The Throat

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.

15

After all that, I did not want to just drive back to Ely Place. I had to let everything sort itself out in my mind before I went back to John's house. The satisfaction of knowing that Bob Bandolier was the Blue Rose murderer had left me. Before anything like it could return, I had to know who had killed April Ransom. I sat behind the wheel of the Pontiac until I noticed that Dorian was peeking out at me through a dimple in one of the drop cloths.

I drove away without any idea of where I would go. I would be like April Ransom, I thought, like April Ransom at the wheel of her Mercedes, Byron Dorian in the other seat. I'd just drive, and see where I wound up.

16

I had gone no more than five blocks when it occurred to me that I had, in effect, done no more than to swap one ghost for another. Where I had seen April Underhill's disgruntled spirit, now I would find myself seeing April Ransom's.

A series of images marched across my inner eye. I saw Walter Dragonette sitting across the battered table from Paul Fontaine, crying victim, victim, victim; then saw Scoot, my old partner in the body squad at Camp White Star, bending to dismember the corpse of Captain Havens. I saw the human jigsaw puzzles sealed up in the body bags; the boy in the hut at Bong To; April Ransom and Anna Bandolier lying unconscious on their beds, separated by space and time. A meaning which seemed nearly close enough to touch connected these images. The figure with an outstretched hand stepping out of death or the imaginative space offers the pearl. On the open palm is written a word no one can read, a word that cannot be spoken.

17

I had returned on automatic pilot to my old neighborhood and was turning from South Sixth Street onto Muffin Street. It was one of those sleepy pockets of commerce that had long ago inserted itself into a residential area, like the row of shops near Byron Dorian's studio but even less successful, and two little shops with soaped windows flanked a store where bins of bargain shoes soaked up sunlight on the pavement.

On the other side of the shoe store was the site of Heinz Stenmitz's two-story frame house. A wide X of boards blocked the entrance to the porch, and vertical pallets of nailed boards covered the windows. On the other side of the house, the site of the butcher shop with its triangular sign, was an empty lot filled with skimpy yellow ragweed and bright sprays of Queen Anne's lace. The weeds led down into a roughly rectangular hollow in the middle of the lot. Red bricks and gray concrete blocks lay among the weeds around the perimeter of the hollow. That vacancy seemed right to me. No one had debased the site with an apartment building or a video shop. Like his house, it had been left to rot away.

At the end of the block, I turned onto South Seventh Street. Next to Bob Bandolier's empty house, the Belknaps were drinking Hannah's lemonade and talking to one another on their porch. Hannah was smiling at one of Frank's jokes, and neither of them noticed me driving past. I stopped at Livermore Avenue, turned right on Window Street, parked in an empty spot a block away from the St. Alwyn, and walked past Sinbad's Cavern to the hotel.

The same old man I had seen before sat smoking a cigar in the lobby; the same feeble bulb burned behind its green shade beside the same worn couch; but the lobby seemed bleaker and sadder.

Under the lazy scrutiny of the desk clerk, I walked toward the pay phone and dialed the number on the slip of paper in my wallet. I spoke for a short time to a gruff, familiar voice. George Dubbin, Byron's father, told me that Damrosch had questioned Bob Bandolier—'Sure he did. Bill was a good cop.' Then he said, 'I wish my kid would go out with women his own age.' When the conversation was over, I went across the lobby to the house phone and punched Glenroy Breakstone's room number.

'You again. Tom's friend.'

'That's right. I'm down in the lobby. Can I come up for a short talk?'

He sighed. 'Tell me the name of the great tenor player in Cab Calloway's band.'

'Ike Quebec,' I said.

'You know what to get before you come up.' He put the phone down.

I went up to the clerk, who had recognized me and was already bending under the desk. He came up with two packs of Luckies and rapped them down on the counter. 'Surprised he let you come up. Bad day for old Glenroy, bad day.'

'I'll watch my back.'

'Better watch your head, because that's what he's gonna mess with.' He raised his right hand and shot me with his index finger.

When I knocked on Breakstone's door, loud jazz muffled his voice. 'What'd you do, fly? Give me a minute.'

Under the music, I heard the sound of wood clicking against wood.

Glenroy opened the door and scowled at me with red-rimmed eyes. He was wearing a thin black sweatshirt that said SANTA FE JAZZ PARTY. 'You got 'em?' He held out his hand.

I put the cigarettes in his hand, and he wheeled away from me, jamming one pack into each of his pockets,