Read Online The Throat by Peter Straub - Free Book Online Page A

Monaghan, the prostitute slashed to death behind the
St. Alwyn, a tenuous link considering that other vice squad officers
past and present had arrested her as often. It was assumed that James
Treadwell, the piano player in Glenroy Breakstone's band, had been
murdered because he had seen Damrosch kill Arlette.
    The most telling connections between Detective Damrosch and the
people he murdered entered with the remaining two victims.
    Five years before the murders began, Buzz Laing had lived for a year
with William Damrosch. This information came from a housekeeper Dr.
Laing had fired. They was more than friends, the housekeeper declared,
because I never had to change more than one set of sheets, and I can
tell you they fought like cats and dogs. Or dogs and dogs. Millhaven is
a conservative place, and Buzz Laing lost half of his patients.
Fortunately, he had private money—the same money that had paid for the
disgruntled housekeeper and the big house on the lake—and after a
while, most of his patients came back to him. For the record, Laing
always insisted that it was not William Damrosch who had tried to kill
him. He had been attacked from behind in the dark, and he had passed
out before he was able to turn around, but he was certain that his
attacker had been larger than himself. Buzz Laing was six feet two, and
Damrosch was some three inches shorter. But it was the detective's
relationship with the last victim of the Blue Rose murderer that spoke
loudest. You will already have guessed that Billy Damrosch was one of
the wretched boys who passed through the ungentle hands of Heinz
Stenmitz. By now, Stenmitz was a disgraced man. He had been sent to the
state penitentiary for child molestation after a suspicious social
worker named Dorothy Greenglass had finally discovered what he had been
doing to the children in his care. During his year in jail, his wife
continued to work in the butcher shop while broadcasting her
grievances—her husband, a God-fearing hardworking Christian man, had
been railroaded by liars and cheats. Some of her customers believed
her. After Stenmitz came home, he went back behind the counter as if
nothing had happened. Other people remembered the testimony of the
social worker and the few grown boys who had agreed to speak for the
prosecution.
    It was what you would expect—one of those tormented boys had come
back to exact justice. He had wanted to forget what he had done—he
hated the kind of man Stenmitz had turned him into. It was tragic.
Decent people would put all this behind them and go back to normal life.
    But I turned the pages of my scrapbook over and over, trying to find
a phrase, a look in the eye, a curl of the mouth, that would tell me if
William Damrosch was the man I had seen in the tunnel with my sister.
    When I tried to think about it, I heard great wings beating in my
head.
    I thought of April sailing on before me into that world of
annihilating light, the world no living person is supposed to know.
William Damrosch had killed Heinz Stenmitz, but I did not know if he
had killed my sister. And that meant that April was sailing forever
into that realm I had glimpsed.
    So of course I saw her ghost sometimes. When I was eight I turned
around on a bus seat and saw April four rows back, her pale face turned
toward the window. Unable to breathe, I faced forward again. When I
turned back around, she was gone. When I was eleven I saw her standing
on the lower deck of the double-decker ferry that was taking my mother
and myself across Lake Michigan. I saw her carrying a single loaf of
French bread to a car in the parking lot of a Berkeley grocery store.
She appeared among a truckful of army nurses at Camp Crandall in
Vietnam —a nine-year-old blond girl in the midst of the uniformed
nurses, looking at me with an unsmiling face. I have seen her twice,
riding by in passing taxis, in New York City. Last year, I was flying
to London on British Airways, and I turned around in my seat to look
for