The Throat

'If the fog lets up by tomorrow, I'm going to take the car out of Purdum and drive it to Chicago. You know, like I said? Feel like coming along?'

He wanted me to drive him to Purdum—he probably wanted me to drive the Mercedes to Chicago, too. 'I have lots of things to do tomorrow,' I said, not knowing how true that statement was. 'We'll see what happens.'

John seemed inclined to stay downstairs with the television. Jimbo was telling us that police had reported half a dozen cases of vandalism and looting in stores along Messmer Avenue, the main shopping street in Millhaven's black ghetto. Merlin Waterford had refused to acknowledge the existence of the Committee for a Just Millhaven, claiming that 'the capture of one lunatic does not justify tinkering with our superb system of local government.'

I picked up 365 Days, a book by a doctor named Ronald Glasser who had treated servicemen wounded in Vietnam, and took it upstairs with me.

9

I laid the four photographs on the bed and stretched out beside them. In soft brown-gray tones, visible to various degrees beneath the ballpoint scribbles, the brick passage behind the St. Alwyn, room 218, the flank of the Idle Hour, and what had to be Heinz Stenmitz's butcher shop looked back at me. A powerful sense of time past—of difference—came from them. The arched passage and the exterior of the Idle Hour had not changed in forty years, but everything around them had been through wars, recessions, and the long disillusionment that followed the narcotic Reagan years.

I looked at the photograph of the hotel room where James Treadwell had died, set it aside and held the fourth photograph under the bedside lamp. It had to be the butcher shop, but something still troubled me—then I remembered the stench of blood and Mr. Stenmitz bending his great blond beast-head toward me. I dropped the photo onto the bed and picked up 365 Days.

Around three-thirty, John began hollering up the stairs that we'd better get going if we wanted to get to Arkham by four. I got into a jacket and put the four photographs in the pocket.

John was standing at the bottom of the stairs, holding a black briefcase. His other hand was balled into a pocket of the silk jacket. 'Where will you be going, anyhow?' he asked me.

'I'll probably hit the computers at the university library,' I said.

'Ah,' he said, as if now he had everything finally figured out.

'There might be some more information about Elvee.'

He leaned forward and peered at my eyes. 'Are you all right? Your eyes are red.'

'I ran out of Murine. If I get involved in something at the library, would you mind taking a cab home?'

'Try to wrap it up before seven,' he said, looking grumpy. 'After that, everything snaps shut like a trap. Budget cuts.'

Twenty minutes later, I dropped John off in front of Arkham's seedy quadrangle and watched him disappear into the heavy gray clouds. A few dim lights burned down from windows in the dark shapes of the college buildings. In the fog, Arkham looked like an insane asylum on the moors. Then I cruised slowly down the street. When a pay telephone swam up out of the murk, I double-parked the car and called Tom's number.

After his message ended, I said that I had to see him as soon as possible, he should call me as soon as he got up, I had to be back at John's—

The line clicked. 'Come on over,' Tom said.

'You're up already?'

'I'm still up,' he said.

10

'Do you know how many Allentowns there are in America?' Tom asked me. 'Twenty-one. Some of them aren't even in the standard atlases. I didn't bother with Allentown, Georgia, Allentown, Florida, Allentown, Utah, or Allentown, Delaware, because they all have populations under three thousand—it's an arbitrary cutoff, but not even Fee Bandolier could get away with committing a string of murders in a town that size.'

The start-up menus glowed from the monitors of his computers. Tom looked a little pale and his hair was rumpled, but the only other indication that he hadn't slept in twenty-four hours was that his necktie had been pulled below the undone top button of his shirt. He was wearing the same long silk robe he'd had on the other day.

'So I went through every one of the sixteen other Allentowns, looking for a Jane Wright who had been murdered in May 1977. Nothing. No Jane Wright. Most of these towns are so small that there were no murders at all in that month. All I could do then was go back to Allentown, Pennsylvania, and take another look.'

'And?'

'I found something good.'

'Are you going to tell me about it?'

'In time.' Tom smiled at me. 'You sounded like you had something pretty good yourself, on the phone.'

There was no point in trying to get him to say anything until he was ready. I took a sip of his coffee and said, 'April Ransom's car is in a garage in Purdum. John panicked when he found it in front of his house with blood all over the seats, and he took it to Alan's garage and cleaned it up and then stashed it out of town.'

'Did he, now?' Tom tilted his head back and regarded me through half-closed eyes. 'I thought he knew where that car was.' He was smiling again, that same slow, almost luxuriant smile I had seen on the day I had brought John Ransom to meet him. 'Somehow, I see that we do not think he is a guilty party here. Tell me the rest of it.'

'After I left your house the other day, Paul Fontaine pushed me into an unmarked car and drove me out to Pine Knoll.' I told him everything that had happened—Bob Bandolier's middle name and Andy Belin, Billy Ritz, my brawl and John's account of the night April was beaten. I described our visit to the house on South Seventh Street and brought the photographs out of my jacket pocket and put them on the table in front of us. Tom scarcely moved during my long recital—his eyes opened a bit when I got to Andy Belin, he nodded when I described calling the cab company, and he smiled again when I described the fight with John, but that was all.

Finally, he said, 'Hadn't it already occurred to you that Fee Bandolier was a Millhaven policeman?'

'No,' I said. 'Of course it hadn't.'

'But someone took Bob Bandolier's statements out of the Blue Rose file—only a policeman could do that, and only his son would want to.'

He took in my response to these remarks. 'Don't get angry with me. I didn't mention it because you wouldn't have believed me. Or was I wrong about that?'

'You weren't wrong.'

'Then let's think about what else we have here.' He closed his eyes and said nothing for at least an entire minute. Then he said, 'Preservation.' He smoothed out the front of the silk robe and nodded to himself.

'Maybe you could elaborate on that a little bit,' I said. 'Didn't John say Fee's house looked like a museum of the year 1945?' I nodded.

'It's his power source—his battery. He keeps that house to step back into his childhood and taste it again. It's a kind of shrine. It's like that ghost village in Vietnam you told me about.' Finally, he bent forward and looked at the photographs. 'So here we are,' he said. 'The sites of the original Blue Rose murders. With a slight overlay of static provided by the annoying tenants.'

He pulled the fourth photograph toward him. 'Hmmm.'