The Throat

black long-sleeved sweatshirt like the one he was wearing. His said TALINN JAZZFEST across the front; when I unfolded the one he gave me, it said BRADLEY'S above a logo of a toothy man strumming a long keyboard. 'I never even worked that place,' he said. 'A bartender there likes my music, so he mailed it to me. He thought I was about your size, I guess.'

The sweatshirt felt luxuriously soft and warm. 'You moved the telescope into your bedroom.'

'I went into the bedroom when I heard the sirens. After I got a look across the street, I fetched my telescope.'

'What did you see?'

'They were just pulling that blanket thing over the dead guy'

'Did you see who it was?'

'I need a new dealer, if that's what you mean. You mind coming into the bedroom? I want to see what happens.'

I followed Glenroy into his neat, square bedroom. None of the lights had been turned on, and glass over the framed prints and posters reflected our silhouettes. I stood next to him and looked down across Livermore Avenue.

The big cops in rain capes still stood in front of the barricades. A long line of cars crawled by. The plastic sheet had been folded down to Billy Ritz's waist, and a stout, gray-haired man with a black bag squatted in front of the body, next to Paul Fontaine. Billy looked like a ripped mattress. The gray-haired man said something, and Fontaine pulled the sheet back up over the pale face. He stood up and gestured at the ambulance. Two attendants jumped out and rolled a gurney toward the body. The gray-haired man picked up his bag and held out his hand for a black rod that bloomed into an umbrella in front of him. 'What do you think happened to him?' I asked.

Glenroy shook his head. 'I know what they'll say, anyhow —they'll call it a drug murder.'

I looked at him doubtfully, and he gave a short, sharp nod. 'That's the story. They'll find some shit in his pockets, because Billy always had some shit in his pockets. And that'll take care of that. They won't have to deal with any of the other stuff Billy was into.'

'Did you see the words on the wall over there?'

'Yeah. So what?'

'Billy Ritz is the third Blue Rose victim. He was killed—' I stopped myself, because I suddenly realized where Billy Ritz had been killed. 'His body was found exactly where Monty Iceland was killed in 1950.'

'Nobody cares about those Blue Rose murders,' Glenroy said. He stepped back and put his eye to the end of the telescope. 'Nobody is gonna care about Billy Ritz, either, any more than they cared about Monty Leland. Is that Hogan, that one over there now?'

I leaned toward the window and looked down. It was Michael Hogan, all right, rounding the corner in front of the tavern: the charge of his personality leapt across the great distance between us like an electrical spark.

Ignoring the rain, Hogan began threading through the police outside the Idle Hour. As soon as they took in his presence, the other men parted for him as they would have for Arden Vass. Instantly in charge, he got to the body and asked one of the policemen to fold back the sheet. Ritz's face was a white blotch on the wet sidewalk. The ambulance attendants waited beside their gurney, hugging themselves against the chill. Hogan stared down at the body for a couple of seconds and commanded the sheet to be raised again with an abrupt, angry-looking gesture of his hand. Fontaine slumped forward to talk to him. The attendants lowered the gurney and began maneuvering the body onto it. Glenroy left the telescope. 'Want a look?' I adjusted the angle to my height and put my eye to the brass circle. It was like looking through a microscope. Startlingly near, Hogan and Fontaine were facing each other in the circle of my vision. I could almost read their lips. Fontaine looked depressed, and Hogan was virtually luminous with anger. With the rain glistening on his face, he looked more than ever like a romantic hero from forties movies, and I wondered what he made of the end of Billy Ritz. Hogan spun away to speak to the officer who had found the body. The other policemen edged away from him. I moved the telescope to Fontaine, who was watching the attendants wheel the gurney down the sidewalk.

'That writing is red,' Glenroy said. I was still looking at Fontaine, and as Glenroy spoke, the detective turned his head to look at the slogan on the wall. I couldn't see his face. 'Right,' I said.

'Wasn't it black, the other time? Behind the hotel?'

'I think so,' I said.

Fontaine might have been comparing the two slogans, too: he turned around and stared fixedly across the street, toward the passage where three people had been killed. Rain streamed off the tip of his nose.

'It's funny, you mentioning Monty Leland,' Glenroy said.

I straightened up from the telescope, and Fontaine shrank to a damp little figure on the sidewalk, facing in a different direction from all of the other damp little figures. 'Why is it funny?'

'He was kind of in the same business as Billy. You know much about Monty Leland?'

'He was one of Bill Damrosch's informers.'

'That's right. He wasn't much else, but he was that.'

'Billy Ritz was an informer?'

'Like I told you—the man was in the middle. He was a contact.'

'Whose informer was he?'

'Better not to know.' Glenroy tilted up the telescope. 'Show's over.'

We went back into the living room. Glenroy switched on a lamp near his table and sat down. 'How did you wind up out there in the rain?'

'Paul Fontaine took me out to see Bob Bandolier's grave, and he got called here on the way back. He wasn't in a very good mood.'

'He was saying—okay, maybe he did it, but he's dead. Right? So leave it alone.'

'Right,' I said. 'I think I'm beginning to see why.'

Glenroy hitched himself up in the chair. 'Then you better watch who you talk to. On the real side.'

The record ended, and Glenroy jumped up and flipped it over. He put the needle down on the second side. 'Night and Day' breathed out into the room. Glenroy stood next to his shelves., looking down at the floor and listening to the music. 'Nobody like Ben. Nobody.'

I thought he was about to take the tension out of the air by telling me some anecdote about Ben Webster, but he clamped his arms around his chest and swayed in time to the music for a few seconds. 'Suppose some doctor got killed out at the stadium,' he said. 'I'm not saying this happened, I just supposing. Suppose he got killed bad—cut up in a toilet.'

He looked up at me, and I nodded.

'Suppose I'm a guy who likes to go to ball games now and then. Suppose I was there that day. Maybe I might happen to see a guy I know. He's got some kind of name like… Buster. Buster ain't worth much. When he ain't breaking into someone's house, he's generally drunk on his ass. Now suppose one time when I'm coming back from the food stand, I happen to see this no-good Buster all curled up under the steps to the next level in a puddle of Miller High Life. And if this ever happened, which it didn't, the only reason I knew this was a human being and not a blanket was that I knew it was Buster. Because the way this didn 't happen was, he was jammed so far up under the steps you had to look for him to see him.' I nodded.

'Then just suppose a detective gets word that Buster was out at the game that day, and Buster once did four years at Joliet for killing a guy in a bar, and when the detective goes to his room, he finds the doctor's wallet in a drawer. What do you suppose happens next?'

'I suppose Buster confesses and gets a life sentence.'

'Sounds about right to me,' Glenroy said. 'For a made-up story, that is.'

I asked Glenroy if he knew the number of a cab company. He took a business card from the top of the dresser and carried it to me. When I reached for the card, he held onto it for a second. 'You understand, I never said all that, and you never heard it.'

'I don't even think I was here,' I said, and he let go of the card.

A dispatcher said that a cab would pick me up in front of the hotel in five minutes. Glenroy tossed me my wet shirt and told me to keep the sweatshirt.