The Throat

'And you think that's who it was?'

I nodded. 'I think it was Hoffman.'

Tom sipped the whiskey. 'One. The original Blue Rose murderer is torturing John Ransom. Probably he intends to kill him, too, eventually. Two. Someone else is imitatirig the original Blue Rose killer, and he too is trying to destroy John. Three. Another party is using the Blue Rose murders to cover up his real motives.' He took another little sip. 'There are other possibilities, but I want to stick with these, at least for now. In all three cases, some very determined character is still happily convinced the police think that Walter Dragonette committed his crimes.'

Tommy Flanagan began spinning out an ethereal solo on 'Star Dust.'

I told Tom about April Ransom's interest in the Horatio Street bridge and William Damrosch.

'Did she write up any of her findings?'

'I don't know. Maybe I could look around her office and find her notes. I'm not even sure John really knew anything about it.'

'Don't let him know you're interested in the notes,' he said. 'Let's just do things quietly, for a while.'

'You're thinking about it, aren't you? You already have ideas about it.'

'I want to find out who killed her. I also want to find out who killed this Grant Hoffman. And I want your help.'

'You and John.'

'You'll be helping John, too, but I'd rather you didn't tell him about our discussions until I say it's okay.'

I agreed to this.

'I said that I want to find out,' Tom said. 'That's what I meant. I want to know how and why April Ransom and that graduate student were killed. If we can help the police at that point, fine. If not, that's fine, too. I'm not in the justice business.'

'You don't care if April's murderer is arrested?'

'I can't predict what will happen. We might learn his identity without being able to do anything about it. That would be acceptable to me.'

'But if we find out who he is, we should be able to give our information to the police.'

'Sometimes it works out that way.' He leaned back in his chair, watching to see how I was taking this.

'What if I can't agree to this? I just go back to John's and forget about this conversation?'

'You go back to John's and do whatever you like.'

'I'd never know what happened. I'd never know what you did or what you found out.'

'Probably not.'

I couldn't stand the thought of walking away without knowing what he would do—I had to know what the two of us could discover.

'If you think I'm going to walk out now, you're crazy,' I said.

'Ah, good,' he said, smiling. He had never doubted that I would accept his terms. 'Let's go upstairs. I'll show you my toys.'

2

At the far left of the big downstairs room, past the cabinets for the sound system and the shelves packed with compact discs, a wide staircase led up to the second floor. Tom went up the stairs one step ahead of me now, already talking. 'I want us to begin at the beginning,' he said. 'If nothing else comes out of this, I want to understand the first Blue Rose murders. For a long time, Lamont thought it was solved, I guess—as you did, Tim. But I think it always bothered him.' At the top of the stairs, he turned around to look at me. 'Two days before his death, he told me the whole history of the Blue Rose murders. We were on the plane back from Eagle Lake, and we were going to stay at the St. Alwyn.' He laughed out loud. 'A couple of nuns in the seats in front of us almost broke their necks, they were listening in so hard. Lamont said that you could call Damrosch's suicide a sort of wrongful arrest—by then he knew that my grandfather had killed Damrosch. Lamont was doing two things at once. He was preparing me to face the truth about my grandfather.'

He stepped back to let me reach the top of the stairs.

'And the second thing Lamont was doing—'

'Was to get me interested in the Blue Rose murders. I think the two of us would have worked on that one next. And do you know what that means? If he hadn't been killed, Lamont and I might have saved April Ransom's life.'

His face twitched. 'That's something I'd like to be clear about.'

'Me, too,' I said. I had my own reason for wanting to learn the identity of the original Blue Rose murderer.

'Okay,' he said. Now Tom did not look languid, bored, amused, indifferent, or detached. He didn't look lost or unhappy. I had seen all of these things in him many times, but I had never seen him in the grip of a controlled excitement. He had never let me see this steely side of him. It looked like the center of his being.

'Let's get to work.' Tom turned around and went down the hallway to what had been the door of Lamont von Heilitz's bedroom and went in.

The old bedroom was dark when I followed him in. My first impression was of a fire-sale chaos like the room downstairs. I saw the dim shapes of desks and cabinets and what looked like the glassy rectangles of several television sets. Books on dark shelves covered most of the walls. A thick dark curtain covered the window. In the depths of the room, Tom switched on a halogen lamp just as I finally grasped that the televisions were computer monitors.

He went methodically around the room, switching on lamps, as I took in that his office served two purposes: the mansion's old master bedroom was a much neater version of the room downstairs. It was where Tom both lived and worked. Against one wall of books, three office workstations held computers; a fourth, larger computer stood on the long wooden desk that faced the curtained window. File cabinets topped with microdiscs in plastic boxes stood beside each workstation and flanked his desk. Next to one of the workstations was a professional copy machine. Sound equipment crowded two tall shelves on the bookcase at the wall to my left. A long red leather chesterfield like Alan Brookner's, a plaid blanket folded over one of its arms, stood before the wall of books. A matching armchair sat at right angles to the chesterfield. Within reach of both was a glass table heaped with books and magazines, with a rank of bottles and ice bucket like the table downstairs. On the glossy white mantel of the room's fireplace, yellow orchids leaned and yawned out of tall crystal vases. Sprays of yellow freesias burst up out of a thick blue vase on a low, black piece of equipment that must have been a subwoofer.

The lamps cast mellow pools of light that burnished the rug lapping against the bookshelves. The orchids opened their lush mouths and leaned forward.

I wondered how many people had been invited into this room. I would have bet that only Sarah Spence had been here before me.

'My father told me something I never forgot, when we were flying back from Eagle Lake. Occasionally, you have to go back to the beginning and see everything in a new way.'

Tom set his glass down on his desk and picked up a book bound in gray fabric boards. He turned it over in his hands, and then turned it over again, as if looking for the title. 'And then he said, Occasionally, there are powerful reasons why you can't or don't want to do that.' He looked for the invisible writing again. Even the spine of the book was blank. 'That's what we're going to do to the Blue Rose case. We're going to go back to the beginning, the beginnings of a couple of things, and try to see everything in a new way.'

I felt a flicker, no more than that, of an absolute uneasiness. Tom Pasmore placed the peculiar book back down on the desk and came toward me with his hands out, and I picked up the battered old satchel and gave it to