The Throat

dressing table. The details of the room lay buried under a lot more scribbled ink.

'A picture of room 218 at the St. Alwyn,' I said, and looked up at Ransom's face. 'Bob Bandolier took pictures of the sites before he did the murders.'

I uncovered the next image, scarcely touched by the little Dumkys. Here, rendered in soft brown tones, was the Livermore Avenue side of the Idle Hour, where Monty Leland had been murdered. The photograph beneath had been taken from a spot nearer the corner of South Sixth and showed more of the tavern's side. A zigzag of ink ran across the wooden boards like a bolt of lightning.

'The guy was an obsessive's obsessive. It was planned out, like a campaign.'

I moved the photograph to the bottom of the pile and found myself looking at a photograph almost unreadable beneath inky loops and scratches. I lifted it nearer my face. It had to be a picture of Heinz Stenmitz's butcher shop, but something about the size or shape of the building buried beneath the ink bothered me.

The next was nearly as bad. The edge of a building that might equally have been the Taj Mahal, the White House, or the place where I lived on Grand Street dove beneath a hedge of scribbles.

'They worked that one over,' John said.

I peered down at the picture, trying to figure out what troubled me about it. I could only barely remember the front of Stenmitz's shop. One side of the sign that projected out in a big V above the window read HOME-MADE SAUSAGES; the other side, QUALITY MEATS. Something like that seemed visible underneath the scrawls, but the proportions of the building seemed wrong.

'It must be the butcher shop, right?'

'I guess,' I said.

'How come they're squirreled away in these boxes?'

'Fee must have found them in a drawer—wherever his father kept them. He put them down here to protect them—he must have thought that no one would ever find them.'

'What do we do with them?'

I already had an idea about that.

I sorted through the photographs and chose the clearest of each pair. John took the envelope, and I passed him the others. He slid them into the envelope and tucked in the flap. Then he turned over the envelope and held it up close to his face, as I had done with the last photograph. 'Well, well.'

'What?'

'Take a look.' He pointed to faint, spidery pencil marks on its top left-hand corner.

In faint, almost ladylike thin gray letters, the words blue rose appeared on the yellowing paper.

'Let's leave these here,' I said, and put the envelope in the smallest box, folded the top shut, and slid the box into the next, and then inserted this one into the largest box, folded its flaps shut, and pushed if back behind the furnace.

'Why?' John asked.

'Because we know they're here.' He frowned and pushed his eyebrows together, trying to figure it out. I said, 'Someday, we might want to show that Bob Bandolier was Blue Rose. So we leave the envelope here.'

'Okay, but where are the notes?'

I raised my shoulders. 'They have to be somewhere.'

'Great.' John walked to the end of the basement, as if trying to make the boxes of notes materialize out of the shadows and concrete blocks. After he passed out of sight behind the furnace, I heard him coming up on the far side of the basement. 'Maybe he hid them under the furnace grate.'

We went back around to the front of the furnace. John opened the door and stuck his head inside. 'Ugh.' He reached inside and tried to pick up the grate. 'Stuck.' He withdrew his hand, which was streaked with gray and black on the back and completely blackened on the palm. The sleeve of the blue silk jacket had a vertical black stripe just below the elbow. John grimaced at the mess on his hand. 'Well, I don't think they're in here.'

'No,' I said. 'They're probably still in the boxes. He doesn't know that we know they exist.'

I took another, pointless look around the basement.

John said, 'What the hell, let's go home.'

We went upstairs and back out into the fog. John locked the door behind us.

I got lost somewhere north of the valley and nearly ran into a car backing out of a driveway. It took me nearly two hours to get back to Ely Place, and when we pulled up in front of his house, John said, 'Got any other great ideas?'

I didn't remind him that the idea had been his.

8

'What do we do now?' John asked. We were in the kitchen, eating a big salad I had made out of a tired head of lettuce, half of an onion, some old Monterey jack cheese, and cut-up slices of the remaining luncheon meat.

'We have to do some shopping,' I said.

'You know what I mean.'

I chewed for a little while, thinking. 'We have to work out a way to get him to take us to those notes. And I've been running a few lines of research. I want to continue with those.'

'What kind of research?'

'I'll tell you when I have some results.' I didn't want to tell him about Tom Pasmore.

'Does that mean that you want to use the car again?'

'A little later, if that's all right,' I said.

'Okay. I really do have to get down to the college to take care of my syllabus and a few other things. Maybe you could drive me there and pick me up later?'

'Are you going to set up Alan's courses, too?'

'I don't have any choice. April's estate is still locked up, until it gets out of probate.'

I didn't want to ask him about the size of April's estate.

'It'll be a couple of million,' he said. 'Two something, according to the lawyers. Plus about half a million from her life insurance. Taxes will eat up a lot of it.'

'There'll be a lot left over,' I said.

'Not enough.'

'Enough for what?'

'To be comfortable, I mean, really comfortable, for the rest of my life,' he said. 'Maybe I'll want to travel for a while. You know what?' He leaned back and looked at me frankly. 'I have gone through an amazing amount of shit in my life, and I don't want any more. I just want the money to be there.'

'While you travel,' I said.

'That's right. Maybe I'll write a book. You know what this is about, don't you? I've been locked up inside Millhaven and Arkham College for a long time, and I have to find a new direction.'

He looked at me, hard, and I nodded. This sounded almost like the old John Ransom, the one for whose sake I had come to Millhaven.

'After all, I've been Alan Brookner's constant companion for about ten years. I could bring his ideas to the popular audience. People are always ready for real insights packaged in an accessible way. Think about Joseph Campbell. Think about Bill Moyers. I'm ready to move on to the next level.'

'So let's see if I get this right,' I said. 'First you're going to travel around the world, and then you're going to popularize Alan's ideas, and after that you're going to be on television.'

'Come off it, I'm serious,' he said. 'I want to take time off to rethink my own experience and see if I can write a book that would do some good. Then I could take it from there.'

'I like a man with a great dream,' I said.

'I think it is a great dream.' John looked at me for a couple of beats, trying to figure out if I was making fun of him and ready to feel injured.

'When you do the book, I could help you find the right agent.'

He nodded. 'Great, thanks, Tim. By the way.'

I looked attentively at him, wondering what was next.