The Throat

I remembered that he had been up all night long, first here, then at North Twentieth Street, and then back here again. 'Do you know what happened?' A kind of animation moved in his face, but at a level beneath the skin, so that whatever he was feeling showed only as a momentary flash in his sagging eyes.

'I thought I'd find John Ransom here.'

'We got him at home. I thought you were staying with him.'

'My God,' I said. 'Tell me what happened.'

His eyes widened, and his face went still. 'You don't know?' The men in white coats pushed the gurney past us, and three policemen came along behind them. Fontaine and I looked down at the small covered body. I remembered Eliza Morgan leaning against the wall, and suddenly I understood whose body it was. For a moment my stomach turned gray—it felt as though everything from the bottom of my rib cage to my bowels had gone flat and dead, mushy.

'Somebody—?' I tried again. 'Somebody killed April Ransom?'

Fontaine nodded. 'Have you seen the newspaper this morning? Watch any morning news? Listen to the radio?'

'I read the paper,' I said. 'I know about that man, ah, Walter Dragonette. You arrested him.'

'We arrested him,' Fontaine said. He made it sound like a sad joke. 'We did. We just didn't do it soon enough.'

'But he confessed to attacking Mrs. Ransom. In the Ledger—'

'He didn't confess to attacking her,' Fontaine said. 'He confessed to killing her.'

'But Mangelotti and Eliza Morgan were in that room.'

'The nurse went for a cigarette right after she came on duty.'

'What happened to Mangelotti?'

'While Mrs. Morgan was out of the room, our friend Walter sauntered past the nurses' station without anybody seeing him, ducked into the room, and clobbered Mangelotti on the side of the head with a hammer. Or something resembling a hammer. Our stalwart officer was seated beside the bed at the time, reading entries in his notebook. Then our friend beat Mrs. Ransom to death with the same hammer.' He looked up at me and then over at Mangelotti. He looked as if he had bitten into something sour. 'This time, he didn't bother signing the wall. And then he walked away past the patients' lounge and went downstairs and got into his car to go to the hardware store for a hacksaw blade.' He looked at me again. Anger and disgust burned in his tired eyes. 'He had to wait for the hardware store to open, so we had to wait. In the meantime, the nurse left the patients' lounge and found the body. She yelled for the doctors, but it was too late.'

'So Dragonette knew that she was about to come out of her coma?'

He nodded. 'Walter called to ask about her condition this morning. It must have been the last thing he did before he left home. Doesn't that make you feel all warm and happy on the inside?' His eyes had gotten a little wild, and red lines threaded through the whites. He mimed picking up a telephone. 'Hello, I just wanted to see how my dear lovely friend April Ransom is getting along, yes yes… Oh, you don't say, really, well, isn't that sweet? In that case, I'll just be popping in to pay her a little social call, oh my yes indeedy, as soon, that is, as I cut the head off the guy on my living room floor, so you go ahead and make sure that she'll be alone, and if you can't arrange that, please see that nobody but Officer Mangelotti is alone in the room with her, yes, that's M-A-N-G-E-L-O- DOUBLE T-I—'

He did not stop so much as strangle on his own emotions. The other policemen watched him surreptitiously. In his wheelchair, Mangelotti heard every word, and flinched at the spelling of his name. He looked like a slaughterhouse cow.

'I don't get it,' I said. 'He went to all that trouble to protect himself, and the second you guys get out of your cars and wave your guns at him, he says, Well, I didn't just kill everybody inside there, I also knifed those Blue Rose people. And then he was so lucky—to get here exactly when the nurse went out of the room. It seems a little unlikely.'

Fontaine reared back and widened his bloodshot eyes. 'You want to talk about unlikely? Unlikely doesn't count anymore.'

'No, but it confuses the civilians,' said a voice behind me. I turned around to see the man in the pinstriped suit who had followed April Ransom's body out of her room. Deep vertical lines cut down his face on either side of his thin forties mustache. His light brown hair was combed straight back, exposing deep indentations in his hairline. He had looked familiar to me earlier because I had seen his picture in the paper that morning. He was Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan, Fontaine's superior.

Hogan put his hand on Fontaine's elbow.

'This is the guy who wanted to meet you,' Fontaine said.

I sensed immediately that I was in the presence of a real detective, someone even Tom Pasmore would respect. Michael Hogan possessed a powerful personal authority. Hogan had the uncomplicated masculinity of old movie stars like Clark Gable or William Holden, both of whom he resembled in a generalized, real-world fashion. You could see Hogan commanding a three-masted schooner through a heavy storm or sentencing mutineers to death on the yardarm. His offhand remark about 'civilians' seemed perfectly in character.

What I was most conscious of at the moment when Michael Hogan shook my hand was that I wanted his approval—that most abject, adolescent desire.

And then, in the midst of the crowd of policemen and hospital staff, he did an astonishing thing. He gave me his approval.

'Didn't you write The Divided Man?' I barely had time to nod before he said, 'That was a very perceptive book. Ever read it, Paul?'

As amazed as myself, Fontaine said, 'Read it?'

'About the last word on the Blue Rose business.'

'Oh, yes,' said Fontaine. 'Yes.'

'It was the last word before Walter Dragonette came along,' I said.

Hogan smiled at me as if I had said something clever. 'Nobody is very happy about Mr. Dragonette,' Hogan said, and changed the subject without losing any of his remarkable civility. 'I suppose you came here to find your friend Ransom.'

'I did, yes,' I said. 'I tried calling him, but all I got was the machine. Does he know—he does know what happened, doesn't he?'

'Yes, yes, yes,' Hogan said, sounding like an ancient uncle rocking in front of a fire. 'After Paul and I got the call about his wife, we got him at home.'

'You heard April had been killed before Dragonette confessed to doing it?' I asked. I didn't quite know why, but this seemed important.

'That's probably enough,' said Paul Fontaine. Before I saw the implications of my question, he sensed an implied criticism. 'We've got work to do, Mr. Underhill. If you'd like to see your friend—'

Hogan had immediately understood the nature of this criticism. He raised his eyebrows and broke into what Fontaine was saying. 'We usually hear about crimes before we get confessions.'

'I know that,' I said. 'It's more that I was wondering if Walter Dragonette heard about this crime before he confessed to it.'

'It was a good clean confession,' Fontaine said.

Fontaine was beginning to look irritated, and Hogan moved to mollify him. 'He knew where she was being held. That information was never released. There are eight hospitals in Millhaven. When we asked Dragonette the name of the hospital where he had killed April Ransom, he said Shady Mount.'

'Did he know her room number?'

'No,' Hogan said, and at the same time Fontaine said, 'Yes.'

'Paul means he knew the floor she was on,' Hogan said. 'He wouldn't know that unless he'd been here.'

'Then how did he know where to find her in the first place?' I asked. 'I don't suppose the switchboard gave out information about her.'

'We really haven't had the time to fully interrogate Mister Dragonette,' said Hogan.