The Throat

brother's waist and pulled him away from Walter's house.

'Akeem, it wasn't no movie,' Kwanza said.

Too shocked and frightened to speak, Akeem grimaced at him, frantically gesturing that Kwanza should start running for home right now. 'Damn,' Kwanza said, and sprinted away like a jackrabbit. In seconds they were pounding up their own lawn toward the front door.

Akeem yanked the door open, and the boys tumbled inside.

'It wasn't no movie,' Kwanza said. 'It wasn't—'

Akeem ran up the stairs toward his parents' bedroom.

He woke up his father, shaking his shoulder and babbling about a dead man with his head cut off across the street, this guy was all dead, his head was all cut off, blood was all around…

Kenneth Johnson told his wife to stop screaming at the kid. 'You saw a dead man in the house across the street? Mr. Dragonette's house?'

Akeem nodded. He had begun to cry, and his brother sidled into the bedroom to witness this astonishing spectacle.

'And you saw it, too?'

Kwanza nodded. 'It wasn't no movie.'

His wife sat up straight and grabbed Akeem and pulled him into her chest. She gave her husband a warning look.

'Don't worry, I'm not going over there,' he said. 'I'm calling the police. We'll see what happens this time.'

Two policemen pulled up in a black-and-white about ten minutes later. One of them marched up to the Johnson house and rang the bell, and the other sauntered across the lawn and peered through the gap in the curtains. Just as Kenneth Johnson opened the door, the second policeman stepped away from the window with a stunned expression on his face. 'I think your friend would like you to join him,' Johnson said to the man on his doorstep.

Before another twenty minutes had passed, six unmarked police cars had been installed up and down the street. The original black-and-white and one other stood parked around the corners at both ends of the block. While they all waited, a young policewoman with a soothing voice talked to Kwanza and Akeem in the living room. Kenneth Johnson sat on one side of the boys, his wife on the other.

'You've heard loud noises from the Dragonette house on other occasions in the past?'

Kwanza and Akeem nodded, and their father said, 'We all heard those noises, and a couple of times, I called to complain. Don't you keep a record of complaints down at the station?'

She smiled at him and said in her soothing voice, 'In all justice, Mr. Johnson, the situation we have now is a good deal more serious than a loud argument.'

Johnson frowned until the smile wilted. 'I don't know for sure, but I'm willing to bet that Walter over there seldom stopped at the argument stage.'

It took the policewoman a moment to understand this remark. When she did understand it, she shook her head. 'This is Millhaven, Mr. Johnson.'

'Apparently it is.' He paused to consider something. 'You know, I wonder if that fellow over there even owns a freezer.'

This irrelevance was too much for the young woman. She stood up from where she had been kneeling in front of the two boys and patted Kwanza's head before closing her notebook and tucking her pen into her pocket.

Johnson said, 'I can't help it, I'm sorry for you people.'

'This is Millhaven,' the policewoman repeated. 'If you'll permit me, I want to suggest that your boys have already been through enough for one day. In situations of this kind, counseling is always recommended, and I can provide you with the names of—'

'My God,' Johnson said. 'You still don't get it.'

The policewoman said, 'Thank you for your cooperation,' and walked away to stand in front of the Johnsons' living room window and wait for Walter Dragonette to come back home.

7

An hour and a half before Walter Dragonette was due at his desk in the accounts department, the old blue Reliant appeared at the end of the block. Other cars up and down the street began backing out of driveways and easing away from the curb. The lurking patrol cars swung into the street at either end and slowly moved toward the white house in the middle of the block. Walter Dragonette drove blithely down his street and pulled up in front of his house. He opened his door and put a foot on the concrete.

The two squad cars sped forward and spun sideways, their tires squealing, to block the ends of the street. The unmarked cars raced up to the Reliant, and in an instant the street was filled with policemen pointing guns at the young man getting out of his car.

Kenneth Johnson, who described all of this to me, including what his children had done to bring such enveloping turmoil upon the Millhaven police department, told me later that when Walter Dragonette got out of his car and faced all those cops and guns, he gave them his secret smile.

The police ordered him away from his car, and he cheerfully moved. They spoke, and Walter told them that he was the Meat Man. Yes, of course he would come down to the station with them. Well, certainly he would put down the paper bag in his hand. What was in the bag? Well, the only thing in the bag was the hacksaw blade he had just purchased. That was why he had left the house—to get a new hacksaw blade. Paul Fontaine, who still knew nothing about what had happened to April Ransom since he and John Ransom had left her bedside that morning, took a card from his jacket pocket and read Dragonette his rights under the Miranda decision. Walter Dragonette eagerly nodded that yes, he understood all of that. He'd want a lawyer, that was for sure, but he didn't mind talking now. It was time to talk, wouldn't the detective agree?

Detective Fontaine certainly did think that it was time to talk. And would Mr. Dragonette permit the police to search his house?

The Meat Man took his eyes from Detective Fontaine's interesting face to smile and nod at Akeem and Kwanza, who were looking at him through their living room window. 'Oh, by all means—I mean, they really should look through the place, really they should.' Then he looked back at Detective Fontaine. 'Are they prepared for what they're going to find?'

'What are they going to find, Mr. Dragonette?' asked Sergeant Hogan.

'My people,' the Meat Man said. 'Why else would you be here?'

Hogan asked, 'Which people are we talking about, Walter?'

'If you don't know about my people—' He licked his lips, and twisted his head to look over his shoulder to see his little white house. 'If you don't know about them, what made you come here?' His eyes moved from Fontaine to Hogan and back again. They did not answer him. He put his hand over his mouth and giggled. 'Well, whoever goes into my house is in for a little surprise.'

8

I never heard the waitress put the plate on the table. Eventually I realized that I could smell toast, looked up, and saw breakfast steaming beside my right elbow. I moved the plate in front of me and ate while I read about what the first policemen inside Walter Dragonette's house had found there.

First, of course, had been Alfonzo Dakins, whose shoulder joint had broken Dragonette's hacksaw blade and forced him into an early morning trip to the hardware store. Alfonzo Dakins had met Walter Dragonette in a gay bar called The Roost, accompanied him home, accepted a beer treated with a substantial quantity of Halcion, posed for a nude Polaroid photograph, and passed out. He had partially reawakened to find Walter's hands around his neck. The struggle that followed this discovery had awakened Akeem Johnson. If Dakins had not been woozy with Halcion and alcohol, he would easily have killed Dragonette, but the smaller man managed to hit him with a beer bottle and to snap handcuffs on him while he recovered.