The Throat

Tom raised his eyes to mine, and I saw the glimmer of something like a sparkle in them. 'Did he, now?' he said, in such a way that I could not tell whether or not he had already known it. Before I was able to ask, a yelp of pain or astonishment came from the other room, accompanied by a thud and another yelp, this time clearly one of pain.

I laughed, for I suddenly knew exactly what had happened. 'John finally saw your paintings,' I said.

Tom lifted his eyebrows. He gestured ironically toward the door.

When we came out of the kitchen, John Ransom was standing on the other side of the table, looking at the paintings that hung on that wall. Ransom was bending down to rub his knee, and his mouth was open. He turned to stare at us. 'Did you hurt yourself?' Tom asked.

'You own a Maurice Denis,' John Ransom said, straightening up. 'You own a Paul Ranson, for God's sakes!'

'You're interested in their work?'

'My God, that's a beautiful Bonnard up there,' John said. He shook his head. 'I'm just astounded. Yes, well, my wife and I own a lot of work by the Nabis, but we don't—' But we don't have anything as good as that, he had been going to say.

'I'm particularly fond of that one,' said Tom. 'You collect the Nabis?'

'It's so rare to see them in other people's houses…' For a moment Ransom gaped at the paintings. The Bonnard was a small oil painting of a nude woman drying her hair in a shaft of sunlight.

'I don't go into other people's houses very much,' Tom said. He moved around to his chair, sat down, regarded the bottles and the ice bucket for a moment, and then poured himself a drink of another, less expensive brand of vodka than the one he had given John Ransom. His hand was completely steady. He took a small, businesslike sip. Then he smiled at me. I sat down across from him. A small spot of color like rouge appeared in both of his cheeks.

'I wonder if you've ever thought about selling anything,' John said, and turned expectantly around.

'No, I've never thought about that,' Tom said.

'Would you mind if I asked where you found some of this work?'

'I found them exactly where you found them,' Tom said. 'On the back wall of this room.'

'How could you—?'

'I inherited them when Lamont von Heilitz left me this house in his will. I suppose he bought them in Paris, sometime in the twenties.' For a second more he indulged John Ransom, who looked as if he wanted to pull out a magnifying glass and scrutinize the brush strokes on a four-foot-square Maurice Denis, and then he said, 'I gathered that you were interested in talking about the Blue Rose murders.'

Ransom's head snapped around.

'I read what the Ledger had to say about the assault on your wife. You must want to learn whatever you can about the earlier cases.'

'Yes, absolutely,' Ransom said, finally leaving the painting and walking a little tentatively back to his seat.

'Now that Lamont von Heilitz's name has come up, it may be as well to go into it.'

Ransom slid onto the other couch. He cleared his throat, and when Tom said nothing, swallowed some of his vodka before beginning. 'Did Mr. von Heilitz ever do any work on the Blue Rose murders?'

'It was a matter of timing,' Tom said. He glanced at the glass he had set on the table, but did not reach for it. 'He was busy with cases all over the country. And then, it seemed to come to a neat conclusion. I think it bothered him, though. Some of the pieces didn't seem to fit, and by the time I got to know him, he was just beginning to think about it again. And then I met someone at Eagle Lake who had been connected to the case.'

He bent forward, lifted his glass and took another measured sip. I had never had the good luck to meet Lamont von Heilitz, but as I looked at Tom Pasmore, I had the uncanny feeling that I was seeing the old detective before me. John Ransom might have been seeing him, too, from the sudden tension in his posture.

'Who did you meet at Eagle Lake?' John asked. This was the privately owned resort in northern Wisconsin to which a select portion of Millhaven's society families went every summer.

'In order to tell you about this,' Tom said, 'I have to explain some private things about my family. I want to ask you not to repeat what I have to say.'

John promised.

'Then let me tell you a story,' Tom said.

12

'You probably remember meeting my mother now and then, at school functions.'

'I remember your mother,' Ransom said. 'She was a beautiful woman.'

'And fragile. I'm sure you remember that, too. My mother would spend whole days in her bedroom. Sometimes she'd cry for hours, and even she didn't know why, she'd just stay up there and weep. I used to get so angry with her for not being like anyone else's mother… Well, instead of getting angry, I should have been thinking about what could have made her be so helpless.' Tom let that sink in for a moment, then reached for his glass again. His pale lips made a round aperture for the slightly larger sip of vodka. He hated having to tell this story, I saw. He was telling it because he would have hated my telling it even more, and because he thought that John Ransom ought to know it. He set the glass down and said, 'I suppose you knew something about my grandfather.'

John blinked. 'Glendenning Upshaw? Of course. A powerful man.' He hesitated. 'Passed away in your senior year. Suicide, I remember.'

Tom glanced at me, for we both knew the real circumstances of his grandfather's death. Then he looked back at John. 'Yes, he was powerful. He made a fortune in Millhaven, and he had some political influence. He was a terrible man in almost every way, and he had a lot of secrets. But there was one secret he had to protect above all the others, because he would have been ruined if it ever came out. He killed three people to protect this secret, and he nearly succeeded in killing a fourth. His wife learned about it in 1923, and she drowned herself in Eagle Lake—it destroyed her.'

Tom looked down at his hands in his lap. He raised his eyes to mine, briefly, and then looked at John Ransom. 'My grandfather fired all his servants when my mother was about two. He never hired any more, even after his wife died. He couldn't afford to have anyone discover that he was raping his daughter.'

'Raping?' Ransom sounded incredulous.

'Maybe he didn't have to use force, but he forced or coerced my mother into having sex with him from the time she was about two until she was fourteen.'

'And in all that time, no one found out?'

Tom took another swallow, I think from relief that he had finally said it. 'He went to great lengths to make sure that would never happen. For obvious reasons, my mother went to the doctor he had always used. In the early fifties, this doctor took on a young partner. Needless to say, the young doctor, Buzz Laing, did not get my mother as one of his patients.'

'Okay, Buzz Laing,' Ransom said. 'Everybody always thought he was the fourth Blue Rose victim, but Tim told me that he was attacked by someone else. What did he do, find out about your mother?'

'Buzz took the office records home at night to build up backgrounds on his patients. One night he just grabbed the wrong file. What he saw there disturbed him, and he went back to his partner to discuss it. Years before, the older doctor had recorded all the classic signs of sexual abuse—vaginal bleeding, vaginal warts, change in personality, nightmares. Et cetera, et cetera. It was all there in the records.'

When Tom set his glass down, it was empty. Ransom pushed his own glass toward him, and Tom added ice and vodka to it.

'So the older doctor called your grandfather,' John Ransom said when Tom had taken his seat again.

'One night Buzz Laing came home and went upstairs, and a big man grabbed him from behind and almost cut