The Throat

'You were going to lose everything, and you couldn't take it. So you cooked up this Blue Rose business to make it look as though her death were part of a pattern—you used some kind of story to sucker poor Grant Hoffman into that passage, and you tore him to pieces to make sure he'd never be identified. You're worse than Hogan—he couldn't help killing, but you murdered two people for the sake of your own comfort.'

'So what do you think you're going to do now?' John was still glaring at me, his chin propped on his joined hands.

'Nothing. I just want you to understand that I know.'

'You think you know. You think you understand.' John glared at me for a moment—his feelings were boiling away within him—and then he pushed himself up out of his chair. He could not sit still any longer. 'That's funny, actually. Very funny.' He took two steps toward the wall of paintings and then slammed his hands together, palm to palm, not as if applauding, but as if trying to give himself pain. 'Because you never understood anything. You have no idea of who I really am. You never did.'

'Maybe not,' I said. 'Not until now, anyhow.'

'You're not even close. You never will be. You know why? Because you have a little mind—a little soul.'

'But you murdered your wife.'

He swung himself around slowly, the contempt in his eyes all mixed up with rage. He couldn't tell the difference anymore. His own bitterness had poisoned him so deeply that he was like a scorpion that had stung itself and kept on stinging. 'Sure. Yeah. If you choose to put it that way.'

He smoldered away for a second, waiting for me to criticize or condemn him—to prove once and for all that I did not understand. When I said nothing, he whirled around again and moved closer to the wall of paintings. For a monent, I thought that he was going to rip one of them off the wall and tear it to shreds in his hands. Instead, he thrust his hands into his pockets, turned away from the paintings, and marched toward the fireplace.

I got a single burning glance. 'Do you know what my life has been like? Can you even begin to imagine my life? Those two people—' He got to the fireplace and whirled to face me again. His face was stretched tight with the sheer force of his emotions. 'The fabulous Brookners. You know what they did to me? They put me in a box and nailed it shut. They rammed me into a coffin. And then they jumped up on the lid, just to make sure I'd never get out. They had a high old time, up on top of my coffin. Do you even begin to imagine that those two people knew anything about decency! About respect? About honor! They turned me into a babysitter.'

'Decency,' I said. 'Respect. Honor.'

'That's right. Am I making sense to you? Do you begin to get the point?'

'In a way,' I said, wondering if he were going to make another rush at me. 'I can see how you'd feel like Alan's babysitter.'

'Oh, first I was April's. In those days, I was just Alan's little flunky. Later, I got to be his babysitter, and by then my wonderful wife was jumping into bed with that sleazy kid.'

'Which was indecent,' I said. 'Unlike luring your own graduate student into a brick alley and tearing him to pieces.'

John's face darkened, and he stepped forward and kicked at one of the wooden legs of the coffee table. The leg split in half, and the table canted over toward him, spilling books onto the floor. John smiled down at the mess, clearly contemplating giving the books a separate kick of their own, and then changed his mind and moved to the mantelpiece. He gave me a look of utter triumph and utter bitterness, picked up the bronze plaque, raised it over his head, and slammed it down onto the edge of the mantel. A chunk of veiny pink marble dropped to the floor, leaving a ragged, chewed-looking gap in the mantel. Breathing hard, John gripped the plaque and looked around his living room for a target. Finally, he picked out the tall lamp near the entrance, cocked back his right arm, and hurled the plaque at the lamp. It sailed past the lamp and clattered against the wall, where it left a dark smudge and a dent before dropping to the floor. 'Get out of my house.'

'I want to say one more thing, John.'

'I can't wait.' He was still breathing hard, and his eyes looked as if they had stretched and lengthened in his skull.

'No matter what you say, we used to be friends. You had a quality I liked a lot—you took risks because you believed that they might bring you to some absolutely new experience. But you lost the best part of yourself. You betrayed everything and everybody important to you for enough money to buy a completely pointless life. I think you sold yourself out so that you could keep up the kind of life your parents always had, and you have scorn even for them. The funny thing is, there's still enough of the old you left alive to make you drink yourself to death. Or destroy yourself in some quicker, bloodier way.'

He grimaced and looked away, balling his hands. 'It's easy to make judgments when you don't know anything.'

'In your case,' I said, 'there isn't all that much to know.'

He stood hunched into himself like a zoo animal, and I stood up and walked away. The atmosphere in the house was as rank as a bear's cage. I got to the front door and opened it without looking back. I heard him get to his feet and move toward the kitchen and his freezer. I closed the door behind me, shutting John Ransom up in what he had made for himself, and walked out into a sunny world that seemed freshly created.

5

Tom was sitting in front of his computer when I got back to his house, scratching his head and looking back and forth from the screen to a messy pile of newspaper clippings on his desk. Across the room, the copy machine ejected sheet after sheet into five different trays. There was already a foot-high stack of paper in each of the trays. He looked up at me as I leaned into the room. 'So you saw John.' It wasn't a question.

He nodded—he knew all about John Ransom. He had known the first time John came into his house. 'The papers will all be copied in another couple of hours. Will you give me a hand writing the note and wrapping the parcels?'

'Sure,' I said. 'What are you doing now?'

'Messing around with a little murder in Westport, Connecticut.'

'Play on,' I said. 'I have to get some sleep.'

Two hours later, I yawned myself back downstairs and usedthe office telephone to book my return flight to New York while the last of the sheets pumped out of the copy machine.

Tom swiveled his chair toward me. 'What should we say in the letter that goes along with the papers?'

'As little as possible.'

'Right,' Tom said, and clicked to a fresh screen.

I thought you should see this copy of the bundle of papers I found in the garbage can behind my store yesterday evening. Four other people are also getting copies. The originals are destroyed, as they smelted bad. The man who wrote these pages claims to have killed lots of people. Even worse, he makes it clear that he is a police officer here in town. I hope you can put him away for good. Under the circumstances, I choose to remain anonymous.

'A little fancy,' I said.

'I never claimed to be a writer.' Tom set the machine to print out five copies and then went down to his kitchen and returned with big sheets of butcher's paper and a ball of string. We tied up each of the stacks of copied