The Throat

another widening column of shining gray light.

The lobby was filled with hazy illumination from the oval windows set into thick doors opposite leading out to the old ticket booth and the glass doors on Livermore Avenue.

Two chest-high pieces of wooden furniture stood in the place of the old candy counter. Even in the partial light, the lobby seemed smaller than I had remembered and cleaner than I had expected. At its far end, another set of doors with metal hand plates led into the aisle at the other side of the theater. I went up to the furniture where the candy counter had been, bent down to look at a round carving in what I thought was the back of a shelf unit, and saw ornate letters in the midst of the filigree. I took out my penlight and shone it on the letters, inri. I pointed the light at what looked like a lectern and saw the same pattern. I was standing in front of a portable altar and pulpit.

Tom said, 'Some congregation must use this place as a church on Sundays.'

Tom went toward a door in the wall next to the pulpit. He tried the knob, which jittered but would not otherwise move, unrolled the burglar kit, peered at the keyhole, and worked another key into the slot. When the lock clicked and the door opened, Tom packed away the kit and peered inside. He took out his light, switched it on, and with me behind him went into a stuffy, windowless room about half the size of Tom's kitchen.

'Manager's office,' he said. The penlights picked out a bare desk, a small number of green plastic chairs, and a wheeled rack crowded with shiny blue choir robes. Four cardboard boxes stood lined up in front of the desk. 'Do you suppose?' Tom asked, running his light along the boxes.

I went through the chairs and knelt in front of the two boxes at the center of the desk. The open flaps had been simply laid shut, and I opened those of the first box to see two stacks of thick blue books. 'Hymnals,' I said.

I played my own light along the other boxes while Tom started moving things around behind me. None of the boxes showed anything but ordinary wear, no rips or holes made by busy rats. All four would hold hymnals. I checked them anyhow and found—hymnals. I stood up again and turned around. The rack stuffed with choir robes angled out into the room. Tom's head protruded above the rack, and the circle of light before him shone on a plywood door almost exactly the color of his hair. 'Fee always liked basements, didn't he?' Tom said. 'Let's take a look.'

9

I walked around the rack as Tom opened the door, and trained my penlight just ahead of his. A flight of wooden stairs with a handrail began at the door and led down to a cement floor. I followed Tom down the stairs, playing my light over the big space to our right. Two startled mice scrambled toward the far wall. We descended another three or four steps, and the mice darted into an almost invisible crevice between two cement blocks in the wall on the other side of the basement. Tom's light flashed over an old iron furnace, a yard-square column of bricks, heating pipes, electrical conduits, rusting water pipes, and drooping spiderwebs. 'Cheerful place,' he said.

We reached the bottom of the steps. Tom went straight ahead toward the furnace and the front of the theater, and I walked off to the side, looking for something I had glimpsed while I watched the mice scramble toward the wall. Tom's light wandered toward the center of the basement; mine skimmed over yards of dusty cement. I moved forward in a straight line. Then my beam landed squarely on a wooden carton.

I walked up to it, set down the thermos, and pushed at the edge of the flat top. It moved easily to the side and exposed a section of something square and white. I slid the top all the way off the carton and held the light on what I thought would be reams of paper arranged into neat stacks. A lunatic message gleamed back into the light. Black letters on a white ground spelled out BUYTERVIO. Above that, in another row of letters, was MNUFGJKA. Two other nonsense words filled the top two rows of the carton. 'Buytervio?' I said to myself, and finally realized that the carton contained the letters once used to spell out the movie titles on the marquee.

'Come over here.'

Tom's voice came from a penumbra of light behind the furnace. I picked up the thermos and followed the beam of my own light across the dirty floor to the side of the furnace and then shone it on Tom. 'He was here,' he said. 'Take a look.'

I misheard him to say He's here, and, thinking that Fee's corpse lay on the ground beside the gun with which he had killed himself, experienced an involuntary surge of rage, sorrow, grief, and pain, all mingled with something that felt like regret or disappointment. My light swept over a pair of cardboard boxes. Did I want him to live, in spite of everything he had done? Or did I simply want to be in at the end, like Tom Pasmore? Raging at both Fee and myself, I aimed my light at Tom's chest and said, 'I can't find him.'

'I said, he was here.' Tom took my hand and aimed the beam of light on the boxes I had overlooked in my search for the corpse.

Their flaps lay open, and one box was tipped onto its side, exposing an empty interior. Ragged holes of various sizes had been chewed into two sides of the box still upright. Tom had tried to prepare me, but as much as a body, the empty boxes were the end of our quest. I said, 'We lost him.'

'Not yet,' Tom said.

'But if he moved the notes to some other safe house, all he has to do now is kill Dick Mueller.' I placed my hand on my forehead, seeing horrible things. 'Oh, God. It might already be too late.'

'Mueller's safe,' came Tom's voice from the darkness beside me. 'I called his house last night. His answering machine said that he was on vacation with his family for the next two weeks. He didn't say where.'

'But what if Fee called him? He'd know…' It didn't matter, I saw.

'He still has to come back,' Tom said. 'He knows somebody's trying to blackmail him.'

That was right. He had to come back. 'But where did he put those notes?'

'Well, I have an idea about that.' I remembered Tom saying something like this earlier and waited for him to explain. 'It's an obvious last resort,' Tom said. 'In fact, it's been in front of our face all along. It was even in front of his face, but he didn't see it either, until today.'

'Well, what is it?'

'I can't believe you won't see it for yourself,' Tom said. 'So far, you've seen everything else, haven't you? If you still don't know by the time we're done here, I'll tell you.'

'Smug asshole,' I said. We separated again to probe the rest of the theater's basement.

On a hydraulic platform beneath the stage, I found an organ—not the 'mighty Wurlitzer' that would have appeared in a billow of curtains before the start of features in the thirties, but a tough, bluesy little Hammond B- 3.

The old dressing rooms on the basement's left side were nothing but barren concrete holes with plywood counters to suggest the twelve-foot mirrors and rings of light bulbs that had once stood along their far walls.

'Well, now we know where everything is,' Tom said. Back in the office, Tom led me past the glimmering robes and pushed the rack back into place. We went back out into the lobby, and he relocked the door. I started toward the entrance we had used on our way out, but Tom said, 'Other side.'

His instincts were better than mine. From the far side of the theater, we would be invisible to anyone entering through the back door, while he—Fee—would be outlined in the column of gray light the instant he came inside. I walked past the altar and pulpit to the padded doors on the far side of the lobby and let us back into the darkness.

10

We moved blindly down the far aisle, touching the backs of the seats for guidance, moving through total blackness, a huge coffin, where every step brought us up against what looked like a solid, unyielding black wall that retreated as we moved forward.

Tom touched my shoulder. We had not yet reached the wide separation between rows in the middle of the theater, but could have been anywhere from the third row to the twentieth. The black wall still stood before me,