The Big Bad City

by McBain, Ed

  “And what’s that, Doctor?”

  “Three thousand dollars.”

  Which is why she needed four grand from her brother, Brown thought.

  “I must say she was rather pleased with the results,” Lowenthal said. “Kept touching them. Well, most women do that. Smile and touch. It’s remarkable.” He hesitated a moment, a frown furrowing his brow. “There’s something I don’t understand.”

  “Yes?”

  “Did she go back to the church?”

  “Yes. After a very short time.”

  “That explains it then. She wanted to be a singer, you know. That’s why she had the operation done. So she’d look good on a concert stage. Already had a talent agent. In fact, it was Herbie who sent her to me.”

  “Herbie who?” Carella said at once.

  10

  HERBIE KAPLAN’S OFFICE WAS ON THE TWELFTH FLOOR OF THE KRIMM BUILDING AT 734 Stemmler Avenue in the Midtown North Precinct. The elevator up was packed with songwriters, musicians, and agents at ten o’clock that Friday morning, all of them speaking an arcane language neither Carella nor Brown understood. Kaplan’s office was at the far end of a hallway lined with doors that had wooden lower panels and frosted glass upper panels. All up and down the hallway, there was the sound of pianos playing and voices singing. The cacophony reminded Carella of rehearsals for the sixth-grade production of Annie, in which his darling little daughter had played the evil Miss Hannigan, and his handsome son, Mark, had played Daddy Warbucks. Closed classroom doors all along the elementary-school corridor, and behind them, kids bleating “Tomorrow” and “A Hard Knock Life” to the solid accompaniment of the music department’s thumping. The lettering on Kaplan’s door read HK TALENT. Carella knocked and twisted the doorknob. Brown followed him in.

  They were standing in a small entry lined with three sheets of Broadway shows, presumably those utilizing the talents of HK Talent. There were windows to the left, open to Stemmler Avenue and the noisy traffic below. Facing the entrance door, there was a desk with a blonde behind it, a phone to her ear. She glanced up as the detectives entered, and then went back to her conversation. They stood waiting. At last, she hung up and said, “Hi, can I help you?”

  “Detectives Carella and Brown,” Carella said. “We have an appointment with Mr. Kaplan.”

  “Oh, sure, just a sec,” she said, and picked up the receiver again. She pressed a button in the base of the phone, listened, said, “The cops are here,” listened again, and then hung up. “Go right on in,” she said, and indicated with a toss of her head a door to the right of her desk. The detectives went to it Carella opened it. They both went in.

  Herbie Kaplan appeared to be about forty-five or so, a short, not unpleasant-looking man with reddish hair and eyebrows, sitting behind his desk in shirtsleeves and a vest. He rose as the detectives came in, said, “Hey, how you doin?” and gestured to a pair of chairs in front of his desk. The detectives sat. There were windows behind Kaplan, facing the side street. On the wall to their left, there was an upright piano with framed pieces of sheet music above it, again presumably the efforts of HK clients.

  “I should’ve called the minute I saw her picture in the paper, I know,” Kaplan said. “But I figured a nun? How could Katie Cochran end up being a nun? But you got to me, anyway, huh? A week later as it turns out, but you got to me. So it’s okay in the long run. Can I get you anything? A cup of coffee? Something to drink?”

  “Thanks, no,” Carella said.

  “Mr. Kaplan,” Brown said, “we understand you once referred Kate to a plastic surgeon named George Lowenthal, is that correct?”

  “Yeah, I send a lot of my clients to him. Tits and ass, correct? That’s the name of the song and the name of the game.”

  “Tell us how you first met her.”

  “She walked in off the street. This was, what, four years ago? Cute as could be, she looked thirteen, fourteen, she was twenty-three. Voice like an angel. I had this audition pianist at the time, a guy named Frank DiLuca, he since passed away. She sang two Janis Joplin tunes, are you familiar with ‘Cry Baby?’ ‘Me and Bobby McGee?’ ”

  “Yes,” Brown said.

  “No,” Carella said.

  Brown looked at him.

  “Knocked down the ceiling,” Kaplan said. “I couldn’t believe it. This big voice coming out of a kid looks like a war refugee. She told me she wanted to be a rock singer, wanted to know could I hook her up with a good band. She had in mind, like, R.E.M., or Stone Temple Pilots, or Alice in Chains, fat chance. I told her first put on some weight and next buy herself a pair of tits. She asked me how much that would cost, I told her three, four grand, this doctor I knew. Then she asked me … can you believe it? …she asked me could I advance her the money against the time she was a big rock star. I told her take a walk, kid. She comes back two weeks later with four grand in the kip, wants to know the doctor’s name. I sent her to Georgie, him and I went to high school together in Majesta. He does a very nice job. Next time she walks in here, she’s wearing a tight cotton sweater, no bra, I tell her now you’re talking. We changed her name and I started selling her.”

  “Changed it to what?”

  “Katie Cochran. Which was better than either Katherine or Kate.”

  “Did you find a band for her?”

  “You have to understand it’s rare that a rock group comes along actually needing a singer. Very rare. These kids start as a complete entity, they got everybody in place from go, including the lead singer. They write their own music, they make a demo CD, they try to get it played on local stations, they’re hoping for a big-time recording contract. Every now and then, though, somebody’s replaced, like Pete Best was by Ringo Starr. But that’s rare. Very rare. So it was lucky I represented this group where the girl singer had left to get married cause her boyfriend made her pregnant. A group called The Racketeers.”

  “The Racketeers?” Brown asked.

  He’d never heard of them. Knew every rock group ever cut a record, but not anybody called The Racketeers.

  “They later became The Five Chord,” Kaplan said.

  Brown hadn’t heard of them, either.

  “I get kids in here,” Kaplan said, “they call themselves Green Vomit, they think that’s cool, Green Vomit. Would you like to dance to the music of Green Vomit? The rappers are an altogether different story, they think it’s cute to call themselves 4Q2. I sometimes wish I was still in the rag trade, I got to tell you.”

  “So what happened?” Carella asked.

  “What do you mean? Did Katie Cochran become a big rock star? You know she didn’t. She ended up a dead nun, didn’t she?”

  “I meant with The Five Chord.”

  “Oh. It was a fortuitous happenstance, as they say. Katie was looking for a band, they were looking for a lead singer. Boys, meet Katie Cochran. Katie, here’s The Racketeers. Soon to be known as The Five Chord, catchy, no?”

  Brown didn’t think it was catchy at all.

  “So you’re saying she joined the band,” he said.

  “The Five Chord is what that means. Five people.”

  “Then what?”

  “I sent them to a booking agent.”

  “And?”

  “He booked them.”

  “Who was he?”

  “The booking agent? Guy named Hymie Rogers, no relation to Richard Rodgers. Or even to Buck Rogers. He’s dead now.”

  “Do you remember the names of anybody in the band?”

  “Sure, all of them. Addresses and phone numbers, forget it. For that, you have to go to the musicians’ union.”

  The woman who answered the phone at the number the musicians’ union had given them identified herself as Alan’s mother, Adelaide Figgs, and when Carella asked if he could speak to her son, please, there was a long silence on the line.

  “Alan is dead,” the woman said.

  The words were chilling, not only because the woman’s voice was so sepulchral, but also because they conjured up the insta
nt horror of someone methodically knocking off members of The Five Chord. What Carella definitely did not need at the moment was a serial killer. Let all those other detectives out there occupy themselves with serial killers. He himself could count on the fingers of one hand all the serial killers he’d encountered in all his years on the force.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

  “He died last month,” the woman said.

  This enforced the notion of someone out there stalking The Five Chord. Please don’t tell me he was strangled, Carella thought. He waited. The silence on the line lengthened. For a moment, he thought he’d been cut off.

  “Ma’am?” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “How did he die, ma’am?”

  “AIDS,” she said.

  Gay, he thought.

  “He was gay,” she said, echoing his surmise, the short sentence laden with such bitterness that he dared not pursue it further.

  “Sorry to have bothered you,” he said.

  “No bother,” she said, and hung up.

  Sal Roselli was watering his lawn when they found him.

  A short, wiry man with curly black hair and brown eyes, barefoot and in shorts and a tank-top shirt, he stood happily spraying his grass. “I could turn on the sprinkler,” he said, “but I enjoy handling the hose. I’m sure that’s Freudian.”

  The lawn was at the back of a development house on Sand’s Spit, near the airport. It had taken Carella and Brown half an hour to drive here in light traffic, and it was now a little before noon. The heat was beginning to build again. The water splashing from the hose made them think of yesterday’s rain, made them long for rain again today.

  “You got my number from the musicians’ union, huh?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “They probably thought it was for a job.”

  “No, they knew we were policemen.”

  “So Katie’s dead, huh?”

  “You didn’t know that?”

  “No. First I heard was when you told me on the phone. Something, huh? Do the others know?”

  “We haven’t talked to the others yet,” Brown said.

  “Last time I saw them was at Alan’s funeral. He died last month, did you know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “AIDS,” Roselli said. “Well, I’m not surprised. I always thought he had tendencies. Anyway, we were all there. Not Katie, of course, God only knew where she was. Now she turns up here. Dead. A nun. It’s difficult to believe.”

  “When’s the last time you saw her?”

  “When the band broke up. Four years ago? Right after we finished the tour. She told us she was quitting. We had a little farewell dinner, and off she went.”

  “Did you know she was returning to the order?”

  “Didn’t know she’d ever been in an order. I figured she might be going back to Philadelphia. I knew she had a brother there, inherited a lot of money when their parents died in a car crash.”

  “So that’s the last time you saw her.”

  “Yes. Around four years ago.”

  “And the other guys in the band last month sometime.”

  “Yes. It was really sad. Made me realize how much I miss The Five Chord. What the band was—well, first off, we had no leader. Like The Beatles, you know? We all had equal billing. There was Davey on drums, and me on keyboard, and then Alan on lead guitar, and Tote on bass. Davey Farnes, Alan Figgs, and Tote Hollister. Everybody but me sounded Dickensian. Tote was short for Totobi, though, which didn’t exactly come from Great Expectations, either. Tote’s black, I guess you already know that …”

  “No.”

  “He is. Which caused a bit of difficulty in the South, but that’s another story. His real name is Thomas. Thomas Hollister. The Totobi was his stab at finding roots. I’ll tell you the truth, the band was just a run-of-the-mill, all-American garage band—until Katie came along.”

  You think of The Supremes, you think of Diana Ross. You think of The Mamas and the Papas, you think of Mama Cass. You think of Big Brother and the Holding Company, you think of Janis Joplin. Mention The Five Chord, and after the wild applause and uncontrollable hysteria die down, you think of Katie Cochran. Well, you know the trite scene, don’t you? Singer starts her song, everybody stops sweeping. Mouths fall open, jaws hang agape, even the gods are awestricken. Struck? Whatever.

  That’s what happened the first time she walked into the Oriental, where we were rehearsing. You know the Oriental rehearsal studios off Langley? She looked sixteen, she could’ve been anybody’s kid sister. Herbie Kaplan had sent her down, he was representing us at the time, we were still calling ourselves The Racketeers. She did “Satisfaction” for us, giving the old Stones tune a spin old Mick never dreamt of in his universe, and promptly knocked our socks off. Here’s a kid who looks like she needs permission from her mother to attend the senior prom, and she’s got a wisdom and maturity in her voice and in her eyes that signal Sign me, Sign me, Sign me—though at the time The Racketeers didn’t have contracts to sign, not even on napkins.

  We got The Racketeers from Davey’s father, by the way. He came in one day while we were rehearsing in Davey’s living room, and remarked in his Deliberately Dense Parent mode, “This racket you’re making … is it supposed to be music?” Hence The Racketeers, imminently to become The Five Chord the moment Davey’s father came up with yet another name for the band. This was after Katie had joined us, there were now five of us in the band. This time Davey’s father was in his Learned Elder mode, explaining that rock bands play mostly in the key of G, and the five chord in the key of G is the D triad. That’s D, F sharp, and A, if you’d like to try it on your accordion. So what Mr. Farnes—that’s Davey’s father’s name, Anthony Farnes, he sounds Dickensian, too, I just realized. Looked sort of Dickensian, for that matter. Anyway, what he was trying to do was convey the fact that this was a rock band, and there were five of us in it. The five chord, dig? And the five chord in the key of G, which is the key favored …

  “Forget it,” Roselli said. “I guess you had to be there.” He turned the nozzle of the hose, began spraying another section of lawn. “A nun, huh?” he said. “Who’d have expected it?”

  “The Sisters of Christ’s Mercy,” Carella said.

  “I mean … it wasn’t that she was wild or anything, quite the contrary. But a nun? I mean, come on. Katie?”

  She may have looked like your kid sister, but this was the girl who wrote songs you could fry eggs on. Five-seven, weighed about a hundred and ten pounds, skinny as a wren, but nice breasts. She was wearing her hair in a ponytail that first time she sang for us, you never expected this sexy voice to come out of her mouth. Turned out she knew all the R&B repertoire, could do all the later rock stuff, too—well, everything, for that matter. Pop, Broadway show tunes, you name it, Katie could sing it. I guess we all four of us fell in love with her that very first day. Summertime was just around the corner, this must’ve been April when we auditioned her.

  I remember the booking agent Herbie sent us to wanted to know if the name of the band was supposed to be plural. Hymie Rogers, his name was, a short, fat guy with a cigar he kept chomping. “Is it The Five Chords?” he wanted to know.

  “No, it’s The Five Chord,” Davey said, sounding a little pissed off that the guy hadn’t understood the reference, a booking agent for rock bands, for Christ’s sake! At the time, I felt this was a mistake on Davey’s part, getting so agitated, I mean. I mean, we weren’t Pink Floyd, we were a garage band with a girl singer whose voice could shatter concrete. Which, of course, the agent recognized the minute Katie opened her mouth.

  Make a long story short, he booked us for “a summer tour of Dixie,” as he called it, which meant we’d be following a club circuit that ran through Virginia and the Carolinas, and then swung through Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia before heading into Florida, where we’d play Tampa and St. Pete, and a town near the Everglades, and then back north again to end the tour in Calusa. Every
rock band’s dream tour, right?

  This was three years ago.

  Well, let me see, I was twenty-five at the time. So that makes it … well, wait a minute, it was four years ago. That means I was only twenty-four. Jesus. We all had beards back then, all the guys on the band. Davey was exactly my age, give or take a few weeks. Tote was a little older. You ought to talk to him. I mean, he’d probably give you a different slant. He knew Katie better than any of us.

  Anyway, we left the city here on the last day of June, for the beginning of the tour, a Fourth-of-July-weekend gig in Richmond, Virginia. The way we traveled was in a sports utility wagon, a used Jeep actually that Davey had picked up cheap from a bass player leaving for a gig in London. There was plenty of room for the five of us plus the instruments, speakers, amps, all of it, inside the car. Every night, we carried everything into whichever cheap motel we were staying at. Some of these towns we played, you wouldn’t leave a stick of chewing gum in the car, no less instruments and equipment worth thousands of dollars.

  A favorite joke of ours was “Are you sure the Beatles got started this way?” That was whenever anything went wrong. Like when we pulled up in front of a club called The Roadside Palace or some such and it turned out to be this ramshackle dive on the edge of a cliff. Or when we plugged in one night—this was in Georgia someplace—and blew out every light in the club. The owner took a fit till we advised him to put candles on all the tables and find us some acoustic guitars and an upright piano, which for Georgia worked remarkably well, Katie singing all kinds of bluesy shit and all of us playing sort of hushed and reverential behind her, a kind of intime evening, if you dig. Then there was the time …

  On and on, Roselli went, reminiscing about that summer tour four years ago, painting it in glowing terms while the sultry afternoon waned and the detectives worried about hitting heavy traffic going back into the city. Finally, he turned off the recitation and the hose.