The Throat

'That Walter Dragonette was on the front page right here in Azure. And when I first heard about him, I just started to shake. I couldn't eat a bite at dinner. Couldn't sleep at all that night— I had to go down to the lounge and watch the television. And there was his picture on the news, and he was so much younger, and I could go back up to my room.'

Tom did not say anything.

'I'd do the same thing I did back then,' she said. 'With a new baby in the house.'

'We'll be in touch, ma'am, if we cannot locate the beneficiary.'

She hung up without saying good-bye.

20

Tom had tilted himself back in his desk chair and was staring at the ceiling, his hands laced together behind his head, his legs straight out before him and crossed at the ankle. He looked like a bored market trader waiting for something to show up on his Quotron. I leaned forward and poured water from a crystal jug on the table into a clean glass. On second thought, he looked too pleased with himself to be bored.

'Extraordinary place names they have in Ohio,' he said. 'Azure. Tangent. Cincinnati. They're positively Nabokovian. Parma. Wonderful names.'

'Is there a point to this, or are you just enjoying yourself?' He closed his eyes. 'Everything about this moment is extraordinary. Fee Bandolier is extraordinary. That woman, Judy Leatherwood, is extraordinary. She knew exactly what her nephew was. She didn't want to admit it, but she knew. Because he was her sister's child, she tried to protect him. She told him he had to act like a normal child. And the incredible child could do it.'

'Aren't you making a lot of assumptions?'

'Assumptions are what I have to work with. I might as well enjoy them. Do you know what is really extraordinary?'

'I have the feeling you're going to tell me.'

He smiled without opening his eyes. 'This city. Our mayor and chief of police get up on their feet at April Ransom's funeral and tell us that we are a haven of law and order, while, against odds of about a million to one, we have among us two very dedicated, utterly ruthless serial killers, one of them of the disorganized type and only recently apprehended, and the other of the organized type and still at large.' He opened his eyes and brought his hands forward and clasped them in his lap. 'That really is extraordinary.'

'You think Fee killed April Ransom and Grant Hoffman.'

'I think he probably killed a lot of people.'

'You're going too fast,' I said. 'I don't see how you can pretend to know that.'

'Do you remember telling me why Walter Dragonette thought he had to kill his mother?'

'She found his notebook. He made lists of details like 'red hair.' '

'And this is pretty common with people like that, isn't it? They want to be able to remember what they've done.'

'That's right,' I said.

There was an anticipatory smile on his face. 'You wouldn't want anyone else to find your list, would you?'

'Of course not.'

'And if you kept detailed notes and descriptions, you'd have to put them in a safe place, wouldn't you?'

'As safe as possible.'

Still smiling, Tom waited for me to catch up with him.

'Someplace like the basement of the Green Woman, you mean?'

His smile widened. 'You saw the impressions of two boxes. Suppose he wrote narratives of every murder he committed. How many of these narratives would it take to fill two boxes? Fifty? A hundred?'

I took the folded paper from my shirt pocket. 'Can you get into the Allentown police records? We have to find out if this woman, Jane Wright, was murdered there. We even have an approximate date: May 'seventy- seven.'

'What I can do is scan the Allentown newspapers for her name.' He stood up and put his hands in the small of his back and stretched backward. This was probably Tom's morning exercise program. 'It'll take a couple of hours. Do you want to wait around to see what turns up?'

I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly seven. 'John's probably going out of his mind again.' As soon as I said this, I gave an enormous yawn. 'Sorry,' I said. 'I guess I'm tired.'

Tom put a hand on my shoulder. 'Go back to John's and get some rest.'

21

Paul Fontaine stepped out of a dark blue sedan parked in front of the Ransom house as I walked down the block from the spot where I'd left the Pontiac. I stopped moving.

'Get over here, Underhill.' He looked almost incandescent with rage.

Fontaine unbuttoned the jacket of his baggy suit and stepped back from the sedan. I smiled at him, but he wasn't having any smiles today. As soon as I got within a couple of feet of him, he jumped behind me and jammed his hands into the small of my back. I fell toward his car and caught myself on my arms. 'Stay there,' he said. He patted my back, my chest, my waist, and ran his hands down my legs.

I told him I wasn't carrying a gun.

'Don't move, and don't talk unless I ask you a question.' Across the street, a little white face appeared at a downstairs window. It was the elderly woman who had brought coffee to the reporters the day after April Ransom was killed in Shady Mount. She was getting a good show.

'I've been sitting here for half an hour,' Fontaine said. 'Where the hell were you? Where's Ransom?'

'I was driving around,' I said. 'John must have gone out somewhere.'

'You've been doing a lot of driving around lately, haven't you?' He made a disgusted sound. 'You can stand up.'

I pushed myself off the car and faced him. His rage had quieted down, but he still looked furious. 'Didn't I talk to you this morning? Did you think I was trying to amuse you?'

'Of course not,' I said.

'Then what do you think you're doing?'

'All I did was talk to some people.'

His face turned an ugly red. 'We got a call from the Elm Hill police this afternoon. Damn you, instead of paying attention to me, you and your pal went out there and made everybody crazy. Listen to me—you have no role in what is going on in Millhaven. You get that? The last thing we need right now is bullshit about some—some—' He was too angry to continue. He jabbed his index finger at me. 'Get in the car.' His eyes were blazing.

I moved to open the back door of the sedan, and he growled, 'Not there, dummy. Go around and get in the front.'

He opened his door and kept blazing at me as I walked around the front of the car and got in the front seat. He got behind the wheel, slammed his door, and wrenched the ignition key to the side. We streaked off down the street, and he tore through the stop sign on Berlin Avenue and turned left in a blare of horns. 'Are we going to Armory Place?'

He told me to shut up. The police radio crackled and spat, but he ignored it. Fontaine simmered in silence all the way downtown, and when he hit the on-ramp to the east-west expressway, he thumped the accelerator. We hurtled out into the westbound traffic. Fontaine careened through the other cars, ignoring the cacophony, and got us into the fast lane without actually hitting another car. I managed not to put my arms in front of my face. He kept his foot down until we reached seventy-five. When a red Toyota refused to get out of his way, he flashed his lights