Ten Little New Yorkers (12 page)

T
here'd been another murder, all right, and Cooperman's grim mood spoke worlds that it must've been a doozy. Cooperman had been on the circuit for a while and seen just about everything. If I hadn't known better I would've said that he seemed almost a bit shaken up over recent events. For a pro like him, it was highly unusual. He grilled us for a while—where we were last night; where we were this morning; what we did; who we did it with. Maybe it was me, but it didn't really seem as if his heart was in it. But all that was about to change. And fast.

“Victim's name was Ron Lucas,” Cooperman intoned. “Lived near here on Bank Street. Died sometime around midnight or the early hours of the morning.”

“How do you know it's connected to the other murders?” asked Ratso.

“We'll get to that, pal,” said Cooperman, raising his hand like a traffic cop to encourage Ratso to pull his lips together.

Up to this point, I had taken some comfort from Ratso's presence in the loft. It hadn't really changed the cops' methodology. Anderson was milling about, after spending some time adjusting the position of the puppethead on the fireplace mantel. Cooperman, as always, when he really had something, was taking his sweet time. But Ratso did provide a buffer to what certainly would have been more intense scrutiny upon the Kinkster had he not been there. Unfortunately, he did not really know how or when to talk to a cop. He conversed with them just like they were normal people, which, of course, is always a rather tragic mistake.

“How many cigars you got at the moment?” Cooperman suddenly asked.

“Enough,” I said. “I don't know exactly. They're in Sherlock's head.”

“They're where?”

“On the desk. In Sherlock's head.”

“All Cubans?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I'm not supporting their economy; I'm burning their fields.”

“You got those kind where one end's shaped like a torpedo?”

“Yeah.”

“What're they called?”

“Lots of Cuban cigars are shaped like a torpedo. What I have in stock are Montecristo Number 2's. What is this? A customs bust?”

“Mind if I have a look at one? The Montecristo Number 2?”

“No problem,” I said, and I walked over to the desk, lifted Sherlock's cap, and peered down into the empty space where anybody who chooses to be a private investigator keeps his brains. I didn't like the way Cooperman was dragging this out. It was mildly troubling to me because I suspected it was building to something that I wasn't going to want to put in my pipe and smoke. There were fewer cigars in there than I'd thought, but that always seemed to be the case. When you smoke incessantly, you tend to lose count. I found a Monte 2 and took it over to where Cooperman was standing and forked it over to him.

“No cigar band?” he asked. “Why?”

“Because they take them off before they ship them so they can get them through customs. It's illegal, Sergeant. Do I need a lawyer present?”

“Not yet,” he said.

Cooperman called Anderson over, and holding the cigar very delicately, placed it in a plastic evidence bag. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, something was happening, but I didn't know what it was. I glanced over at Ratso. He shrugged again. Anderson went back to strolling around the loft, touching the dust on surfaces, sitting in chairs, straightening furniture, almost like a prospective buyer or a building inspector. It seemed as if it were his loft and Ratso and I were being interviewed as potential subletters. But you can't stop a cop from being a cop. It gives the appearance that you have something to hide.

You could almost smell the coal burning inside Cooperman's head, feeding the engines of doubt and truth and progress in the investigation. Like Sherlock, like myself, he wasn't yet ruling anyone or anything out. That was to his credit, I thought. Now you could almost see the steam coming out of his ears. He had to be debating how much he should say.

“Espresso anyone?” said Ratso, with an exaggerated lilt and lisp to his voice. He got no takers. Cooperman's more relaxed body language, however, seemed to indicate that he'd come to some kind of conclusion. I doubted, though, that he would really take us into his confidence. More likely, he would just give us enough rope to either hang ourselves or start up a rope factory.

“The murders seem to be getting more and more frenzied,” Cooperman said. “This last one was a zoo and a half. Rice strewn all over the place—”

“Ricin?” asked Ratso.

“Rice, you idiot!” said Cooperman, in a momentary lapse of control.

“ ‘She picks up some rice from the place where a wedding has been,' ” I recited.

“Quite,” said Anderson, who'd been listening from across the room.

“We needed the cigar for comparison purposes. The lab will soon tell us if the cigars used in the murders were Cuban.”

“How do you murder somebody with cigars?” I asked, not unreasonably.

Cooperman looked over to Anderson. Now it was Anderson's turn to shrug. Cooperman walked over to the window and looked down grimly into the darkening street. When he spoke at last, it was in a soft, almost world-weary voice.

“This sounds comical unless you've seen it with your own eyes. A guy with his hands duct-taped behind his back. Three cigars shoved down his throat. One in his mouth that had been lit but gone out. One screwed into each of his nostrils. One shoved up his ass. One screwed into each ear. Nine in all. Nine torpedo-shaped cigars without bands, which look just like the one you gave us and just like the one you're smoking now, so we suspect they're Cuban. Cigar jammed into every fucking orifice. Cause of death, asphyxiation by cigar, or multiple cigars, shoved down his throat.”

“You gotta be kiddin',” said Ratso. “No one murders somebody like that.”

“Somebody did last night on Bank Street,” said Cooperman.

“So what's the rice got to do with it?” Ratso persisted.

“We don't know,” said Cooperman. “We found a box of Uncle Ben's Instant Rice beside the body at the scene. The box had been scribbled on in a strange way and we're not sure what, if anything, it means. Where it says ‘Uncle Ben's,' the ‘U' has been enclosed at the top to make it an ‘O,' and the ‘n,' ‘c,' and ‘e' have been marked out. Also, the apostrophe and the ‘s' at the end of Ben's have been marked out. So it reads, ‘Ol Ben,' whatever that's supposed to mean. Could be important, could be nothing.”

I had thought Ratso would pick up on it, and he did. I had hoped he would have the good sense to keep it to himself, but, of course, he didn't. I was about to say, “I'll take that espresso now,” to try to head him off at the pass, but he probably wouldn't have paid any attention anyway. His Watsonlike face was already aglow with the excitement of having put two and two together and coming up with Catch-22. He was so clueless there was just no stopping him when he thought he'd discovered a clue.

“Hey, wait a minute!” Ratso shouted. “This guy's name was Lucas?”

“That's right,” said Anderson, who'd wandered back over. “Ron Lucas.”

“That's it!” Ratso shouted again. “That's why the Uncle Ben's rice was used! The letters were changed to Ol Ben and the guy's last name was Lucas!”

“And?” said Cooperman, beginning to become irritated with Ratso.

“Don't you see?” Ratso crowed. “It's ‘Ol' Ben Lucas'! It's one of the Kinkstah's most famous songs! It's the first song he ever wrote!”

“It's a stupid song,” I said, trying to deflect where this was going. “I wrote it when I was eleven years old.”

“It means the killer knew Kinky's song!” Ratso nattered on, totally oblivious to how deeply enmeshed I was becoming in the dragnet that was Cooperman's mind.

“ ‘Ol' Ben Lucas',” said Cooperman slowly, trying it on for size.

“Maybe the song had something to do with the killer screwing the cigars into Lucas's nostrils?” Ratso suggested.

“Maybe it had something to do with the killer shoving the cigar up his ass,” I said.

But nobody was listening. Ratso was breaking his arm patting himself on the back for discovering such an important and vital clue. The two homicide dicks, to my horror, appeared to be taking Ratso a good bit more seriously now.

“ ‘Ol' Ben Lucas',” Cooperman said again, directing his full attention to Ratso. “Think you could hum a few bars?”

“Actually, we'll need the lyrics, too,” put in Anderson, moving closer to Ratso.

“Well, I don't know,” said Ratso, with mock humility. “I can't really sing that well.”

“It's a stupid song,” I said. Nobody heard me.

“You do
know
the song?” Cooperman asked Ratso.

“Of course!” said Ratso. “Everybody does.”

“At least you and the killer know it,” said Cooperman. “And, of course, Tex here, who, you say,
wrote
it?”

“When he was eleven years old,” said Ratso, beaming with all the admiration of a proud parent.

“Come on,” said Cooperman to Ratso. “Sing a little bit of it.”

“Okay,” said Ratso, like a nervous contestant in some game show. “Here goes.”

With that he sang the chorus of the song for the cops. He gave a flawless performance, I had to admit. Any five-year-old, of course, could have done the same. What Ratso sang is as follows:

“That's it?” said Cooperman after a long pause. He looked like somebody had hit him with a hammer.

“Yeah,” said Ratso. “That was the chorus.”

“It's a catchy little booger,” said Cooperman, egging Ratso on. “And who said you couldn't sing? You were great. Wasn't he great, Sergeant?”

“Best thing I've heard since Joey Ramone died,” said Anderson.

“That was the chorus,” said Cooperman. “How many verses are there?”

“One,” said Ratso, a bit defensively, I thought.

“One chorus, one verse,” said Cooperman, almost gleefully. “We've heard the chorus, let's hear the verse. C'mon. Don't be shy. Let 'er rip.”

For a moment I thought Ratso was beginning to dimly suspect that this whole thing might not have been such a great idea. Perhaps he could see me in the background giving him the dagger-across-the-
throat sign. Perhaps he'd come to realize on his own that this audience was not a group of relatives at a bar mitzvah party. This was the literal-minded, anal-retentive, humorless, colorless, culture-bound, park-between-the-lines law. I saw by the look in his eyes that he wasn't exactly sure whether or not these were his people. But now, of course, it was too late. He soldiered on.

“ ‘When it's cotton-pickin' time in Texas,' ” he sang, “ ‘it's booger-pickin' time for Ben.' ”

Cooperman was clapping his hands in encouragement and nodding over to Anderson to join in. And my mind was whirring with only one thought: The killer knew the fucking song.

Cooperman applauded the little performance heartily. Sergeant Anderson joined in. Ratso was back to being Ratso. Once again, he trusted his crowd. He was luxuriating in this spectacle, like Wayne Newton on a Vegas Saturday night, even throwing a little salute to his audience. He did everything but blow kisses. Then Cooperman stopped applauding and turned to me.

“Goddamnit, Tex,” he said ruefully. “I almost thought you were out of it.”

T
he good news, I suppose, was that Cooperman didn't take me out of there in bracelets that night. He merely warned me once again not to leave the city. Most New Yorkers, of course, would've found a warning like that to be quite unnecessary, even redundant. Most of them believe that if they ever left the city, they'd fall right off the face of the earth. That's how far we've come. I'd come pretty far myself, I thought, as pertains to the matter at hand. I had my own ideas about where the investigation into the six murders was leading, and, of course, the cops had theirs. They believed that I, or one of my minions, was the perpetrator. Oddly enough, I did not necessarily disagree with them.

The “Ol' Ben Lucas Clue,” as Ratso now referred to it, was ridiculous on the face of it. There were people all over the world who'd been practically raised with the song by their hip, baby-boomer parents. The parents, no doubt, were pretty much beyond the age profile of serial killers. But infants back in the seventies and eighties whose folks had been fans of the Kinkster's fell perfectly into the age range. And the song, deceptively simple in music and lyrics, like a slightly twisted childhood nursery rhyme, stayed with you for life. Unfortunately, it had gotten very little radio play over the years, having been passed along in the oral tradition from parents to their children. Therefore, it had not been a financial pleasure for the Kinkster.

While the song seemed absurd, both as a song and as a clue to a horrific string of murders, it might, I reflected, be the perfect sound-track for a psychopathic mind. Then, if you added the “death by cigar” angle to the “Ol' Ben Lucas Clue,” well, I was forced to admit you were starting to get precariously close to the Kinkster's ZIP code. Was somebody trying to implicate me? Was somebody merely taunting my vaunted powers of observation as a much-celebrated amateur private investigator? Or was it possible that there existed in this universe a serial killer discerning in terms of music and cigars who, though obviously quite bitter, had somehow managed to retain his sense of humor?

There was another little matter I was wrangling with in the days immediately following the visit from Cooperman. It was my growing belief that I was now being kept under surveillance by the NYPD. You could call it paranoia and you might be right, but there were too many little giveaways for me to discount the idea. I'm not contending that they had had a tail on me since childhood, though knowing Cooperman and Fox it was certainly possible; I'm simply wondering why they didn't approach Ratso when he was waiting for me in front of the building? The logical answer is that by that time they were already tailing me, thus accounting for Cooperman's quick knock on the door only minutes after my return to the loft.

And where the hell was Fox? I'd asked Cooperman and he'd been very vague. And Anderson was some kind of tech, apparently. Not that his behavior had been particularly uncoplike, but he had wandered all over the loft, precisely in the manner of someone whose job it was to surreptitiously hide a bug—and I'm not talking about a cockroach. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that the loft, indeed, had been bugged. It wouldn't be the first time, of course. Rambam had even surreptitiously bugged the place once himself, in the affair McGovern had faithfully chronicled and dubbed “Spanking Watson.” An electronic bug could present problems, all right, but at least I could check to determine its presence, and if in fact it was there, I could either remove it or possibly use it to my own advantage.

Being tailed was another matter, however. Rambam, I knew, was a master at detecting a tail, eluding a tail, and, of course, getting lots of tail. Unfortunately, Rambam was currently somewhere in Cambodia, busy with a challenging case of grand theft water buffalo. I couldn't just call him on the shoe phone, so I had to rely on my own rudimentary surveillance skills. Or maybe not. In a flash, I called Kent Perkins, my left coast PI, who'd played a seminal role in a recent adventure McGovern had tediously scrutinized and titled “The Prisoner of Vandam Street.” I couldn't very well call Kent from the loft to discuss being bugged if, indeed, I'd been bugged. So I put on my colorful Indian longcoat and got my cowboy hat and grabbed a few cigars out of Sherlock's head. I would be easy to spot, but what the hell. I was only going to take a brisk walk to a pay phone somewhere, and if they could spot me, maybe I could spot them. Too bad they didn't make rearview mirrors for cowboy hats.

I started to leave the cat in charge but quickly realized once again that that would not be possible. It's funny how we seem to internalize all the things that really matter. Creatures of narrow habit. Creatures of sad habit.

I ankled it down the stairs and out into the street. It was the middle of the afternoon and what appeared to be a plain-wrapped squad car was parked about a hundred yards to my left. A guy inside looked up casually and then turned his attention, perhaps a little too quickly, back to reading a newspaper. I hooked a right and goose-stepped for the corner.