The Throat

'Exactly,' I said.

'Did you hear gunfire in the neighborhood?'

'Not then. No, I'm wrong. I heard shots from the area of the riot.'

'What happened when you got to the house?'

'John and I were going around to the back door, but I took him along the side of the house again to go up onto the porch. When John and I got near the porch steps, Alan saw the front door open and started yelling.'

'The patrol car was about a block away at that point.'

'That's right,' I said. 'Alan saw Fontaine and started screaming, 'Is that him?' Fontaine said something like, 'Damn you, Underhill, you're not going to get away.' I don't think the men in the car had seen us yet.'

McCandless nodded.

'John ran up to Alan and tried to get him to calm down, but Alan yanked the gun away from him and started shooting. The next thing I knew, I was lying down in a pool of blood.'

'How many shots did you hear?'

'There must have been two,' I said.

He waited a significant beat. 'I asked, how many did you hear?'

I thought back. 'Well, I saw Alan fire twice,' I said. 'But I think I might have heard more than two shots.'

'Brookner fired twice,' McCandless said. 'Officer Berenger fired a warning shot into the air. The couple who live across the street from where you were say they heard at least five shots, and so does the woman next door. Her husband slept through the whole thing, so he didn't hear anything. Berenger's partner thinks he heard five shots, fired very close together.'

'It's like the grassy knoll,' I said.

'You were facing Ransom and Brookner. What did you see? There had been some trouble in that area during the rioting.'

I remembered what I had seen. 'I had an impression that there was a person between the houses behind Alan and Ransom.'

'Good for you, Mr. Underhill. Did you see this person?'

'I thought I saw movement. It was dark. Then everything went crazy.'

'Have you ever heard of someone named Nicholas Ventura?'

A second too late, I said, 'No.'

'No, I don't suppose so,' McCandless said. He must have known that I was lying. 'Ventura was an up-and- coming young sleazeball who ran into some trouble on Livermore Avenue during the rioting. Somebody took a knife away from him and almost broke off his arm.' McCandless almost smiled at me and then came around the chair and sat down, facing me. 'Some party called 911 from the St. Alwyn Hotel almost immediately afterward, but I don't imagine that it was the same party that kicked the shit out of Ventura, do you?'

'No,' I said.

'In fact, what happened to Ventura was riot-related, wouldn't you say?'

I nodded.

'Probably you heard about the death of a man named Frankie Waldo.'

'I heard something about it,' I said. 'If you want to know what I think—'

'So far, you don't think anything about it,' McCandless said. 'Unofficially, I can tell you that Waldo was tied into Billy Ritz's drug business. And Ritz was killed in retribution for his murder.'

'Do you think you can really do this?' I asked.

'I didn't hear you.'

'Ritz was payback for Waldo.'

'Like I told you, everything is politics.' He stood up. 'By the way, Officer Berenger found some old photographs in the basement of that house. I think some good might come out of this, despite what you idiots tried to do.'

'You're not too unhappy that Fontaine is dead, are you?'

McCandless moved away from the chair. Sonny stepped back and looked down toward his feet. He was deaf and blind. 'You know what makes me happy?' McCandless asked me. 'I can protect him one hell of a lot better the way things are.'

'You didn't have much trouble believing that he was really Franklin Bachelor. All you have is what I told you about Edward Hubbel. I don't get it.'

McCandless gave me a long, utterly unreadable look. Then he glanced down the bed at Sonny, who snapped his head up like a soldier on parade. 'Tell him.'

'Detective Monroe made a search of Detective Fontaine's apartment this morning.' Sonny directed his words to the bright window. 'He located Major Bachelor's discharge papers in his desk.'

If I hadn't known how much it would hurt, I would have laughed out loud. 'I wonder if he also came across some boxes of notes.'

'There never were any boxes of notes,' McCandless said.

'Not now, I bet,' I said. 'Congratulations.'

McCandless let it roll right off him. Maybe they hadn't destroyed the notes, after all. Maybe Fontaine had flushed them down the toilet, page by page, before we had shown up at his old house.

'You'll be protected from journalists as long as you are here,' McCandless said. He sounded like he was reading me my Miranda rights. 'The hospital will screen all your calls, and I'm stationing an officer at the door to secure your privacy. In about an hour, Officer Berenger will bring you your statement, based on your responses to my questions. Is that correct, Sonny?'

'Yes, sir,' Sonny said.

'And you might think about booking your ticket home for the day of your release. You'll be taken to the airport in a patrol car, so after you arrange the ticket, give the officer your flight information.'

'All in the interest of my security,' I said.

'Take care of yourself,' McCandless said. 'You look lousy, if you want to know the truth.'

'Glad to help you out,' I said. They were already moving toward the door.

I opened the magazine and tried to revive my interest in menopause. Some of the symptoms had an ironic familiarity— heavy bleeding, increased pain, depression. The columnist had nothing to say about sudden flare-ups of anger against authority figures who looked like retired circus performers. I understood some of what McCandless had been after, but his insistence on there having been more than three gunshots puzzled me. Whatever I had said had satisfied him, but I couldn't figure out why. Then I started worrying about Alan. I reached across my chest to get the telephone and call County Hospital, but the operator almost apologetically told me that I was restricted by police order to incoming calls. I picked up Modern Bride and discovered that today's young woman got married in pretty much the same kind of thing as yesterday's. I was just getting into Longevity and 'Exercises for the Recently Bereaved' when a short, pudgy young policeman stuck his head in the door and said, 'I'll be right out here, okay?' We recognized each other at the same moment. It was Officer Mangelotti, minus the white head bandage he'd been wearing when I last saw him. 'Nobody said I had to talk to you, though,' he said, and gave me what he thought was a truly evil scowl. His folding chair squeaked when he sat down.

4

Geoffrey Bough conned his way past the receptionist and turned up outside my door about an hour after Ross McCandless left. I was playing with the cold oatmeal the kitchen had sent up, coaxing it into a mound and then mushing it flat. The first indication I had of the reporter's arrival was the sound of Mangelotti saying, 'No. No way. Get out of here.' I thought he was ordering John Ransom away from my room, and I shoved away the oatmeal and called out, 'Come on, Mangelotti, let him in.'

'No way,' Mangelotti said.

'You heard him,' said a voice I knew. Bough squeezed his skinny chest past Mangelotti and leaned into the room. 'Hi, Tim,' he said, as if we were old friends. Maybe we were, by now—I realized that I was glad to see