The Throat (98 page)

The clerk
began pulling stacks of paper stuffed into manila folders out of the
box.

WE carried
the long cardboard container the clerk had given us up the stairs to
the office, Tom in front and me behind him. On the way back, Tom had
stopped off at a stationery store and bought six reams of copy paper,
four of which were now distributed across the tops of the files, with
the other two slipped down beside the files at each end of the box.
Halfway up the stairs, the handholds started to rip, and we had to
carry the box the rest of the way by holding the bottom.

The box went
on the floor beside the copy machine. Tom flipped its square black
switch, and the machine hummed and flashed. I picked up one of the fat
manila folders and opened it up. Papers of varying sizes and colors
filled it, some of them closely filled with single-space typing that
ran from edge to edge without margins, other crowded with the
handwriting I had first seen in the basement of the Green Woman. I
turned to one of the typed pages.

I looked up
at Tom, who was leafing through another file. "This is incredible," I
said. "He described them in such detail. He even put in the dialogue.
It's like a book."

Tom looked a
little sickened by whatever he had read. He closed his file. "They seem
to be more or less in order—each murder takes up about twenty pages,
from what I see here. How many pages do you think we have, about a
thousand?"

"Something
like that," I said, looking down at the stacks.

"At least
fifty murders," Tom said. Both of us looked at the stacks of papers. "I
suppose he let Fontaine solve some of the most colorful ones."

"Who are you
going to send copies to?"

"The FBI.
Isobel Archer. The new chief, Harold Green. Someone at the
Ledger
.
Geoffrey Bough?"

"You'll make
his day," I said. "You're not going to identify yourself, are you?"

"Sure, I'm
the worried citizen who found these papers in a garbage can. In fact, I
think the worried citizen is about to call Ms. Archer right now."

He went to
his desk and dialed a number. I sat down on the couch and listened to
his half of the conversation. When I realized that I was still holding
the thick file, I put it on the table as if I thought I might catch
something from it.

"I'd like to
speak to Isobel Archer, please. It has to do with a shooting."

"Yes, I'll
hold."

"Miss Archer?
I'm glad to be able to speak to you."

"My name?
Fletcher Namon."

"Well, yes,
it is about a shooting. I didn't know what to do about this, so I
thought I'd call you."

"I don't want
to get involved with the police, Miss Archer. It's about a policeman."

"Well, yes."

"Okay. Last
night, this was. I saw a detective, I don't know his name, but I saw
him one night on the news, I know he's some kind of detective, and he
was going into the old movie theater down on Livermore."

"Late at
night."

"No, I
couldn't tell you what time. Anyhow, after he got inside, I heard this
shot."

"No, I got
out of there, fast. "

"I'm sure."

"Sure, I'm
sure. It was a gunshot."

"Well, I
don't know what I expect you to do. I thought that was your business. I
gotta go now."

"No.
Good-bye." He put down the phone and turned to me.

"What do you
think?"

"I think
she'll be down there with a hacksaw and blowtorch in about five
minutes."

"I do, too."
He took all the pages out of the folder on his lap and tapped their
bottom edges against his desk. "It'll take me two or three hours to
copy all this stuff. Do you want to hang around, or is there something
else you feel like doing?"

"I guess I
should talk to John," I said.

"Do you want
me with you?"

"You're an
executive," I said. "Flunkies like me do the dirty work."

I walked
through the heat down the pretty streets toward John Ransom's house.
The Sevens, Omdurman Place, Balaclava Place, Victoria Terrace; brick
houses matted with ivy, stone houses with ornate entrances and leaded
windows, mansard roofs and pointed gables. Sprinklers whirled, and
small boys zipped past on ten-speed bicycles. It looked like a world
without secrets or violence, a world in which blood had never been
shed. A for sale sign had been staked into the neat lawn in front of
Alan Brookner's house.

The white
Pontiac stood at the curb across from John's house, in the same place I
had found it on my first morning back in town. It was squeezed into a
parking place just long enough to accommodate it, and I remembered, as
I had last night, a noisy little patriot in shorts charging out of his
flag-draped fortress to yell about abuse. I walked across sunny Ely
Place and went up to John's front door and rang his bell.

He appeared
at the narrow window to the left of the door and looked out at me with
frowning curiosity—the way you'd look at an encyclopedia salesman who
had come back after you'd already bought the books. By the time he
opened the door, his expression had altered into something more
welcoming.

"Tim! What
are you doing back here?"

"Something
came up," I said.

"More
research? The book going well?"

"Very well.
Can I come in for a minute?"

"Well, sure."
He stepped back and let me in. "When did you get in? Just now?"

"Yesterday
afternoon."

"Well, you
shouldn't be staying in a hotel. Check out and come back here, stay as
long as you like. I just got some information about houses for sale in
Perigord, we could go over it together."

"I'm not in a
hotel," I said. "I'm staying with Tom Pasmore."

"That
stuck-up phony."

John had
followed me into the living room. When I sat down on the couch facing
the wall of paintings, he said, "Why
don't you make yourself at home?"

"Thanks again
for sending me the Vuillard," I said. He had not rearranged the
paintings to compensate for its absence, and the place where it had
been looked naked.

He was
standing beside the couch, looking down at me, uncertain of my mood or
intentions. "I knew you appreciated it. And like I said, I couldn't
have it in my house anymore—it was too much for me."

"I'm sure it
was," I said.

He gave me
the encyclopedia salesman look again and then moved his face into a
smile and sat down on the arm of a chair. "Did you come here just to
thank me for the painting?"

"I wanted to
tell you some things," I said.

"Why do I
think that sounds ominous?" He hitched his knee up beside him on the
fat arm of the chair and kept his smile. John was wearing a dark green
polo shirt, faded jeans, and penny loafers without socks. He looked
like a stockbroker on a weekend break.

"Before we
get into them, I want to hear how Alan's doing."

"Before we
get into these mysterious 'things'? Don't you think I'll want to talk
to you afterward?"

I reminded
myself that John Ransom was pretty smart, after all. "Not at all," I
said. "You might want to talk to me night and day."

"Night and
day." He tucked his foot in closer to his thigh.

"Let's try to
keep that tone." He looked up, theatrically. "Well, Alan. Dear old
Alan. I don't suppose you ever saw him when he was out at County."

"I stopped in
for five minutes, on the way to the airport." He raised his eyebrows.
"Did you? Well, in that case, you know how bad he was. Since
then—really, since I moved him into Golden Manor—he's come a long way.
They've been giving him good care, which they damn well better,
considering how much the place costs."

"Does he mind
being there?"

John shook
his head. "I think he likes it. He knows he'll be taken care of if
anything happens to him. And the women are all crazy about him."

"Do you visit
him often?"

"Maybe once a
week. That's about enough for both of us."

"I suppose
that's right," I said.

He narrowed
his eyes and bit on his lower lip. He didn't get it. "So what did you
want to tell me?"

"In a day or
two, this whole town is going to go crazy all over again. There'll be
another big shakeup in the police department."

He snapped
his fingers and then pointed at me, grinning with delight. "You
bastard, you found those papers. That's it, isn't it?"

"I found the
papers," I said.

"You're
right! This town is going to lose its mind. How many people did
Fontaine kill, anyway? Do you know?"

"It wasn't
Fontaine. It's the man who killed Fontaine."

His mouth
opened, and his mouth twitched in and out of a grin. He was trying to
decide if I were serious.

"You can't be
trying to tell me that you think Alan—"

He hadn't
even been interested enough to ask about the ballistics report. "Alan
didn't shoot Paul Fontaine," I said. "Alan shot me. Someone was hiding
between the houses across the street. I think he must have had some
kind of assault rifle. Alan, you, me—we had nothing to do with it at
all. He was already there by the time we got to the house. He was with
Fontaine in the ghetto. Maybe he even saw him call me here. He probably
followed him to the house."

"So the guy
in Ohio identified the wrong man?"

"No, he
identified the right one. I just didn't understand what he was doing."

John pressed
a palm to his cheek and regarded me without speaking for a couple of
seconds. "I don't suppose I have to know the whole story," he finally
said.

"No, it's not
important now. And I never saw you today, and you never saw me. Nothing
I tell you, nothing you tell me, ever leaves this house. I want you to
understand that."

He nodded, a
little puzzled about the notion of his telling me anything, but eager
enough to grasp what he thought was the main point. "Okay. So who was
it?"

"Michael
Hogan," I said. "The person you knew as Franklin Bachelor changed his
name to Michael Hogan. Right now, he's lying dead on the floor of the
Beldame Oriental with a gun in his hand and the words
BLUE ROSE
written beside his body. In black marker."

John took in
my words avidly, nodding slowly and appreciatively.

"Isobel
Archer is going to wangle her way inside the theater and find his body.
A couple of days from now, she and a few other people, including the
FBI, will get photocopies of the notes he took on his killings. About
half of them are handwritten, and there won't be any doubt that Hogan
wrote them."

"Did you kill
him?"

"Look, John,"
I said. "If I killed a detective in Millhaven, I should never tell
anyone about it. Right? But I want you to understand that everything we
say here is only between us. It'll never leave this room. So the answer
is yes. I shot him."

"Wow." John
was absolutely glowing at me. "That's amazing—you're fantastic. The
whole story is going to come out."

"I don't
think you want that," I said. John stared at me, trying to read my
thoughts. He slid his leg off the arm of the chair. Whatever he saw in
me he didn't like. He had stopped glowing, and now he was trying to
look injured and innocent. "Why wouldn't I want everything to come out?"

"Because you
murdered your wife," I said.

"First,
you brought her to the St. Alwyn and stuck a knife in her, but you
didn't quite manage to kill her. So when you heard that she was coming
out of the coma, you got into her room and finished her off. And of
course, you killed Grant Hoffman, too."

He slid down
off the arm of the chair into the seat. He was stunned. He wanted me to
know that he was stunned. "My God, Tim. You know exactly what happened.
You even know
why
. It was you
who came up with Bachelor's name. You put
the whole thing together."

"You wanted
me to know about Bachelor, didn't you? That's part of the reason you
wanted me to come here in the first place. You had no idea he was
living here—he was supposed to have come in from out of town after
seeing your picture in the paper, killed Hoffman and your wife, and
then slipped off into his new identity when things got too hot."

"This is so
absurd, it's crazy," John said.

"As soon as I
got here, you told me you thought Blue Rose was an old soldier. And you
had worked out this wonderful story about what happened when you got to
Bachelor's camp in Darlac Province. It was a good story, but it left
out some important details."

"I never
wanted to talk about that," he said.

"You made me
work it out of you. You kept dropping hints."

"Hints." He
shook his head sadly.

"Let's talk
about what really happened in Darlac Province," I said.

"Why don't
you just rave, and when you're finished raving, why don't you get out
of here and leave me alone?"

"You shared
an encampment with another Green Beret named Bullock. Bullock and his A
team went out one day and never came back. You went out and found their
bodies tied to trees and mutilated. Their tongues had been cut out."