian sat down on the bed again. "My name used to be Bryan
Dubbin. I thought I could never be a famous painter with a name like
that. Francesco Clemente and Bryan Dubbin? As soon as I graduated from
UI-Millhaven, I changed it to something that sounded better to me. You
don't have to tell me that I was being silly. But it could have been
worse—the other name I was considering was Beaumont Darcy. I guess my
head was in a pretty decadent place back then."

We both
smiled.

"You actually
had your name changed officially? You went to city hall, or wherever?"

"It's easy to
change your name. You just fill out a form. I did the whole thing
through the mail."

"Your father
must have been a little…"

"He was, a
lot. Big time upset. I see his point. I even agree with him. But he
knows I wouldn't do it all over again, and that helps. He says, Well,
kid, at least you kept your goddamn initials." This was delivered in a
forceful raspy growl that communicated both affection and exasperation
and summoned up George Dubbin with eerie clarity.

"That was
good," I said. "I bet he sounds just like that."

"I was always
a good mimic." He smiled at me again. "At school, I used to drive the
teachers crazy."

The
revelation about his name had dissipated the tension between us.

"Talk to me
about April Ransom," I said.

Instead of
answering, Byron reached for his cup, stood up, and walked to the
table, where he began lining up the bottles filled with brushes. He got
them all into a nice straight row at the far end of the table. In order
to be able to see him, I stood up, too, but all I could see was his
back.

"It's hard to
know what to say." Next he started lining up the tubes of paint. He
looked over his shoulder and seemed surprised to see me up on my feet,
looking at him. "I don't think I could just sum her up in a couple of
sentences." He turned all the way around and leaned back against the
table. The way he did it made the table seem as if it had been built
specifically for this purpose, to be leaned against in precisely that
easy, nonchalant way.

"Try. See
what comes out."

He looked up,
elongating his pale neck. "Well, at first I thought she was a sort of
ideal patron. She was married, she lived in a good house, she had a lot
of money, but she wasn't even a little bit snobbish—when she came here,
the first time I met her, she acted like ordinary people. She didn't
mind that I lived in a dump, by her standards. After she was here about
an hour, I realized that we were getting along really well. It was like
we turned into friends right away."

"She was
perceptive," I said.

"Yeah, but it
was more than that. There was a lot going on inside her. She was like a
huge hotel, this place with a thousand different rooms."

"She must
have been fascinating," I said. He walked to the covered windows and
brushed the drop cloths with the side of his hand. Once again, I could
not see his face.

"Hotel."

"Excuse me?"

"I said
hotel. I said she was like a hotel. That's kind of funny, isn't it?"

"Have you
ever been to the St. Alwyn?"

He turned
around, slowly. His shoulders were tight, and his hands were slightly
raised. "What's that supposed to mean? Are you asking if I took her
there and beat her up and knifed her?"

"To tell you
the truth, that thought never occurred to me."

Dorian
relaxed.

"In fact, I
don't think she was assaulted in the hotel."

He frowned at
me.

"I think she
was originally injured in her Mercedes. Whoever assaulted her probably
left a lot of blood in the car."

"So what
happened to it?"

"The police
haven't found it yet."

Dorian
wandered back to the daybed. He sat down and drank some of his coffee.

"Do you think
her marriage was happy?"

His head
jerked up. "Do you think her husband did it?"

"I'm just
asking if you thought she had a happy marriage."

Dorian did
not speak for a long time. He swallowed more coffee. He crossed and
uncrossed his legs. He grazed his eye along the row of paintings. He
put his chin in his hand. "I guess her marriage was okay. She never
complained about it."

"You thought
about it for a long time."

He blinked at
me. "Well, I had the feeling that if April weren't so busy, she would
have been lonely." He cleared his throat. "Because her husband didn't
really share her interests, did he? She couldn't talk to him about a
lot of stuff."

"Things she
could talk about with you."

"Well, sure.
But I couldn't talk with her about her business—whenever she started up
about puts and calls and all that, the only words I ever understood
were Michael and Milken. And her job was tremendously important to her."

"Did she ever
say anything to you about moving to San Francisco?"

He cocked his
head, moving his jaw as if he were chewing on a sunflower seed. "Did
you hear something about that?" His eyes had become cautious. "It was
more like a remote possibility than anything else. She probably just
mentioned it once, when we were out walking, or something." He cleared
his throat again. "You heard something about that, too?"

"Her father
mentioned it to me, but he wasn't too clear about it, either."

His face
cleared. "Yeah, that makes sense. If April had ever moved anywhere, she
would have brought him along. Not to live with her, I mean, but to make
sure she could still take care of him. I guess he's getting kind of out
of it."

"You said you
went for walks?"

"Sure,
sometimes we'd just go walk around."

"Did you go
out for drinks, or anything like that?"

He pondered
that. "When we were still talking about the paintings, we went out for
lunch a couple of times. Sometimes we went for drives."

"Where would
you go?"

He threw up
his hands and looked rapidly from side to side.

I asked if he
minded my asking these questions.

"No, it's
just hard to answer. It's not like we went for drives every day or
anything. Once we went to the bridge, and April told me about what used
to go on at that bar on Water Street, right next to the bridge."

"Did you ever
try to go in there?"

He shook his
head. "It's closed up, you can't go in."

"Did she ever
mention someone named William Writzmann?"

He shook his
head again. "Who's he?"

"It probably
isn't important."

Dorian smiled
at me. "I'll tell you a place we used to go. I never even knew it
existed until she showed it to me. Do you know Flory Park, way out on
Eastern Shore Drive? There's a rock shelf surrounded by trees that
hangs out over the lake. She loved it."

"Alan took me
there," I said, seeing the two of them going down the trail to the
little glen above the lake.

"Well, then,
you know."

"Yes," I
said. "I know. It's very private."

"It was
private," he said. He stared at me for a moment, chewing on the
nonexistent seed, and jumped up again. He carried the cup into the
kitchen. I heard him rinse the cup and open and close the refrigerator.
He came out carrying a bottle of Poland Water. "You want some of this?"

"I still have
some coffee left, thanks."

Dorian went
to his table and poured bottled water into his cup. Then he moved one
of the tubes of paint a fraction of an inch. "I ought to get back to
work soon." He closed both hands around the cup. "Unless you want to
buy a painting, I don't think I can spare much more time."

"I do want to
buy one of your paintings," I said. "I like your work a lot."

"Are you
trying to bribe me, or something like that?"

"I'm trying
to buy one of your paintings," I said. "I've been thinking about doing
that since I first saw them."

"Really?" He
managed to smile at me again. "Which one do you want?" His hands were
all right now, and he moved toward the paintings on the wall.

"The men in
the bar."

He nodded.
"Yeah, I like that one, too." He turned doubtfully to me. "You really
want to buy it?"

I nodded. "If
you can pack it for shipping."

"I can do
that, sure."

"How much do
you want?"

"God. I never
thought about that yet." He grinned. "Nobody but April ever even saw
them before this. A thousand?"

"That's
fine," I said. "I have your address, and I'll send you a check from
John's house. Have UPS ship it to this address." I took one of my cards
from my wallet and gave it to Dorian.

"This is
really nice of you."

I told him I
was happy to have the painting, and we went toward the door. "When you
looked up and down the street before you let me in, did you think that
John might be out there?"

He stopped
moving, his hand already on the doorknob. Then he opened the door and
let in a blaze of sudden light.

"Anything you
did is okay with me, Byron," I said. He looked as if he wanted to flee
back into the artificial light. "You were tremendously helpful to her."

Dorian
shuddered, as if a winter wind were streaming through the open door.
"I'm not going to say any more to you. I don't know what you want."

"All I want
from you is that painting," I said, and held out my hand. He hesitated
a second before taking it.