The Throat

'Well, that man must be crazy,' Marjoiiie said.

For the first time that day, Alan smiled.

'Johnny, I still don't get why the police wanted to question you,' said his father.

'You know how police are. They want to go over and over the same ground. They want me to remember everybody I saw on my way into the hospital, everybody I saw on the way out, anything that might help them.'

'They're not trying to—'

'Of course not. I left the hospital and walked straight home. Tim heard me come in around five past eight.' John looked at me. 'They'll probably want you to verify that.'

I said I was glad I could help.

'Are they coming to the funeral?' Ralph asked.

'Oh, yeah,' John said. 'Our ever-vigilant police force will be in attendance.'

'You didn't say a word about any of this. We wouldn't have known anything about it, if Alan hadn't spoken up.'

'The important thing is that April is gone,' John said. 'That's what we should be thinking about.'

'Not who killed her?' Alan boomed, turning each word into a cannonball.

'Alan, stop yelling at me,' John said.

'The man who did this to my daughter is garbage!' Through some natural extra capacity, Alan's ordinary speaking voice was twice as loud as a normal person's, and when he opened it up, it sounded like a race car on a long straight road. Even now, when he was nearly rattling the windows, he was not really trying to shout. 'He does not deserve to live!'

Blushing, John walked away.

Just Call Me Joyce peeked in. 'Is anything wrong? My goodness, there's enough noise in here to wake the know you what.'

Alan cleared his throat. 'Guess I make a lot of noise when I get excited.'

'The others will be here in about fifteen minutes.' Joyce gave us a thoroughly insincere smile and backed out. Her father must have been hovering in the hallway. Clearly audible through the door, Joyce said, 'Didn't these people ever hear of Valium?'

Even Alan grinned, minutely.

He twisted around to look for John, who was winding back toward us, hands in his pockets like his father, his eyes on the pale carpet. 'John, is Grant Hoffman coming?'

I remembered Alan asking about Hoffman when he was dressed in filthy shorts and roaches scrambled through the pizza boxes in his sink.

'I have no idea,' John said.

'One of our best Ph.D. candidates,' Alan said to Marjorie.

'He started off with me, but we moved him over to John two years ago. He dropped out of sight—which is odd, because Grant is an excellent student.'

'He was okay,' John said.

'Grant usually saw me after his conferences with John, but last time, he never showed up.'

'Never showed up for our conference on the sixth, either,' John said. 'I wasted an hour, not to mention all the time I spent going to and fro on the bus.'

'He came to your house?' I asked Alan.

'Absolutely,' Alan said. 'About once a week. Sometimes, he gave me a hand with cleaning up the kitchen, and we'd gab about the progress of his thesis, all kinds of stuff.'

'So call the guy up,' Ralph said to his son.

'I've been a little busy,' John said. 'Anyhow, Hoffman didn't have a telephone. He lived in a single room downtown somewhere, and you had to call him through his landlady. Not that I ever called him.' He looked at me. 'Hoffman used to teach high school in a little town downstate. He saved up some money, and he came here to do graduate work with Alan. He was at least thirty.'

'Do graduate students disappear like that?'

'Now and then they slink away.'

'People like Grant Hoffman don't slink away,' Alan said.

'I don't want to waste my time worrying about Grant Hoffman. There must be people who would notice if he got hit by a bus, or if he decided to change his name and move to Las Vegas.'

The door opened. Just Call Me Joyce led a number of men in conservative gray and blue suits into the chapel. After a moment a few women, also dressed in dark suits but younger than the men, became visible in their midst. These new arrivals moved toward John, who took them to his parents.

I sat down in a chair on the aisle. Ralph and one of the older brokers, a man whose hair was only a slightly darker gray than his own, sidled off to the side of the big room and began talking in low voices.

The door clicked open again. I turned around on my seat and saw Paul Fontaine and Michael Hogan entering the room. Fontaine was carrying a beat-up brown satchel slightly too large to be called a briefcase. He and Hogan went to different sides of the room. That powerful and unaffected natural authority that distinguished Michael Hogan radiated out from him like an aura and caused most of the people in the room, especially the women, to glance at him. I suppose great actors also have this capacity, to automatically draw attention toward themselves. And Hogan had the blessing of looking something like an actor without at all looking theatrical—his kind of utterly male handsomeness, cast in the very lines of reliability, steadiness, honesty, and a tough intelligence, was of the sort that other men found reassuring, not threatening. As I watched Hogan moving to the far side of the room under the approving glances of April's mourners, glances he seemed not to notice, it occurred to me that he actually was the kind of person that an older generation of leading men had impersonated on screen, and I was grateful that he was in charge of April's case.

Less conspicuous, Fontaine poured coffee for himself and sat behind me. He dropped the satchel between his legs.

'The places I run into you,' he said.

I did not point out that I could say the same.

'And the things I hear you say.' He sighed. 'If there's one thing the ordinary policeman hates, it's a mouthy civilian.'

'Was I wrong?'

'Don't push your luck.' He leaned forward toward me. The bags under his eyes were a little less purple. 'What's your best guess as to the time your friend Ransom got home from the hospital on Wednesday morning?'

'You want to check his alibi?'

'I might as well.' He smiled. 'Hogan and I are representing the department at this municipal extravaganza.'

Cops and cop humor.

He noticed my reaction to his joke, and said, 'Oh, come on. Don't you know what's going to happen here?'

'If you want to ask me questions, you can take me downtown.'

'Now, now. You know that favor you asked me to do?'

'The lost license number?'

'The other favor.' He slid the scuffed leather satchel forward and snapped it open to show me a thick wad of typed and handwritten pages.

'The Blue Rose file?'

He nodded, smiling like a big-nosed cat.

I reached for the satchel, and he slid it back between his legs. 'You were going to tell me what time your friend got home on Wednesday morning.'

'Eight o'clock,' I said. 'It takes about twenty minutes to walk back from the hospital. I thought you said this was going to be hard to find.'

'The whole thing was sitting on top of a file in the basement of the records office. Someone else was curious,