The Throat

'I wonder if the police think I did it.' He threw out his arms, lifted them, then poured coffee into pottery mugs. 'Maybe they think I'm trying to mislead them by bringing up all the old Blue Rose business.' He took his own mug to a tufted leather chair.

'But you haven't been charged with anything.'

'I get the feeling that the homicide detective, Fontaine, is just waiting to pounce.'

'I don't understand why a homicide detective is involved in the first place—your wife is in the hospital.'

'My wife is dying in the hospital.'

'You can't really be sure of that,' I said. He started shaking his head, misery and conflict printed clearly on his face, and I said, 'I guess I'm confused. How can a homicide detective investigate a death that hasn't happened?'

He looked up, startled. 'Oh. I see what you mean. The reason for that is the other victim.'

I had completely forgotten the other victim. 'The assault on April falls into an ongoing homicide investigation. When and if she dies, of course, Fontaine will be in charge of that investigation, too.'

'Did April know this guy?'

Ransom shook his head again. 'Nobody knows who he is.'

'He was never identified?'

'He had no identification of any kind, nothing at all, and nobody ever reported him missing. I think he must have been a vagrant, a homeless person, something like that.' I asked if he had seen the man's body. He shifted in his chair. 'I gather the killer scattered pieces of the guy all over Livermore Avenue.' i

Before I could respond, Ransom went on. 'The guy who's doing this doesn't care who he kills. I don't even think he needed an actual reason. It was just time to get to work again.'

One reason John Ransom had wanted me to come back to Millhaven was that he had been talking nonstop to himself inside his head for weeks, and now he had to let some of these arguments out.

'Tell me about the person who did this,' I said. 'Tell me who you think he is—the kind of person you see when you think of him.'

Ransom looked relieved.

'Well, I have been thinking about that, of course. I've been trying to work out what kind of person would be capable of doing these things.' He leaned toward me, ready, even eager, to share his speculations.

I settled back in my own chair, all too conscious of the disparity between what Ransom and I were discussing and our setting. It was one of the most beautiful private rooms I had ever seen, beautiful in a restrained way centered in the paintings that filled the room. I thought that one of these must be a Vuillard, and the others seemed oddly familiar. The soft colors and flowing shapes of the paintings carried themselves right through the room, into the furniture and the few pieces of sculpture visible on low tables.

'I think he's about sixty. He might have had an alcoholic parent, and he was probably an abused child. You might find some kind of head injury in his history—that turns up surprisingly often, with these people. He is very, very controlled. I bet he has a kind of inflexible inner schedule. Every day, he does the same things at the same time. He's still strong, so he might even exercise regularly. He would probably seem to be the last person you'd suspect of these crimes. And he is intelligent.'

'What does he look like? What did he do for a living? How does he relax?'

'I think the only thing that distinguishes him physically, apart from his being in excellent condition for his age, is that he looks very respectable. And I think he might live down in that area where the murders took place, because with one exception, he stuck with it.'

'You mean, he lives in my old neighborhood?' The exception he had mentioned must have been his wife.

'I think so. People see him, but they don't really notice him. As for relaxing, I don't think he really can relax, so he wouldn't take vacations or anything—probably couldn't really afford that, anyhow—but I bet he was a gardener.'

'And the phrase Blue Rose is related to his gardening?'

Ransom shrugged. 'It's a funny choice of words—it's his way of identifying himself. And I think gardening would suit this guy very well—he could work out some of his tensions, he could indulge his compulsion for order, and he can do it alone.'

'So if we go down to the near south side and find a healthy-looking but boring sixty-year-old man who has a neat flower garden in back of his house, we'll have our man.'

Ransom smiled. 'That'll be him. Handle with care.'

'After being Blue Rose for a couple of months forty years ago, he managed to control himself until this year, when he snapped again.'

Ransom leaned forward again, excited to have reached the core of all his theorizing. 'Maybe he wasn't in Millhaven during those years. Maybe he had some job that took him here and there—maybe he sold ladies' stockings or shoelaces or men's shirts.' Ransom straightened up, and his eyes burned into me. 'But I think he was in the military. I think he joined up to escape the possibility of arrest and spent all the time between then and now in army bases all over the country and in Europe. He would have been in Korea, he might even have been in Vietnam. He probably spent some time in Germany. He undoubtedly lived on a lot of those bases set outside small towns all over the South and the Midwest. And every now and then, I bet he went out and killed somebody. I don't think he ever stopped. I think he was a serial killer before we even knew such things existed. Nobody ever connected his crimes, nobody ever matched the data—Tim, they only began to think about doing that five or six years ago. The FBI has never heard of this guy because nothing he ever did was reported to them. He'd get off the base, persuade some civilian to follow him into an alley or a hotel—he's a very persuasive guy—and then he'd kill them.'

6

As I listened to John Ransom, my eyes kept returning to the painting I thought was a Vuillard. A middle-class family that seemed to consist entirely of women, children, and servants moved through a luxuriant back garden and sat beneath the spreading branches of an enormous tree. Brilliant molten lemon yellow light streamed down through the intense electric green of the thick leaves.

Ransom took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt. 'You seem fascinated by this room, especially the paintings.' He was smiling again. 'April would be pleased. She picked most of them out. She pretended that I helped her, but she did all the work.'

'I am fascinated,' I said. 'Isn't that a Vuillard? It's a beautiful painting.' The other paintings and little sculptures in the room seemed related to the Vuillard in some fashion, though they were clearly by several different artists. Some were landscapes with figures, some had religious themes, others were almost abstract. Most of them had a flat, delicate, decorative quality that had been influenced, like Van Gogh and Gauguin, but after them, by Japanese prints. Then I recognized that a small painting of the descent from the Cross was by Maurice Denis, and then I understood what April Ransom had done and was struck by its sheer intelligence.

She had collected the work of the group called the Nabis, the 'prophets'—she had found paintings by Serusier, K.-X. Roussel, and Paul Ranson, as well as Denis and Vuillard. Everything she had bought was good, and all of it was related: it had a significant place in art history, and because most of these artists were not well known in America, their work would not have cost a great deal. As a collection, it had a greater value than the pieces would have had individually, and the pieces themselves would already be worth a good deal more than the Ransoms had paid for them. And they were pleasing paintings—they aestheticized pain and joy, grief and wonder, and made