The Throat (7 page)

At that point, though I was unaware of it, my father came out of the
Idle Hour. Several other men came with him, but Dad was the first one
through the door.

A car horn blasted in my ear, and I turned my head. The grille of an
automobile was coming toward me with what seemed terrific slowness. I
was absolutely unable to move. I knew that the car was going to hit me.
This certainty existed entirely apart from my terror. It was like
knowing the answer to the most important question on a test. The car
was going to hit me, and I was going to die.

Writing about this in the third person, in
Mystery
, was easier.

My vision of things ceases with the car coming toward me with
terrific unstoppable slowness, frame by frame, as a car would advance
through a series of photographs. Dad and his friends saw the car hit
me; they saw me adhere to the grille, then slip down to be caught on a
bumper ornament and dragged thirty feet before the car jolted to a halt
and threw me off.

At that moment I died—the boy named Timothy Underhill, the
seven-year-old me, died of shock and injury. He had a fractured skull,
his pelvis and his right leg were shattered, and he died. Such a moment
is not visible from a sidewalk. I have the memory of sensation, of
being torn from my body by a giant, irresistible force and being
accelerated into another, utterly different dimension. Of blazing
light. What remains is the sense of leaving the self behind, all
personality and character, everything merely personal. All of that was
gone, and something else was left. I want to think that I was aware of
April far ahead of me, sailing like a leaf through some vast dark
cloudgate. There was an enormous, annihilating light, a bliss, an
ecstasy you have to die to earn. Unreasoning terror surrounds and
engulfs this memory, if that's what it is. I dream about it two or
three times a week, a little more frequently than I dream about the man
I killed face-to-face. The experience was entirely nonverbal and, in
some basic way, profoundly
inhuman
.
One of my clearest and strongest impressions is that living people are
not supposed to know
.

I woke up encased in plaster, a rag, a scrap, in a hospital room.
There followed a year of wretchedness, of wheelchairs and useless
anger—all this is in
Mystery.
Not in that book is my parents' endless
and tongue-tied misery. My own problems were eclipsed, put utterly into
shadow by April's death. And because I see her benevolent ghost from
time to time, particularly on airplanes, I guess that I have never
really recovered either.

On October fifteenth, while I was still in the hospital, the first
of the Blue Rose murders took place on almost exactly the same place
where April died. The victim was a prostitute named Arlette Monaghan,
street name Fancy. She was twenty-six. Above her body on the brick wall
of the St. Alwyn, the murderer had written the words
BLUE ROSE
.

Early in the morning of October twentieth, James Treadwell's corpse
was found in bed in room 218 of the St. Alwyn. He too had been murdered
by someone who had written the words
BLUE ROSE
on the
wall above the
body.

On the twenty-fifth of October, another young man, Monty Leland, was
murdered late at night on the corner of South Sixth and Livermore, the
act sheltered from the sparse traffic down Livermore at that hour by
the corner of the Idle Hour. The usual words, left behind by the
tavern's front door, were painted over as soon as the police allowed by
the Idle Hour's owner, Roman Majestyk.

On November third, a young doctor named Charles "Buzz" Laing managed
to survive wounds given him by an unseen assailant who had left him for
dead in his house on Millhaven's east side. His throat had been slashed
from behind, and his attacker had written BLUE ROSE on his bedroom wall.

The final Blue Rose murder, or what seemed for forty-one years to be
the final Blue Rose murder, was that of Heinz Stenmitz, a butcher who
lived on Muffin Street with his wife and a succession of foster
children, all boys. Four days after the attack on the doctor, Stenmitz
was killed outside his shop, next door to his house. I have no
difficulty remembering Mr. Stenmitz. He was an unsettling man, and when
I saw his name in the
Ledger's
subhead (the headline was
BLUE ROSE
KILLER CLAIMS FOURTH VICTIM
), I experienced an ungenerous
satisfaction
that would have shocked my parents.

I knew, as my parents did not—as they refused to believe, despite a
considerable scandal the year before—that there were two Mr.
Stenmitzes. One was the humorless, Teutonic, but efficient butcher who
sold them their chops and sausages. Tall, blond, bearded, blue-eyed, he
carried himself with an aggressive rectitude deeply admired by both my
parents. His attitude was military, in the sense that the character
played over and over by C. Aubrey Smith in Hollywood films of the
thirties and forties was military.

The other Mr. Stenmitz was the one I saw when my parents put two
dollars in my hand and sent me to the butcher shop for hamburger. My
parents did not believe in the existence of this other man within Mr.
Stenmitz. If I had insisted on his presence, their disbelief would have
turned into anger.

The Mr. Stenmitz I saw when I was alone always came out from behind
the counter. He would stoop down and rub my head, my arms, my chest.
His huge blond bearded head was far too close. The smells of raw meat
and blood, always prominent in the shop, seemed to intensify, as if
they were what the butcher ate and drank. "You came to see your friend
Heinz?" A pat on the cheek. "You can't stay away from your friend
Heinz, can you?" A sharp, almost painful pat on the buttocks. His thick
red fingers found my pockets and began to insinuate themselves. His
eyes were the lightest, palest blue eyes I've ever seen, the eyes of a
Finnish sled dog. "You have two dollars? What are these two dollars
for? So your friend Heinz will show you a nice surprise, maybe?"

"Hamburger," I would say.

The fingers were pinching and roaming through my pocket. "Any love
letters in here? Any pictures of pretty girls?"

Sometimes I saw the miserable child who had been sent to his house,
a child for whom Mr. and Mrs. Stenmitz were paid to care, and the sight
of that hopeless Billy or Joey made me want to run away. Something had
happened
to these children: they
had been squeezed dry and ironed flat They were slightly dirty, and
their clothes always looked too big or too small, but what was scary
about them was that they had no humanity, no light—it had been drained
right out of them.

When I saw Mr. Stenmitz's name under the terrible headline I felt
amazed and fascinated, but mainly I felt relief. I would not have to go
into his shop alone anymore; and I would not have to endure the awful
anxiety of going there with my parents and seeing what they saw, C.
Aubrey Smith in a butcher's apron, while also seeing the other,
terrible Heinz Stenmitz winking and capering beneath the mask.

I was glad he was dead. He couldn't have been dead enough, to suit
me.

Then there were no more of the murders. The last place someone wrote
BLUE ROSE
on a wall was outside Stenmitz's Quality Meats
and Home-Made
Sausages. The man who wrote those mysterious words near his victims'
bodies had called it quits. His plan, whatever it was, had been
fulfilled, or his rage had satisfied itself. Millhaven waited for
something to happen; Millhaven wanted the second shoe to drop.

After another month, in a great fire of publicity, the second shoe
did drop. One of my clearest memories of the beginning of my year of
convalescence is of the
Ledger's
revelations about the secret history
of the murders. The
Ledger
found a hidden coherence in the Blue Rose murders and was delighted,
with the sort of delight that masquerades as shock, by the twist at the
story's end. I read a tremendous amount during that year, but I read
nothing as avidly as I did the
Ledger
.
It was terrible, it was tragic, but it was all such a tremendous story.
It became my story, the story that most opened up the world for me.

As each installment of William Damrosch's story appeared in the
Ledger
, I cut it out and pasted it
into an already bulging scrapbook. When discovered, this scrapbook
caused some excitement. Mom thought that a seven-year-old so interested
in awfulness must be awful himself; Dad thought the whole thing was a
damn shame. It was over his head, out of his hands. He gave up on
everything, including us. He lost his elevator operator job at the St.
Alwyn and moved out. Even before he was fired from the St. Alwyn, he
had given indications of turning into one of the winos who hung out in
Dead Man's Tunnel, and after he had been fired and moved into a
tenement on Oldtown Way, he slipped among them for a time. Dad did not
drink in Dead Man's Tunnel. He carried his pint bottle wrapped in a
brown paper bag to other places around the Valley and the near south
side, but his clothes grew dirty and sour, he seldom shaved, he began
to look old and hesitant.

The front pages of the
Ledger
that I pasted into my Blue Rose scrapbook described how the homicide
detective in charge of the murder investigation had been found seated
at his desk in his shabby basement apartment with a bullet hole in his
right temple. It was the day before Christmas. The
Ledger
being what it was, the blood
and other matter on the wall beside the body was not unrecorded.
Detective Damrosch's service revolver, a Smith & Wesson .38 from
which a single shot had been fired, was dangling from his right hand.
On the desk in front of the detective was a bottle of Three Feathers
bourbon, all but empty, an empty glass, a pen and a rectangular sheet
of paper torn from a notebook, also on the desk. The words
BLUE
ROSE
had been printed on the paper in block capitals. Sometime between three
and five o'clock in the morning, Detective Damrosch had finished his
whiskey, written two words on a sheet of notebook paper, and by
committing suicide confessed to the murders he had been supposed to
solve.

Sometimes life is like a book.

The headlines that followed traced out Detective William Damrosch's
extraordinary background. His real name was Carlos Rosario, not William
Damrosch, and he had been not so much born as propelled into the world
on a freezing January wind—some anonymous citizen had seen the
half-dead child on the frozen bank of the Millhaven River. The citizen
called the police from the telephone booth in the Green Woman Taproom.
When the police scrambled down from the bridge to rescue the baby, they
found his mother, Carmen Rosario, stabbed to death beneath the bridge.
The crime was never solved: Carmen Rosario was an illegal immigrant
from Santo Domingo and a prostitute, and the police made only
perfunctory efforts to find her killer. The nameless child, who was
called Billy by the social worker who had taken him from the police,
was placed into a series of foster homes. He grew up to be a violent,
sexually uncertain teenager whose intelligence served mainly to get him
into trouble. Given the choice of prison or the army, he chose the
army; and his life changed. By now he was Billy Damrosch, having taken
the name of his last foster father, and Billy Damrosch could use his
intelligence to save his life. He came out of the army with a box full
of medals, a scattering of scars, and the intention of becoming a
policeman in Millhaven. Now, with the prescience of hindsight, I think
he wanted to come back to Millhaven to find out who had killed his
mother.

According to the police, he could not have killed April, because
Bill Damrosch only killed people he knew.

Monty Leland, who had been killed in front of the Idle Hour, was a
small-time criminal, one of Damrosch's informants. Early in his career,
before his transfer from the vice squad, Damrosch had many times
arrested Arlette Monaghan, the prostitute slashed to death behind the
St. Alwyn, a tenuous link considering that other vice squad officers
past and present had arrested her as often. It was assumed that James
Treadwell, the piano player in Glenroy Breakstone's band, had been
murdered because he had seen Damrosch kill Arlette.

The most telling connections between Detective Damrosch and the
people he murdered entered with the remaining two victims.

Five years before the murders began, Buzz Laing had lived for a year
with William Damrosch. This information came from a housekeeper Dr.
Laing had fired. They was more than friends, the housekeeper declared,
because I never had to change more than one set of sheets, and I can
tell you they fought like cats and dogs. Or dogs and dogs. Millhaven is
a conservative place, and Buzz Laing lost half of his patients.
Fortunately, he had private money—the same money that had paid for the
disgruntled housekeeper and the big house on the lake—and after a
while, most of his patients came back to him. For the record, Laing
always insisted that it was not William Damrosch who had tried to kill
him. He had been attacked from behind in the dark, and he had passed
out before he was able to turn around, but he was certain that his
attacker had been larger than himself. Buzz Laing was six feet two, and
Damrosch was some three inches shorter. But it was the detective's
relationship with the last victim of the Blue Rose murderer that spoke
loudest. You will already have guessed that Billy Damrosch was one of
the wretched boys who passed through the ungentle hands of Heinz
Stenmitz. By now, Stenmitz was a disgraced man. He had been sent to the
state penitentiary for child molestation after a suspicious social
worker named Dorothy Greenglass had finally discovered what he had been
doing to the children in his care. During his year in jail, his wife
continued to work in the butcher shop while broadcasting her
grievances—her husband, a God-fearing hardworking Christian man, had
been railroaded by liars and cheats. Some of her customers believed
her. After Stenmitz came home, he went back behind the counter as if
nothing had happened. Other people remembered the testimony of the
social worker and the few grown boys who had agreed to speak for the
prosecution.