The Throat

either.'

'Are you crazy?' Ransom stared at me as if I had just betrayed him. 'How can you say that? Everybody knows he killed April. We even heard him say he killed April.'

'I was thinking about everything while you were upstairs, and I realized that Dragonette didn't know enough about these murders to have done them. He doesn't even know what happened.'

He glared at me for a moment and then turned away in frustration and sat down on the couch and took in what the local TV stations were doing. Isobel Archer gloated beautifully into the camera and said, 'And so a startling new development in the Dragonette story, as a friend of the Ransom family casts doubt on the police case here.' She raised a notebook to just within camera range. 'We will have tape on this as soon as possible, but my notes show that the words were: 'I don't think he did it. I think the police will reject that portion of his confession, in time.' ' She lowered the notebook, and an audible pop, whisked her into darkness and silence.

Ransom slammed the remote onto the table. 'Don't you get it? They're going to start blaming me.'

'John,' I said, 'why would Dragonette interrupt his busy little schedule of murder and dismemberment at home to reenact the Blue Rose murders? Don't they sound like two completely different types of crime? Two different kinds of mind at work?'

He looked sourly at me. 'That's why you went out there and threw raw meat to those animals?'

'Not exactly.' I went to the couch and sat down beside him. Ransom looked at me suspiciously and moved a few inches away. He began rearranging the Vietnam books into neater, lower stacks. 'I want to know the truth,' I said.

He grunted. 'What actual reasons do you have for thinking that Dragonette isn't guilty? The guy seems perfect to me.'

'Tell me why.'

'Okay.' Ransom, who had been slouching back against the couch, sat up straight. 'One. He confessed. Two. He's crazy enough to have done it. Three. He knew April from his visits to the office. Four. He always liked the Blue Rose murders, just like you. Five. Could there really be two people in Millhaven who are crazy enough to do it? Six. Paul Fontaine and Michael Hogan, who happen to be very good cops and who have put away lots of killers, think the guy is guilty. Fontaine might be a little weird sometimes, but Hogan is something else—he's one smart, powerful guy. I mean, he reminds me of the best guys I knew in the service. There's no bullshit about Hogan, none.'

I nodded. Like me, John had been impressed by Michael Hogan.

'And last, what is it, seven? Seven. He could find out all about April and her condition from his mother's old pal Betty Grable at the hospital.'

'I think it was Mary Graebel, different spelling,' I said. 'And you're right, he did find out April was at Shady Mount. When I came down in the elevator with Fontaine this morning, an old lady working behind the counter almost passed out when she saw us. I bet that was Mary Graebel.'

'She knew she helped kill April,' John said. 'The cow couldn't keep her mouth shut.'

'She thought she helped her old friend's son kill April. That's different.'

'What makes you so sure he didn't?'

'Dragonette claimed that he couldn't remember anything he had done to that cop in April's room, Mangelotti. He overheard Fontaine joking that Mangelotti was dead—so he claimed that he had murdered him. Then Fontaine said he was exaggerating, so Dragonette said he was exaggerating, too!'

'He's playing mind games,' John said.

'He didn't know what happened to Mangelotti. Also, he had no idea that April had been killed until he heard it over the police radio. That was the point that always bothered me.'

'Why would he confess if he didn't do it? That still doesn't make sense.'

'Maybe you didn't notice, but Walter Dragonette is not the most sensible man in the world.'

Ransom leaned forward and stared down at the floor for a time, considering what I had been saying. 'So there's another guy out there.'

I saw a mental picture of those drawings where the eye wanders over the leaves of an oak tree until the dagger leaps out of concealment, and the brickwork on the side of a house reveals a running man, a trumpet, an open door.

'You and your brainstorms.' He shook his head, now almost smiling. 'I'm going to have to live with the repercussions of shoving that reporter around.'

'What do you think they'll be?'

He shifted one of the stacks of novels sideways half an inch, back a quarter-inch. 'I suppose my neighbors are more convinced than ever that I killed my wife.'

'Did you, John?' I asked him. 'This is just between you and me.'

'You're asking me if I killed April?'

His face heated as before, but without the violence I had seen in him just before he had gone after Geoffrey Bough. He stared at me, trying to look intimidating. 'Is this something Tom Pasmore asked you to say?'

I shook my head.

'The answer is no. If you ask me that once more, I'll throw you out of this house. Are you satisfied?'

'I had to ask,' I said.

2

For the next two days, John Ransom and I watched the city fall apart on local television. When we were inside his house, we ignored the knot of reporters, varying from a steady core of three to a rumbling mob of fifteen, occupying his front lawn. We also ignored their efforts to lure us outside. They rang the bell at regular intervals, pressed their faces against the windows, yelled his name or mine with doglike repetitiveness… Every hour or so, either John or I would get up from the day's fifth, sixth, or fifteenth contemplation of the names and faces of the victims to check the enemy through the narrow window slits on either side of the door. It felt like a medieval siege, plus telephones.

We ate lunch in front of the set; we ate dinner in front of the set.

Someone banged imperiously on the front door. Someone else fingered open the mail slot and yelled, 'Timothy Underhill! Who killed April Ransom?'

'Who killed Laura Palmer?' muttered Ransom, mostly to himself.

This was on the day, Saturday, that Arkham's dean of humanities had left a message on the answering machine that Arkham's trustees, board of visitors, and alumni society had registered separate complaints about the televised language and behavior of the religion department's Professor Ransom. Would Professor Ransom please offer some assurance that all legal matters would be concluded by the beginning of the fall term? And it followed our struggles back and forth through the mob on our way to Trott Brothers Funeral Parlor.

So he wasn't doing too badly, considering everything. The worst aspect of our experience at Trott Brothers had been the manner of Joyce 'Just call me Joyce' Trott Brophy, the daughter and only child of the single remaining Mr. Trott. Just Call Me Joyce made the reporters seem genteel. Obese and hugely pregnant, professionally oblivious to grief, she had long ago decided that the best way to meet the stricken people life brought her way was with the resolute self-involvement she would have called 'common sense.'

'We're doing a beautiful job on your little lady, Mr. Ransom, you're going to say she looks as beautiful as she did on her wedding day. This here coffin is the one I'm recommending to you for display purposes during the service, we can talk about the urn later, we got some real beauties, but look here at this satin, plump and firm and shiny as you can get it—be the perfect frame around a pretty picture, if you don't mind my saying so. You wouldn't believe the pains I get carrying this baby back and forth around this showroom, boy, if Walter Dragonette showed up here he'd get two for the price of one, that'd give my daddy the job of his life, wouldn't it, by golly, that's gas this time. You ever get those real bad gas pains? I better sit down here while you and your friend talk things over, just don't pay any attention to me, Lord, I heard everything anyhow, people hardly know what they're saying when they come in here.'

We had at least two hours of Just Call Me Joyce, which demonstrated once again that when endured long enough, even the really horrible can become boring. In that time John rented the 'display' coffin, ordered the