The Throat (22 page)

The only customers not engrossed in their morning papers were four
silent men arranged around a table across the room. The two men in
suits affected an elaborate disengagement from the others, who might
have been truck drivers, and from each other. All four ignored the cups
before them. They had the air of people who had been waiting for a long
time. The sense of mutual distrust was so strong that I wondered what
had brought them together. One of the men in suits saw me looking at
them and snapped his head sideways, his face stiff with discomfort.

My copy of the
Ledger
lay
folded on the table in front of me. I
pulled it toward me, turned it over, and momentarily forgot the men
across the room and everything I had thought and experienced that
morning as I took in the big banner headline. Beneath it was a color
photograph of dozens of uniformed and plainclothes policemen standing
on the front lawn of a small white frame house. One of the detectives
was the joker I had met at the hospital the previous night, Paul
Fontaine. Another, a tall commanding-looking man with an indented
hairline, deep lines in his face, and a William Powell mustache, was
identified as Fontaine's immediate superior, Detective Sergeant Michael
Hogan. Almost as soon as I began to read the article to the left of the
photograph, I saw that, among at least a dozen other unsuspected
killings, the murder of the unknown man in the passage behind the St.
Alwyn and the attack on April Ransom had been solved. A
twenty-six-year-old clerk in the Glax Corporation's accounts department
named Walter Dragonette had confessed. In fact, he had confessed to
everything under the sun. If he had thought of it, he would have
confessed to strangling the little princes in the tower.

The big headline read:
HORROR IN NORTH SIDE HOME
.

The story all but obliterated the rest of the news. Five million
dollars' worth of cocaine had been seized from a fishing boat, an
unnamed woman claimed that a Kennedy nephew had raped her in New York
three years before being charged with rape in Palm Beach, and a state
representative had been using military planes for personal trips: the
rest of the paper, like every issue of the
Ledger
to come out for a
week, dealt almost exclusively with the young man who, when surrounded
and asked, "Is your name Walter Dragonette?" by a squad of policemen,
had said, "Well, I guess you know."

"What do we know?" asked a policeman pointing a gun at his chest.
"That I'm the Meat Man," answered Dragonette. He smiled a charming,
self-deprecating smile. "Otherwise, I must have a lot of unpaid parking
tickets."

The
Ledger
reporters had
done an astonishing amount of work. They
had managed to get the beginning of the saga of Walter Dragonette, his
history and deeds, out onto the street only a couple of hours after
they were discovered. The reporters had been busy, but so had Walter
Dragonette.

Dragonette's little white house on North Twentieth Street, only a
block south of the Arkham College campus, was in the midst of a
"transitional" area, meaning that it had once been entirely white and
was now 60 to 70 percent black. In this lay the roots of much of the
troubles that came later. Dragonette's black neighbors claimed that
when they had called the police to complain of the sounds of struggle,
the thudding blows and late-night screaming they had heard coming from
the little white house, the officers had never done anything more than
drive down the street—sometimes they ridiculed the caller, saying that
these sounds were hardly rare in their neighborhood, now, were they? If
the caller wanted peace, why didn't she try moving out to Riverwood—it
was always nice and quiet, out in Riverwood. When one male caller had
persisted, the policeman who had answered the telephone delivered a
long comic monologue which ended, "And how about you, Rastus, when you
hit your old lady upside the head, do you want us charging there and
giving you heat? And if we did, do you actually think she'd swear out a
complaint?" Rastus, in this case a forty-five-year-old English teacher
named Kenneth Johnson, heard cackling laughter in the background.

After someone was missing for three or four days, the police took
notes and filled out forms, but generally declined to take matters
further—the missing son or brother, the missing husband (especially the
missing husband) would turn up sooner or later. Or they would not. What
were the police supposed to do, make a house-to-house search for a dude
who had decided to get a divorce without paperwork?

Under these circumstances, the neighborhood people had not even
thought of calling the police to complain about the sounds of
electrical saws and drills they had sometimes heard coming from the
little white house, nor about the odors of rotting meat, sometimes of
excrement, that drifted through its walls and windows.

They knew little of the presentable-looking young man who had lived
in the house with his mother and now lived there alone. He was
friendly. He looked intelligent and he wore suits to work. He had a shy
little smile, and he was friendly in a distant way with everybody in
the neighborhood. The older residents had known and respected his
mother, Florence Dragonette, who had worked at Shady Mount Hospital for
better than forty years.

Mrs. Dragonette, a widow in her early thirties with an iron-bound
reputation and a tiny baby, had moved into the little white house when
North Twentieth Street had been nearly as respectable as she was
herself. She had raised that child by herself. She put the boy through
school. Florence and her son had been a quiet, decent pair. Walter had
never needed many friends—oh, he got into a little trouble now and
then, but nothing like the other boys. He was shy and sensitive; he
pretty much kept to himself. When you saw them eating dinner together
on their regular Saturday nights at Huff's restaurant, you saw how
polite he was to his mother, how friendly but not familiar to the
waiters, just a perfect little gentleman. Florence Dragonette had died
in her sleep three years ago, and Walter took care of all the details
by himself: doctor, casket, cemetery plot, funeral service. You'd think
he'd have been all broken up, but instead he kept his grief and sorrow
on the inside and made sure everything was done just the way she would
have wanted it. Some of the neighbors had come to the funeral, it was a
neighborly thing to do, you didn't need an invitation, and there was
Walter in a nice gray suit, shaking hands and smiling his little smile,
holding all that grief inside him.

After that, Walter had come out of himself a little bit more. He
went out at night and he brought people home with him. Sometimes the
neighbors heard loud music coming from the house late at night, loud
music and laughter, shouting, screaming—things they had never heard
while his mother was alive.

"Oh, I'm really sorry," Walter would say the next day, standing next
to the little blue Reliant his mother had driven, anxious to get to
work, polite and charming and slightly shamefaced. "I didn't know it
got so noisy in there. You know. I certainly don't want to disturb
anybody."

Every now and then, late at night, he played his records and his
television a little too loud. The neighbors smelled rotting meat and
came up to him as he was watering his lawn and said—You put out rat
poison, Walter? Seems like a rat or two musta died underneath your
floorboards. And Walter held the hose carefully away from his neighbor
and said, Oh, gosh, I'm really sorry about that smell. Every now and
then that old freezer of ours just ups and dies and then everything in
it goes off. I'd buy a new one in a minute, but I can't afford a new
freezer right now.

Walter Dragonette's curtains had been open only two or three inches,
a narrow gap, ordinarily nothing but entirely wide enough for two small
boys, Akeem and Kwanza Johnson, to look through, giggling and jostling
each other out of the way, fighting to press their faces up against the
glass.

Akeem and Kwanza, nine and seven, lived across the street from
Walter Dragonette. Their father was Kenneth Johnson, the English
teacher who had been addressed as "Rastus" by a Millhaven policeman
eighteen months before. The Johnson house had four bedrooms and a porch
and a second floor, and Mr. Johnson had himself installed in his living
room floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves, every spacious shelf of which
was packed with books. Subsidiary piles of books stood on the coffee
table, on the night-stands and end tables, on the floor, and even on
top of the twelve-inch black-and-white television that was the only set
Mr. Johnson had in his house.

Akeem and Kwanza Johnson were much more interested in television
than in books. They
hated
the
old black-and-white set in their kitchen.
They wanted to watch TV in the living room, the way their friends did,
and they wanted to watch it in color on a big screen. Akeem and Kwanza
would have settled for a twenty-one-inch set, as long as it was color,
but what they really wanted, what they dreamed of persuading their
father to buy, was something roughly the size of the oak bookshelves.
And they knew that their neighbor across the street owned such a
television set. They had been hearing him watch late-night horror
movies for years,
and they knew Walter's TV had to be
dope
.
Walter's TV set was so great
their father called up the police twice to
complain
about it. Walter's
TV set was so bad that you could hear it
all the way across the street.

On the night before the morning when Walter Dragonette greeted
fifteen armed policemen by telling them that he was the Meat Man,
nine-year-old Akeem Johnson had come awake to hear the faint but
unmistakable sounds of a grade-A horror movie coming from the speakers
of the wonderful television set across the street. His father never let
him go to horror movies and did not permit them on the television set
at home, but a friend of Akeem's had shown him videotapes of Jason in
his hockey mask and Freddy Krueger in his hat, and he knew what horror
movies sounded like. What he was listening to, faint as it was, made
Jason and Freddy sound like wimps. It had to be one of those movies he
had heard about but never seen, like
The
Evil Dead
or
Texas Chainsaw
Massacre
, where folks got hunted down and cut up, man, right
there in
your face. Akeem heard a man howling like a dog, sobbing like a woman,
roaring, screeching, wailing…

He got out of bed and walked to his window and looked across the
street. Instead of meeting as they usually did, Walter's curtains
showed a narrow gap filled with yellow light. Akeem realized that if he
got out of bed and sneaked out of the house, he could hide beneath the
window, peek in, and actually watch the movie playing on Walter's big
television. He also realized that he was not going to do that. What he
could do, however, was wait for Walter to leave his house in the
morning, and then just walk across the street and take a look inside
that window and at least see if Walter's TV was the beast it sounded
like.

The faint sounds from across the street came to an end as the movie
shifted to one of the boring parts that always followed the excitement.

In the morning, Akeem went down to the kitchen and poured milk over
his Cocoa Puffs and parked himself at the kitchen table where he could
watch Walter's house through the window. About ten minutes later, his
little brother dragged in, rubbing his eyes and complaining about a bad
dream. After Akeem told him what he was doing, Kwanza got his own bowl
of cereal and sat beside him at the table, and the two of them watched
the house across the street like a pair of burglars.

Walter burst through his front door just after seven. He was wearing
a white T-shirt and jeans, so wherever he was going, he would have to
come back to change clothes before he went to work. Walter hustled down
his walk, looked over both his shoulders as he unlocked his car, got
in, and zoomed off.

"Okay?" Akeem asked.

"Yo," said his brother.

They slid out of their chairs and went to the front door. Akeem
quietly unlocked and opened it. They stepped outside, and Akeem gently
let the door slide back into the frame without quite closing. The
brothers walked over their front lawn. The dew pasted grass shavings to
their bare feet. They felt funny and exposed when they stepped onto
Walter's front yard and ran up to the window hunched over. Akeem
reached the window first, but Kwanza butted him sideways, like a little
goat, before he got a good look in through the curtains.

"You take your turn," Akeem said. "Yo, this was my idea."

"Me too, I wanna look too," Kwanza complained, and slipped in front
of him when he bent his face again to the uncovered stripe of glass.
Both boys peered in to see the enormous television set.

At first, it looked as though Walter had been painting his living
room. Most of the furniture had been pushed against the far wall, and
newspapers covered the floor. "Akeem," Kwanza said.

"Where is that thing?" Akeem said. "I know it's here, no way it
ain't here."

"Akeem," his brother said again, in exactly the same tone of voice.

Akeem looked down at the floor where his brother was pointing, and
he too saw the corpse of a large, heavy black man stretched out in a
swamp of bloody newspapers. The man's head lay some feet away, rolled
on its side so that it seemed to be contemplating the broken hacksaw
blade stuck halfway through what had been its left shoulder. The broad
back, about the color of the Cocoa Puffs dissolving into mush back on
the Johnsons' kitchen table, stared up at them. Deep cuts punctured it,
and sections of skin had been sliced off, leaving red horizontal gashes.