The Throat

This sense of escape vanished as soon as I walked up the stone flags that bisected Alan Brookner's overgrown lawn.

I turned the knob and stepped inside. A taint of rotting garbage hung in the air like perfume, along with some other, harsher odor.

'Alan,' I called out. 'It's Tim Underhill.'

I moved forward over a thick layer of mail and passed into the sitting room or library, or whatever it was. The letters John had tossed onto the chesterfield still lay there, only barely visible in the darkness. The lights were off, and the heavy curtains had been drawn. The smell of garbage grew stronger, along with the other stink.

'Alan?'

I groped for a light switch and felt only bare smooth wall, here and there very slightly gummy. Something small and black rocketed across the floor and dodged behind a curtain. A few more plates of half-eaten food lay on the floor.

'Alan!'

A low growl emerged from the walls. I wondered if Alan Brookner were dying somewhere in the house—if he'd had a stroke. The enormously selfish thought occurred to me that I might not have to tell him that his daughter was dead. I went back out into the corridor.

Dusty papers lay heaped on the dining room table. It looked like my own worktable back at John's house. A chair stood at the table before the abandoned work.

'Alan?'

The growl came from farther down the hallway.

In the kitchen, the smell of shit was as loud as an explosion. A few pizza boxes had been stacked up on the kitchen counter. The drawn shades admitted a hovering, faint illumination that seemed to have no single source. The tops of glasses and the edges of plates protruded over the lip of the sink. In front of the stove lay a tangled blanket of bath towels and thinner kitchen towels. A messy, indistinct mound about a foot high and covered with a mat of delirious flies lay on top of the towels.

I groaned and held my right hand to my forehead. I wanted to get out of the house. The stench made me feel sick and dizzy. Then I heard the growl again and saw that another being, a being not of my own species, was watching me.

Beneath the kitchen table crouched a hunched black shape. From it poured a concentrated sense of rage and pain. Two white eyes moved in the midst of the blackness. I was standing in front of the Minotaur. The stench of its droppings swarmed out at me.

'You're in trouble,' the Minotaur rumbled. 'I'm an old man, but I'm nobody's pushover.'

'I know that,' I said.

'Lies drive me crazy. Crazy' He shifted beneath the table, and the cloth fell away from his head. A white scurf of his whiskers shone out from beneath the table. The furious eyes floated out toward me. 'You are going to tell me the truth. Now.'

'Yes,' I said.

'My daughter is dead, isn't she?'

'Yes.'

A jolt like an electric shock straightened his back and pushed out his chin. 'An auto accident? Something like that?'

'She was murdered,' I said.

He tilted his head back, and the covering slipped to his shoulders. A grimace spread his features across his face. He looked as if he had been stabbed in the side. In the same terrible whisper, he asked, 'How long ago? Who did it?'

'Alan, wouldn't you like to come out from under that table?'

He gave me another look of concentrated rage. I knelt down. The buzzing of the flies suddenly seemed very loud.

'Tell me how my daughter was murdered.'

'About a week ago, a maid found her stabbed and beaten in a room at the St. Alwyn Hotel.'

Alan let out a terrible groan.

'Nobody knows who did that to her. April was taken to Shady Mount, where she remained in a coma until this Wednesday. She began to show signs of improvement. On Thursday morning, someone came into her room and killed her.'

'She never came out of the coma?'

'No.'

He opened his Minotaur eyes again. 'Has anyone been arrested?'

'There was a false confession. Come out from under the table, Alan.'

Tears glittered in the white scurf on his cheeks. Fiercely, he shook his head. 'Did John think I was too feeble to hear the truth? Well, I'm not too damn feeble right now, sonny.'

'I can see that,' I said. 'Why are you sitting under the kitchen table, Alan?'

'I got confused. I got a little lost.' He glared at me again. 'John was supposed to come over. I was finally going to get the truth out of that damned son-in-law of mine.' He shook his head, and I got the Minotaur eyes again. 'So where is he?'

Even in this terrible condition, Alan Brookner had a powerful dignity I had only glimpsed earlier. His grief had momentarily shocked him out of his dementia. I felt achingly sorry for the old man.

'Two detectives showed up when we were about to leave. They asked John to come down to the station for questioning,' I said.

'They didn't arrest him.'

'No.'

He pulled the cloth up around his shoulders again and held it tight at his neck with one hand. It looked like a tablecloth. I moved a little closer. My eyes stung as if I had squirted soap into them.

'I knew she was dead.' He slumped down into himself, and for a moment had the ancient monkey look I had seen on my first visit. He started shaking his head.

I thought he was about to disappear back into his tablecloth. 'Would you like to come out from under the table, Alan?'

'Would you like to stop patronizing me?' His eyes burned out at me, but they were no longer the Minotaur's eyes. 'Okay. Yes. I want to come out from under the table.' He scooted forward and caught his feet in the fabric. Struggling to free his hands, he tightened the section of cloth across his chest. Panic flared in his eyes.

I moved nearer and reached beneath the table. Brookner battled the cloth. 'Damn business,' he said. 'Thought I'd be safe —got scared.'

I found an edge of material and yanked at it. Brookner shifted a shoulder, and his right arm flopped out of the cloth. He was holding his revolver. 'Got it now,' he said. 'You bet. Piece of cake.' He wriggled his other shoulder out of confinement, and the cloth drooped to his waist. I took the gun away from him and put it on the table. He and I both pulled the length of fabric away from his legs, and Alan got one knee under him, then the other, and crawled forward until he was out from under the table. The tablecloth came with him. Finally, he accepted my hand and levered himself up on one knee until he could get one foot, covered with a powder-blue tube sock, beneath him. Then I pulled him upright, and he got his other foot, in a black tube sock, on the cloth. 'There we go,' he said. 'Right as rain.' He tottered forward and let me take his elbow. We shuffled across the kitchen toward a chair. 'Old joints stiffened up,' he said. He began gingerly extending his arms and gently raising his legs. Glittering tears still hung in his whiskers.

'I'll take care of that mess on the floor,' I said.

'Do what you like.' The wave of pain and rage came from him once more. 'Is there a funeral? There damn well better be, because I'm going to it.' His face stiffened with anger and the desire to suppress his tears. The Minotaur eyes flared again. 'Come on, tell me.'

'There's a funeral tomorrow. One o'clock at Trott Brothers. She'll be cremated.'

The fierce grimace flattened his features across his face again. He hid his face behind his knotted hands and