Ten Little New Yorkers (15 page)

J
ohn Lennon once remarked, “Life is what happens when you're making plans.” John didn't mention it, but death is also what sometimes happens when you're finally becoming interested in your social calendar. The killer struck again before I was even able to leave McGovern's. An operational pattern that moved this quickly might not have been surprising to veteran serial case profilers, but, I must report, the eighth killing caused me to quickly kill what was left of the Old Grandad. Each man kills the thing he loves. Oscar Wilde.

News of the eighth murder came to me first from McGovern and then from Ratso, the latter individual needlessly stating that he could not reveal his “sauces.” Not that anyone cared to know. No details were vouchsafed yet, the NYPD obviously circling the paddy wagons on this one. The crush of high-profile media pressure was blotting out what little sun there was in New York. “All the press has gone apeshit,” Ratso had shouted over the blower. “It's bigger than Son of Sam, Kinkstah!” McGovern did provide one small detail of the crime, for whatever it was worth. The victim this time was an older man, apparently. Quite a bit older than the other victims. What that meant was anybody's guess.

It was time, I figured, to roll the dice. If, indeed, I was correct in my suspicions, I might as well find out before the perpetrator got up to twelve maids a'milking. I knew I was going to get one chance and only one chance at this, so I had to be right the first time. And not only did I have to be right, I had to prove my case to the cops and, perhaps more important, to my own satisfaction. But you've got to break an egg if you want
huevos rancheros.
Sometimes, you've got to break two.

I glanced out McGovern's window into the little alley behind his building. The weather was dark and foreboding, with periodic lightning forking the bleak skyline. Rain or shine, I thought, pretty damn soon I had to deliver the mail. There's a dark and a troubled side of life, the old song goes. There's a bright and a sunny side, too. As we live in this war-torn, weatherbeaten world, it seems to get harder every day to keep on the sunny side. A vision I held in my heart of Heather was helping to boost my spirits for what I suspected was coming to a theater near me soon. It was clearly time to leave the nest. Besides, I'd been out of Cuban cigars for several days now, a situation that always seemed to radically alter my personality. But how would anyone know?

I wrote McGovern a brief note late that afternoon, thanking him for his horsepitality. Gray walls of rain were beginning to slant down at strange, unnatural angles outside McGovern's window. It was the kind of weather with which Sherlock himself might've felt quite at home. I knew I wasn't really Sherlock. Under my current operating circumstances, it was going to be impossible to totally rule out the impossible. Sometimes, aboard this ship of fools, you just have to settle for a sailor's luck.

I borrowed an old overcoat of McGovern's that I doubted he'd miss. It was bigger than a circus tent, but not quite as garish. The evening was getting colder and darker, almost, it seemed, by force of habit, but the rain had slacked off enough to create the kind of visibility required for a small child to land a paper airplane. An investigation is a lot like life, I thought as I walked, and the really important little pieces of any mystery are quite often the ones that have been there all the time. If you miss them in the beginning, you're very likely to wind up lost at the end. And sometimes it's all very simple, really. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I don't mean to be too cryptic here, but if I told you how I know what I know, you'd say, “Hell, everybody knows that!” which, of course, everybody doesn't. That's why, over the years, I've made it a practice not to reveal either my methods or myself in public.

I walked down Jane in the rain. I walked down Fourth Street past Twelfth and Bank and Perry to Seventh Avenue. I walked up Vandam glancing casually around for signs of surveillance, seeing none in evidence. Something told me they were there, however. Kind of like when you know a Peeping Tom is watching you. If the tech guy Anderson, whom Cooperman had brought in as a substitute for Fox, had bugged the loft, as I suspected, the street surveillance would be lying very low. By the time I got near 199B Vandam I was cold and wet and numb and I didn't really give a damn if anyone was watching from the street or from the sky. Like a man in a trance, I looked down and saw a shivering black-and-white bundle lying at the foot of the door to the building. Two familiar green eyes looked up at me. I picked her up and held her to my chest like a tramp on the street clinging to an angel.

“My God!” I said. “Where have you been?”

The cat, of course, said nothing.

C
ats walk the miles and the years with the graceful resilience people can only dream of. Whether out of loyalty, love, or whether, like us, they are also creatures of narrow habit, they often do manage to come back just in the nick of time. Their adventures, their journeys, remain in their eyes and in our imaginations. The trail of a cat, like the trail of a killer, is shielded from the world and shrouded by the smoke of life and the fog of death. Where have you been, my charming young one?

Once I'd gotten her back up in the loft I noticed that she really didn't seem much the worse for wear after all these many months. She looked a little thin, but so had Jesus. In the back of a cabinet, the cat food was still there. I hadn't had the heart to throw it away. Or maybe it was personal sloth. She ate a can of tuna like it was a last supper. I'm not contending there was necessarily a piece of Jesus in that cat. I'm only saying that if you look into the eyes of a stray animal, you can sometimes find the sanctuary of the god of your choosing. If you can make room in your heart to give that animal sanctuary, you truly have opened the gates of heaven a little bit wider.

So now everything was falling into place. The cat was home, resting on my desk under her heat lamp. The investigation was reaching its end game. If Cooperman had his person of interest, I had mine as well. And with the pleasant aspect of a candlelit dinner with Heather in the near future, it was almost enough to make me believe in astrology. Who needed big hairy steaks when your destiny was written in the stars?

“It's just like old times,” I said to the cat, as I lifted Sherlock's cap and plucked out a fresh Cuban cigar from deep within his gray matter department. It might have been some kind of anthropomorphic bullshit, but I'd have sworn the cat was smiling.

“This conversation may have to be a little guarded,” I said, as I lopped off the butt of the Montecristo Number 2, the same kind of cigar that had figured in the rather unsavory death of one Ron Lucas. “It's possible that what we're saying may be recorded for all posterity.”

The cat did not care a flea about posterity; the only thing she cared about at that moment was that her own posterior was warm and dry. Perhaps you think this rather a short-sighted, selfish outlook to have. If that's what you think, you don't know cats. And you don't know people. You might make a good morally rigid, well-meaning Dr. Watson, but you'd never have what it takes to become a lonely, truth-seeking missile like Sherlock Holmes.

“Listen to that!” I ejaculated, as I fired up the cigar, which is hard to do by any man's standard. “If I'm not mistaken, it's a blessing from above!”

And so it was. For the first time in many months, the familiar footnotes of the lesbian dance class were pounding with dull, syncopated thuds on the floor above, which, in weaker moments, I liked to refer to as my ceiling. Not only was this a welcome break in the somber silence that had for so long enveloped the loft, but also, I figured, it would create a perfect nightmare for anyone who happened to be eavesdropping with a listening device.

“It makes you wonder,” I commented to the cat, “if God might really be a woman.”

The cat didn't much approve of this kind of talk. The cat was a free-form fundamentalist who'd once been a Baptist until she realized they didn't hold 'em under long enough. I didn't think any less of the cat because she was a fundamentalist. Everybody's a fundamentalist about the things that really matter to them. That's one of the built-in little tragedies of the human race.

“I'll let you in on a little secret,” I confided to the cat, as I poured a long, medicinal shot of Jameson's into the old bull's horn. “I have two persons of interest in my life at the moment. One is a particularly fiendish, psychotic mass killer. The other, newly liberated from years of abuse, is a young woman I've only just met. I plan to see both of them tomorrow night. My dance card, as you can imagine, is rather full.”

The cat took in this information with no small measure of incredulity. A cat usually doesn't believe anything until she reads it in
The New York Times.

“I'll have to call Heather first, of course. She could be the future ex–Mrs. Kinky Friedman. That's Heather, rhymes with feather. You can relate to that, can't you?”

Unfortunately, the cat was asleep by this time. I was busy pouring my second bolt of Jameson's down my neck. Things seemed almost back to normal. I picked up the blower on the left and called Heather and we exchanged a few pleasantries. I told her I had a little private investigator business tomorrow night, but I'd call her afterward and maybe we could have a late dinner.

“Please be careful,” she said, in that intimate, husky-sounding voice I was quickly becoming accustomed to. It just seemed to go with coffee in bed. Or skip the coffee.

“ ‘Please be careful's' my middle name,” I said. “It's a longish middle name. Been hell on monograms. But don't worry, I will.”

I was perhaps being a bit flippant with someone who'd just lost somebody close to her, but maybe flippant was all I had in stock that night. After all, it'd been a long time since anybody'd wanted me to please be careful.

“I hope I'm not being nosy,” she said, “but have you worked things out with the police?”

“Not really.”

“Then you're taking Ratso with you on your little private investigator business tomorrow night?”

“Not really. There are some things you just have to do by yourself. My mother once told me that when I was a baby and she tried to feed me, I would say ‘Shelf! Shelf!' That meant I wanted to do it myself.”

“You must have been a beautiful baby. But don't you think it's time you learned to do it with somebody else?”

“It's past time,” I said, and I meant it. “But, Heather, there is a certain kind of person with a dark, ugly secret that's been festering down deep inside them, maybe for most of their life. That kind of person is dying to unburden himself, but also killing to keep himself from having to do so. There's no logic to it. It doesn't make sense to a rational mind. But if you're the right person to talk to, and you approach this individual at the right place and the right time, they just might cop to it. One thing's for sure. In a million years, they'll never share it with the rest of the class.”

“I understand,” she said. And maybe she did.

I told her again that I'd call her when I got through. I'd already told her too much, but I could see that it wasn't enough. There are things you'd love to tell people you love, but you never seem to tell them. You just trust that they've always known.

T
hat night, with the cat curled up next to me, I dreamed of Lottie. When Lottie Cotton was born on September 6, 1902, in the tiny southeast Texas town of Liberty, there were no airplanes in the sky. There were no SUVs, no superhighways, no cell phones, no televisions. When Lottie was laid to rest this past July in Houston, there was a black Jesus looking after her from the wall of the funeral chapel. Most biblical scholars agree today that Jesus, being of North African descent, very likely may have been black. But Lottie was always spiritually color-blind; her Jesus was the color of love. She spent her entire life looking after others. One of them, I'm privileged to say, was me.

Lottie was not a maid. She was not a nanny. She did not live with us. We were not rich rug rats raised in River Oaks. We lived in a middle-class neighborhood of Houston. (My mother was one of the first speech therapists hired by the Houston Independent School District; my father traveled throughout the Southwest doing community relations work.) Lottie helped cook and babysit during the day and soon became part of our family. I was old enough to realize, yet young enough to know, that I was in the presence of a special person. Laura Bush, my occasional pen pal, had this to say about Lottie in a recent letter, and I don't think she'd mind my sharing it with you: “Only special ladies earn the title of ‘second mother.' She must have been a remarkable person, and I know you miss her.”

There are not many people like Lottie left in this world. Few of us, indeed, have the time and the love to spend our days and nights looking after others. Most of us take our responsibilities to our own families seriously. Many of us work hard at our jobs. Some of us even do unto others as we would have them do unto us. But how many would freely, willingly, lovingly share the architecture of the heart with two young boys and a young girl, a cocker spaniel named Rex, and a white mouse named Archimedes?

One way or another for almost fifty-five years, wherever I traveled in the world, Lottie and I managed to stay in touch. I now calculate that when Lottie sent me birthday cards in Borneo when I was in the Peace Corps, she was in her early sixties, an age that I myself am now rapidly, if disbelievingly, approaching. She also remained in touch with my brother, Roger, who lives in Maryland, and my sister, Marcie, who lives in Vietnam. To live a hundred years on this troubled planet is a rare feat. But to maintain contact with your “children” for all that length of time, and for them to have become your dear friends in later years, is rarer still.

For Lottie did not survive one century in merely the clinical sense; she was as sharp as a tack until the end of her days. At the ripe young age of ninety-nine, she could sit at the kitchen table and knowledgeably discuss politics or religion—or stuffed animals. Lottie left behind an entire menagerie of teddy bears and other stuffed animals, each of them with a name and personality all its own. She also left behind two live animals, dogs named Minnie and Little Dog, who had followed her and protected her everywhere she went. (Minnie is a little dog named for my mother, and Little Dog, as might be expected, is a big dog.)

Lottie is survived by her daughter, Ada Beverly (the two of them have referred to each other as “Mama” for at least the past thirty years), and one grandson, Jeffery. She's also survived by Roger, Marcie, and me, who live scattered about a modern-day world, a world that has gained so much in technology yet seems to have lost those sacred recipes for popcorn balls and chocolate-chip cookies. “She was a seasoned saint,” a young preacher who'd never met her said at her funeral. But was it too late, I wondered, to bless the hands that prepared the food? And there were so many other talents in Lottie's gentle hands, not the least of which was the skill to be a true mender of the human spirit.

I don't know what else you can say about someone who has been in your life forever, someone who was always there for you, even when “there” was very far away. Lottie was my mother's friend, she was my friend, and now she has a friend in Jesus. She always had a friend in Jesus, come to think of it. The foundation of her faith was as strong as the foundation of the railroad tracks she helped lay as a young girl in Liberty. Lottie, you've outlived your very bones, darling. Yours is not the narrow immortality craved by the authors, actors, and artists of this world. Yours is the immortality of a precious passenger on the train to glory, which has taken you from the cross-ties on the railroad to the stars in the sky.

By day and by night, each in their turn, the sun and the moon gaze through the window, now and again reflecting upon the gold-and-silver pathways of childhood. The pathways are still there, but we cannot see them with our eyes. Nor shall we ever again tread lightly upon them with our feet. Yet as children, we never suspect we might someday lose our way. We think we have all the time in the world.

I am still here, Lottie. And Ada gave me two of the teddy bears that I sent you long ago. As I write these words, they sit on the windowsill looking after me. Some might say they are only stuffed animals. But, Lottie, you and I know what's really inside them. It's the stuff of dreams.