Ten Little New Yorkers (8 page)

T
he next morning I met McGovern at a little breakfast place in the Village called La Bonbonniere. It was run by a charming Frenchman named Charles, who was currently the only Frenchman I knew or liked. Unless you wanted to count Victor Hugo or Joan of Arc, the latter, of course, not technically being a French-
man,
though, no doubt, she would've performed admirably in Winnie Katz's lesbian dance class had it still been in session. I had no idea what La Bonbonniere meant and I didn't really want to know. The food was good and the ambience was very basic and the café was located almost precisely midway between McGovern's place and my loft. That was why the large Irishman and I were dining there that morning. Of course, there also was the little matter of some unfinished business between us.

“Look, I'm sorry,” said McGovern. “Shit happens when you're working on deadline. The guy was on a skiing vacation. He never came to your loft. We've already printed a retraction.”

“Printing a retraction,” I said. “That solves all the problems in the world, doesn't it?”

“Of course not,” said McGovern reasonably, as he studied the menu scrutinously as if he hadn't seen it thousands of times before. “But now I think you have an even bigger problem.”

“What to order?”

McGovern laughed his loud Irish laughter. Several nearby diners looked over. McGovern did not appear to notice.

“I wish that were your problem, Kink,” he said at last. “I think your problem is obvious to both of us as well as the cops by now. If the murder victim was on a skiing vacation and was killed shortly after arriving back in the city, then how did his wallet get into your loft?”

“If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn't be having breakfast in a funky little café with a large, jovial Irishman.”

“I'm jovial? You should tell that to my ex-wife.”

“Jesus Christ, McGovern. I didn't know you were ever married.”

“It was only for a week. We tried everything. Nothing worked.”

I waited for McGovern to laugh, but he didn't. He just signaled the waiter and ordered two scrambled eggs, a sausage, and a croissant. I laughed inwardly—quiet, Jewish laughter. Then I ordered two eggs looking at me, like my father always used to say, and a toasted poppy-seed bagel. Oscar Wilde was right, I thought, as the waiter departed. The human soul was unknowable.

“So what are you going to do about the wallet?” asked McGovern, sipping his coffee.

“Nothing,” I said. “The cops have it.”

“I know that. Like Ratso would say, ‘I have my sauces.' ”

“What else do you know?”

“Ask specifics, Kink. The Shadow knows.”

“You know about the fifth murder?”

“The one in Chelsea with the knitting needle? Where the hell do you even find a knitting needle?”

“In a knitting haystack. Do you know how victim number four was killed?”

“Yes,” said McGovern, “but let's not talk about it now—the waiter's just bringing me my sausage.”

“I see,” I said.

And, of course, I did see. McGovern, like any good, veteran journalist in the field, knew a lot of things he didn't necessarily care to divulge. For one thing, his knowledge was the brick and mortar of his livelihood. For another, he had to always be conscious of protecting his “sauces.” McGovern was also, I suspected, in somewhat of a snit because I'd expressed indifference to the investigation early on and now, admittedly, was coming back to him to try to weasel information. If I was going to get his help on this one, I'd have to play it sensitively. And sensitivity was not my long suit.

“Look, you big, obstinate fuck,” I said. “Why can't we work together on this case?”

“Oh, now you want to work together on this case. Now, after I've been working my sources night and day. After you abandoned ship and went down to Texas leaving me holding the bag, or the wallet, as the case may be. Now after I've slaved for you for twenty-five years, you want to try to save our marriage.”

“McGovern, I'm being rather serious here. You're having breakfast with a man who could well be the target of the NYPD's investigation. Believe me, this case is getting very close to home. I need your help.”

“Those are the words I was waiting to hear,” said McGovern, as he cut into his sausage. “How can I help?”

I told McGovern some of the directions in which I wanted to go with the investigation and some of the kinds of information that I would be needing. I told him that with five murders under his belt, we were already starting out under the gun, so to speak, as far as ferreting out the killer. McGovern rather pointedly asked me whose fault that was. I told him that assessing the blame should be left to God and drunks and small children, all of which—I thought but didn't mention—McGovern was capable of behaving like. Nevertheless, McGovern took it personally and said it was character assassination and I told him that if I wanted to assassinate his character I would've had to resort to nuclear weapons.

Our little brunch ended amicably enough, however, with McGovern pledging to aid the investigation in any way he could and me pumping up his balls a bit by assuring him as to how vital a role he would be playing. We'd gone through this charade many times before, it seemed, and it had always been rather tedious. The results, notwithstanding the ennui experienced in gaining them, had been indisputable. Like it or not, McGovern and I were a team.

“I'll be in touch with you, Watson,” I told him as I left the place.

“That's what I'm afraid of,” he said.

I went back to my empty loft and my empty life, but at least now I had something to do with my mind. To paraphrase Sherlock, the man is nothing, the work is all. Everybody in New York had a project and I was no exception to the rule. I would catch this killer who had already taken five lives. That was my project. It made for a rather cold, loveless hobby, but as a project, it was passionate.

I called Rambam and, as fate would have it, I reached him on his shoe phone. As fate would also have it, he was in the neighborhood. This was good because I didn't really know where in the hell to start on the case, and on the personal side, I was only a few steps away from attempting to commit suicide by jumping through a ceiling fan. This was bad because I needed all the fans I could get.

“I'll be right over,” he said. “I always enjoy hanging out with people who are targets of murder investigations.”

“Thanks, pal,” I told him.

It was a sunny, cold day outside. Inside the loft it seemed dark and numb and threatening, something you could only guess at by the way it felt in your bones. I sat down at the desk, lit a cigar, and looked to Sherlock for answers. He didn't have any. Neither did I. I was losing my hair and losing my mind and losing what little faith I had left in my fellow man. I'm losing, said Frank Sinatra just before he died. I'm losing, too, I thought. And the funny thing was I didn't really give a shit. By the time Rambam showed up, it was ten minutes too late to make any difference.

“Fuck!” said Rambam. “This place not only feels like a tomb, it's as cold as a tomb.”

“I didn't notice.”

“Jesus! There's no sign of life!”

“Oh, please. Just sit down.”

“I mean, the cat's gone.”

“Brilliant! What else do your powers of observation tell you?”

“I don't even hear the lesbian dance class pounding away up there.”

“Winnie's giving the class a break. She's spending her free time collaborating with the cops.”

“Never trust a lesbian.”

“You can say that again.”

“Never trust a lesbian.”

I looked at Rambam sitting across the desk from me in the client's chair that seemed to have been so empty for so long. There was no question this was the kind of case any private investigator would give his pebbled glass to sink his teeth into. The killer, clearly a psycho, was at least imaginative. Rambam looked handsome and clean-cut and efficient. He looked like a thinking man's Archie Goodwin. And if he was Archie Goodwin, then I must be Nero Wolfe. Sherlock was thin and Wolfe was fat, and the only qualities they shared were a passion for the truth and the fact that they both were very lonely men.

“Okay, Archie,” I said. “Report.”

“You've got to be kidding.”

“Archie Goodwin was a great investigator. He was Nero Wolfe's eyes, legs, and sometimes, his heart.”

“I'm probably the only one of your friends who even knows who Archie Goodwin was.”

“That's why you're him.”

“You really have gone around the bend, you know.”

“Archie! Report!”

“Okay, Mr. Wolfe, here we go. We don't have shit. How's that? We have to rely on your drinking buddy McGovern and the cops for our information, and the cops aren't sharing. So, in short, Mr. Wolfe, we're fucked.”

“Hardly, Archie. You know as well as I that we're far from fucked. Perhaps you are merely being slothful and indolent. There have been a myriad of cases that the NYPD has failed to solve that subsequently have evolved into metaphysical notches on our belt.”

“And that's a hell of a big belt.”

“Stop mumbling, Archie. I can't hear you.”

“This is insane,” said Rambam, laughing to himself in a dangerous-sounding way and looking at me with unbridled pity in his eyes. “As you've said on many occasions, Mr. Wolfe, the cops have all the manpower and all the resources and we can't compete with them in those areas.”

“ ‘Areae' is the Latin plural.”

“What we need to do, not to mention a few sit-ups on your part, is to approach this case from an angle the cops may have ignored. Maybe tackle it from behind.”

“You're not suggesting anal sex?”

“All I'm saying, you sick, sedentary bastard, is that I'm going to crank up the ol' hard-boiled computer and then we'll see what it has to say about the backgrounds of the five victims. The cops have been over this ground already, of course, but there's always something you miss on the first go around. I'm sure a man of your genius will be able to pick up on the details they've missed. You may actually have to leave the brownstone for some of this. I may need some backup.”

“Are you suggesting anal sex?”

“I'm suggesting you better go upstairs and water your tulips before I punch you in the nose.”

“Orchids, Archie. Not tulips. Tulips are so pedestrian. I think I will go upstairs and water my orchids.”

“I'll warn Winnie.”

“Maybe I'll just ring for some beer. Thank you, Archie. You're dismissed.”

“Hell,” said Rambam, as he goose-stepped toward the door. “It's almost enough to make you miss Sherlock.”

“Right you are, Watson,” I said.

“
Almost
enough,” he said.

I
once asked the famed Texas defense lawyer, Racehorse Haynes, if he would be willing to do some pro bono work on a case with which I was involved. Before Racehorse could answer, our mutual friend and brilliant lawyer David Berg piped up: “The words ‘Racehorse' and ‘pro bono' are never used in the same sentence.”

That was kind of how it was with Rambam. I was aware, of course, that Rambam had a right to earn a living. Though the work he'd done for and with me paid very well in the coin of the spirit, it was never going to help him pay the rent. The problem was that Rambam's other work tended to be of a global nature, taking him suddenly off to solve the strange matter of
The Giant Rat of Lower Baboon's Asshole
at almost precisely the moment I needed him most right here in little old New York City. I never begrudged Rambam for taking a paying gig, but as a friend and fellow investigator, the timing of his travels did tend to irk me. It seemed ungracious to complain too much, however, especially considering how many times he'd actually laid his life on the line for the Kinkster.

Thus, it was not surprising when, several days later, I met Rambam in Chinatown and he informed me that he had good news and bad news. We were at a new place of Rambam's choosing, and the beef chow fun with black bean sauce and the salt and pepper shrimp were definitely killer bee. Big Wong's still took top awards for the soup, however. A bowl of won ton mein at Big Wong's could cure almost all the ills of the world.
Almost
all the ills of the world. It was another cold, dreary afternoon in the city and the moods of its occupants paralleled the weather fairly closely. Rambam seemed, however, in what for him was a rather cheerful, almost chirpy frame of mind. By trained deductive reasoning I concluded that he'd soon be traveling to sunnier climes. This, I suspected, was the bad news. As to the good news, I didn't have a clue.

“This fucking place has Big Wong's beat hands down,” said Rambam, as he went to work on a whole steamed flounder that took up nearly half the table.

“You're just mad because a waiter there splashed hot tea on you. That's how they wash the tables. They splash hot tea on them. It's one of the colorful traditions I like at Big Wong's. You just made the mistake of sitting down before they'd finished cleaning the table.”

“One mistake I won't make is going back there again.”

There was a certain ethnic trait in Rambam that kept him from discussing what was clearly on both of our minds until the food had arrived and largely been consumed. Maybe he just liked to keep his cards close to his lobster bib. At any rate, Rambam finally decided to bring the annual meeting of the Brotherhood of the Flaming Asshole to order. He was brief with his opening remarks.

“Do you want the good news first,” he asked, “or the bad news?”

“I'm Jewish,” I said. “I'll take the bad news first.”

“I'm leaving tomorrow for Cambodia. I'd hoped I could postpone it but I can't. This is an urgent, not to mention very lucrative, case.”

Rambam traveled the globe on a fairly regular basis, and he was also given to leaving at short notice, so the only thing that surprised me was how little the news really surprised me. I took it in rather stoically.

“Give my regards to Angkor Wat.”

“Wat?” shouted Rambam. “Can't hear you. I got a chopstick in my ear.”

“Okay,” I said, “what's the good news?”

“The good news is that the hard-boiled computer didn't let us down. I fed the names of the five victims into it and it clearly affirmed that three of the five were scumbags.”

“That
is
a hard-boiled computer.”

“The point is, even in New York, three out of five victims turning out to be scumbags is, to say the least, statistically improbable.”

“Define ‘scumbag.' ”

“For our purposes it would comprise individuals with rap sheets full of abuse toward women. I'm talking rape, forced sodomy, every manner of domestic violence you can imagine. Now, remember, that's only three of the stiffs. The other two, for the moment, seem to come up clean. But, believe me, it's suggestive. Very fucking suggestive.”

“Very fucking suggestive of what?”

“How the fuck should I know? Archie Goodwin's blowing out for Cambodia tomorrow at three o'clock and I haven't even packed my pith helmet yet. It's up to you, Mr. Wolfe. You and Ratso, your favorite Dr. Watson.”

“Aren't you mixing metaphors a bit? If only for balance, you need a skinny guy and a fat guy, and Wolfe and Watson are too endomorphically similar. So I'll be Sherlock and Ratso will be Watson.”

“Boy, if the killer could hear that, I bet he'd be quaking in his boots.”

It did sound pretty ridiculous, I reflected, as I scooped up the last salt and pepper shrimp just ahead of Rambam's rapacious hand. What the hell did it matter anyway? The whole thing was going to be ten times as hard with Rambam out of the picture. It was true that Ratso and I had solved more than a few high-profile cases on our own, but this time the perpetrator was clearly a serial psycho suffering from an overactive imagination. Times like these required every hand on board, and the whole team working together, not to mix a metaphor. And this was modern-day New York, not Victorian London. The Sherlock-Watson business might be an effective therapeutic game for Ratso—hell, even possibly for myself—but deductive reasoning doesn't always fare so well when pitted against brutal, violent, twisted, miscreative, undecaffeinated evil. Even with Rambam, this one looked like a bitch from hell.

“Where do you think we should start?” I asked.

“You start with the two murder victims whose backgrounds appear to be clean. Right now we just have an unusual statistical circumstance. For there to be a pattern, there has to be a pattern. Capisce?”

“I think so.”

“Look, if these two supposedly clean guys are really clean, then this particular statistical universe might as well circle the bowl. If you and your pet rodent can't dig up something on those two guys, then whatever you have on the other three is probably irrelevant. There's a reason somebody systematically whacks five people. It may not be especially logical. It may not be apparent on the surface. But, trust me, it's there. These are not Son of Sam affairs or random thrill killings. There's method in this guy's madness.”

“There's also madness in his method,” I said.

“No shit, Sherlock,” said Rambam grimly. “Don't fucking get careless.”

Before we parted company that afternoon Rambam reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and handed me an envelope that he said contained everything the hard-boiled computer had spit out regarding the case. The envelope did not seem terribly thick. Maybe the hard-boiled computer had other things on its mind. I told Rambam as much. I also told him I thought that all computers were the work of Satan. No, he said, the work of Satan was what Ratso and I would soon be investigating.

Eventually, Rambam went back to that faraway kingdom called Brooklyn, and I walked home alone. Along the way, a refrain from a Billy Joe Shaver song, “Freedom's Child,” kept running through my head. “Fillin' up the empty space, left by one who's gone.” The problem was that there were getting to be so many empty spaces in my life that pretty soon I was going to need a fucking backhoe.