The Throat

couch and sat down. I took the chair beside the chesterfield. His eyes almost snapped with excitement, and I wondered how I could ever have thought they looked washed out. 'If William Damrosch didn't unite the Blue Rose victims, what did?'

During the brief moment in which Tom Pasmore and I waited for the other to speak, I would have sworn that we were thinking the same thing.

Finally I broke the silence. 'The St. Alwyn Hotel.'

'Yes,' Tom said softly.

4

'When Lamont and I got off the plane from Eagle Lake, we went to the St. Alwyn. We stayed there the last night of his life. The St. Alwyn was where the murders happened—in it, behind it, across the street.'

'What about Heinz Stenmitz? His shop was five or six blocks from the St. Alwyn. And there wasn't any connection between Stenmitz and the hotel.'

'Maybe there was a connection we don't know yet,' Tom said. 'And think about this, too. How much time elapsed between the murder of Arlette Monaghan and James Treadwell? Five days. How much time between Treadwell and Monty Leland? Five days. How much time between Monty Leland and Heinz Stenmitz? Almost two weeks. More than twice the time that separated the first three murders. Do you make anything of that?'

'He tried to stop, but couldn't. In the end, he couldn't restrain himself—he had to go out and kill someone again.' I looked at Tom glinting at me and tried to imagine what he was thinking. 'Or maybe someone else killed Stenmitz—maybe it was like Laing, a copycat murder, for entirely different motives.'

He smiled at me almost proudly, and despite myself, I felt gratified that I had guessed what he was thinking.

'I guess that's possible,' Tom said, and I knew that I had not followed his thinking after all. My pride curdled. 'But I think my grandfather was Blue Rose's only imitator.'

'So what are you saying?'

'I think you were half right. It was the same man, but with a different motive.'

I confessed that I was lost.

Tom leaned forward, eyes still snapping with excitement. 'Here we have a vindictive, ruthless man who does everything according to plan. What's his motive for the first three murders? A grudge against the St. Alwyn?'

I nodded.

'Once every five days for fifteen days, he kills someone in the immediate vicinity of the St. Alwyn, once actually inside the St. Alwyn. Then he stops. By this time, how many people do you suppose are staying in the St. Alwyn? It must be like a ghosttown.'

'Sure, but…' I shut up and let him say what he had to.

'And then he kills Stenmitz. And who was Heinz Stenmitz? Pigtown's friendly neighborhood sex criminal. The other three victims could have been anybody—they were pawns. But when somebody goes out of his way to kill a molester of little boys, an active chickenhawk, I think that is not a random murder.'

He leaned back, finished. His eyes were still blazing.

'So what you need,' I said, 'is a vindictive, ruthless man who has a grudge against the St. Alwyn—and —'

'And—'

'And a son.'

'And a son,' Tom said. 'You've got it. The kind of man we're talking about couldn't stand anybody violating his own child. If he found out about it, he'd have to kill the man who did it. The reason nobody ever thought of this before is that it looked as though that was exactly the reason that Stenmitz had been killed.' He laughed. 'Of course it was the reason he was killed! It just wasn't Damrosch who killed him!'

We looked at each other for a moment, and then I laughed, too.

'I think we know a lot about Blue Rose,' Tom said, still smiling at his own vehemence. 'He didn't stop because my grandfather had just guaranteed his immunity from arrest by killing William Damrosch. We've been assuming that all along, but, now that I have Blue Rose in a kind of focus, I think he stopped because he was finished—he was finished even before he murdered Heinz Stenmitz. He accomplished what he set out to do— he paid back the St. Alwyn for whatever it did to him. If he thought the St. Alwyn had still owed him something, he would have gone on leaving a fresh corpse draped around the place every five days until he was satisfied.'

'So what set him off all over again two weeks ago?'

'Maybe he started brooding about his old grudge and decided to make life miserable for the son of his old employer.'

'And maybe he won't stop until he kills John.'

'John is certainly the center of these new murders,' Tom said. 'Which puts you pretty close to that center, if you haven't noticed.'

'You mean Blue Rose might decide to make me his next victim?'

'Hasn't it occurred to you that you might be in some danger?'

It sounds stupid, but it had not occurred to me, and Tom must have seen the doubt and consternation I felt.

'Tim, if you want to go back to your life, there's no reason not to. Forget everything we talked about earlier. You can tell John that you have to meet a deadline, fly home to New York, and go back to your real work.'

'Somehow,' I said, trying to express what I had never put into words until this moment, 'my work seems related to everything we've been talking about. Every now and then I get the feeling that some answer, some key, is all around me, and that all I have to do is open my eyes.' Tom was looking at me very intently, not betraying anything. 'Besides, I want to learn Blue Rose's name. I'm not going to run out now. I don't want to go back to New York and get a phone call from you a week from now telling me John was found knifed to death outside the Idle Hour.'

'As long as you remember that this isn't a book.'

'It isn't Little Women, anyhow,' I said.

'Okay.' He looked across the room at the monitor on his desk, where SEARCHING still pulsed on and off. 'Tell me about Ralph Ransom.'

5

After I described my conversation with John's father at the funeral, Tom said, 'I didn't know your father used to work at the St. Alwyn.'

'Eight years,' I said. 'He ran the elevator. He was fired not too long after the murders ended. His drinking got worse after my sister was killed. About a year later, he straightened himself out and got a job on the assembly line at the Glax Corporation.'

'Your sister?' Tom said. 'You had a sister who was killed? I didn't know about that.' He looked at me hard, and I saw consciousness come into his face. 'You mean that she was murdered.'

I nodded, too moved by the speed and accuracy of his intelligence to speak.

'Did this happen near your house?' He meant: did it happen near the hotel?

I told him where April was murdered.

'When?'

I thought he already knew, but I told him the date and then said that I had been running across the street to help her when I was hit by the car. Tom knew all about that, but he had known nothing else.

'Tim,' he said, and blinked. I wondered what was going through his mind. Something had amazed him. He began again. 'That was five days before Arlette Monaghan's murder.' He sat there looking at me with his mouth open.