The Throat (75 page)

"There might
be some more information about Elvee."

He leaned
forward and peered at my eyes. "Are you all right? Your eyes are red."

"I ran out of
Murine. If I get involved in something at the library, would you mind
taking a cab home?"

"Try to wrap
it up before seven," he said, looking grumpy. "After that, everything
snaps shut like a trap. Budget cuts."

Twenty
minutes later, I dropped John off in front of Arkham's seedy quadrangle
and watched him disappear into the heavy gray clouds. A few dim lights
burned down from windows in the dark shapes of the college buildings.
In the fog, Arkham looked like an insane asylum on the moors. Then I
cruised slowly down the street. When a pay telephone swam up out of the
murk, I double-parked the car and called Tom's number.

After his
message ended, I said that I had to see him as soon as possible, he
should call me as soon as he got up, I had to be back at John's—

The line
clicked. "Come on over," Tom said.

"You're up
already?"

"I'm
still
up," he said.

"Do you know
how many Allentowns there are in America?" Tom asked me. "Twenty-one.
Some of them aren't even in the standard atlases. I didn't bother with
Allentown, Georgia, Allentown, Florida, Allentown, Utah, or Allentown,
Delaware, because they all have populations under three thousand—it's
an arbitrary cutoff, but not even Fee Bandolier could get away with
committing a string of murders in a town that size."

The start-up
menus glowed from the monitors of his computers. Tom looked a little
pale and his hair was rumpled, but the only other indication that he
hadn't slept in twenty-four hours was that his necktie had been pulled
below the undone top button of his shirt. He was wearing the same long
silk robe he'd had on the other day.

"So I went
through every one of the sixteen other Allentowns, looking for a Jane
Wright who had been murdered in May 1977. Nothing. No Jane Wright. Most
of these towns are so small that there were no murders at all in that
month. All I could do then was go back to Allentown, Pennsylvania, and
take another look."

"And?"

"I found
something good."

"Are you
going to tell me about it?"

"In time."
Tom smiled at me. "You sounded like you had something pretty good
yourself, on the phone."

There was no
point in trying to get him to say anything until he was ready. I took a
sip of his coffee and said, "April Ransom's car is in a garage in
Purdum. John panicked when he found it in front of his house with blood
all over the seats, and he took it to Alan's garage and cleaned it up
and then stashed it out of town."

"Did he,
now?" Tom tilted his head back and regarded me through half-closed
eyes. "I thought he knew where that car was." He was smiling again,
that same slow, almost luxuriant smile I had seen on the day I had
brought John Ransom to meet him. "Somehow, I see that we do not think
he is a guilty party here. Tell me the rest of it."

"After I left
your house the other day, Paul Fontaine pushed me into an unmarked car
and drove me out to Pine Knoll." I told him everything that had
happened—Bob Bandolier's middle name and Andy Belin, Billy Ritz, my
brawl and John's account of the night April was beaten. I described our
visit to the house on South Seventh Street and brought the photographs
out of my jacket pocket and put them on the table in front of us. Tom
scarcely moved during my long recital—his eyes opened a bit when I got
to Andy Belin, he nodded when I described calling the cab company, and
he smiled again when I described the fight with John, but that was all.

Finally, he
said, "Hadn't it already occurred to you that Fee Bandolier was a
Millhaven policeman?"

"No," I said.
"Of course it hadn't."

"But someone
took Bob Bandolier's statements out of the Blue Rose file—only a
policeman could do that, and only his son would want to."

He took in my
response to these remarks. "Don't get angry with me. I didn't mention
it because you wouldn't have believed me. Or was I wrong about that?"

"You weren't
wrong."

"Then let's
think about what else we have here." He closed his eyes and said
nothing for at least an entire minute. Then he said, "Preservation." He
smoothed out the front of the silk robe and nodded to himself.

"Maybe you
could elaborate on that a little bit," I said. "Didn't John say Fee's
house looked like a museum of the year 1945?" I nodded.

"It's his
power source—his battery. He keeps that house to step back into his
childhood and taste it again. It's a kind of shrine. It's like that
ghost village in Vietnam you told me about." Finally, he bent forward
and looked at the photographs. "So here we are," he said. "The sites of
the original Blue Rose murders. With a slight overlay of static
provided by the annoying tenants."

He pulled the
fourth photograph toward him. "Hmmm."

"It has to be
Stenmitz's shop, doesn't it?" Tom looked sharply up at me. "Do you have
some doubts about that?"

I said I
wasn't sure.

"It's almost
unreadable," he said. "Wouldn't it be interesting if it were a
photograph of something else?"

"What about
your computers? Do you have a way to lift off the ink and expose what's
underneath?"

Tom thought
about it for a couple of seconds, frowning down at the ruined
photograph with his chin in his hand. "The computer can extrapolate
from me bits and pieces that are still visible— suggest a
reconstruction. There's so much damage here it'll probably offer
several versions of the original image."

"How long
would that take?"

"At least a
couple of days. It'll have to go through a lot of variations, and some
of them will be worthless. To tell you the truth, nearly all of them
will be worthless."

"Are you
willing to do it?"

"Are you
kidding?" He grinned at me. "I'll start as soon as you leave. Something
bothers you about this picture, doesn't it?"

"I can't put
my finger on it," I said.

"Maybe
Bandolier originally intended to kill Stenmitz somewhere else," Tom
said, more to himself than to me. He was looking at an invisible point
in space, like a cat.

Then he
focused on me again. "Why did Fee kill April Ransom?"

"To finish
what his father started?"

"Did you read
that book I gave you?"

We looked at
each other for a moment. Finally I said, "You think that Franklin
Bachelor could be Fee Bandolier?"

"I'm sure of
it," Tom said. "I bet that Fee called his father twice, in '70 and '71,
and that's why Bob changed his phone number. When Bob died, Fee
inherited the house and sold it to Elvee."

"Can you get
into the draft records from Tangent? We know Fee enlisted under another
name right after he graduated from high school, in 1961."

"None of that
information was ever computerized. But if you'd be willing to make a
little trip, there's a good chance we could find out."

"You want me
to go to Tangent?"

"I looked
through almost every issue of the Tangent
Herald
published during the
late sixties. I finally managed to find the name of the head of the
local draft board, Edward Hubbel. Mr. Hubbel retired from the hardware
business about ten years ago, but he's still living in his own home,
and he's quite a character."

"Wouldn't he
give you the information over the phone?"

"Mr. Hubbel
is a little cranky. Apparently, war protestors gave him a lot of
trouble during the late sixties. Someone tried to blow up the draft
office in 1969, and he's still mad. Even after I explained that I was
writing a book about the careers of veterans from various areas, he
refused to talk to me unless I saw him in person. But he said he kept
his own records of every boy from Tangent who went into the army while
he ran the board, and if someone will take the trouble to see him in
person, he'll make the effort of checking his files."

"So you do
want me to go to Tangent," I said.

"I booked a
ticket on a flight for eleven o'clock tomorrow. If the fog lifts, you
can be back for dinner."

"What name
did you use?"

"Yours," he
said. "He won't talk to anyone but a veteran."

"Okay. I'll
go to Tangent. Now will you tell me what you found in the police
records in Allentown, Pennsylvania?"

"Sure," he
said. "Nothing."

I stared at
him. Tom was almost hugging himself in self-satisfaction.

"And that's
the information you uncovered? Could you explain why that's so
wonderful?"

"I didn't
find anything in the police records because I don't have any access to
them. You can't get there from here. I had to do it the hard way,
through the newspapers."

"So you
looked in the newspaper and found Jane Wright." He shook his head, but
he was still bubbling over with suppressed delight.

"I don't get
it," I said.

"I didn't
find Jane Wright anywhere, remember? So I went back to the Allentown,
Pennsylvania, records for anything that even looked close to the name
and date on that piece of paper you found in the Green Woman."

Tom grinned
at me again and stood up to walk around the side of the chesterfield.
He picked up a manila folder lying next to the computer keyboard on his
desk and tucked it under his elbow.

"Our man
wants to keep a narrative account of every murder he's done as a kind
of written memory. At the same time, someone as intelligent as Fee
might work out a way to defuse these records, to make them harmless if
anyone else found them. If he turned his own records into a kind of
code, he'd have it both ways."

"A code? You
mean, change the names or the dates?"

"Exactly. I
ploughed through microfilm of the Allentown paper from the
mid-seventies. And in the papers from May 1978, I came across a very
likely little murder."

"Same month,
one year off."

"The victim's
name was Judy Rollin. Close enough to Jane Wright to suggest it, but so
different that it amounts to a good disguise." He took the folder from
under his elbow, opened it up, and took out the sheet of paper on the
bottom. Then he walked back to me and handed me the file. "Take a look."

I opened the
file, which held copies of three pages of newsprint. Tom had circled
one story on each page. The pages had been reduced in size, and the
type was just large enough to be read without a magnifying glass. On
the first page, the circled story was about the discovery by three
teenage boys of the corpse of a young woman who had been knifed to
death and then dumped behind an abandoned steel mill. The second story
gave the dead woman's name as Judy Rollin, twenty-six, a divorced
hairdresser employed at the Hi-Tone Hair Salon last seen at Cookie's, a
club five miles from the old steel mill. Mrs. Rollin had gone to the
club with two friends who had gone home together, leaving her behind.
The third article, headed
DOOMED BY LIFE IN THE FAST LANE
,
was a salacious description of both Judy Rollin and Cookie's. The dead
woman had indulged in drugs and alcohol, and the club was said to be "a
well-known place of assignation for drug dealers and their customers."

The last
article was
ARRESTED GOOD-TIME GIRL MURDERED KILLS SELF IN CELL
.
A bartender at Cookie's named Raymond Bledsoe had hanged himself in his
cell after confessing to Mrs. Rollin's murder. An informant had
provided police with information that Bledsoe regularly sold cocaine to
the victim, and Mrs. Rollin's handbag had been found in the trunk of
his car. The detective in charge of the case said, "Unfortunately, it
isn't possible for us to provide full-time surveillance for everyone
who expresses an unwillingness to spend the rest of their lives in
prison." The name of the detective was Paul Fontaine.

I handed the
sheet of paper back to Tom, who slid it into his file.

"Paul
Fontaine," I said. I felt a strange sense of letdown, almost of
disappointment.

"So it seems.
I'm going to do some more checking, but…" Tom shrugged and spread out
his hands.

"He was so
confident that he'd never get caught that he didn't bother changing his
name when he came to Millhaven." Then I remembered the last time I'd
seen Fontaine. "My God, I asked him if he'd ever heard of Elvee
Holdings."

"He still
doesn't know how close we are. Fontaine just wants you to get out of
town. If we can get our friend in Tangent to identify him as Franklin
Bachelor, we'll have a real weapon in our hands. And maybe you could
fit in a visit to Judy Leatherwood, too."

"I suppose
you have a picture," I said.

Tom nodded
and went back to his desk to pick up a manila envelope. "I clipped this
out of the
Ledger
."

I opened the
envelope and took out the photograph of Paul Fontaine standing in front
of Walter Dragonette's house in the midst of a lot of other officers.
Then I looked back up at Tom and said that Judy Leatherwood wasn't
going to believe that I was showing her the photograph to straighten
out an insurance matter.

"That part's
up to you." Tom said. "You have a well developed imagination, don't
you?"

The last
thing he said to me before he closed the door was "Be careful." I
didn't think he was talking about driving in the fog

The flight to
Tangent, Ohio, took off at twelve fifty-five, nearly two hours late.
For most of the morning, I thought the plane would never leave, and I
kept calling the airport to see if the flight had been cancelled. A
young man at the ticket counter assured me that although some arriving
aircraft had been rerouted, there were no problems with takeoffs. So
while John took a cab to the suburbs to pick up his wife's car, I drove
out to the airport at a rousing twenty-five miles an hour, passed a
couple of fender-benders without having one, and left the Pontiac in
the long-term parking garage.