Ten Little New Yorkers
Page 6
“Look, Cooperman doesn’t just want to ask questions. Cooperman wants answers. Answers I ain’t got. If you listen to Cooperman, it sounds like he thinks I croaked the guy. Now where would he get an idea like that?”
There was a long silence on the line. I knew McGovern wouldn’t deliberately put me in a bad situation. But that appeared to be exactly what he’d done and we both knew it. The truth was the truth, of course. But what the hell was the truth? I wanted the answer to that one as much as McGovern.
“Let’s look at this rationally,” said McGovern. “Let’s apply a little deductive reasoning, like your imaginary childhood friend Sherlock would do if he were here.”
“He is here.”
“Okay. Neither of us put the wallet of a murder victim in your loft, so the guy himself must’ve dropped it there just before he got himself croaked.”
“Considerate of him.”
“The point is, I think I know which one he was. There were only three guys that followed me to your place, and I think the tall, skinny one was Scalopini. It had to be him or else how’d the wallet get dropped there? So it was accurate to say that the victim, not realizing he had twenty-four hours to die, attended a party at Kinky Friedman’s loft.”
I didn’t know whether to kill myself or get a haircut. It was like somebody had hit me on the head with a hammer. I could’ve shit standing. My thoughts were swirling around like a Texas blue norther. For one of the few times in my life, I was totally at a loss for words.
“Kink. Kink? Are you there?”
I was there, all right. I was here and I was there and I was everywhere I didn’t want to be. The whole scenario, I reflected, was positively Kafkaesque. By leaving New York when I did, I’d given the appearance of being more involved than if I’d stayed. Guilt was a funny thing. It had a peculiar nasty little habit of attaching itself to you, of washing all over you, even when you knew in your heart you were blameless as you were the day you were born.
Being Jewish, of course, never cuts you much slack in the guilt department. It didn’t help that half the city of New York was reading with interest and raising a collective eyebrow at the news that its latest murder victim had been hanging out socially at the Kinkster’s loft just hours before his unfortunate demise. Certainly, Cooperman was curious. As for myself? The great detective didn’t have a clue. I was, however, rapidly running out of charm. So I hustled the still-protesting McGovern off the blower and rounded up Rambam.
“Secret bat phone.”
“Yeah. I think I’ve got a problem.”
“Problems R Us. What happened? You get stuck fucking a cow?”
“Rambam, this is serious. Did you see McGovern’s piece in the Daily News?”
“Who hasn’t? Remind me never to go to a party at your loft.”
“It wasn’t a party. I was the host, supposedly, and I hardly remember being there myself.”
“Those are the best kind. When people say you had a good time.”
“Well, I’m not having a good time now. Cooperman just called me.”
“He called you at the ranch?”
“No, Rambam. He called me at my chalet in Gstaad and the call was then beamed by satellite over to me here at the ranch.”
“Cooperman actually called you at the ranch. How’d he get the number?”
“He came prowling around Vandam Street, apparently, after he’d read McGovern’s wonderful story. He ran into Winnie Katz, apparently, grilled her, and she, like any good citizen, gave him the wallet and, apparently, my number.”
“Lot of apparentlys. Bottom line is, never trust a lesbian.”
“Now you tell me.”
“Never trust anybody else either. Okay, Cooperman’s already got the wallet. What else does he want?”
“That’s what’s worrying me a bit. He wants my ass back in New York yesterday. To be more precise, he gave me forty-eight hours.”
“Wow. Twenty-four hours to die. Forty-eight hours to get back to New York. Working with a lot of time lines here. What did Cooperman say would happen if you decide not to come back?”
“He’ll call the local sheriff, he says. Have me brought back.”
“A material witness warrant probably. Well, don’t ever say you’re not wanted. Reading between the lines, I’d say somebody’s just cut in on your little Texas two-step.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning your vacation’s over before it started. You’ve heard about the long arm of the law? This one is reaching out to grab you by the balls, brother. You don’t mess around with a material witness warrant. They’ll find you and bring you back, believe me. And don’t forget, right now you’re just a material witness. Cooperman could easily upgrade you at any time.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you could go from a material witness to a target of the investigation at any time. You could, depending on circumstances, even be upgraded to a suspect. The nomenclature’s fairly meaningless to the world in general, of course, but in the eyes of a cop, it can be very finely nuanced. This probably won’t happen, but the other thing you could be is ‘a person of interest.’ That’s the one you really don’t want any part of. Cooperman didn’t mention a search warrant, did he?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Then you can assume he got one and they’ve already been through the place. There’s nothing terribly incriminating there probably. They could’ve found some long-forgotten stashes of dope left behind by one of your halfwit friends like Chinga or McGovern. Maybe there’s an overdue library book from 1957.”
“In 1957 I was attending Edgar Allan Poe Elementary School in Houston, Texas.”
“Okay. So it was planted.”
Still talking to Rambam, I got up from the cozy chair by the fire and walked into the kitchen and poured myself another cup of Kona coffee. I opened the cabinet and looked at a bottle of Jameson’s for a moment, then closed the cabinet door. Funny how I didn’t seem to be drinking as much these days. Dealing with the NYPD, of course, could drive you to drink.
“Look,” I said finally to Rambam, “I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t conceal any evidence of a crime. So why do I feel just a weensy bit guilty?”
“Two reasons,” said Rambam. “One is all the pressure you’re feeling from Cooperman, and two is because you’re a fucking Jew. Quite normal, under the circumstances.”
“So I guess I just come back and face the music.”
“There’s no other option. And believe me, the music you’ll probably face is going to sound like it’s coming from a jukebox in hell. It’ll make you wish you were listening to Barry Manilow.”
I hung up with Rambam and went back into the living room and looked at the fire. For some reason the words of an old cowboy song came into my head. “I’m Going to Leave Ol’ Texas Now / They’ve got no use for the longhorned cow / They’ve plowed and fenced my cattle range / And the people there are all so strange.”
I walked closer to the fire and thought I might just relax a moment before I began the tedium of making last-minute plane reservations. I started to sit down, but then I realized that would not be possible. Perky was already curled up comfortably in my chair.
Fourteen
Just like a hospital, a bus station, or a whorehouse has its own institutionalized ambience, so, indubitably, does a cop shop. I waited in the hallway, seated in one of those ubiquitous plastic chairs in which so many troubled souls had waited before me. The real bad guys get to go right in, no doubt. It’s just the guys like me, the ones who might be on their way to becoming persons of interest, in whom the cops seem to have almost no interest at all. I thought about all of this and wished that I could still be fighting Perky for the chair by the fire.
By this time, I’d gotten over my anger at McGovern and Winnie. To paraphrase my father, they were just people doing the best they could. Given the same set of circumstances, if I’d been in their places, I might have done the same. And besides, this was America and I had nothing to wo
rry about because I was innocent of any crime related to murder or stolen wallets. I wasn’t totally innocent, of course. I’d let some good people down in my time. I broke some beautiful hearts that it was too late to mend. I almost ritually bought bad aloha shirts in Hawaii. (Somebody had to buy them.) I wasn’t perfect. But I wasn’t as guilty as Cooperman seemed to be making me out to be. In fact, I wasn’t guilty at all. Unless being human is being guilty. You could argue that one, of course. If you wanted to.
While I sat there cops came and went, all on their busy little errands. Some of them glanced at me. Some of them didn’t bother. None of them said, “Good morning.” Of course it wasn’t really morning anymore. It had been when I’d gotten there. It was now a few hairs and a freckle past Gary Cooper time and I was still waiting in this fucking plastic chair. Ah well, I thought, like the Guinness slogan says: “Good things happen to those who wait.” Bad things happen, too, of course.
At least the time I sat there gave me a chance to get my story down. My story was that Scalopini, or whatever the hell his name was, had come over with McGovern and a few other guys I didn’t know on the night before I’d left town. They were all fairly heavily monstered when they got there, and by the end of the evening I was pretty well walking on my knuckles as well. The soon-to-be-dead guy must’ve dropped his wallet on the floor at some time during the visit and was too fucked up to notice its absence. Of course, the rest of us had also been too fucked up to notice its presence. Maybe it had fallen against the counter or underneath the desk. Maybe we’d kicked it around like a soccer ball for a few hours. How the hell did I know? Anyway, I never saw it there. Then I left for Texas. That was my story and I was sticking to it.
“Hey, Tex,” said a familiar voice. “Come on in. Didn’t realize you’d been waiting in the green room so long. Sorry ’bout that. Been a ball-dragger of a day and it hasn’t even started yet.”
The voice and, of course, the vessel that housed it belonged to none other than Detective Sergeant Buddy Fox, a man not often known for being this positively chatty. His tone and demeanor were friendly, conversational, almost breezy, a far cry from Cooperman’s blunt, bullying, doom-and-gloom telephone technique. Was an incipient case of good cop–bad cop already taking form? Why bother with such a charade for a guy like me? I wondered. Hell, I wasn’t even a person of interest yet. Or was I?
“Thanks for coming back so fast, Tex,” said Fox, as he led me down a long, cramped corridor and ushered me into a small, drab room, the only other occupants of which appeared to be filing cabinets. “Myself, I’ve wanted to go on a vacation ever since the day I first put on a badge. I try like hell, but I can’t get away. Know why, Tex?”
“Why?”
“Because the poor miserable bastards that make up the human race keep on killing each other. They’re probably doing it just to keep me from taking the family to Sea World. I haven’t had a vacation in thirty years. Kids are all grown up. Don’t even want to go to Sea World. I’m the only one who wants to go to Sea World. But the bastards keep killing each other.”
“That’s tough.”
“Go ahead and smoke, Tex, if you like. I’m going to. If we can’t kill somebody else we might as well kill ourselves. Right?”
“Right,” I said. I pulled out a cigar and lopped the butt off. Before I could light it, Fox, like some thoughtful waiter, fired up his Zippo and did the honors for me. Then he lit his cigarette. Fox inhaled, then exhaled extravagantly—and rather sadly, I thought, as if he were losing the smoke of life.
“Mort’ll be here in a minute,” said Fox lightly. “Go easy on him, Tex. He’s pretty grumpy today.”
“Maybe he needs a trip to Sea World.”
“Maybe,” said Fox. He didn’t say anything else for a while. He just looked straight ahead, as if attempting to establish eye contact with a nearby filing cabinet.
The little room seemed to noticeably darken when Cooperman finally made his entrance. He carried with him the now-several-days-old Daily News opened to McGovern’s story with the bold headline “Twenty-four Hours to Die.” He tossed the paper to me and hoisted his large body onto a desk.
“Read it,” was all he said.
I pored over the piece dutifully. There was a photo of Scalopini that seemed to vaguely resemble one of the three wise men McGovern had dragged to my loft, but I really couldn’t be sure. He’d apparently not been a model citizen. He’d done some time more than twenty years ago on sexual assault charges involving a young girl. Since getting out of prison eight years ago, he’d worked on and off as a bouncer, a shoe salesman, and a limo driver. He’d been married and divorced twice. And, of course, on the last night of his life, he’d stopped by to pay a social visit to Kinky Friedman’s loft. There wasn’t much else to it. There didn’t have to be.
“Is that the guy?” growled Cooperman. “Guy who came to your party?”
“It wasn’t a party. I didn’t—”
“Is that the guy?”
“I think it’s him. I can’t really be sure.”
“You think it’s him. What else do you think?”
“Not too much,” I said, looking doubtfully down at the guy’s picture in the paper.
Suddenly, something struck me in the chest, startling me out of whatever protective stupor you habitually fall into whenever you’re being grilled by cops. It didn’t really hurt. It just surprised me a little. I saw what it was quickly enough and caught it in my hands. It was the guy’s wallet.
“Now I know what it’s like,” I said, “to be struck by a speeding wallet.”
“You seen it before?” asked Cooperman sharply, all no-nonsense now.
“Never,” I said. “The guy must’ve dropped it—”
“At the party you didn’t have?”
“Look, Sergeant, I didn’t invite these guys over. I didn’t want to see them. I didn’t even want to see McGovern.”
“Take a good look at that wallet. Look at his driver’s license. Is-that-the-guy?”
“I guess it must’ve been him.”
“You guess it must’ve been him? You guess it must’ve been him? Never seen the wallet?”
“No.”
“Want to know how he died?”
“Sure. Tell me.”
“Tell him, Fox.”
“Bound and gagged with his dick cut off. Bled to death. Slowly.”
The room grew quiet. I looked at the guy’s driver’s license photo again. It wasn’t a bad shot, as they go. Didn’t look much like the picture in the Daily News, but then you never should believe everything you see in the papers. What the hell was I doing here anyway? I wondered.
“Think carefully, Tex,” snarled Cooperman. “You’ve never laid eyes on that wallet before?”
“Never,” I repeated truthfully, wondering why Cooperman was being so persistent. Where the hell was he going with this?
I didn’t get to find out right away because Cooperman’s wallet fetish was interrupted by a sharp knock on the door. A uniform came in and handed Cooperman some papers. He perused them with a grave expression, then abruptly removed his large buttocks from the desk.
“Looks like a fifth victim, Tex. Went down in Chelsea very late last night. This one was found with a knitting needle jammed up his nose right into his brain.”
“What’ll they think of next?” said Fox.
“You got in this morning, right, Tex?” said Cooperman.
“That’s right. I took a cab from the airport to here, just stopping long enough at my place to drop off my busted valise.”
“We’ve got to get over to Chelsea now, but I want you to understand something, Tex. Under no circumstances are you to leave the city. You got that?”
“What am I?” I said. “A witness? A suspect?”
Cooperman looked at me coldly with obsidian eyes that had seen a lot of shit go down in this city and were sure that they were going to see a lot more. He smiled a smile that wasn’t really a smile; it was a stubborn, bitter rictus of malice.
“Dickless wonder,” said Fox. Cooperman paid him no attention.
“This dead guy? Scalopini?” he repeated. “He was never at your loft. He wasn’t even in the city that night. He was on a skiing trip in Vermont. When he came back the next day, the killer surprised him when he entered his own apartment. I’ll take that wallet now.”
I looked down at the wallet in my hand. Then I gave it to Cooperman.
“Then how—?” I started to ask.
“That’s what we want to know,” said Cooperman.
Fifteen
Much later that afternoon, at the Second Avenue Deli, Ratso’s large, slightly pear-shaped, Jewish buttocks were literally on the edge of his seat as I regaled him with the morning’s adventures at the cop shop. Cop-talk about “vics” and “perps” always seemed to titillate Ratso’s proclivities to delve deeply into the psychological nature of the criminal mind. But unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, depending upon the way you looked at it, Ratso was quintessentially a good guy. And good guys rarely if ever are capable of gleaning significant insights into the criminal mind. Nevertheless, Ratso’s enthusiasm often compensated for his spiritual disability.
“This is it, baby!” he shouted, as the waiter brought the matzo ball soup. “This is the big case we’ve been waiting for, Sherlock!”
“It also has the advantage,” I said, “of my being involved in it whether I like it or not.”
Ratso, never one to pick up on ironical nuances, or nuances of any kind for that matter, slurped his soup and nodded repeatedly to himself with a seeming sense of great satisfaction. Whether this response was in reaction to the situation or the soup, I would not like to hazard a guess.
“Do you think they’re random?” he asked.
“Do I think what are random?”
“The string of killings, of course, Sherlock. The four murders in the Village.”