The Throat

weight. My feet vanished beneath me, and I landed on the marble apron of the fireplace so hard I saw actual stars. Ransom reached wildly up toward my head and got a hand on my face and pulled himself up onto my chest. Both hands closed around my neck. I bashed the plaque into the side of his head. Because of the way I was holding the award, I couldn't use the edge, only the flat surface. I hit him with the plaque again. A creaky squawk came from my throat, and I merely tapped the plaque against the side of his head. My muscles felt like water. I used the last of my strength to bash the metal plaque against his head again.

John's hands loosened on my throat. All the tension went out of his body. He was a huge slack weight pressing down on me. His chest heaved. Strangled, wheezing noises came from his mouth. After a couple of seconds, I realized that he wasn't dying right on top of me. He was weeping. I crawled out from under him and lay panting on the carpet. I unwrapped my fingers from the plaque. John curled up like a fetus and continued to cry, his arms tented over his head.

After a little while, I got upright and slid along the marble apron and leaned against the edge of the fireplace. We'd been fighting for no more than a minute or two. Someone had been slamming a baseball bat into my arms, my back, my legs, my chest, and my head. I still felt Ransom's hands around my neck.

John lowered his arms and lay curled up with his chest on the marble apron and his hips and legs on the carpet. An ugly wound bled down into his hair. He reached into his trouser pocket for a dark blue handkerchief and put it up against the cut. 'You're a real bastard.'

'Tell me what happened,' I said. 'Try to get in the truth this time.'

He looked at the handkerchief. 'I'm bleeding.' He placed the handkerchief back over the wound.

'You can put a bandage on it later.'

'How did you know about Purdum?'

'I was sneaky,' I said. 'Where is her car now, John?'

He tried to push himself up and groaned. He lay back down again. 'It's out there in a storage garage. In Purdum. April and I could have retired there. It's a beautiful place.'

People like Dick Mueller moved to Riverwood. People like Ross Barnett retired to estates in Purdum.

John sat up, holding the handkerchief to the side of his head, and slid on his bottom until his back hit the other side of the fireplace. We sat there like andirons. He wiped his free hand down over his face and snorted back mucus. Then he looked at me, red-eyed. 'I'm sorry I went for you like that, but you pushed my buttons, and I snapped. Did I hurt you?'

'Was that what happened with April? You snapped?'

'Yeah.' He nodded very carefully, wincing. I got another darting look from the red eyes. 'I wasn't going to tell you about any of this, because it makes me look so bad. But I didn't invite you here to use you—you have to know that.'

'Then tell me what happened.'

He sighed. 'You got a lot of it right. Barnett spoke to April confidentially about going into business in San Francisco. I wasn't crazy about that. I wanted her to keep to the agreement we made—that she'd quit after she proved she could do a good job at Barnett. But then she had to prove she was the best broker and analyst in the whole damn Midwest. It got so I never saw her except on weekends, and not always then. But I didn't want her to go to California. She could open her own office here, if that was what she wanted. Everything would have been all right, if it hadn't been for that fourth-rate, womanizing twerp.' He glared at me. 'Dorian had an affair with Carol Judd, the dealer who put him onto April, did you know that?'

'I guessed,' I said.

'The guy is slime. He goes after older women. I will never, never know what April saw in him. He was cute, I guess.'

'How did you find out about it?'

John inspected the handkerchief again. I couldn't see the wound, but the handkerchief was bright with blood. 'Could we move? I have to take care of this gash.'

I got up, all my joints aching, and held out a hand for him. John grabbed my hand and levered himself up. He steadied himself on the mantel for a moment and then began moving across the living room toward the stairs.

2

Leaning over to let the blood drip into the sink, John dipped a washcloth into the stream of cold water and dabbed at the inch-long abrasion on the side of his head, where his hair began to get thin. It didn't look so bad now that it was clean. He had placed a square white bandage on the edge of the sink. I was sitting on the tub, looking up at him and holding a wad of folded tissues.

'April told me she was working late at the office. Just to see if she was telling me the truth, I called her line every half hour for three hours. Every half hour, on the button. Maybe six times. She was never there. Around eleven-thirty, I went up to her office here and looked in the file where she kept her charge slips and credit card records. Okay.'

He held out his hand, and I passed him the tissues. He clamped them down on the gash to dry it and then tossed them into the wastebasket and snatched up the bandage square. He centered it over the wound, pushed wisps of hair out of the way, and flattened it down on his scalp. 'That'll do. I guess I won't need any stitches.' He turned his head to see the bandage from different angles. 'Now all I have is one hell of a headache.'

He opened his medicine chest, shook two aspirin tablets onto his palm, and swallowed them with a gulp of water from a surprisingly humble red plastic cup.

'You know what I found? Charges from Hatchett and Hatch. She bought clothes for that little turd.'

'How do you know they weren't yours?' He sneered at me in the mirror. 'I haven't bought anything there in years. All my suits and jackets are made for me. I even get my shirts made to order at Paul Stuart, in New York. And I order my shoes from Wilkes Bashford in San Francisco.' He lifted a foot so that I could admire a dark brown pigskin cap-toe. 'About all I buy in Millhaven is socks and underwear.' He patted the bandage and stepped away from the sink. 'Could we go downstairs so I could get a drink? I'm going to need one.'

I followed him into the kitchen, and he gave me a chastened look as he opened the freezer. Now that his father was gone, the three-hundred-dollar bottle was back in the vodka library. 'I'm not going to run away or anything, Tim, you don't have to act like my shadow,'

'What did you do when she finally came home?' He poured about three inches of hyacinth vodka into a glass. He tasted it before answering me. 'I should never put ice cubes in this stuff. It's too refined to dilute—such a delicate flavor. Would you like a sip?'

'A sip wouldn't help me. Did you confront her directly?'

He took another taste and nodded. 'I had the charge slips right in front of me—I was sitting out there in the living room, and she came in about a quarter past twelve. God, I almost died.' He looked up at the ceiling and let out a nearly soundless sigh. 'She looked so beautiful. She didn't see me for a second. And as soon as she noticed me, she changed. All the life went out of her. She might have just seen her jailer. Right up until that moment, I was still thinking that there could be another explanation for everything. The clothes could have been for her father—he used to like that store. But the second I saw her mood change like that, I knew.'

'Did you lose your temper?'

He shook his head. 'I felt like someone had just shoved a knife in my back. 'Who is it?' I said. 'Your little pet, Byron?' She said she didn't know what I was talking about. So I told her I knew that she hadn't been at her office all night, and she gave me some kind of story about not answering the phone, about being in the copy room, in another office… so I said, April, what are these charge slips? and she kept giving me lies, and I kept saying Dorian, Dorian, Dorian, and finally she plunked herself down in a chair and said, okay, I've been seeing Byron. What's it to you? God, it was like she was killing me. Anyhow, she got less defensive as we went along, and she said she was sorry I had to find out like this, she didn't like being underhanded, and she was almost glad I'd found out, so we could talk about ending our marriage.'

'Did she mention the job in San Francisco?'