It was downhill from there. A form letter from a Catholic priest in Nicaragua, which had come addressed to “Occupant.” A bill from Con Ed. A letter from a militant lesbian coalition called Sisters of Sappho, which I inadvertently opened before I realized it was for Winnie Katz.
Bringing up the tail end of the day’s correspondence was a postcard from the Pilgrim Psychiatric Center. It was from my old friend Cleve, the former manager of the Lone Star Cafe. It read as follows: “Don’t believe the doctors. There’s nothing lamp carrot rocking-horse wrong with me. Wish you were here.”
That was the lot. One of these days I’ll reverse my zip code and see what happens.
I called McGovern at the Daily News and he vehemently denied having anything to do with the story on page 2. He asked me if I’d been at the scene of the bust. I vehemently denied having anything to do with it. We both vehemently hung up.
I got a screwdriver and turned the old black-and-white television set that was missing a knob on to Wild Kingdom. I moved to Ratso’s couch and the cat moved to her rocking chair. I lay down for a little power nap, and an idea gradually began forming in the back of my mind amidst all the debris that Leila’s legs had recently kicked there. The idea rose like a phoenix, no doubt from the ashes of several rather charred brain cells. It started off a little shaky, but it looked like it was going to fly.
I did not especially like Wild Kingdom. I always felt that the feeling was Mutual of Omaha. The cat, however, always seemed vaguely to enjoy the show, so I turned it on every now and then for her enjoyment.
It wasn’t a great sacrifice for me. Just part of the give-and-take of daily life. A little adjustment we make in order to ensure that the world becomes a better place for our children and our kittens. On the other hand, it could’ve been that, subconsciously, these little kindnesses I performed were a trick I was playing on God to make Him think I was a more sensitive American than I am. But could any man play a trick on God? Whose Wild Kingdom was it anyway? Was it God’s or Mutual of Omaha’s? Tune in next week.
Ratso walked in just about the time I got the phone call from Sergeant Cooperman.
37
After I’d established that Ratso was not going to interrupt his journey to the refrigerator to answer the phones, I walked over to the desk and collared the blower on the left.
“Start talkin’,” I said.
“Goodbye, Tex,” said Sergeant Cooperman.
“Going somewhere, Sergeant?”
“Yeah. Funeral of a guy. Used to be a country singer. Tried his hand at a little amateur crime-solving now and then. Got lucky a few times. Then he got in over his head. Colorful character, he was. Gutsy guy, too. Never liked him too much, personally … Never got off on funerals much, either. I’ll take a fucking wake any day.”
“I know what you mean. I’d rather go to an Irish wake than a Jewish wedding. They’re more fun.”
Ratso looked over at me inquiringly from the refrigerator. I shrugged and took a fresh cigar out of Sherlock Holmes’s head.
“Got a mick in the woodpile somewhere, do you, Tex?” While I listened to Cooperman chuckle I began preignition procedures on the cigar. For a while I thought he had the chuckle on an endless loop, but it subsided neatly right about the time I had the cigar ready for lift-off.
“Gonna wear a Colombian necktie to the funeral, Tex?”
“I must assume, then,” I said, “that this call’s in reference to ‘Country Singer Thought to Be Finger.’” I took a not-so-relaxed puff on the cigar.
“Let me tell you something you obviously don’t know,” said Cooperman. “These guys don’t operate like the Mafia. They don’t make a precise, targeted hit. It ain’t like the Tongs either, where they let the honky customers continue eating their sweet-and-sour pork while they blow away the enemy slopes at the next table. These are the kind of guys that like to waste the grandmother in the wheelchair, the dog, the cat. They see a two-month-old baby in a crib, they ice it. And believe me, they don’t pick the rattle up off the floor. If they come for you, every bag lady and hot-dog vendor on Vandam Street will go with you. You’re not dealing with Ricardo Montalban here.”
The chuckle was gone from Cooperman’s voice. Even the malice was gone. Things were worse than I’d thought. I needed a drink.
“You know,” Cooperman continued almost wistfully, “when I think of two Jewish meatballs like you and your pal Ratso trying to stay ten steps ahead of a private army of bloodthirsty spies with an intelligence network that’s probably superior to the FBI …”
Cooperman sighed. I tried to swallow. Sometimes it’s harder than it looks.
“You might have been set up, pal,” he said. “Or maybe somebody’s using you for a tethered goat. I can’t prove it. In fact, if anybody asks, I didn’t even say it.”
“Maybe you’re wrong,” I said. “Maybe they won’t figure it out. Maybe they won’t bother to come after us.”
“Maybe I’m a nigger jet pilot,” said Cooperman.
I put my cigar down in the middle of a big, Texasshaped ashtray. It looked lonely there, burning away deep in the heart of Texas. I hardly noticed Ratso, who, by this time, was hovering close to the desk like an expectant father.
“Well,” I said, “other than renting a stateroom on the Titanic, what do you suggest we do?”
“Absolutely nothing. And keep your fingers crossed. I got to run.”
“One more thing,” I said. “What’s a Colombian necktie?”
“That,” said Cooperman, “is where they slit your throat vertically, pull your tongue out through the opening, and let it hang down your neck. Colombian necktie.”
“Nah, don’t think I want it. Too trendy. It’d clash with my hunting vest.”
“Wear whatever you want,” said Cooperman. “It’s your funeral.”
38
When I finally got to sleep that night, I dreamed I was in the office of a beautiful female psychiatrist. Apparently things hadn’t been working out too well for me and I was seeing this lady shrink to find out what was wrong.
“Have you ever been involved in joshman?” she asked. She lowered her voice slightly when she said the word joshman.
“What is joshman?” I asked.
She seemed a little surprised that I didn’t know. She looked at me for a moment. Then she said very clearly and distinctly, “Joshman is when a man kisses another man on the knees.”
I woke up suddenly. I’d heard a sound that I didn’t think belonged in the dream. I hit the lights and checked the clock by my bedside. Closing in on 3 A.M. I listened.
Except for Ratso’s rather unpleasant snoring, there was nothing. I was almost ready to kill the light and get back to my joshman dream when I heard it again. Sounded like a muffled clang. Maybe it was a shy trolley. I walked over to the bedroom window and looked, but it didn’t do much good. No one had opened that window or even seen through it in forty-seven years. Not that there was much of a view. Garbage-truck docking area.
Grime was a nice word for what was covering the outside of the window. It was rusted shut tighter than some people’s minds. The window worked about as well as everything else in the loft. I kind of liked it that way. Always live in a house that’s older than you are.
I heard the sound again. This time I had it. A drunk throwing rocks against the fire escape. It was as common in New York as crickets in the country. Then a shrill voice that sounded like it was coming all the way from Brooklyn shattered the night.
“Hey, Tom fucking Sawyer! Throw down the goddamn puppet head!”
It was Rambam.
I walked across the cold floor of the loft, past Ratso’s torporous body, past the cat stirring slightly in the rocker, to the kitchen. I turned the kitchen light on. If the Colombians wanted me, I figured they could dream up more creative methods than shooting a man standing at a window.
The puppet head smiled down on me from on top of the refrigerator. The puppet head always looked like it was smiling. You’d look like you w
ere smiling, too, if you had a large house key wedged in your teeth.
I picked up the puppet head, opened the window, and read Vandam Street like a gutsy quarterback who was playing hurt. Rambam came out of the darkness from my right at a measured pace. Throwing into the wind, I tried to lead him, but the parachute didn’t hang quite as much as I’d expected. He had to run into the gutter and halfway onto the street to make the catch.
“Complete to Rambam,” he shouted.
I closed the window before I froze to death. Through the window, I watched Rambam with no little degree of fascination as he spiked the puppet head in the gutter.
* * *
Rambam came in the door wearing his green Israeli Army jacket just about the time I was getting into my old hunting vest. East meets West. Or, if you spoke with a Yiddish accent, East meets vest. It wasn’t terribly funny. It was just the kind of thing you think of when you don’t want to think about everything else.
“Parked way up the street,” said Rambam, as he flipped me the puppet head. “In case the Colombians try to put a potato in my tailpipe.”
I examined the puppet head carefully. It looked happier, more alive, and more purposeful than many faces I passed on the street every day. And it didn’t use the word marvelous too much. I was starting to get kind of attached to it. I placed it gently back on top of the refrigerator.
“Alas, poor Yorick,” I said, “you have a head the size of a LeSueur pea.”
I took the bottle of Jameson and two appropriately stemmed glasses and sat down at the desk with Rambam. We had a round or two and I ran down for him everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Leila’s apartment, Leila, Hector, Carlos, meeting Cooperman and Fox on the street before the bust, the Daily News story, and Cooperman’s phone call earlier in the evening. The only thing I didn’t tell him about was the joshman dream. I didn’t think it was pertinent to the case. Also, I didn’t want any spurious rumors flying around New York about unfounded joshman episodes in my past. Even one can ruin a guy.
When I’d finished telling Rambam everything I knew about the Colombians, which wasn’t a hell of a lot, he sat back in the chair and thought about it for a moment. Then he took the bottle and poured us both another shot.
“You’re leaving tomorrow,” he said. “You and Ratso. You’re going back to your ranch in Texas and you’re going to stay there. I’ll pick you up and put you on a plane. All you got to do is pack, check the plane schedules, and call me and I’ll pick you up. Any problem with that?”
“Well,” I said.
“Fine. That’s it.” He stood up. “Look,” said Rambam, “the average detective, third grade, earns about thirty-six thousand a year. The average Carlos character spends more than that a day just on payoffs. They know all about you already. You’ve got zero chance. I’ll pick you guys up tomorrow.”
“You want to crash here?”
“Where the hell am I gonna sleep?”
“Well,” I said, “you could sleep on the couch with Ratso.”
“Or?”
“Or you could sleep in the bedroom with me. There’s only one bed, but we could put a guitar case between us like we used to do on the road with the band to keep us from accidentally hosing somebody in the middle of the night.”
“Thanks for the offer,” said Rambam. “It’s very attractive, but I don’t want to wake up with a Colombian butterfly.”
“What’s a Colombian butterfly?” I asked.
“That’s where they take your lungs out of you while you’re still alive, and leave them suspended outside your body.”
“Charming,” I said.
“Sweet dreams,” said Rambam.
After he’d left I walked over to the kitchen window and looked out into the nothingness of the New York night. It almost didn’t matter whether all this stuff was real or not. It was bad enough either way. I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know what to do.
I stared into the darkness again and I thought of Wyatt Earp’s brother Virgil’s last words. All of the Earp brothers were very close and they were said to have believed strongly in life after death. The legend is that when Virgil was dying after a gunfight, Wyatt knelt by his brother’s side in the dust and asked him what he saw.
“Wyatt,” he reportedly said, “I don’t see a fuckin’ thing.”
39
New York’s a tar baby. Once you’re here, it’s hell to get away. Like most New Yorkers who plan to leave the city, we didn’t make it.
Everyone thinks they’re not going to die in New York. Everyone thinks they’re going to die someplace nice like St. Penisburg, Florida. Everyone is wrong.
There are some interesting, if not particularly relevant, exceptions. Of course, when the subject is death it’s sometimes hard to say what might or might not be relevant. Maybe nothing’s relevant. Be that as it may, Damon Runyon—born, of course, in Manhattan, Kansas—wanted to die in New York and did, and had his ashes scattered over Broadway from a small plane flown by Eddie Rickenbacker. George S. Kaufman, the playwright, wished to die in New York and he also got his wish. Kaufman, however, requested in his will that his ashes be thrown in the face of the theater critic for The New York Times.
The only other guy that ever did anything very significant with his ashes was Joe Hill, who was wrongfully tried and hanged on a trumped-up charge in Utah. Joe Hill’s ashes were scattered, at his request, in every state of the union except Utah. Never cared for Utah much myself.
The lesson in all of this, I suppose, is that it’s a good thing to get your ashes hauled as much as possible before they’re finally scattered.
Ratso was waking up.
It was not a nice thing to see.
I busied myself with feeding the cat some tuna and the espresso machine some ground coffee beans while Ratso proceeded with his morning ablutions. By nine o’clock Friday morning, Ratso and I were drinking cups of espresso and looking at each other across the kitchen table like Ward and June Cleaver.
I filled Ratso in on Rambam’s visit and told him what Rambam had advised. He seemed to take it soberly enough.
“We’ve been warned twice now,” I said. “Once by Cooperman and once by Rambam. Of course, you don’t have to stay here in the loft or go to Texas. You could leave now and go to your place or lie low somewhere else.”
“Yeah,” said Ratso, “but if their intelligence network is superior to the fucking FBI, they already know more about me than my mother. I think we’re in this one together, Kinkster. And I don’t really believe these guys are going to come after us. Anyway, it’s too late to run and they don’t have bagels in Texas.”
“Great,” I said. “So I’m joined at the hip to a guy who wears a coonskin cap without the tail and a dead man’s shoes.”
“It could be worse,” said Ratso. “There could be a dead man standing in your shoes.”
I got us both another round of espresso and extracted my first cigar of the morning from Sherlock Holmes’s head.
“You know,” said Ratso, “I wonder if these guys— these Colombians—could have been in this thing from the start. After all, you met Leila at the cat show. Then, very shortly after that, you’re shot with a dart filled with a lethal dose of lion tranquilizer. And these guys, from everything I’ve read, aren’t all that far removed from the jungle themselves.”
“I’ve considered that.” I lit the cigar and watched the smoke dance in the sunshine that was coming in the window. It was a cold but beautiful February day and there wasn’t a Colombian in sight.
“And then,” Ratso continued, “there’s this Colombian necktie business.” My hand went unconsciously to my throat.
“Go on.”
“Well, I don’t know if these guys have a tongue fetish or what, but there seems to be some common ground between the Colombian necktie and what happened to Rick ‘Slick’ Goldberg.”
“My dear Ratso, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“So you think they iced Goldberg.”
“Actually, my conclusions are quite the opposite of that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean these are early days, Watson. Too early in the case to idly discuss it with you.”
“You’re a sharing, caring kind of guy, Sherlock. It’s inspiring to work with a guy who gives so much of himself.” I puffed on the cigar a bit and looked at Ratso. “As Marco Polo said on his deathbed in 1324: ‘I have not told one half of what I saw.’”
“Yeah,” said Ratso, “but those were the Dark Ages. Today inquiring minds want to know.”
“In this case,” I said, “curiosity might just kill the rat.”
* * *
Not long thereafter, Ratso departed the loft in somewhat of a snit. I let him go. It was probably safer on the streets of New York than it was these days at 199B Vandam. Who the hell knows what’s safe anymore? Some people claim the smoke from my cigar is drifting over to them and creating a health hazard, but I don’t let it bother the Kinkster. The main health hazard in the world today is people who don’t love themselves.
To cover all bases, I went to the desk, got the number of American Airlines, and gave it a call. All the American agents were busy so I had to listen to some tape-recorded Musak by the Captain and Toenail. Where were the Disappointer Sisters when you needed them?
It would be somewhat ironic if I were to net myself a Colombian butterfly while waiting for the next available agent to answer the phone. For about two or three minutes I listened to the kind of crap that would make an elevator blush. Then I just said to hell with it.
40
The call that was going to change my life did not come that afternoon. There were two others, however.
The first was from Rambam, who felt I was laying my life on the line by not going to Texas. I told him I was laying my life on the line every time I ate a frankfurter at Madison Square Garden, but I wasn’t leaving town because a cop and a private investigator were getting a little nervous in the service. He said something, probably to relieve his frustration and disgust, and then hung up.
When the Cat's Away Page 9