The Throat

nurses should smoke, and I don't think April should be left alone.'

'Isn't that cop always there?'

Ransom shrugged and began walking back down the way we had come. 'He spends most of his time staring out of the window.' His hands were still stuffed into his trousers pockets, and he hunched over a little as he walked. He looked over at me and shook his head.

I said, 'It can't be easy to see April like that.'

He sighed—sighed up from his heels. 'Tim, she's dying right in front of me.'

We both stopped walking. Ransom covered his face with his hands for a moment. A few people walking past us stared at the unusual sight of a grown man in a handsome gray suit crying in public. When he lowered his hands, moisture shone on his red face. 'Now I'm a public embarrassment.' He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face.

'Do you still want to see Tom Pasmore? Would you rather just go home?'

'Are you kidding?'

He straightened his spine and began moving down the sidewalk again, past the card shop and the grocery store and the florist with its striped awning and its sidewalk display of flowers. 'Whatever happened to April's Mercedes? I don't think I saw it when we left the house.'

Ransom frowned at me. 'You hardly could have. It's gone. I suppose it'll turn up eventually—I've had other things to think about.'

'Where do you think it is?'

'To tell you the truth, I don't care what happened to the car. It was insured. It's just a car.'

We walked several more blocks through the heat, not talking. Now and then John Ransom pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and blotted his forehead. We were getting closer to the UI campus, and bookstores and little restaurants had replaced the grocery stores and florists. The Royal, Millhaven's only art film house, was showing a season of thrillers from the forties and fifties—the marquee showed a complicated schedule beginning with a double feature of Double Indemnity and Kiss Me Deadly and ending, sometime in August, with Pickup on South Street and Strangers on a Train. In between they were running From Dangerous Depths, The Big Combo, The Asphalt Jungle, Chicago Deadline, DOA, The Hitchhiker, Laura, Out of the Past, Notorious. These were the movies of my youth, and I remembered the pleasure of slipping into the cool of the Beldame Oriental on a hot day, of buying popcorn and watching a doom-laden film noir in the nearly empty theater.

Suddenly I remembered the nightmare I'd had on the morning of the day John Ransom had called me—the thick hands on the big white plate. Cutting off human flesh, chewing it, spitting it out in revulsion. The heat made me feel dizzy, and the memory of the dream brought with it the gritty taste of depression. I stopped moving and looked up at the marquee.

'You okay?' Ransom said, turning around just ahead of me.

The title of one of the films seemed to float out an inch or two from the others—a trick of vision, or of the light. 'Have you ever heard of a movie called From Dangerous Depths?' I asked. 'I don't know anything about it.'

Ransom walked back to join me. He looked up at the crowded marquee. 'Cornball title, isn't it?'

Ransom plunged across Berlin Avenue and walked east on a block lined with three-story frame and redbrick houses separated by thick low hedges. Some of the tiny front lawns were littered with bicycles and children's toys, and all of them bore brown streaks like burn scars. Rock and roll drifted down from an upstairs window, tinny and lifeless.

'I remember Tom Pasmore,' Ransom said. 'The guy was an absolute loner. He didn't really have any friends. The money was his grandfather's, wasn't it? His father didn't amount to much—I think he ran out on them in Tom's senior year.'

That was the sort of detail everyone at Brooks-Lowood would have known.

'And his mother was an alcoholic,' Ransom said. 'Pretty lady, though. Is she still alive?'

'She died about ten years ago.'

'And now he's retired? He doesn't do anything at all?'

'I suppose just looking after his money is a full-time job.'

'April could have done that for him,' Ransom said.

We crossed Waterloo Parade and walked another block in silence while Ransom thought about his wife.

After we crossed Balaclava Lane, the houses began to be slightly larger, set farther apart on larger lots. Between Berlin Avenue and Eastern Shore Drive, the value of the property increases with every block—walking eastward, we were moving toward John Ransom's childhood neighborhood.

Ransom's silence continued across Omdurman Road, Victoria Terrace, Salisbury Road. We reached the long street called The Sevens, where sprawling houses on vast lawns silently asserted that they were just as good as the houses one block farther east, on Eastern Shore Road. He stopped walking and wiped his forehead again. 'When I was a kid, I walked all over this neighborhood. Now it seems so foreign to me. It's as if I never lived here at all.'

'Aren't the same people basically still here?'

'Nope—my parents' generation died or moved to the west coast of Florida, and people my age all moved out to Riverwood. Even Brooks-Lowood moved, did you know that? Four years ago, they sold the plant and built a big Georgian campus out in Riverwood.'

He looked around, and for a moment he seemed to be considering buying one of the big showy houses. 'Most people like April, people with new money, they bought places out in Riverwood. She wouldn't hear of it. April liked being in the city—she liked being able to walk. She liked that little house of ours, and she liked it just where it is.'

He was using the past tense, I noticed, and I felt a wave of pity for all he was going through.

'Sometimes,' he said. 'I get so discouraged.'

We walked up the rest of the block and turned right onto Eastern Shore Drive. Mansions of every conceivable style lined both sides of the wide road. Huge brick piles with turrets and towers, half-timbered Tudor structures, Moorish fantasies, giant stone palaces with stained-glass windows—money expressing itself unselfconsciously and unfettered by taste. Competing with one another, the people who built these enormous structures had bought grandeur by the yard.

Eventually, I pointed out Tom Pasmore's house. It was on the west side of the drive, not the lake side, and dark green vines grew up the gray stone of its facade. As always in Lamont von Heilitz's day, the curtains were closed against the light.

We went up the walk to the front door, and I rang the bell. We waited for what seemed a long time. John Ransom gave me the look he'd give a student who did not hand in a paper on time. I pressed the bell again. Maybe twenty seconds passed.

'Are you sure His Lordship is up?'

'Hold on,' I said. Inside the house, footsteps came toward the door.

After shooting me another critical glance, John pulled his damp handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the back of his neck and his forehead. The lock clicked. He squared his shoulders and worked his face into a pretty good imitation of a smile. The door swung open, and Tom Pasmore stood on the other side of the screen, blinking and smiling back. He was wearing a pale blue suit with a double-breasted vest still partially unbuttoned over a snowy white shirt and a dark blue silk tie. Comb marks separated his damp hair. He looked tired and a little out of focus.

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