Ten Little New Yorkers (13 page)

T
hat Ol' Ben Lucas business is either some kind of incredible coincidence,” said Kent Perkins, “or somebody's seriously trying to frame you.”

“You're the PI,” I said. “What do you think?”

“I don't believe in coincidences,” said Kent. “Where are you now?”

“I'm at a pay phone on the corner a block and a half from the loft, pretending not to see a guy in a plain-wrapped squad car who's pretending not to see me. I guess I didn't really think they'd actually put me under surveillance, so I didn't dress for the occasion. I'm wearing a black cowboy hat and a long, red Indian coat made from a blanket on the res. In this outfit, the blind sheik Abdul bin Bubba could probably tail me.”

“Could work to your advantage. You could work a variation on the old cowboy-hat-behind-the-boulder trick. It always worked for Tom Mix.”

Kent proceeded to lay out an urban, modern version of an old ploy straight out of a western movie. It sounded fairly preposterous but it might be crazy enough to work, I told Kent, as I watched the tail pretend to look at the address of a nearby building. What a wonderful world, I thought. Here I am in New York, being framed apparently by the sickest psycho in the city, and my pal Kent Perkins, probably driving Dean Martin's old sand-over-sable Rolls through Beverly Hills, is giving me advice on how to elude the cops.

“You can't go back to the loft,” he said. “There's a chance the place
is
bugged and if you try to disassemble the bug you tip your hand and look guilty. You've got to stay with a friend for a few days and keep out of sight. The cops are probably just messing with your head. I can't believe they'd really think you could be the murderer.”

“That's why you're not a cop,” I said.

I cradled the blower and casually legged it up the street in the direction away from the tail. Maybe it wasn't that big a deal after all. If Abbie Hoffman managed to elude the Feds for years as an underground fugitive, shaking this tail should be a piece of cake. But what if I did elude them this time? They'd only find me again. And why would they waste the time and manpower to tail somebody twenty-four hours a day if they didn't strongly suspect him? Meanwhile, of course, the real killer was running loose somewhere, maybe looking out at you from some window at Starbucks, or perhaps sitting alone at a table at the Carnegie Deli, possibly pretending to eat a bagel. I began to see even more clearly why people made false confessions. If enough people suspect you long enough and hard enough, you begin to almost believe that the real killer is you.

It was starting to rain by the time I got to the little neighborhood bar called “The Ear,” so named because the letter “B” of the word “Bar” was half burned out, as, of course, were most of the clientele. The place was not crowded, but it was full enough to hide a cowboy who was holding his hat out deliberately from behind a boulder in order to draw fire or at least a little attention. The guy who was tailing me parked directly across the street from The Ear, now making no pretense about reading the paper. The relationship between the tail and the tailee was a little bit like love, I reflected, as I entered the place: After the period of courtship is over, you just get right down to it.

There are icons in this world such as Elvis, Jesus, Che Guevara, and James Dean. Then there are cult celebrities who do not stir instant crowd hysteria but may cause a number of individuals to whisper, “Isn't that Toulouse-Lautrec?” It is that latter galaxy of smaller stars to which I belong, but even that can have its advantages. Fortunately, Mal, the guy who ran the place, was there behind the bar. I had a few brief words with him, ordered a Guinness, and found an empty table right by the window, taking a seat with my back against the street. This, I figured, had to be a surveillance cop's dream. Here was a guy in a bright red Indian blanket, a big black cowboy hat, and smoking a big cigar, sitting at a table right by the window. You could tail a guy like that in your sleep. That was exactly what I wanted the cop to think.

After I'd been nursing the Guinness for a few minutes, Mal made a small announcement to the bar patrons. Shortly after that, I got up and left my drink and headed in the obvious direction of the dumper. Three or four customers gravitated to the same area, whereupon we congregated in a small hallway out of sight of the prying eyes of the street. What Mal and I had cooked up was a typical small pub amusement: a Kinky Friedman look-alike contest. I selected a Jewish-looking ectomorph with a mustache, who was probably an accountant or a homosexual, or, very possibly, a serial killer himself, and I gave him my hat and my coat and stuck a cigar in his mouth. He walked back to my table by the window and sat down in my chair to a light smattering of applause, thereby winning a free round of drinks for himself and his friends, if he had any, which I rather doubted. I took the opportunity to put on a dark, nondescript raincoat and don a black beret that may well have been forlornly hanging there for many years, depending on whether it had been left by Lennon or Lenin. Then I scooted like a dog out the back door into a welcome wall of rain.

Evading an NYPD surveillance team—I say team, because though I only saw the one guy, I didn't know who or what else was out there—is always an exhilarating experience. It's a better high than closing on a house or getting a divorce. Jewish divorces, incidentally, are always the most expensive. That's because they're worth it. At any rate, I wandered through the rain-wept streets of the Village for a while, just to be sure that I'd really shaken the tail. I hadn't given a lot of thought to what my next amusement would be. I figured I'd just drift over in the general direction of McGovern's place on Jane Street. It was a step up from Ratso's with the only downside being that you usually had to repeat everything two times, which of course is redundant because if you repeat something that is two times. The serial killer, it should be noted, had now struck six times.

Walking around in the rain connects all the dots in the world and sometimes helps you see things from a different slant, almost as if those little raindrops really know where they're going. As if any of us really know where we're going. So I wondered as I wandered, as the rain continued to fall, as the wheels and the world continued to spin, as paper boats continued to sail upon the asphalt sea, as water turned to wine, and wine turned to blood, and the day turned to night, and lovers turned to each other, and men and women turned gay, and I turned right on Christopher Street.

The “Ol' Ben Lucas Clue,” as Ratso had called it, was what was bothering me. Assuming that rather obliquely obvious message had not been left by someone with only a passing familiarity with that song, but rather a passing familiarity with me, it indicated that the killer had to emanate from a relatively small universe of human beings, if, indeed, you want to call a killer like this human. Indeed, if you walked in the rain a while and thought about it, the killer was just about as human as it gets. To paraphrase my father, the term we criminologists like to use for this kind of killer is “a sick fuck.”

The combination of the song and the Cuban cigars was highly problematical for the Kinkster. It did not necessarily portend that the murderer was a Village Irregular or somebody close to me. A deranged fan, for instance, could have been capable of the same behavior. There were lots of deranged fans out there, as Bob Dylan, Dwight Yoakam, John Cale, or virtually any thinking man's rock star will tell you. We all tend to have a little deranged fan in us, to overidentify with our field of study, thereby incurring the rain-barrel effect, in which one more tiny imagined slight can produce horrific results. In other words, the killer didn't necessarily have to know me. The problem was that I was pretty sure that he did.

We all wear masks. But a monster of this magnitude wears a mask that is all but impenetrable to the naked eye. Was Chinga capable of these acts? Were Mick Brennan or Pete Myers? Even Rambam, Ratso, McGovern? How does anybody ever know until the fateful moment the killer lifts his hand, when the mask falls to the bloody floor? If a human being is capable of these actions, as was clearly the case, then any one of us would appear to be abundantly capable of crawling into the demon's skull for a while, getting behind the wheel, and going for a little ride. It's not so strange really. Especially when it's raining.

I don't know how long I roamed the streets like a rambling hunchback, but I eventually found myself in the familiar environs of the Corner Bistro and Jane Street. I had no idea how Cooperman would react to the news that I had eluded their surveillance. Would he merely stake out the loft? Would he redouble efforts to find me? Would he put out an APB to all ships at sea, close the airports, ban smoking in neighborhood bars? I was soaking wet by this time, cold, and exhausted. The thrill of outwitting the cops had just about worn off. As Kris Kristofferson once observed, “Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose.” As somebody else once said, “The policeman is your friend.” As Bukowski once said, “Run with the hunted.” As Meatloaf said, “Two out of three ain't bad.”

I was hanging by spit by the time I got to McGovern's building. Not only did I feel like a fugitive on the run, but it was highly unnerving as the realization had sunken in that the sickest fuck in the city knew a great deal more about me than I knew about him. 2B or not 2B, I thought as I drilled McGovern's buzzer about eleven times, that really was the fucking question. And the answer, apparently, was that it was not 2B, for McGovern wasn't home. Visions of Ratso's skidmarked couch flitted briefly through my mind, but were rejected almost as quickly as they came, no pun intended. I had to think rationally, I told myself. After all, I hadn't broken any law by evading the cops because ostensibly I wasn't supposed to be aware that they were following me. What a joke, I thought. The cops following me had pretended like they weren't following me while I was pretending like I didn't know I was being followed. It seemed very much like an atheist who goes through life vociferously denying the existence of God right up until the moment the celestial shit hits the fan.

I resorted at last to the old Kinkster method of pushing every buzzer on the wall. It worked like a Samoan charm. The door buzzed like a large bee, I walked in from the rain, ankled it up one flight of stairs, walked to the far end of the hallway, and sat down on the comfortable, carpeted floor, my back resting against McGovern's warm door. I must have either nodded out or passed out, but when I awoke I was mildly surprised to see the jolly green giant standing over me.

“Get inside,” said McGovern. “The cops're looking for you everywhere.”

I dutifully followed the big man into the relatively small apartment and immediately plopped down on the sofa Frederick Exley had slept on, that large, soft, salmon-colored sofa that had been shipped across the Atlantic twice in its lifetime. When I looked up, McGovern had pulled up a chair close to the sofa and poured us each an adult portion of what I was sure was strong snakepiss. He handed me a glass, I downed about half, and it shook me by the shoulders.

“Are you positive you weren't followed here by the cops?” he asked with a surprising degree of intensity.

“Positive,” I said. “Been wandering free as a bird for hours. I shook 'em at The Ear late this afternoon. The device was a Kinky Friedman impersonator contest.”

“That's too fucking bad,” said McGovern almost bitterly.

“Why is that?” I said.

“Because the seventh murder went down about three hours ago.”

T
he part of me that's Indian is very wise,” McGovern was saying as he made coffee the following morning.

“And what is the part of you that's Indian telling you?” I inquired.

“It says, ‘Pale face kemosabe in a heap big pile of deep Nixon.' ”

“I see. And what does the Irish part of you say?”

“The Irish part of me says, ‘Put a little Bushmill's in the coffee.' ”

“Very sensible. And I take it the Indian part is in basic agreement with the Irish part as pertains to putting some firewater in the coffee?”

“That's about the only thing they both
do
agree on. By the way, what is your proud Hebraic background telling you?”

“Take out life insurance now,” I said.

The situation, however, was really no joking matter. I longed for the days when I was a lonely, loveless amateur private investigator living with an antisocial cat in a draughty loft beneath the pounding hooves of a lesbian dance class. All that was gone now, I reflected. Flying far away somewhere with Holden Caulfield's ducks and Martin Luther King's dreams.

“It's most unfortunate,” McGovern was pontificating, “that you eluded the police surveillance at the time that you did. Had they still been tailing you at the time of the seventh murder, it would've cleared you beyond a doubt. But with them already suspicious of you, and then you evade the surveillance within hours of the crime, it looks really bad from their point of view. Surely you see that.”

“Nixon happens,” I said, more cavalierly than I felt. Cavalier was about the only way to go at a time like this, I thought. I recalled that Cavalier had been the name of Breaker Morant's horse. Breaker was a war hero with poetry in his saddlebags and the Brits had killed him for it. Happened every day. Good, even great, innocent people killed under the charade of what they called the law by gutless bastards. What chance did a maverick like myself have in a world like this? I couldn't hide at McGovern's forever. I'd either have to turn myself in to the cops or turn the key of my loft over to Winnie again and cash in my airline miles, which, of course, I didn't have. I only had miles. Miles and miles of bathroom tiles with green and hungry crocodiles waiting at the corners of my eyes.

“What do you know about the seventh murder?” I asked McGovern.

“Much bloodier, less musical,” he said. “Stabbed about a zillion times, mostly in the groin area. They're not telling me everything, of course. There was, incidentally, a note left next to the body this time. Homicide is keeping its contents very close to the vest, however.”

“Did it say, ‘Support mental health or I'll eat you'?”

“Cheer up,” said McGovern. “Cannibalism can't be far behind.”

“But why are the cops after me? Why aren't they busy pursuing the killer?”

“That should be obvious, isn't it?”

“Not to me. They couldn't be stupid enough to believe I'm the killer. Cooperman's smarter than that. In fact, he's far too savvy to think I killed these people.”

“I feel sure he doesn't really believe you killed anybody.”

“I'm not so sure he won't bust me anyway. Highly publicized, serial killings create a certain climate of urgency around any cop shop. Sometimes common sense is overtaken by the desire to find a perpetrator. Sometimes any perpetrator will do. It happens often enough.”

“But that's not what's happening here,” said McGovern, as he brought me a steaming cup of coffee laced with a double shot of Black Bush. “What's happening here is that they think you know something you're not telling them.”

“I do.”