Ten Little New Yorkers (14 page)

A
fter McGovern had left for work, I lay on the couch for a while staring at the photo of Carole Lombard that hung on the brick wall next to the fireplace. Something about her eyes reminded me of someone. Was it Heather, or was it someone I loved long ago and was lucky enough to still love today? Or was it someone else? I wasn't sure, but whoever it was, she was trying to tell me something. This made no sense at all, of course, but that's how I read it. A woman I knew, or had once known, was trying to communicate with my soul through the eyes of a dead movie star. What's wrong with that? It wasn't half as crazy as this murder investigation. The dead bodies were stacking up all over the Village, it seemed, and the two entities that might have half a chance of catching the killer, the NYPD and the Kinkster, were sharing information almost as well as the FBI and the CIA. And the murders were happening so fast it was almost like the killer was expecting to be caught. The only thing I felt certain of was that the killer would not stop until apprehended. An artist knows when to stop; a killer never does.

It's the little things, they say, that are important in life. The little things, of course, are also important in death. Based solely on the sketchy nature of McGovern's initial sources, it was very difficult to draw a great deal of enlightenment. In other words, I needed what the cops had. Conversely, they needed what I had, though, no doubt, they didn't quite see it that way. It was a shame we both weren't better team players.

As I saw it, my options were quite few. If the cops were actively looking for me, the loft on Vandam Street would most certainly be staked out. So I could hole up at McGovern's for a while, then move from safe house to safe house like a good Robin Hood or a bad Saddam. It was unlikely, however, that the case was ever going to be solved if my lifestyle devolved to that of a fugitive from justice. Sooner or later, it appeared, I would have to confront the authorities and face the music. Parking my ego at the door, it was nevertheless my firm opinion that, unless they got very lucky, the NYPD was not likely to bring this killer to justice.

In the past there were many times when I hadn't seen eye to eye with Detective Sergeants Cooperman and Fox and their minions, but this was the first time I'd been so totally shut out of the crime scenes, so utterly excommunicated from the official investigation. Kent Perkins had said that it appeared as if I were being framed, but I didn't quite see it that way. It felt more to me like I was being taunted. Arrogance, indubitably, is the hallmark of every murderer. This one seemed to be challenging me to take my best shot.

From the vantage point of McGovern's couch I reviewed what I knew of the victims, the clues, the virtual leap of deduction I would have to make, not being privy to all the pieces of the puzzle. Beginning with the very first victim's wallet being discovered in my loft, the case had started by drawing me into it, and now had transformed itself into some fashion of horrific tarbaby that seemed determined not to let me go. Where did one find a knitting needle in the haystack of the city? Where did one find the savagery to drive it into a victim's brain? The anger to lop a man's shillelagh off and let him bleed to death? To waste nine good Cuban cigars in the wasting of a human being was an act of unspeakable evil. I thought again of Ratso obliviously singing the catchy, if somewhat crude, little children's song to the cops. As author of “Ol' Ben Lucas,” I rather resented its use to mock the dead. But it was unmistakable. Converting the Uncle Ben's Rice box to read Ol Ben. The victim's name had been Lucas. The killer knew the song. The killer knew I smoked Cuban cigars. Did that, of itself, mean that the killer necessarily knew me? Could he be a vigilante, I thought, of the very worst, most primitive kind? A killer who, indeed, may walk about in society while inside, his mind and his soul are unraveling into the depths of depravity? Carole Lombard caught my eye again. What was she trying to tell me?

I must have nodded out for a while, because when McGovern suddenly burst into the place much earlier than I'd expected, I almost did a double-back-flip off the couch. He seemed to be in a state of almost unbridled excitement as he helped me up from the floor. I took a seat finally in an overstuffed rocking chair beside a pile of old newspapers that seemed to reach the sky.

“What the hell is it, McGovern?” I said at last.

“The note!” he ejaculated. “The note!”

“What note?”

“The one that was found beside the body of the seventh murder victim.”

“Ah, yes, Watson. The much-heralded hate mail from the hand of a killer.”

“A source at the NYPD just provided me with the information with the express understanding that it is to be off the record and not to be printed.”

“Very wise, Watson, very wise.”

“I didn't want to reveal the note's contents over the phone, so I rushed right over.”

“Very wise, Watson, very wise.”

“Okay. You're sitting down. You're ready for this?” McGovern flipped through his little reporter's notebook.

“I've been ready for about fifty-nine years, Watson. What the hell did the note say?”

“Hang on a minute. Let me find it.” He flipped frantically through the notebook.

“Watson, your organizational skills are to be highly commended. You are a veritable machine, my dear friend.”

“I copied the note verbatim from my source. Just a minute. I had it right here.”

“I'll probably have passed away before you find it.”

“Here it is!” said McGovern triumphantly, the big man holding the tiny notebook in the air. “Ready for this?”

“No,” I said. “Give me a little time to prepare myself.”

McGovern walked purposefully to the center of the room. Holding the notebook in front of him with both hands so as not to miss a word, he read as follows:

“ ‘When it gets too kinky for the rest of the world, it's getting just right for me.' ”

A
fter McGovern had triumphantly trotted back to work, I was left to ponder the imponderables. I figured that the little homicide note chased away any lingering doubts the NYPD might've had about the Kinkster's involvement in the case. They had their person of interest and that was me. I couldn't really blame Cooperman. If I'd been him I would've thought the same. From the dead man's wallet in the loft, to the “Ol' Ben Lucas” scenario, to my eluding police surveillance at precisely the wrong window of time, to the general kinky quality of the crimes themselves, to “When it gets too kinky for the rest of the world, it's getting just right for me,” there was a pattern here that even Ratso couldn't have missed. Whether I'd done the crimes myself (which, of course, I hadn't), or whether I was merely being set up, I could see why I'd become the principal person of interest in the eyes of the cops. I had to admit that even I was getting a little interested in myself.

Not long after the door had slammed on McGovern's large, luminous, white buttocks, I broke into his bottle of Black Bush and began pacing back and forth across the little apartment. I had to be sure, I thought. And to be sure, I had to get into the mind of the killer. A murderer who was taunting someone was different from a murderer who was trying to frame someone, even though it was too nuanced a point to register heavily with the cops. The difference, however, was crucial because it went to motivation. When it comes to crime-solving, I'll take motivation every time. Carole Lombard smiled that smart, savvy smile at me and I knew I was on the right track.

I drank some more of McGovern's snakepiss and I thought again about the note left at the scene of the crime. It meant a lot more to me than it did, no doubt, to the cops. It was a line from a fairly obscure song on a fairly obscure album I'd recorded almost thirty years ago. The song was called “Kinky” and it was written by the great Ronnie Hawkins. We'd recorded the song at Shangri-La, The Band's private studio near Malibu. The musicians included Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, Lowell George, Ron Wood, Van Dyke Parks, Dr. John, Ringo Starr, and Eric Clapton. Some are dead and some are living. In my life I've loved them all.

Yet while “Ol' Ben Lucas” was known to half the civilized world, with the possible exception of Sergeant Cooperman, who was, apparently, ignorant of my talents, the same could not be said for “Kinky.” “Kinky,” for all its merits, was a song known only by that small, twisted group of people I like to refer to as “insects trapped in amber.” This constituted a very tiny universe, indeed. If the killer knew the song, he very likely knew more about me than I knew about myself. Either the murderer had known me for a long time, or else he'd really done his homework. Today, of course, with the Internet, any serial killer worth the name can easily bone up on his field of study. That widened the universe a little, but only a little. The thing that was truly haunting me, however, was not the scenario of the killer knowing a lot about me. It was the feeling, based purely on the abstract nature of the crimes, that I knew the killer.

By the time McGovern returned that evening, the bottle of Black Bush was almost empty and Carole Lombard had started winking at me, which I took as a sign. Over the years and miles, from the world of the dead to the world of the dimly lit, she knew something, all right. And this time, though I may have been walking on my knuckles, I had more than an inkling that I knew what it was.

“Here's my question,” I said to McGovern, as he lumbered in the door. “Just how well do we truly know the people who are closest to us?”

“Here's my question,” said McGovern, as he walked through the small living room into the even smaller kitchen. “What happened to my nearly full bottle of Black Bush?”

“Whether the bottle is nearly full or nearly empty depends on how you look at it.”

“I can see that you've been doing more than looking at it.”

“Damn straight. That bottle of Irish whisky, Carole Lombard, and I have pretty well determined the identity of the killer, or at least I've narrowed it down to a precious few.”

“That's amazing, Sherlock,” said McGovern, with a heavy overlay of facetiousness. “With only the dribs and drabs of information you've received regarding the crime scenes, most of it provided by myself, I might add, you've nailed the killer. Mind telling me how you managed to accomplish that feat?”

“You know I never reveal my methods, Watson. Not only that, but I'm certain this villain wears a mask, Watson. A familiar mask, even a friendly one. The good news is, that even with this Agatha Christie–like cornucopia of dead bodies lying all around us, our dedicated little perpetrator's work is not yet complete. The only way to prove the identity of our little problem child, Watson, is to catch the fiend red-handed. Do you follow me, Watson?”

“I can't follow you, the way you're pacing back and forth. There'd be no room to turn around. We'd bump into each other.”

“Good point, Watson. Your rapierlike grasp of a situation at hand always ceases to amaze me.”

“What do we do now, Sherlock?”

“We finish the Black Bush, Watson.”

“I'll get out the magnifying glasses.”

There are conventional ways of solving life's little problems, and then there are unconventional ways. Crime-solving is no different. You can paint by the numbers, you can color between the lines, you can borrow somebody's notes for Abnormal Psychology 101. You can join the police academy, you can become a federal agent and wear a certain kind of sunglasses, you can follow all the rules, connect all the dots, and finally, you'll get to a place where you never question authority because you are the authority. In the matter at hand I did not have the luxury of employing any of this esteemed methodology. All I could do, in fact, was frisbee my soul into hell in the hope some three-headed, flatulent dog might catch it.

O
ne definite advantage of having a very small circle of friends is that it lessens the possibility that one of them might be a serial killer. Nonetheless, these days, who can be completely sure? During the height of my Peruvian marching powder days, I performed regularly on Sunday nights at the Lone Star Café. The place was architected in such a weird way that only the downstairs bartender had an unobscured view of the stage, but everybody could see every patron as they came through the revolving doors and moved gingerly past the narrow catwalk between the bar and the stage. Many strange people came through those doors those nights, strangers to me, strangers possibly to themselves, resembling Latin American drug kingpins and mild-mannered shoe salesmen with dark sides of their lives bigger than Dallas. Sometimes, when a really wiggy stranger came in, I would cry out from the microphone in a frightening falsetto like a deranged mynah bird, “I know your secret!” This always got a laugh from the crowd, but was also dangerous because, especially in those drug-addled, highly paranoid times, just about everybody did have a secret and some of them were darker, indeed, than the dark side of the moon, or a marriage, or a garbage truck. I, alone, did not have a secret. That's because, to paraphrase Ted Mann, the only secrets I kept were the ones I'd forgotten.

I spent only a few days hiding out at McGovern's but, because of McGovern, and the small size of the apartment, it felt more like the tedious, interminable time frame of the Peloponnesian Wars. To be totally fair to McGovern, he was providing me with what little news I could obtain regarding the murder spree, which relegated me pretty much to the situation of the blind man and the elephant. Added to that, I also knew, like everybody else, what I read in the papers. Unfortunately, most of what I had read was written by McGovern. This is not to say that McGovern wasn't a good, even a great, journalist; it's just never really best foot forward for the fountainhead of all knowledge to be derived from a large Irishman who once combed his hair before meeting a racehorse.

I had my own ideas, of course, as to the identity of the killer, but I still had to rule out what was impossible, thereby leaving me only with what was possible, thereby removing all questions and doubt and leaving only a fine residue of ennui and unpleasantness. I began by running up McGovern's phone bill, calling everyone and anyone I knew who might be capable of saying, “More eggnog?” This included Washington Ratso, who had an alibi because he lived and worked in Washington, Will Hoover, who had an alibi because he lived and worked in Hawaii, Kent Perkins, Dr. Jim Bone, Roscoe West, Billy Swan, the aforementioned Ted Mann, John Mankiewicz, Dylan Ferrero, Dwight Yoakam, Bob Dylan, Hitler, Jesus Christ, and Butch Huff from Ashland, Kentucky. They all knew me well but they hadn't the means to have created a necklace of necrology in New York. To borrow a tiresome sports analogy, I was touching all bases. Some of the bases became slightly incredulous and mildly irritated when they began to discern the true purpose of my call, but when you're an amateur private investigator on the run from the cops, that comes with the territory.

Then I got down to dealing with that small, finite universe of people who did have the means, those who lived and worked, or shirked, in New York. Like I said, mine was an asymmetrical campaign, performed without the massive data, manpower, or authority at the beck and call of the NYPD. More than ever I was relying on cowboy logic, native sensitivity, androgynous intuition, hints, suspicions, gut feelings, personal experience, and other, more spiritually abstract whims and pet peeves that, no doubt, neither Sherlock nor Nero Wolfe would have countenanced. Some would point out, of course, that both of those great men were fictional characters. To this, I would respond that the world of fiction and the world of nonfiction are overlapping worlds in which much of what comprises the nonfiction world may not be true, and much of what makes up the world of fiction may, indeed, be true if the reader knows how to read between the lines. Hopefully, there will be more than one reader. And so it was that I navigated between these worlds in much the way I'd done for most of my life, ever aware of the little-known fact that many centuries ago Tahitian sailors were believed to have made their way to the Hawaiian Islands in rudimentary canoes, and these noble, primitive men, as they crossed thousands of miles of uncharted, often starless seas, in order to detect ever-so-subtle ocean currents, were said to have, on occasion, placed their scrotums on the wooden floors of their canoes for navigational purposes.

Calling the Village Irregulars and other close friends was a whole other help line, of course. It was hard to see any of them doing the evil deeds, but I didn't want to wind up like the nice old neighbor lady who lived next door to Charles Whitman, who climbed the Texas Tower in 1967 and shot to death sixteen people. I didn't want to be interviewed by local TV only to say, “He was such a nice boy.” The truth is they never are. Nice boys can turn evil on a rusty dime. Friends can stab you in the back. Women will betray you when you least expect it. To the cold eye of the private investigator, nothing is what it appears to be. Most people are like Ratso, living in an innocent Dr. Watson wonderland. When they visit somebody they haven't seen for some time, they always make some gushing remark such as, “I've never seen him happier in his life.” Three days later the person always blows his brains out. Ironically, the closer we get to other people, the harder it often is to see behind the mask. Yet this killer seemed almost to be speaking to me, beseeching me, screaming my name.

I narrowed the universe, smaller and smaller. All the usual suspects lived in New York. All of them had the means except Rambam, who was out of the country for several of the murders. Or at least he claimed he was. He was due back soon and I, of course, would have to check him out on his alibi, which was not going to make for a pleasant welcome home. Even McGovern and Ratso could not be overlooked. Hell, nobody could be overlooked until this killer was caught. So I went deeper into McGovern's liquor cabinet, found a bottle of Old Grandad this time, and began making some exploratory calls.

I won't bore you with the blow-by-blow details, the people who took it personally, the ones who said I belonged in a mental institution, or the methods I employed with which to extract from them the information I needed. Some, like Brennan, were downright hostile and uncooperative. Some, like Chinga, never responded to my calls at all. Few of the Irregulars, of course, had the motivation to commit these heinous acts. Few of them, indeed, had any motivation at all. The ones who did, seemed to evince little enthusiasm for my investigation. Winnie was more interested in discussing the new dance classes she was organizing. Pete Myers was consumed with his upcoming one-man motorcycle odyssey in Mexico. Besides, the blower was far from the best tool for unearthing the truth about human beings. I cradled the blower at last, sat down on the oceangoing couch, and poured a very large, adult portion of Old Grandad into an appropriately stemmed glass. I was just preparing to pour a hefty shot down my neck, when the aforementioned blower began ringing. I killed the shot, then collared the instrument. First things first.

“Start talkin',” I said, in an Old Grandad–strangled voice I hardly recognized. Evidently, the caller didn't either.

“Kinky?” asked the rather dubious female.

“Yeah, it's me. Something just went down the wrong way. Who's this?”

“Heather Lay,” she purred.

Something about the lazy, sleepy way she pronounced her name excited me. I'd been working the case pro bono, but the sound of her voice gave new meaning to the term.

“I got this number from your friend Ratso,” she said. “Or should I say Larry. When I called the number on your card and left a message and didn't hear from you, I got worried. So I looked up Larry Sloman in the phonebook and we had a long chat. You are being careful, aren't you?”

“I'm wearing my rubbers,” I said.

There was something about Heather that made me want to go on listening to her forever. I hardly knew this person, I thought, yet it felt like I'd known her all my life. She didn't behave like any other woman I'd ever met. And she didn't seem to be wearing a mask.

“Look, Kinky. Funny to call you Kinky. I hope you catch whoever it was who killed Jordan, but more important, I want you to be safe. I have to admit that Jordan's death has liberated me, and I think that all started when you visited me the other day. I knew right away that you weren't really a friend of Jordan's. You couldn't have been. You're too sweet.”

I'm not often afflicted with the condition of being at a loss for words. On this occasion, however, I could think of absolutely nothing to say. I felt deeply moved. I felt exhilarated and hopeful. I felt, well, liberated.

“Not as sweet as you,” I finally managed to mutter.

“You don't know that yet,” she said. “What're you going to do now?”

“I can't hide from life and the cops forever. I'll take you out to dinner for a big hairy steak.”

“I'm a vegetarian.”

“I'm a vagitarian.”

“Good,” she said with a shy chuckle. “We're both on healthy diets.”

“The first thing I've got to do, though, is to go back to my loft and change clothes.”

“I thought it was staked out?”

“Is there anything Ratso
didn't
tell you?”

“He didn't tell me you have brown eyes that twinkle. I saw that for myself. But won't you be arrested if you go back?”

“I don't think so. We just might have to put up with a few chaperones on our first date.”

“How romantic.”

“You see, the cops don't really want me, Heather. They just want to know what I know.”

“And what
do
you know?”

“I know who killed Jordan,” I said.