The Throat

Millhaven. I had looked at them during the long nights of work, been pleased and delighted by them, but until this moment I had never really seen them—seen them together.

The Vuillard was a much greater painting than Byron Dorian's, but by whose standards? John Ransom's? April's? By mine, at least at this moment, they had so much in common that they spoke in the same voice. For all their differences, each seemed crammed with possibility, with utterance, like Glenroy Breakstone's saxophone or like the human throat—overflowing with expression. It occurred to me that for me, both paintings concerned the same man. The isolated boy who stared out of Vuillard's deceptively comfortable world would grow into the man turned toward Byron Dorian's despairing little bar. Bill Damrosch in childhood, Bill Damrosch near the end of his life—the painted figures seemed to have leapt onto the wall from the pages of my manuscript, as if where Fee Bandolier went, Damrosch trailed after. Heinz Stenmitz meant that I was part of that procession, too.

The red light blinked at my elbow, and I finished the tea, set down the cup, and pushed the playback button.

'It's Tom,' said his voice. 'Are you home? Are you going to answer? Well, why aren't you home? I wanted to talk to you about something kind of interesting that turned up yesterday. Maybe I'm crazy. But do you remember talking about Lenny Valentine? Turns out he's not fictional, he's real after all. Do we care? Does it matter? Call me back. If you don't, I'll try you again. This is a threat.'

I rewound the tape, looking across the room at the paintings, trying to remember where I had heard or read the name Lenny Valentine—it had the oddly unreal 'period' atmosphere of an old paperback with a tawdry cover. Then I remembered that Tom had used Lenny Valentine as one of the possible sources for the name Elvee Holdings. How could this hypothetical character be 'real after all'? I didn't think I wanted to know, but I picked up the receiver and dialed.

7

I waited through his message, and said, 'Hi, it's Tim. What are you trying to say? There is no Lenny—'

Tom picked up and started talking. 'Oh, good. You got my message. You can deal with it or not, that's up to you, but I think this time I'm going to have to do something, for once in my life.'

'Slow down,' I said, slightly alarmed and even more puzzled than before. Tom's words had flown past so, quickly that I could now barely retain them. 'We have to decide about what?'

'Let me tell you what I've been doing lately,' Tom said. For a week or so, he had busied himself with the two or three other cases he had mentioned to me in the hospital, but without shedding the depression I had seen there. 'I was just going through the motions. Two of them turned out all right, but I can't take much credit for that. Anyhow, I decided to take another look through all those Allentowns, and any other town with a name that seemed possible, to see if I could find anything I missed the first time.'

'And you found Lenny Valentine?'

'Well, first I found Jane Wright,' he said. 'Remember Jane? Twenty-six, divorced, murdered in May 1977?'

'Oh, no,' I said.

'Exactly. Jane Wright lived in Allerton, Ohio, a town of about fifteen thousand people on the Ohio River. Nice little place, I'm sure. From 1973 to 1979, they had a few random murders— well, twelve actually, two a year, bodies in fields, that kind of thing—and about half of them went unsolved, but I gather from the local paper that most people assumed that the killer, if there was one single killer, was some kind of businessman whose work took him through town every now and then. And then they stopped.'

'Jane Wright,' I said. 'In Allerton, Ohio. I don't get it.'

'Try this. The name of the homicide detective in charge of the case was Leonard Valentine.'

'It can't be,' I said. 'This is impossible. We had this all worked out. Paul Fontaine was in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in May of 'seventy-seven.'

'Precisely. He was in Pennsylvania.'

'That old man I talked to, Hubbel, pointed right at Fontaine's picture.'

'Maybe his eyesight isn't too good.'

'His eyesight is terrible,' I said, remembering him pushing his beak into the photograph.

Tom said nothing for a moment, and I groaned. 'You know what this means? Paul Fontaine is the only detective in Millhaven, as far as we know, who could not have killed Jane Wright. So what was he doing at that house?'

'I suppose he was beginning a private little investigation of his own,' Tom said. 'Could it be a coincidence that a woman named Jane Wright is killed in a town with the right sort of name in the right month of the right year? And that the detective in charge of the case has the initials LV, as in Elvee? Is there any way you can see that as coincidental?'

'No,' I said.

'Me, neither,' Tom said. 'But I don't understand this LV business anymore. Would someone call himself Lenny Valentine because it starts with the same letters as Lang Vo? That just doesn't sound right.'

'Tom,' I said, remembering the idea I'd had that morning, 'could you check on the ownership of a certain building for me?'

'Right now, you mean?'

I said yes, right now.

'Sure, I guess,' he said. 'What building is it?'

I told him, and without asking any questions, he switched on his computer and worked his way into the civic records. 'Okay,' he said. 'Coming up.' Then it must have come up, because I could hear him grunt with astonishment. 'You know this already, right? You know who owns that building.'

'Elvee Holdings,' I said. 'But it was just a guess until I heard you grunt.'

'Now tell me what it means.'

'I guess it means I have to come back,' I said, and fell silent with the weight of all that meant. 'I'll get the noon flight tomorrow. I'll call you as soon as I get there.'

'As soon as you get here, you'll see me at the gate. And you have your pick of the Florida Suite, the Dude Ranch, or the Henry the Eighth Chamber.'

'The what?'

'Those are the names of the guest rooms. Lamont's parents were a little bit eccentric. Anyhow, I'll air them out, and you can choose between them.'

'Fontaine wasn't Fee,' I said, finally stating what both of us knew. 'He wasn't Franklin Bachelor.'

'I'm partial to the Henry the Eighth Chamber myself,' Tom said. 'I'd suggest you stay away from the Dude Ranch, though. Splinters.'

'So who is he?'

'Lenny Valentine. I just wish I knew why.'

'And how do we find out who Lenny Valentine is?' Then an idea came to me. 'I bet we can use that building.'

'Ah,' Tom said. 'Suddenly, I'm not depressed anymore. Suddenly, the sun came up.'

PART SIXTEEN

FROM DANGEROUS DEPTHS

1

And so, again because of an unsolved murder, I flew back to Millhaven, carried the same two bags out again into the bright, science-fictional spaces of its airport, and again met the embrace of an old friend with my own. A twinge, no more, blossomed and faded in my shoulder. I had removed the blue cast shortly after putting down the