Ten Little New Yorkers (5 page)

A
s I coaxed Winnie into remaining on the line, I vowed never again to bring the blower into the dumper. It was only asking for trouble. My attempts at laying some decent cable had been totally thwarted by the call, and now, with the phone to my ear and with my jeans still around my ankles, I hopped like Hopalong Cassidy into the nearby Indian Ghost Room to determine if my wallet happened to be residing in a previously worn pant. Once I had the answer, I planned to hop right back to the dumper and resume the congressional hearing. What complicated this plan a bit was that the Black Quadruped Society, now joined by Brownie, Hank, and Lady, were all following my white luminous buttocks in single file into the Indian Ghost Room.

“What the hell do you think this is?” I shouted. “The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade?”

“What're you doin'?” asked Winnie.

“You wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“No!”

I couldn't really blame the Friedmans. They hadn't seen me in a long time and they wanted to be with me. For that matter, I wanted to be with them. I just didn't want to be hopping around with my pants down, talking to a lesbian in New York, with all of them following me like the Pied Piper of Medina. That's Texas, not Saudi Arabia.

“Where are you now?”

“I'm in the Ghost Room—”

“The what?”

“Indian Ghost Room. It's a long stultifyingly dull story. I'm searching for my previously worn pant. Ah-ha! There it is. Give me some room, will you?”

“Who are you talking to?”

“Never end a sentence in a preposition. The grammatically correct way to say that is, ‘Who are you talking to, asshole?' ”

“You took the words right out of my mouth. Who
are
you talking to, asshole?”

“I'm talking to a Russian peasant with a withered arm.”

“You sure you're not masturbating?”

“I'm looking for my goddamn wallet.”

“I already told you. I found it on the floor of your loft when I was bringing in your mail. I put it on your desk. You want me to FedEx it to you?”

“It's not my wallet.”

“Whose wallet do you think it is?”

“I'm holding my wallet in my hand! You see? It's right here. Right, everybody?”

“Who are you talking to?”

“I'm talking to a large, extended Pakistani family that came over to borrow some nuclear weapons. You see, everybody? There's my driver's license. No, that's not Sirhan Sirhan. That's me. That's my name. I did
not
forget my wallet!”

“So what's a strange wallet doing in your loft? Hey! This could be a big case for a private dick like you. ‘The Mystery of the Missing Wallet.' Your fans will stay away in droves.”

By this time I was hopping back into the dumper with many of the Friedmans mistakenly thinking it was some new kind of game, leaping up into the air, blocking my path, and pawing playfully at my scrotum. Finally, I sat back down on the throne and politely asked Winnie if she'd go back down to my loft and get the mystery wallet and call me back. She agreed, I thought, rather grudgingly, hanging up as I was still speaking to her. Moments later, I had completed my morning ablutions. Amelia Earhart appeared to be leering malevolently at me as I goose-stepped out of the dumper.

Winnie took her sweet Sapphic time to call me back. This gave me the opportunity to do a little quick deductive reasoning regarding this curious situation. There had been several rather rowdy farewell parties at the loft in the days preceding my departure. McGovern had brought what had looked like a Gray Line Tour of individuals into my place, none of whom I had ever seen before in my life. Could McGovern or one of his drunken acquaintances have dropped his wallet? Of course. That had to be the answer.

I put the matter out of my mind, made a pot of Kona coffee, and fired up my second cigar of the morning, an Epicure Number 2. What would I do without the Hawaiians and the Cubans? I thought. Probably miss out on a lot of the flavor and the smoke of life, I figured. I took the cup of steaming coffee and the cigar and walked outside the lodge with the Friedmans into the bright, frosty Hill Country morning. Now that I wasn't in New York, I reflected, having nothing to do wasn't so bad.

Yet, almost like a locked-room puzzle, the affair of the strange, intrusive wallet kept niggling at the corner of my consciousness. Was I so scattered when I left the city that I hadn't noticed it? Very possibly. Well, we'd know the answer soon. Hell, I thought, it probably belonged to McGovern. He could lose his wallet for several years and never be aware of it. That was one of the beautiful things about McGovern.

I was sitting on the old round picnic table with the Friedmans, just looking at the hills surrounding me, when the blower made its presence known again. Why did I even have a blower anymore? As Groucho Marx told me once by way of introduction, “I've already met everybody I want to meet.” He also gave me this sage advice when I met him, grudgingly as it was, in New York: “Go back to Texas.” It had taken me a while, but I now agreed with Groucho on both counts.

“Start talkin',” I said.

“Okay, I'm in your loft. It smells like a cigar died in here. But you're right. It's not your wallet.”

“Good. For a moment I was afraid I was living in a parallel universe.”

“It belongs to a guy named Robert Scalopini. Know him?”

“I think I met him once on a chafing dish. Of course I don't know him. I don't even want to know him. He's probably one of those guys McGovern dragged in before I left town. Things got a little crazy.”

“So what do you want me to do with the wallet?”

“Look, Winnie, I know you're busy, but I'm in Texas right now. Just handle it, will you? Call the guy. Call the cops. Call the Missing Wallet Bureau.”

“Sure, Sherlock,” she said scornfully. “What are neighbors for?”

T
hat afternoon I took the six Friedmans for a long walk around the ranch, leaving Lady by herself at the lodge to enjoy a little peace and quiet. I don't know whether or not you've noticed this interesting phenomenon, but it's been my observation that cats always seem to be outnumbered in this world. Cats are Indians. Cats are Jews. Cats are Negroes with the blues. Cats are poets when they choose. Of course, sometimes cats just like to snooze. We left Lady lying on a warm chair by the fire, looking like a lovely piece of living architecture.

I took the Friedmans out on the South Flat and over to Big Foot Falls, so named after Big Foot Wallace, a frontier scout who lived with the Indians. I took the Friedmans down Armadillo Canyon, so named because God saw his first armadillos there. He e-mailed Noah just in time to get the little boogers aboard the ark. Then God took a power nap for about five thousand years and woke up just in time to speak to Pat Robertson.

The Friedmans loved to go on walks. They even loved the word “walk.” I liked to go on walks, too. Sometimes they almost gave you a chance to think. After all these years, I didn't have my name on pebbled glass. I didn't have a beautiful, leggy secretary. Ratso was right. There was good reason to be depressed. Without a case to work on, I had very little to justify my existence on this planet. Ratso, to be fair, had tried his best to bolster my self-confidence by extolling the glories of the past. But I didn't really believe in yesterday. It was just another small town too far off the superhighway to bother with.

The only wisp of a mystery in the air, I reflected as we hiked up the back side of Echo Hill toward the crystal beds, was how that wallet had gotten into my loft. Was I slipping? In my haste to bugout for the dugout could I have missed something like that? It had to have been accidentally dropped by one of McGovern's buddies from the Corner Bistro. They had been fairly heavily monstered that night. For that matter, so had I. What the hell, I thought. Let Winnie handle it. Now that she was taking a sabbatical from her dance classes, she had plenty of time on her hands. She wasn't busy like me, watching the Friedmans pore over the site of the old dump. More than fifty years, shit had been crammed into that hole in the ground and burned repeatedly. The Friedmans ran back and forth over the dump excitedly like they knew something they weren't telling me, which was very possible. Mr. Magoo hiked his leg and whizzed on an old archery target. Perky was sniffing curiously at the remains of an ancient tennis shoe. Somewhere down there were half-burned relics of a bygone age, camp newspapers, menus, letters from home, written by those whose names were now written in the stars. This is how all of civilization was built, I thought. The shining city rises from the old Echo Hill dump.

“Gentlemen,” I said to the Friedmans. “And ladies, of course. Behold the future of man!”

The Friedmans looked at me rather quizzically. Then Mr. Magoo hiked his leg and whizzed on what was left of a bright-red plastic kayak.

By the time we got back to the lodge, all of us were exhausted. I made the Friedmans some bones and I made myself some coffee and, so she wouldn't feel left out, I opened a can of tuna for Lady, which she stared at briefly with a slightly bemused expression on her face before following something near the ceiling with her eyes that neither the dogs nor I could see. This was a recent and fairly unnerving habit of Lady's and, to my mind, it invariably brought on the notion of impending doom. How accurate an assessment this was I will leave to you, gentile reader, to decide. I'm a fatalist. I'm ready for anything. That's probably why it never happens.

I put a few more logs on the fire, then walked a cup of coffee and a freshly stoked cigar into the Ghost Room, where I stared down the answering machine. It blinked first. There were three messages. The first was Cousin Nancy wanting to know if I'd like to have dinner with them at the Rescue Ranch. The second was from my beautiful and brilliant friend Dr. Noreena Hertz in London. Unfortunately, her British accent was so thick I could never understand more than half of what she had to say. Maybe that was why we got along. The third was from McGovern. He sounded highly agitato so I called him back first.

“MIT! MIT! MIT!” he said. That was our international man-in-trouble secret code. McGovern, of course, began most of his calls to me that way.

“MIT!” I said, somewhat peevishly. Now that I was in the real world of Texas, I didn't feel I had a lot of time for this nonsense. Not that I was doing much of anything else.

“Twenty-four Hours to Die.”

“Say what?”

“That's the headline,” said McGovern ebulliently. “Twenty-four Hours to Die.”

“What headline?”

“The headline of the story I'm writing for the
Daily News.
”

“What's it about? The life span of the fruit fly? Hollywood love affairs?”

“No, it's about the fourth guy getting murdered here in New York. Remember I told you about those three murder victims in the Village? Well, a fourth guy got croaked yesterday.”

“So what? There's plenty more where they came from.”

“What's the matter with you, Kink? Don't you care anymore?”

“Give me a break, McGovern. I'm down here on vacation. This isn't exactly man bites dog, you know. Millions of people live in the city. Some of them are bound to get taken off the board.”

“Are you kidding? There's never been a murder spree like this in the Village. The cops are playing it very close to the vest to avoid setting off a panic. But four victims inside a week and a half? That's big news. Four victims! It's almost like the killer knew you were leaving town, Sherlock.”

“Don't try to put me up on a pedestal, Watson.”

“I'm kidding, Kink. But you've got to admit it is a big story.”

“The big story is your department, Watson. The mind of the killer is my department. Did all the murders take place in the West Village?”

“I thought you'd never ask. No. Two of them took place in the East Village and two of them happened in the West Village.”

“Symmetry, Watson, symmetry. This appeals to me. This sense of balance in an unbalanced mind.”

“Glad to hear it. Well, I've got to get started on ‘Twenty-four Hours to Die.' I'm planning to chronicle the last twenty-four hours in the life of the most recent victim.”

“Wonderful, Watson, wonderful! Your industrious nature is a credit to the information age! Pray what is the name of this fourth victim, this unfortunate fellow you are soon to immortalize?”

“Let's see. I had it here somewhere. Here it is. His name is Robert Scalopini.”

O
ne of the hazards to smoking that is seldom talked about is the danger—which fortunately happens only very rarely—of swallowing your cigar. In my whole life it's manifested itself on only one or two occasions, until now, of course. Still holding the portable blower and listening to McGovern yammering on, I walked rather briskly into the kitchen and poured a Texas-sized shot of Jameson's into a glass that was bigger than Dallas. I could still hear McGovern's distant voice buzzing like a malarial mosquito in the background as I threw the contents of the glass in the general direction of my uvula. It went down like a male prostitute at the corner of Truth and Vermouth.

“Did you say Robert Scalopini?” I said at last.

“That's right. Robert Scalopini. Know him?”

“I've seen him on a chafing dish,” I said, my mind whirring like a wood-chipper.

“Sounded like you knew him.”

“No, McGovern. I didn't know him.”

“You don't have to bite my head off. You don't have to sound so peevish. It merely seemed as if you were unsure as to whether or not you knew him.”

“Let's just put it this way, McGovern,” I said, doing everything in my power to conceal my irritation. “A large, loud, rather inebriated Irishman named Mike McGovern brought a group of his new best friends whom he'd just met, apparently, at the Corner Bistro I believe, to my loft to tell me goodbye at the precise moment I was contemplating committing suicide by jumping through a ceiling fan.”

“Go on,” said McGovern, somewhat belligerently.

“Someone in your intrepid little group of comrades evidently dropped his wallet in my loft. I have this information on good authority from Winnie Katz, who found said wallet when she was bringing in some mail for me earlier today.”

“Go on,” said McGovern truculently.

“The wallet, according to Winnie, appears to belong to someone you know. Or should I say
knew.
”

“Let's see. Is it Judge Crater's wallet? Is it Frederick Exley's wallet? Is it Jesus Christ's wallet? Uh, Richard Milhous Nixon's wallet?”

“Oh, no, no, my dear Watson! How very witty of you! They've all no doubt been in my loft at one time or another, I feel certain. But none of them, my dear friend, happens to be the party that left his wallet at the—uh—party. That would be someone who, I'm given to believe, had twenty-four hours to live. Or rather, as some might sensationalize the matter, to die.”

“What?” said McGovern sharply.

“That's right, Watson. The wallet in my loft belonged to good ol' Bob Scalopini. The late Bob Scalopini, if I'm not mistaken.”

Now, of course, it was McGovern's turn to swallow his cigar, except for the fact he didn't smoke cigars. Maybe he would inhale a large, well-twisted joint or an entire Vodka McGovern or those fucking cookies he was incessantly baking. At any rate he must have inhaled something because he didn't speak for a very long while. When I at last heard his voice again, it had an entirely different-sounding resonance. McGovern, a journalist to the core, apparently felt he had a scoop.

“This is unbelievable!” he shouted. “It's a goddamn bird's nest on the ground! And you don't remember which one was Scalopini?”

“Of course not, McGovern. I wasn't the one who brought them over to my loft.”

“That's right. But he was definitely there?”

“After applying my methods of deductive reasoning to the known facts in this matter, I must concur, Watson, with your invariably brilliant conclusion.”

“Okay, this is great! This is a gift! I've got to get started.”

“Watson, life is a gift. Death is a gift. Friendship can even be a gift—”

By this time, however, in his journalistic zeal to follow a hot story, McGovern had already cradled the blower. I could imagine him with his trusty little newspaper reporter's notebook in his hand, burning up the wires, legging it out the door, and always, always, asking an infinite stream of questions, which, of course, led inexorably to further questions and sometimes, possibly, some answers. That's what we all were looking for, of course. Answers. In puzzles. In people. In life. That's why we buy newspapers, why we play the jukebox, why we climb tall mountains, why we squint at a bleb of walrus semen through a microscope, why we go to New York, why we come back to Texas.

Twenty-four hours to die, I thought. That might be more than most of us needed.