Read Online The Throat by Peter Straub - Free Book Online

that year, but I read
nothing as avidly as I did the Ledger .
It was terrible, it was tragic, but it was all such a tremendous story.
It became my story, the story that most opened up the world for me.
    As each installment of William Damrosch's story appeared in the Ledger , I cut it out and pasted it
into an already bulging scrapbook. When discovered, this scrapbook
caused some excitement. Mom thought that a seven-year-old so interested
in awfulness must be awful himself; Dad thought the whole thing was a
damn shame. It was over his head, out of his hands. He gave up on
everything, including us. He lost his elevator operator job at the St.
Alwyn and moved out. Even before he was fired from the St. Alwyn, he
had given indications of turning into one of the winos who hung out in
Dead Man's Tunnel, and after he had been fired and moved into a
tenement on Oldtown Way, he slipped among them for a time. Dad did not
drink in Dead Man's Tunnel. He carried his pint bottle wrapped in a
brown paper bag to other places around the Valley and the near south
side, but his clothes grew dirty and sour, he seldom shaved, he began
to look old and hesitant.
    The front pages of the Ledger that I pasted into my Blue Rose scrapbook described how the homicide
detective in charge of the murder investigation had been found seated
at his desk in his shabby basement apartment with a bullet hole in his
right temple. It was the day before Christmas. The Ledger being what it was, the blood
and other matter on the wall beside the body was not unrecorded.
Detective Damrosch's service revolver, a Smith & Wesson .38 from
which a single shot had been fired, was dangling from his right hand.
On the desk in front of the detective was a bottle of Three Feathers
bourbon, all but empty, an empty glass, a pen and a rectangular sheet
of paper torn from a notebook, also on the desk. The words BLUE
ROSE had been printed on the paper in block capitals. Sometime between three
and five o'clock in the morning, Detective Damrosch had finished his
whiskey, written two words on a sheet of notebook paper, and by
committing suicide confessed to the murders he had been supposed to
solve.
    Sometimes life is like a book.

    The headlines that followed traced out Detective William Damrosch's
extraordinary background. His real name was Carlos Rosario, not William
Damrosch, and he had been not so much born as propelled into the world
on a freezing January wind—some anonymous citizen had seen the
half-dead child on the frozen bank of the Millhaven River. The citizen
called the police from the telephone booth in the Green Woman Taproom.
When the police scrambled down from the bridge to rescue the baby, they
found his mother, Carmen Rosario, stabbed to death beneath the bridge.
The crime was never solved: Carmen Rosario was an illegal immigrant
from Santo Domingo and a prostitute, and the police made only
perfunctory efforts to find her killer. The nameless child, who was
called Billy by the social worker who had taken him from the police,
was placed into a series of foster homes. He grew up to be a violent,
sexually uncertain teenager whose intelligence served mainly to get him
into trouble. Given the choice of prison or the army, he chose the
army; and his life changed. By now he was Billy Damrosch, having taken
the name of his last foster father, and Billy Damrosch could use his
intelligence to save his life. He came out of the army with a box full
of medals, a scattering of scars, and the intention of becoming a
policeman in Millhaven. Now, with the prescience of hindsight, I think
he wanted to come back to Millhaven to find out who had killed his
mother.
    According to the police, he could not have killed April, because
Bill Damrosch only killed people he knew.
    Monty Leland, who had been killed in front of the Idle Hour, was a
small-time criminal, one of Damrosch's informants. Early in his career,
before his transfer from the vice squad, Damrosch had many times
arrested Arlette