The Throat

Across the street, a little old man in a baggy double-breasted suit and a white T-shirt was staring at me. He turned to look at some friends inside a diner and made a circular motion at his temple with his forefinger.

I uttered some noise halfway between a sigh and a groan. It was no wonder that I had been afraid to come back to Millhaven, if things like this were going to happen to me. All that saved me from another spell was the sudden memory of what I'd read in the gnostic gospel while I waited for John to come back from the hospital: If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

I was trying to bring it forth—had been trying to bring it forth since I stood in front of the graves in Pine Knoll cemetery —but what in the world was it?

5

I nearly went straight back to the Pontiac and returned to John Ransom's house. At the back of my mind was the idea of booking a seat back to New York on the evening flight. I was no longer so sure I cared about what had happened more than forty years ago in, near, or because of the St. Alwyn Hotel. I had already written that book.

Either in spite of or because of the experience I'd just had, I suddenly felt hungry. Whatever I was going to do would have to wait until I ate some sort of breakfast. The neon scimitar in the restaurant window had not been turned on yet, but an open sign hung from the inside doorknob. I went into the hotel for a morning paper at the desk.

What I saw when I came into the lobby must have been almost exactly what Glenroy Breakstone and his piano player, the murdered James Treadwell, had known forty years ago; and what my father had seen, walking across the lobby to his elevator. Worn leather furniture and squat brass spittoons stood on an enormous, threadbare oriental rug. One low-wattage bulb burned behind a green glass shade next to a couch.

A small stack of the morning's Ledger lay on the desk. I picked one up and slid thirty-five cents toward the clerk. He was sitting down behind the desk with his chin in his hand, concentrating on the newspaper folded over his knees. He heard the sound of the coins and looked up at me. The whites of his eyes flared. 'Oh! Sorry!' He glanced at the three copies that remained on the desk. 'Got to get up early to get a paper today,' he said, and reached for the coins. I looked at my watch. It was nine-thirty: the St. Alwyn got up late.

I carried the paper into Sinbad's Cavern. A few silent men ate their breakfasts at the bar, and two couples had taken the tables at the front of the room. A waitress in a dark blue dress that looked too sophisticated for early morning was standing at the end of the bar, talking with the young woman in a white shirt and black bow tie working behind it. The place was quiet as a library. I sat down in an empty booth and waved at the waitress until she grabbed a menu off the bar and hurried over. She was wearing high heels, and she looked a little flushed, but it might have been her makeup.

She put the menu before me. 'I'm sorry, but it's so hard to concentrate today. I'll get you some coffee and be right back.'

I opened the menu. The waitress went to a serving stand on the near side of the bar and came back with a glass pot of coffee. She filled my cup. 'Nobody around here can believe it,' she said. 'Nobody.'

'I'll believe anything today,' I said.

She stared at me. She was about twenty-two, and all the makeup made her look like a startled clown. Then her face hardened, and she took her pad from a side pocket of the sleek blue suit. 'Are you ready to order, sir?'

'One poached egg and whole wheat toast, please.' She wrote it down wordlessly and walked back through the empty tables and brushed through the aluminum door to the kitchen.

I looked at the blond girl in the bow tie at the end of the bar and at the couples seated at the far tables. All of them had sections of the morning newspaper opened before them. Even the men eating on stools at the bar were reading the Ledger. The waitress emerged from the kitchen, stabbed me with a glance, and whispered something to the girl behind the bar.

The only customers not engrossed in their morning papers were four silent men arranged around a table across the room. The two men in suits affected an elaborate disengagement from the others, who might have been truck drivers, and from each other. All four ignored the cups before them. They had the air of people who had been waiting for a long time. The sense of mutual distrust was so strong that I wondered what had brought them together. One of the men in suits saw me looking at them and snapped his head sideways, his face stiff with discomfort.

My copy of the Ledger lay folded on the table in front of me. I pulled it toward me, turned it over, and momentarily forgot the men across the room and everything I had thought and experienced that morning as I took in the big banner headline. Beneath it was a color photograph of dozens of uniformed and plainclothes policemen standing on the front lawn of a small white frame house. One of the detectives was the joker I had met at the hospital the previous night, Paul Fontaine. Another, a tall commanding-looking man with an indented hairline, deep lines in his face, and a William Powell mustache, was identified as Fontaine's immediate superior, Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan. Almost as soon as I began to read the article to the left of the photograph, I saw that, among at least a dozen other unsuspected killings, the murder of the unknown man in the passage behind the St. Alwyn and the attack on April Ransom had been solved. A twenty-six-year-old clerk in the Glax Corporation's accounts department named Walter Dragonette had confessed. In fact, he had confessed to everything under the sun. If he had thought of it, he would have confessed to strangling the little princes in the tower.

The big headline read: HORROR IN NORTH SIDE HOME.

The story all but obliterated the rest of the news. Five million dollars' worth of cocaine had been seized from a fishing boat, an unnamed woman claimed that a Kennedy nephew had raped her in New York three years before being charged with rape in Palm Beach, and a state representative had been using military planes for personal trips: the rest of the paper, like every issue of the Ledger to come out for a week, dealt almost exclusively with the young man who, when surrounded and asked, 'Is your name Walter Dragonette?' by a squad of policemen, had said, 'Well, I guess you know.'

'What do we know?' asked a policeman pointing a gun at his chest. 'That I'm the Meat Man,' answered Dragonette. He smiled a charming, self-deprecating smile. 'Otherwise, I must have a lot of unpaid parking tickets.'

The Ledger reporters had done an astonishing amount of work. They had managed to get the beginning of the saga of Walter Dragonette, his history and deeds, out onto the street only a couple of hours after they were discovered. The reporters had been busy, but so had Walter Dragonette.

Dragonette's little white house on North Twentieth Street, only a block south of the Arkham College campus, was in the midst of a 'transitional' area, meaning that it had once been entirely white and was now 60 to 70 percent black. In this lay the roots of much of the troubles that came later. Dragonette's black neighbors claimed that when they had called the police to complain of the sounds of struggle, the thudding blows and late-night screaming they had heard coming from the little white house, the officers had never done anything more than drive down the street—sometimes they ridiculed the caller, saying that these sounds were hardly rare in their neighborhood, now, were they? If the caller wanted peace, why didn't she try moving out to Riverwood—it was always nice and quiet, out in Riverwood. When one male caller had persisted, the policeman who had answered the telephone delivered a long comic monologue which ended, 'And how about you, Rastus, when you hit your old lady upside the head, do you want us charging there and giving you heat? And if we did, do you actually think she'd swear out a complaint?' Rastus, in this case a forty-five-year-old English teacher named Kenneth Johnson, heard cackling laughter in the background.

After someone was missing for three or four days, the police took notes and filled out forms, but generally declined to take matters further—the missing son or brother, the missing husband (especially the missing husband) would turn up sooner or later. Or they would not. What were the police supposed to do, make a house-to-house search for a dude who had decided to get a divorce without paperwork?

Under these circumstances, the neighborhood people had not even thought of calling the police to complain