The Throat

things Walter Dragonette had confessed to doing.

One article claimed that 'the eyes of the world, from Akron to Australia, from Boise to Britain, from Cleveland to Canton' had 'turned toward a white, one-story house in Millhaven.' Neighbors were talking to reporters from the BBC and news teams from three networks. One Philadelphia reporter was heard asking a resident of North Twentieth Street to describe what he called 'the stench of death.' And here came the answer, written down by two reporters: 'A real bad stink, real bad.'

Another article reported that 961 men, women, and children were missing in the state of Illinois. A spokesman for the FBI said that if you were over twenty-one, you had the right to be missing.

Arkham College officials warned their students to be careful about crime on campus, although students interviewed felt little concern for their own safety. 'It's just too strange to worry about,' said Shelley Manigault of Ladysmith, Wisconsin. 'To me, it's a lot more frightening to think about the position of women in society than about what one twisted white guy does when he's inside his house.'

The Ledger reported that Walter Dragonette had been friendless in high school, where his grades had varied from A to F. Classmates recalled that his sense of humor had been 'weird.' He had been fascinated with the Blue Rose murders and had once run for class treasurer under the name Blue Rose, earning a schoolwide total of two votes. In the sixth grade, he had collected the corpses of small animals from the streets and empty lots and experimented with ways of cleaning their skeletons. In the eighth grade, he had privately exhibited in a plush-lined cigar box an object he had claimed to be the skeletal hand of a five-year-old boy. Those who had seen the object declared that it had been a monkey's paw. For several days on end, he had pretended to be blind, coming to school with dark glasses and a white cane, and once he had nearly managed to persuade his homeroom teacher that he had amnesia. Twice during the time that he attended Carl Sandburg High School, Dragonette had used chalk to draw the outlines of bodies on the floor of the gymnasium. He told Detective Fontaine and Sergeant Hogan that the outlines were of the bodies of people he had actually killed—killed while he was in high school.

For Dragonette claimed to have killed a small child named Wesley Drum in 1979, after having sex with him in a vacant lot. He said that when he was a sophomore at Carl Sandburg, the year he ran for class treasurer under the name Blue Rose, he had killed a woman who picked him up while he was hitchhiking—stabbed her with an army surplus knife while she stopped at a red light. He could not remember her name, but he knew that he had stuck her right in the chest, and then stuck her a couple more times while she was still getting used to the idea. He grabbed her purse and jumped out of the car a couple of seconds after the light changed. He was sorry that he had stolen the lady's purse, and he wanted it known that he would be happy to return the $14.78 it had contained to her family, if someone would give him the right name and address.

Both of these stories matched unsolved murders in Millhaven. Five-year-old Wesley Drum had been found dead and mutilated (though still in possession of both hands) in an empty lot behind Arkham College in 1979, and in 1980, Walter Dragonette's fifteenth year, Annette Bulmer, a thirty-four-year-old mother of two dying from numerous deep stab wounds, had been pulled from a stalled car at the intersection of Twelfth Street and Arkham Boulevard.

Walter readily gave the police what the Ledger called 'assistance' on 'several prominent recent cases.'

I continued to leaf through the paper as I finished my breakfast, realizing that now I was free to do whatever I liked. April Ransom was recovering, and her confessed attacker had been arrested. A sick little monster who called himself the Meat Man had diverted himself from his amusements (or whatever it was when you killed people and had sex with their corpses) long enough to reenact the Blue Rose murders. No retired soldier in his sixties, back from Korea and Germany, patrolled Livermore Avenue in search of fresh victims: no murderer's rose garden grew in the backyard of a well-kept little house in Pigtown. The past was still buried with the rest of my family in Pine Knoll.

I folded the paper and waved to the waitress. When she came over to my booth, I told her that I could see why she'd been having trouble concentrating on her work this morning.

'Well, yeah,' she said, warming up. 'Things like that don't happen in Millhaven—they're not supposed to.'

9

The machine answered when I called Ransom from the St. Alwyn's lobby, so he was either still asleep or already back at the hospital.

I walked back to the Pontiac, made a U-turn on Livermore Avenue, and drove back beneath the viaduct toward Shady Mount.

Because I didn't want to be bothered with a meter, I turned into one of the side streets on the other side of Berlin Avenue and parked in front of a small redbrick house. A big flag hung from an upstairs window and a yellow ribbon had been tied into a grandiose bow on the front door. I walked across the empty street in the middle of the block, wondering if April Ransom had already opened her eyes and asked what had happened to her.

It was my last afternoon in Millhaven, I realized.

For a moment, opening the visitors' door, I wondered what name I would give to my unfinished book; and then, for the first time in a long dry time, the book jumped into life within me—I wanted to write a chapter about Charlie Carpenter's childhood. It would be a lengthy tour of hell. For the first time in months, I saw my characters in color and three dimensions, breathing city-flavored air and scheming for the things they thought they needed.

These fantasies occupied me pleasantly as I waited for, and then rode up in, the elevator. I barely noticed the two policemen who stepped inside the elevator behind me. The radios on their belts crackled as we ascended and stepped out of the elevator on the third floor. It was like having an escort. As burly and contained as a pair of Clydesdales, the two policemen moved around me and then turned the corner toward the nurses' station.

I rounded the corner a few seconds behind them. The policemen turned right at the nurses' station and went toward April Ransom's room through a surprising number of people. Uniformed police, plainclothes detectives, and what looked like a few civilians formed a disorganized crowd that extended from the station all the way around the curve to Mrs. Ransom's room. The scene reminded me uncomfortably of the photograph of Walter Dragonette's front lawn. All these men seemed to be talking to one another in little groups. An air of exhaustion and frustration, distinct as cigar smoke, hung over all of them.

One or two cops glanced at me as I came nearer to the nurses' station. Officer Mangelotti was seated in a wheelchair before the counter. A white bandage stained red over his ear wrapped around his head, leaving his face so exposed it looked peeled. A man with a monkish hairline knelt in front of the wheelchair, speaking quietly. Mangelotti looked up and saw me. The man in front of him stood up and turned around to show me his saggy clown's face and drooping nose. It was Detective Fontaine.

His face twitched in a sorrowful smile. 'Someone I know wants to meet you,' he said. Plummy pouches hung underneath his eyes.

A uniformed policeman nearly seven feet tall moved toward me out of the corridor leading to April Ransom's room. 'Sir, unless you are on the medical staff of this hospital you will have to vacate this area.' He began shooing me away, blocking me from seeing whatever was going on behind him. 'Immediately, sir.'

'Leave him be, Sonny,' Fontaine said.

The enormous cop turned to make sure he had heard correctly. It was like watching the movement of a large blue tree. Behind him two men pushed a gurney out of one of the rooms along the curve of the corridor. A body covered with a white sheet lay on the gurney. Three other policemen, two men in white coats, and a mustached man in a lightweight blue pinstriped suit followed the gurney out of the room. The last man looked familiar. Before the blue tree cut off my view, I caught a glimpse of Eliza Morgan leaning against the inner wall of the circular corridor. She moved away from the wall as the men pushed the gurney past her.

Paul Fontaine came up beside the big officer. He looked like the other man's monkey. 'Leave us alone, Sonny.'

The big cop cleared his throat with a noise that sounded like a drain unblocking. He said, 'Yes, sir,' and walked away.

'I told you police should never go to hospitals, didn't I?' His eyes looked poached above the purple bags, and