The Throat

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.

8

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.

It was what you would expect—one of those tormented boys had come back to exact justice. He had wanted to forget what he had done—he hated the kind of man Stenmitz had turned him into. It was tragic. Decent people would put all this behind them and go back to normal life.

But I turned the pages of my scrapbook over and over, trying to find a phrase, a look in the eye, a curl of the mouth, that would tell me if William Damrosch was the man I had seen in the tunnel with my sister.

When I tried to think about it, I heard great wings beating in my head.

I thought of April sailing on before me into that world of annihilating light, the world no living person is supposed to know. William Damrosch had killed Heinz Stenmitz, but I did not know if he had killed my sister. And that meant that April was sailing forever into that realm I had glimpsed.

So of course I saw her ghost sometimes. When I was eight I turned around on a bus seat and saw April four rows back, her pale face turned toward the window. Unable to breathe, I faced forward again. When I turned back around, she was gone. When I was eleven I saw her standing on the lower deck of the double-decker ferry that was