The Throat

himself or crying.'

'He never noticed your light?'

'Those red dragons probably don't see real good,' Frank said.

'It's little,' she said. 'Like a pinpoint.'

'You never saw him go into the house?'

'I think he goes around the far side and comes in the back,' she said.

'Probably he comes down the chimney.'

'Did you ever call the police?'

'No.' For the first time, she seemed embarrassed.

'Tears from Beyond the Grave,'Frank said, 'by I. B. Looney.'

'Welders are all that way,' Hannah said. 'I don't know why, but they all think they're comedians.'

'Why didn't you call the police?'

'I think it's one of those poor little Dumkys, all grown up now, come back to a place where he used to be happy.'

'Hillbillies don't act like that,' Frank said. 'And hillbillies is what they were. Even the little ones got so drunk they passed out on the lawn.' He grinned at his wife again. 'She liked them because they called her ma'am.'

She gave him a disapproving look. 'There's a big difference between being ignorant and being bad.'

'Did you ever ask other people on the street if they saw him, too?'

She shook her head. 'There's nobody in this neighborhood is up at night except me.'

'Mr. Bandolier lived alone?'

'He did everything alone,' Frank said. 'He was a whole separate country.'

'Maybe it's him,' I said.

'You'd need a microscope to find any tears in Mr. Bandolier,' Frank said, and for once his wife seemed to agree with him.

Before I left, I asked Hannah Belknap to call me the next time she saw the man in the house next door. Frank pointed out the houses of the two other couples who had been on the block since the Belknaps had moved in, but he didn't think they'd be able to help me find Robert Bandolier.

One of these couples lived up at the end of the block and had only the vaguest memories of their former neighbor. They thought he was, in their words, 'a stuck-up snob with his nose in the air,' and they had no interest in talking about him. They still resented his renting to the Dumkys. The other couple, the Millhausers, lived two houses up from Livermore, on the other side of the street. Mr. Millhauser came outside the screen door to talk to me, and his wife shouted from a wheelchair stationed far back in a gloomy hallway. They shared the universal dislike of Bob Bandolier. It was a shame that house just sat empty year after year, but they too had no wish to see more of the Dumkys. Mrs. Millhauser bawled that she thought the Sunchanas had moved to, what was that place called, Elm Hill? Elm Hill was a suburb on Millhaven's far west side. Mr. Millhauser wanted to get back inside, and I thanked him for talking to me. His wife shouted, 'That Bandolier, he was handsome as Clark Gable, but no good! Beat his wife black and blue!' Millhauser gave me a pained look and told her to mind her own business. 'And you might as well mind yours, mister,' he said to me. He went back inside his house and slammed the door.

12

I left the car on South Seventh and walked toward the St. Alwyn through the steaming day. Everything I had heard in the past two days went spinning through my head. The farther I got from South Seventh Street, the less I believed that Hannah Belknap had seen anyone at all. I decided to give myself the pleasure of meeting Glenroy Breakstone even though it would probably turn out to be another blind alley, and after that I would try to find the Sunchanas.

My stomach growled, and I realized that I hadn't eaten anything since dinner with the Ransoms at Jimmy's, last night. Glenroy Breakstone could wait until after lunch—he was probably still in bed, anyhow. I got a Ledger from a coin-operated dispenser on the corner of Livermore and Widow Street and carried it through the street entrance of Sinbad's Cavern.

The restaurant had relaxed since the morning of Walter Dragonette's arrest. Most of the booths were filled with neighborhood people and hotel residents eating lunch, and the young woman behind the bar was pulling draft beers for workmen covered in plaster dust. The waitress I had spoken to that morning came out of the kitchen in her blue cocktail dress and high heels. There was a lively buzz of conversation. The waitress waved me toward a table in a rear corner of the room. At a table directly across the room, four men ranging in age from over fifty to about twenty sat around a table, drinking coffee and paying no attention to one another. They were very much like the different men who had been at the same table on the day of April Ransom's murder. One of them wore a summer suit, another a hooded sweatshirt and dirty trousers. The youngest man at the table was wearing baggy jeans, a mesh undershirt, and a heavy gold chain around his neck. They ignored me, and I opened my paper.

Millhaven was still tearing itself apart. Half of the front page dealt with the protest meetings at Armory Place. The Reverend Al Sharpton had appeared as promised and declared himself ready to storm City Hall by himself if the policemen who had failed to respond to calls from Walter Dragonette's neighbors were not put on suspension or dismissed. Pictures of the chief and Merlin Waterford orating at April Ransom's funeral, complete with full texts of both remarks, filled the top of the next page. All three editorials blasted Waterford and the performance of the police department.

While I read all of this and ate a club sandwich, I gradually began to notice what the men across the room were doing. At intervals, they stood up and disappeared through an unmarked door in the wall behind their table. When one came out, another went in. I caught glimpses of a gray hallway lined with empty metal kegs. Sometimes the man coming back out left the restaurant, sometimes he went back to the table and waited. The men smoked and drank coffee. Whenever one of the original men left, another came in from outside and took his place. They rarely spoke. They did not look arrogant enough to be mobsters or furtive enough to be drug dealers making pickups.

When I left, only the man with the gold chain was left of the original four, and he had already been once in and out of the back room. None of them looked at me when I paid up and left through the arched door into the St. Alwyn's lobby.

I forgot about them and went up to the desk clerk to ask if Glenroy Breakstone was in his room.

'Yeah, Gienroy's up there,' he said and pointed to a row of house phones. One old man in a gray suit with fat lapels sat on the long couch in the lobby, smoking a cigar and mumbling to himself. The clerk told me to dial 925.

A thick, raspy voice said, 'You have reached Glenroy Breakstone's residence. He is home. If you have a message, now's the time.'

'Mr. Breakstone?'

'Didn't I say that? Now it's your turn.'

I told him my name and said that I was downstairs in the lobby. I could hear the sound of Nat 'King' Cole singing 'Blame It on My Youth' in the background. 'I was hoping that I could come up to see you.'

'You some kind of musician, Tim Underhill?'

'Just a fan,' I said. 'I've loved your playing for years, and I'd be honored to meet you, but what I wanted to talk about with you was the man who used to be the day manager here in the fifties and sixties.'

'You want to talk about Bad Bob Bandolier?' I had surprised him, and he laughed. 'Man, nobody wants to talk about Bad Bob anymore. That subject is talked out.'

'It has to do with the Blue Rose murders,' I said.

There was a long pause. 'Are you some kind of reporter?'

'I could probably tell you some things you don't know about those murders. You might be interested, if only for James Treadwell's sake.'

Another pause while he considered this. I was afraid that I had gone too far, but he said, 'You claim you're a jazz fan?'

I said that I was.

'Tell me who played the tenor solo on Lionel Hampton's 'Flyin' Home,' who played tenor for the Billy Eckstine