The Animal Hour

by Andrew Klavan

  Perkins bent over, held his head. He could just barely keep himself from saying “Argh!” “I thought there were no Republicans,” he said. He shook his head at the dirty white tiles of the floor.

  “In New York,” said Mulligan. He lifted a finger, but not at Perkins. He waggled it at the wall. He continued, with excruciating patience. “There are no Republicans in New York. In Washington, there are lots and lots of Republicans. Passels of Republicans. Republicans everywhere. And some of these Republicans don’t want Fernando Woodlawn to become governor because his dishonest plans to milk the state for gain might interfere with their dishonest plans to milk the state for gain. So these Republicans, see, have asked that the FBI investigate Fernando until they find something that will end his gubernatorial hopes and dreams. So for the past year or so, there have been idiot FBI agents sidling up to people in the dark and wearing sunglasses and finding out exactly nothing because Fernando never breaks the law—not the Laws of Man anyway.”

  “Jesus, Mulligan,” Perkins said. He was still bent over, holding his head in his hands. “I mean, you’re killing me here. I give up. I confess. For God’s sake, would you get to the point?”

  Mulligan dropped his feet to the floor with a clunk. Perkins looked up. Saw the detective standing, his hands slipping into his trench coat pockets again. The round face was blank as the cop walked toward him. Perkins straightened in his plastic chair. Mulligan blinked down at him from behind his wire rims.

  “Last week, a young woman came to me,” he said. “That was Nancy Kincaid. She didn’t want to come to the police, but she was scared and she didn’t know where else to go. She was afraid her employer, Fernando Woodlawn, wanted to involve her in something illegal. Something strange anyway, maybe even dangerous. She couldn’t tell her parents, because they idolized Woodlawn and wouldn’t understand. And no one else could help her. So she came to me.”

  “Okay. All right,” said Perkins. He was all ears now. More than a little wary of the impassive face above him, the slowly blinking eyes. Mulligan had come close, and he remembered how fast the detective had moved when he slammed the photo down on the desk. A dangerous guy, definitely. Not a fun, not a takin’-it-easy kind of guy at all.

  “Woodlawn wanted her to pick up a package under mysterious circumstances,” Mulligan ploughed on. “At night. In a Chinatown alley. Carry the package straight back to the office without looking at it, he said. If anyone asks, tell ’em you’re responding to an anonymous call. Don’t involve Fernando … On and on. Understand? So it frightened her. It sounded dirty. She thought he might be using her for something dirty because no one would suspect her or follow her. Oh yeah—to add to the mystery, she was supposed to carry a book.” The detective nodded toward the table, and Perkins turned to it, his mouth opening. “The Animal Hour. She was supposed to carry The Animal Hour under her arm for identification.”

  What could Perkins say? He showed the cop his bewildered gaze; he had no better response. How many people, after all, could possibly own his book? Or even know about his book? The café crowd? The crowd over at St. Mark’s church? Even over at St. Mark’s, the rads and the fems despised him. But then maybe that was it, he thought. Maybe this was some advanced new form of literary criticism. It was a logical extension of the going thing, after all …

  He was about to make some sort of crack to this effect, but the detective’s expression stopped him. Or not his expression—that would be going too far. Some tension in the impassive face. Some irradiating pain beneath the pasty skin. Something grim anyway that made Perkins wait.

  And Mulligan licked his lips once and blinked as his glasses flashed in the fluorescents. And then he said: “I referred her to the feds.”

  What was this? Perkins didn’t have time to figure out the full meaning of the words. But it sounded like a confession of some sort, didn’t it? I referred her to the feds. Somehow, this strange little man had brought him into this soulless office—with its empty desks and its hanged papers and its unforgiving cinderblock walls—this weird little cop had brought him in here and had then proceeded to beat a confession out of himself.

  “The feds,” Perkins said.

  “It was an interagency courtesy. It sounded like what they were after, right? Something on Fernando. It sounded like it might make them happy and they might make my boss happy about me.” His shoulders lifted and fell. He looked down at his shoes. “And so Nancy Kincaid went to the feds. And the feds—who are arrogant and incompetent to the point of being … well, feds—the feds went off and sidled around and wore their sunglasses and talked into their walkie-talkies. And they played their bullshit cloak and dagger games, which I am not at liberty to discuss with you. And, in the end, they got the package in the Chinatown alley …”

  Perkins wasn’t even trying to understand anymore, but suddenly it just clicked into place. “And that was the photograph. Fernando up the masked girl’s ass. It was a blackmail thing.”

  Still blinking at his shoes, Mulligan nodded slightly. “The feds thought they finally had Fernando, and instead they had a gang of shmoes trying to extort money from him—twenty-five thousand dollars—nothing.”

  And Perkins was surprised to find he really did get it now. “But that was good, right? Good for the feds.”

  “Right.” The detective raised his blank and yet somehow agonized eyes to him. “Now the feds could bust the extortionists and come off as competent and nonpolitical—and still slip it to the papers that Fernando was doing leather and rectums in his off hours. No governorship and no trail to the Republicans. It was perfect.” He turned away, to the louvered windows. Wistfully, Perkins thought. Gazing at them as if he could see something through their thin, filthy panes. “And everyone was happy,” he said. “And everything was great. And that was the last I heard about it until this morning. And then the feds called me. And everyone was panicking. And everything had turned to shit. Nancy Kincaid had been abducted right out of her own apartment building. Our federal friends hadn’t even thought to put a guard on her. Even her parents weren’t at home that night. So zippo, she was just gone.”

  And you referred her to them, Perkins thought. You referred her to the feds. He had the picture now. He understood, in some measure anyway, that pained glow lighting the detective’s skin, that phosphor of rage. But the understanding did not improve his day. In fact, it made him feel heavy inside. Weighted down with dread. Oh yes. The Bad News was definitely a-comin’—he could feel it. Little black gibbering Bad News Demons. Crowding in around him to carry him off, like the devils in those apocalypse paintings who drag the sinful souls to Hell.

  He had to ask—he couldn’t stand the suspense. “What about Zach? What about my brother?” And when the cop let him wait for an answer: “I mean, okay, so he took pictures of this Woodlawn guy for Downtowner. He’s their photographer, he always does stuff like that. But I mean, he’s not in this other stuff. He’s just a mystical little guy, Mulligan. He never hurt anybody but himself.”

  Mulligan lifted a hand from his pocket and pointed—and all Perkins could think of was the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come pointing at Scrooge’s grave. The detective was pointing at the photos on the desk beside him. “The man who delivered the photographs of Woodlawn fit your brother’s description. He was driving a car that had been rented in New Jersey in your brother’s name. When my people searched your brother’s apartment this morning, they found a secret compartment in his closet.”

  “What?”

  “With a peephole and special photographic equipment and sexual paraphernalia inside—all of which was almost definitely used in taking the pictures of Woodlawn and the girl.”

  Perkins turned slowly again to the photographs lying on his book. The graduation shot of Nancy Kincaid was on top, but it lay askew. The photo of

  Tiffany it’s Tiffany

  the woman in the mask peeked out from under it. Perkins could see only the masked head but he thought of the dark freckled skin.

  You don�
��t understand anything, Oliver, not anything.

  And then, with a queasy thrill, he thought of a naked ass. Tiffany’s compact, glisteningly naked ass. And then not hers. A child’s ass. Zach’s bare ass, to be exact, his corduroy overalls down around his thighs, his cheeks purple, almost black, with bruises and the heavy brass ruler smashing into the soft flesh again; its almost silent, sickeningly silent, thud …

  But I broke it. I broke the typewriter, he thought. His stomach turned, his throat thickened with dread.

  “There’s something else,” said Mulligan. Perkins looked up. “We got an anonymous call this morning. Reporting that a man with longish black hair, wearing a sweater and blue jeans, had been seen entering the mews in MacDougal Alley …”

  “Yeah, so? That was me.”

  “… and that terrible screams had been heard …”

  “What?”

  “ … coming out of the place and that we should get someone over there on the double.”

  “What?” Perkins stood up. “An anonymous call? From who?”

  He was a head taller than the detective. Mulligan had to lift his chin in order to blink up at him.

  “Well, you know what I mean,” Perkins said. “What did he sound like?”

  “It was a woman.”

  And again, Perkins thought: Tiffany. Tiffany! She had set him up. He almost said it out loud. She had lured him to the mews with that desperate call to Nana. Then she had called the cops so they’d catch him there. He knew there was treachery behind that angel puss of hers. She had set him up, and he was willing to bet anything in this world that she was setting up Zachary too. That car rented in Zach’s name. That stuff hidden in the closet, the secret compartment or whatever. It was all Tiffany’s doing. She had gotten herself involved in some sort of mess and now she was trying to pass it off on Zach, on Zach and him both. I know my brother, Perkins wanted to tell Mulligan. He’s not the least neurotic guy in the world, and God knows he’s had his problems. But blackmail? That girl in the mews? No way, man. It just wasn’t him. He was being set up—they both were. By Tiffany.

  He wasn’t sure what kept him from speaking out right away. The instinct to silence was powerful, a physical restraint. She was Zach’s girlfriend, after all—and he had to protect Zach. In any case, his accusations died in him the way his poems did. Rising from his belly, dissipating, falling away like dew.

  And then what? The detective was still blinking up at him. His face was still unreadable and dangerous. And they’d found him, Perkins, right there, right in the mews, with the body. They could charge him with murder. He’d have to stand trial. They might even …

  “Now you can go,” Mulligan said.

  “I … what?”

  Mulligan almost sighed—it was something like a sigh anyway. His hands in his trench coat, he turned and walked away. Walked over to the windows. Fed his face up into the dusty sunlight.

  “I can go?” said Perkins.

  “Right. You didn’t do anything.” Mulligan seemed to give his answer to the unseen sky over Tenth Street. “The girl’d been dead for hours when you got there. Anyway, I’m talking to you and I know you didn’t do anything. Maybe the feds’ll see it differently.”

  Perkins resisted the impulse to run for it. “You think I’ll lead you to Zach, don’t you?” he said.

  Mulligan gazed at the windows. “I think you’ll find him. Or that he’ll come to you, yeah.”

  “And you’re gonna follow me?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “You’re gonna bring him to me. You’re gonna turn him in.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yeah.” Mulligan drew out the syllable wearily. He glanced over at Perkins, just for a moment, then turned wistfully to the light again. “A young woman who came to me for help got herself stuffed into a toilet bowl,” he said mildly. “Stuffed into a toilet, just as if she were a piece of shit instead of a girl, instead of a human being.” A meditative pause. Perkins closed his eyes a moment to erase the girl’s stare from his mind. “If you bring your brother to me,” Mulligan continued, “I give you my word that I will personally beat the living shit out of him until he tells me everything he knows about this murder.”

  The poet let out a mirthless snort. “So why would I bring him to you?”

  Mulligan faced him from across the room. His glasses flashed. His face remained impassive. “Because as pissed and humiliated and panicked as I am,” he said, “I am only exactly half as pissed and humiliated and panicked as the Federal fucking Bureau of Investigation. Right? And if they get hold of your brother before I do, they are going to gun him down and announce that the case is solved. They are going to kill him, Perkins. I know this for a fact.

  “If the feds get to him first, your brother is going to be dead.”

  The phone on the desk kept breeping.

  This, Nancy thought, is very bad.

  Dr. Schoenfeld lay at her feet. Curled on his side, half covered by the chair that had fallen on him. Blood was still pulsing from his shattered nose. It stained his mustache. It ran into his mouth. Nancy stared at him.

  Bureep. Bureep. The phone shrilled. A voice shrilled in Nancy’s mind: Who did this? What kind of person would do this? Keen as the phone, just as insistent. What kind of monster would do this, Nancy?

  Shut up—I don’t know—this is so bad—I have to think. She held her hands over her ears. She stared down at Dr. Schoenfeld. She could still hear the phone. She could still hear the voice in her mind: What kind of psycho …?

  She heard Dr. Schoenfeld now too. He started moaning: “O-o-o-o-oh …”

  I’ve got to get out of here.

  What kind of vicious …?

  Shut up, shut up! We’ll take questions later. God!

  Desperately, she looked around her. It was like being trapped in a box; in a coffin under the ground. Hemmed in by table, desk, and chairs. Sealed in by the closed door. No room to move. The fallen doctor covered almost the whole floor. His tweed jacket touched her foot.

  “O-o-o-o-oh …” he moaned. He spit weakly: a bloody tooth fell out of his mouth.

  Bureep. Bureep.

  “God!” Nancy whispered.

  She had to do something. She stepped over the doctor. Into the narrow space between the doctor and the desk. Now she could feel the back of his head resting against her ankles. His soft hair on her skin.

  The phone breeped: What kind of a person are you, Nancy?

  “Shut up,” she whispered. God, she hated being schizophrenic! She leaned over the desk. Pushed papers aside. Her open folder—Nancy Kincaid printed on the top form. Blood spattered over the letters. She pushed the pages away. She needed a weapon. Anything.

  The phone shrilled.

  The doctor’s ballpoint. She picked it up. She could brace it against her palm, she thought. Drive the point into someone’s throat.

  “O-o-o-o-oh …”

  What kind of savage …?

  “Shut up!” she hissed. She threw the pen aside. A pen was no good. No one would be afraid of a pen. She yanked open the desk drawer.

  A letter opener! She seized hold of it. Lightweight. A flat handle. A brass blade.

  The doctor’s chair fell off him onto the floor.

  “Christ. Help me.”

  Nancy whipped around, looked down. Young Schoenfeld had rolled onto his back. His bearded cheek was pressed to her leg. His shoulder pinned her foot. His smoky eyes appealed to her. He coughed blood.

  “Help me …”

  She might have to give him the old stomperoo, she thought. Really put him out.

  The phone shrieked wildly. She pulled her foot free. Grabbed hold of a chair for support as she stepped over him. She was at the door. With one hand on the knob, she palmed the letter opener in the other. Blade up along the wrist, handle hidden in the hand. Then she cracked the door open. Peeked her head out.

  The hall was empty for the moment. She could see down it into the narrow room beyond. The slumped figures in the plastic chair
s. Three nurses gathered at the far end. The cop—she couldn’t see him from here, but she knew he was there: the cop and the metal detector at the entranceway.

  “Someone help …,” Dr. Schoenfeld murmured. She heard him shift on the floor behind her.

  Shit!

  She had to get somebody’s attention—fast. She peered feverishly at the cluster of nurses.

  And a door opened. She brought her head around. It was one of the doors down the hall. It opened and someone came backing out. A broad white wall of a someone.

  Mrs. Anderson.

  “All right, Doctor,” Nancy heard her say. “I’ll bring that right to you.”

  The squat black woman backed into the hall, shutting the door as she came.

  “Mrs. Anderson,” Nancy hissed.

  But the nurse didn’t hear her. She turned away from her. Started walking away, down to the end of the hall. Nancy watched helplessly: the wide stride of her elephant legs, the swing of her black-sausage arms.

  “Mrs. Anderson!”

  The nurse stopped.

  The phone in the office breeped again. “Oh Jesus,” Dr. Schoenfeld said from the floor. His voice was getting louder.

  Mrs. Anderson glanced over her shoulder, puzzled. Had someone called her? Yes: she spotted Nancy. Her big brown face went stony, her eyes narrowed.

  “Mrs. Anderson! Hurry!” Nancy gestured toward the office with her head. “It’s Dr. Schoenfeld. Hurry. Please.”

  Mrs. Anderson didn’t think twice. She came down the hall like a locomotive, her fat arms pistoning. In a moment, she was at Nancy’s side, blotting out everything behind that monumental face.

  “What’s happening, honey? What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know. Dr. Schoenfeld …”

  And right on cue, the doctor moaned loudly: “Oh God, somebody …”

  Nancy jumped back out of the way as Mrs. Anderson charged across the threshold. The nurse stopped short as she saw the wounded doctor. She stood in all her massiveness, looking down at him.