The Throat

1

By eight-thirty the sun was already high over the rooftops of South Fourth Street, and we stepped out of the car's briskly conditioned air into ninety-degree heat that almost instantly plastered my shirt to my sides. Tom Pasmore was wearing one of his Lamont von Heilitz specials, a blue three-piece windowpane check suit that made him look as if he had just arrived from Buckingham Palace. I had on more or less what I'd worn on the airplane, jeans and a black double-breasted jacket over a white button-down shirt, and I looked like the guy who held the horses.

Expresspost Mail and Fax was a bright white shopfront with its name painted in drastic red letters above a long window with a view of a clean white counter at which a man with rimless glasses and a red tie stood flipping through a catalogue. The bronze doors of individual mail receptacles lined the walls behind him.

We came through the door, and the man closed the catalogue and placed it on a shelf beneath the counter and looked eagerly from Tom to me and back to Tom. 'Can I do something for you?' he said.

'Yes, thanks,' Tom said. 'I want to pick up the papers that my colleague deposited here for the Elvee Corporation yesterday evening.'

A shadow of uncertainty passed over the clerk's face. 'Your colleague? Mister Belin?'

'That's him,' Tom said. He brought the key out of his pocket and put it on the counter in front of the clerk.

'Well, Mister Belin said he was going to do that himself.' He looked over his shoulder at a rank of the locked boxes. 'We can't give you a refund, or anything like that,'

'That's all right,' Tom said.

'Maybe you should tell me your name, in case he comes back.'

'Casement,' Tom said.

'Well, I guess it'll be all right.' The clerk picked up the key.

'We're grateful for your help,' Tom said.

The clerk turned away and went to the wall to his right, twiddling the key in his fingers. The boxes in the bottom row were the size of the containers used to ship dogs on airplanes. When he had nearly reached the rear of the shop, the clerk knelt down and put the key into a lock.

He looked back up at Tom. 'Look—since you already paid for the week, I can reserve this one for you until the time is up. That way, if you want to use it again, you won't have to pay twice.'

'I'll pass that on to Mister Belin,' Tom said.

The clerk began pulling stacks of paper stuffed into manila folders out of the box.

2

WE carried the long cardboard container the clerk had given us up the stairs to the office, Tom in front and me behind him. On the way back, Tom had stopped off at a stationery store and bought six reams of copy paper, four of which were now distributed across the tops of the files, with the other two slipped down beside the files at each end of the box. Halfway up the stairs, the handholds started to rip, and we had to carry the box the rest of the way by holding the bottom.

The box went on the floor beside the copy machine. Tom flipped its square black switch, and the machine hummed and flashed. I picked up one of the fat manila folders and opened it up. Papers of varying sizes and colors filled it, some of them closely filled with single-space typing that ran from edge to edge without margins, other crowded with the handwriting I had first seen in the basement of the Green Woman. I turned to one of the typed pages.

When we left the bar it was one or two in the morning, and she was too drunk to walk straight. I ought to take you in for public intoxication. You ain't a cop now, are you? No, honey, I own one of those big hotels downtown, I already told you that. Which one? The Heartbreak Hotel, I said. I already been there. I probably owe you lots of rent. I know that, honey, we'll take care of that. She giggled. Here's my car. Her black skirt rode up on her thighs when she got in. Skinny thighs, one black and blue thumbprint. We got to the GWT and she said This dump? Don't worry, there's a throne all ready for you downstairs.

I looked up at Tom, who was leafing through another file. 'This is incredible,' I said. 'He described them in such detail. He even put in the dialogue. It's like a book.'

Tom looked a little sickened by whatever he had read. He closed his file. 'They seem to be more or less in order—each murder takes up about twenty pages, from what I see here. How many pages do you think we have, about a thousand?'

'Something like that,' I said, looking down at the stacks.

'At least fifty murders,' Tom said. Both of us looked at the stacks of papers. 'I suppose he let Fontaine solve some of the most colorful ones.'

'Who are you going to send copies to?'

'The FBI. Isobel Archer. The new chief, Harold Green. Someone at the Ledger. Geoffrey Bough?'

'You'll make his day,' I said. 'You're not going to identify yourself, are you?'

'Sure, I'm the worried citizen who found these papers in a garbage can. In fact, I think the worried citizen is about to call Ms. Archer right now.'

He went to his desk and dialed a number. I sat down on the couch and listened to his half of the conversation. When I realized that I was still holding the thick file, I put it on the table as if I thought I might catch something from it.

'I'd like to speak to Isobel Archer, please. It has to do with a shooting.'

'Yes, I'll hold.'

'Miss Archer? I'm glad to be able to speak to you.'

'My name? Fletcher Namon.'

'Well, yes, it is about a shooting. I didn't know what to do about this, so I thought I'd call you.'

'I don't want to get involved with the police, Miss Archer. It's about a policeman.'

'Well, yes.'

'Okay. Last night, this was. I saw a detective, I don't know his name, but I saw him one night on the news, I know he's some kind of detective, and he was going into the old movie theater down on Livermore.'

'Late at night.'

'No, I couldn't tell you what time. Anyhow, after he got inside, I heard this shot.'

'No, I got out of there, fast. '

'I'm sure.'

'Sure, I'm sure. It was a gunshot.'

'Well, I don't know what I expect you to do. I thought that was your business. I gotta go now.'

'No. Good-bye.' He put down the phone and turned to me.

'What do you think?'

'I think she'll be down there with a hacksaw and blowtorch in about five minutes.'

'I do, too.' He took all the pages out of the folder on his lap and tapped their bottom edges against his desk. 'It'll take me two or three hours to copy all this stuff. Do you want to hang around, or is there something else you feel like doing?'

'I guess I should talk to John,' I said.