I put a few more logs on the fire, then walked a cup of coffee and a freshly stoked cigar into the Ghost Room, where I stared down the answering machine. It blinked first. There were three messages. The first was Cousin Nancy wanting to know if I’d like to have dinner with them at the Rescue Ranch. The second was from my beautiful and brilliant friend Dr. Noreena Hertz in London. Unfortunately, her British accent was so thick I could never understand more than half of what she had to say. Maybe that was why we got along. The third was from McGovern. He sounded highly agitato so I called him back first.
“MIT! MIT! MIT!” he said. That was our international man-in-trouble secret code. McGovern, of course, began most of his calls to me that way.
“MIT!” I said, somewhat peevishly. Now that I was in the real world of Texas, I didn’t feel I had a lot of time for this nonsense. Not that I was doing much of anything else.
“Twenty-four Hours to Die.”
“Say what?”
“That’s the headline,” said McGovern ebulliently. “Twenty-four Hours to Die.”
“What headline?”
“The headline of the story I’m writing for the Daily News.”
“What’s it about? The life span of the fruit fly? Hollywood love affairs?”
“No, it’s about the fourth guy getting murdered here in New York. Remember I told you about those three murder victims in the Village? Well, a fourth guy got croaked yesterday.”
“So what? There’s plenty more where they came from.”
“What’s the matter with you, Kink? Don’t you care anymore?”
“Give me a break, McGovern. I’m down here on vacation. This isn’t exactly man bites dog, you know. Millions of people live in the city. Some of them are bound to get taken off the board.”
“Are you kidding? There’s never been a murder spree like this in the Village. The cops are playing it very close to the vest to avoid setting off a panic. But four victims inside a week and a half? That’s big news. Four victims! It’s almost like the killer knew you were leaving town, Sherlock.”
“Don’t try to put me up on a pedestal, Watson.”
“I’m kidding, Kink. But you’ve got to admit it is a big story.”
“The big story is your department, Watson. The mind of the killer is my department. Did all the murders take place in the West Village?”
“I thought you’d never ask. No. Two of them took place in the East Village and two of them happened in the West Village.”
“Symmetry, Watson, symmetry. This appeals to me. This sense of balance in an unbalanced mind.”
“Glad to hear it. Well, I’ve got to get started on ‘Twenty-four Hours to Die.’ I’m planning to chronicle the last twenty-four hours in the life of the most recent victim.”
“Wonderful, Watson, wonderful! Your industrious nature is a credit to the information age! Pray what is the name of this fourth victim, this unfortunate fellow you are soon to immortalize?”
“Let’s see. I had it here somewhere. Here it is. His name is Robert Scalopini.”
Eleven
One of the hazards to smoking that is seldom talked about is the danger—which fortunately happens only very rarely—of swallowing your cigar. In my whole life it’s manifested itself on only one or two occasions, until now, of course. Still holding the portable blower and listening to McGovern yammering on, I walked rather briskly into the kitchen and poured a Texas-sized shot of Jameson’s into a glass that was bigger than Dallas. I could still hear McGovern’s distant voice buzzing like a malarial mosquito in the background as I threw the contents of the glass in the general direction of my uvula. It went down like a male prostitute at the corner of Truth and Vermouth.
“Did you say Robert Scalopini?” I said at last.
“That’s right. Robert Scalopini. Know him?”
“I’ve seen him on a chafing dish,” I said, my mind whirring like a wood-chipper.
“Sounded like you knew him.”
“No, McGovern. I didn’t know him.”
“You don’t have to bite my head off. You don’t have to sound so peevish. It merely seemed as if you were unsure as to whether or not you knew him.”
“Let’s just put it this way, McGovern,” I said, doing everything in my power to conceal my irritation. “A large, loud, rather inebriated Irishman named Mike McGovern brought a group of his new best friends whom he’d just met, apparently, at the Corner Bistro I believe, to my loft to tell me goodbye at the precise moment I was contemplating committing suicide by jumping through a ceiling fan.”
“Go on,” said McGovern, somewhat belligerently.
“Someone in your intrepid little group of comrades evidently dropped his wallet in my loft. I have this information on good authority from Winnie Katz, who found said wallet when she was bringing in some mail for me earlier today.”
“Go on,” said McGovern truculently.
“The wallet, according to Winnie, appears to belong to someone you know. Or should I say knew.”
“Let’s see. Is it Judge Crater’s wallet? Is it Frederick Exley’s wallet? Is it Jesus Christ’s wallet? Uh, Richard Milhous Nixon’s wallet?”
“Oh, no, no, my dear Watson! How very witty of you! They’ve all no doubt been in my loft at one time or another, I feel certain. But none of them, my dear friend, happens to be the party that left his wallet at the—uh—party. That would be someone who, I’m given to believe, had twenty-four hours to live. Or rather, as some might sensationalize the matter, to die.”
“What?” said McGovern sharply.
“That’s right, Watson. The wallet in my loft belonged to good ol’ Bob Scalopini. The late Bob Scalopini, if I’m not mistaken.”
Now, of course, it was McGovern’s turn to swallow his cigar, except for the fact he didn’t smoke cigars. Maybe he would inhale a large, well-twisted joint or an entire Vodka McGovern or those fucking cookies he was incessantly baking. At any rate he must have inhaled something because he didn’t speak for a very long while. When I at last heard his voice again, it had an entirely different-sounding resonance. McGovern, a journalist to the core, apparently felt he had a scoop.
“This is unbelievable!” he shouted. “It’s a goddamn bird’s nest on the ground! And you don’t remember which one was Scalopini?”
“Of course not, McGovern. I wasn’t the one who brought them over to my loft.”
“That’s right. But he was definitely there?”
“After applying my methods of deductive reasoning to the known facts in this matter, I must concur, Watson, with your invariably brilliant conclusion.”
“Okay, this is great! This is a gift! I’ve got to get started.”
“Watson, life is a gift. Death is a gift. Friendship can even be a gift—”
By this time, however, in his journalistic zeal to follow a hot story, McGovern had already cradled the blower. I could imagine him with his trusty little newspaper reporter’s notebook in his hand, burning up the wires, legging it out the door, and always, always, asking an infinite stream of questions, which, of course, led inexorably to further questions and sometimes, possibly, some answers. That’s what we all were looking for, of course. Answers. In puzzles. In people. In life. That’s why we buy newspapers, why we play the jukebox, why we climb tall mountains, why we squint at a bleb of walrus semen through a microscope, why we go to New York, why we come back to Texas.
Twenty-four hours to die, I thought. That might be more than most of us needed.
Twelve
The next few days on the ranch were filled with activity. The boys and girls who thronged the little green valley of summertime were gone, of course. So were the hummingbirds. But the three donkeys, Roy, Gabby, and Little Jewford, came by the lodge to visit rather often, always provoking an explosion of barking and excitement on the part of the Friedmans. I kept the fire in the old fireplace burning twenty-four hours a day. To paraphrase Earl Buck-elew, I burned wood like a widow woman. I had a good reason for doing so. In my soul I
could feel the warmth of the world slipping away.
How could people live, I wondered, without a fire burning brightly in the fireplace? How could they live in an empty loft without a cat dumping vindictively about the floor, or a lesbian dance class pounding relentlessly on the ceiling? How could people live anywhere in this world without Cuban cigars or Kona coffee? How, indeed, could they live at all? I didn’t have any answers, but then I didn’t have all that many questions either. Most of the time I seemed to just watch the fire, as men had done for thousands of years, all in the twinkle of an eye.
The days passed. Two of them to be exact. I was sitting in the comfortable chair by the fire that Perky and I fought over constantly, half-dreaming of climbing Ayers Rock in Australia with Miss Texas. It doesn’t matter. Very little does, actually, once it starts to get smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror of your late-model, four-wheeled penis. It’s only later, in your dreams, when it starts to get bigger and bigger and the wheels fall off of your four-wheeled penis, and then your penis gets bigger and bigger, and soon you need a big chair by the fire just for your penis, and you and your penis and Perky are all constantly fighting over that chair. At any rate, it was into this bucolic idyll that a note of modern-day reality intruded by way of the blower.
“Rear Admiral Rumphumper,” I said. “How can I hump you? I mean, how can I help you?”
“You can help me by never answering the phone that way for the rest of your life.”
It was a familiar-sounding male voice with a New York accent. The voice carried with it a strong sense of authority. In fact, if I wasn’t mistaken, it was the voice of authority itself. It was my old sometimes friend, sometimes nemesis, Detective Sergeant Mort Cooperman of the NYPD. Now why in the hell would he be calling me in Texas? I wondered.
“Have you seen the papers, Tex?”
“I’ve seen the Times. The Kerrville Times, that is. I’ve seen the Mountain Sun. I’ve seen the Bandera Bulletin. I’ve seen the papers Willie Nelson uses to roll his dope with. They’re bigger than the menu at the Carnegie Deli. Of course everything’s bigger in Texas.”
I don’t know why I always derived such unbridled joy out of irritating Cooperman. He was, after all, just a public servant doing his job. A trifle overzealously sometimes, but what the hell. Anyway, my remarks appeared to have hit home. There was a longer than usual silence on the line. Then Cooperman’s growl started once again to chew on my ear.
“Tex, I don’t have a lot of time for this horseshit, so pull your lips together a minute, will you? Don’t start with me, Tex, or I may have to finish with you and you ain’t gonna like it. The paper I’m talkin’ about is the Daily News, which I realize you don’t get down there in Texas but I thought maybe your pal McGovern would’ve told you.”
“Told me what?” I said, playing dumb. It achieved no good purpose to get Cooperman really agitated. I just liked to tweak him a little like Tweety Bird used to do to Puddy Tat in those cartoons that kids used to watch before video games came along to suck, fuck, and cajole the innocence out of everybody’s childhood. More than anything else, Cooperman, I suppose, reminded me of Yosemite Sam.
“Quite a party you guys had, according to McGovern’s story. Guy comes to your place, twenty-four hours later he’s dead and you’ve bolted town for Texas.”
“Is that how you found me? McGovern gave you the number?”
“I’ve always had your number, Tex. But, now that you asked, no, we didn’t get your number from McGovern. We went to your loft, just like this murder victim number four did. We thought about getting a search warrant, but then we thought maybe we’d try to talk to you first. We were just getting tired of waiting when we ran into a friendly neighbor who lives upstairs and said she was looking after things for you. She gave us your phone number down there in Texas.”
“All my little helpers.”
“That’s right. Now we need you to help us, Tex. She told us how she found the dead guy’s wallet in your loft. What gives?”
“Look, Sergeant. I wouldn’t know a Robert Scalopini if I stepped on one.”
“You seem to know his name pretty well. I never mentioned the victim’s name to you.”
“Of course I know his name,” I said, taking my turn at becoming irritable. “McGovern told me his name and so did Winnie.”
“Winnie Katz, isn’t it? That your girlfriend?”
Sometimes in life you just had to take a few deep breaths and pretend you were a Buddhist or a dead teenager or something. When you banter with a cop you’ve got to be very careful you don’t cross that police line.
“She’s one of New York’s finest lesbians,” I said at last.
“Yeah, I thought I picked up something about her. So she finds the stiff’s wallet on the floor of your loft. That doesn’t look good. So I feel compelled to ask you again, Tex. How’d it get there?”
“How the hell do I know? Look, Sergeant, I didn’t kill the guy. I didn’t know the guy. As near as I can recall, I never met the guy. Maybe McGovern remembers more than he told me.”
“That’s the problem I have, Tex. Your pal McGovern doesn’t remember meeting the guy either. He says he thinks he brought a few people over to your place, but he doesn’t know if this bird was one of them.”
“If McGovern’s the one who in all likelihood brought this guy over to my loft, why don’t you try to refresh his memory? Why don’t you ask him these questions?”
“Because the stiff’s wallet didn’t turn up on the floor of his apartment. It turned up on the floor of your apartment. Capisce?”
There exists a certain thing called “cop logic” that never fails to boggle the rational mind. Sure, there were cases that had boggled Cooperman’s mind, that were eventually, sometimes with great media fanfare, resolved by the Kinkster. Yet there were also times when Cooperman and I had worked together with good results. Why then would he waste both of our time grilling me as if I were his main suspect, making me not eager to want to help him, making me crazy? So they found a dead guy’s wallet in my loft. Big fucking deal.
“Look, Sergeant,” I said, “I’ve already told you I never met this guy. I never met his wallet—”
“Understand me, Tex. If you don’t refresh your memory about this guy being in your loft, as McGovern’s story claims he was, things could get even worse for you. Tex, I want you up here tomorrow at the precinct.”
“Sergeant, be reasonable. I’m down here in Texas and Texas is a very big state. If I left for the airport now I couldn’t be sure I’d get there tomorrow.”
“Okay, pal. You have forty-eight hours. If you’re not here by then—”
“You don’t really believe I croaked this guy?”
“If you’re not here by then, I’ll issue a material witness warrant to your local sheriff. He’s probably the guy from Gunsmoke, but you can bet your ass, Tex, he’ll bring you in.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“If he had a wallet, I’d bring him in, too.”
Thirteen
I was mad at McGovern, mad at Winnie, mad at the whole damn world. I was just starting to relax and unwind my catfish here in Texas and now the horse manure had really hit the fan. I didn’t know for sure how the wallet had gotten into the loft, but, if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on McGovern bringing over the flotsam and jetsam of the Corner Bistro without even knowing the identities of the individuals. McGovern, who’d once combed his hair before meeting a racehorse, was a trusting soul. This time, he’d gone too far. Compounding his error in judgment, he’d then seen fit to write up the whole megilla in the Daily News. Why couldn’t he just have left it alone? I didn’t know the stiff. I couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup. What could I possibly bring to Cooperman’s table by hustling my buttocks back to New York? I hadn’t, of course, read McGovern’s article, but I could just imagine how much he must have embellished the situation to have Cooperman so hot on my trail. And Winnie’d been some help, as well. Making it possible for her local law en
forcement officer to easily get in touch with me. Telling him she’d found the stiff’s wallet in my loft. Hell yes, it sounded bad. And here I was, not knowing the victim, not knowing how his fucking wallet had gotten into my loft, innocent as the Baby Jesus, just trying to sit by the fire and watch the Fox News Network twenty-four hours a day. That’s what happens when you mind your own business. In a growing rage, I called McGovern’s number.
“MIT! MIT! MIT! You fuckhead!” I shouted.
“Who’s calling, please?”
“McGovern, what the hell did you say in that story you wrote?”
“You mean ‘Twenty-four Hours to Die’?”
“In twenty-four hours I’m going to kill your ass.”
“What are you so upset about? I just told the truth. The piece has gotten great response.”
“I’m aware of that. Sergeant Cooperman just called me.”
“Cooperman called you? At the ranch?”
“That’s right. And he wasn’t looking for Gabby Hayes. I think my good friend Winnie Katz aided and abetted him in locating me. And, of course, the catalyst for the whole thing was your ridiculous story.”
“I just wrote the truth!”
“You know what the Turks say? They say, ‘When you tell the truth, have one foot in the stirrup.’ ”
“You had one foot in the stirrup, Kink. You just didn’t ride far enough. Cooperman just probably wants to ask you a few questions. That’s all. There’s no reason to get so excited.”
Ten Little New Yorkers Page 5