“One mistake I won’t make is going back there again.”
There was a certain ethnic trait in Rambam that kept him from discussing what was clearly on both of our minds until the food had arrived and largely been consumed. Maybe he just liked to keep his cards close to his lobster bib. At any rate, Rambam finally decided to bring the annual meeting of the Brotherhood of the Flaming Asshole to order. He was brief with his opening remarks.
“Do you want the good news first,” he asked, “or the bad news?”
“I’m Jewish,” I said. “I’ll take the bad news first.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow for Cambodia. I’d hoped I could postpone it but I can’t. This is an urgent, not to mention very lucrative, case.”
Rambam traveled the globe on a fairly regular basis, and he was also given to leaving at short notice, so the only thing that surprised me was how little the news really surprised me. I took it in rather stoically.
“Give my regards to Angkor Wat.”
“Wat?” shouted Rambam. “Can’t hear you. I got a chopstick in my ear.”
“Okay,” I said, “what’s the good news?”
“The good news is that the hard-boiled computer didn’t let us down. I fed the names of the five victims into it and it clearly affirmed that three of the five were scumbags.”
“That is a hard-boiled computer.”
“The point is, even in New York, three out of five victims turning out to be scumbags is, to say the least, statistically improbable.”
“Define ‘scumbag.’ ”
“For our purposes it would comprise individuals with rap sheets full of abuse toward women. I’m talking rape, forced sodomy, every manner of domestic violence you can imagine. Now, remember, that’s only three of the stiffs. The other two, for the moment, seem to come up clean. But, believe me, it’s suggestive. Very fucking suggestive.”
“Very fucking suggestive of what?”
“How the fuck should I know? Archie Goodwin’s blowing out for Cambodia tomorrow at three o’clock and I haven’t even packed my pith helmet yet. It’s up to you, Mr. Wolfe. You and Ratso, your favorite Dr. Watson.”
“Aren’t you mixing metaphors a bit? If only for balance, you need a skinny guy and a fat guy, and Wolfe and Watson are too endomorphically similar. So I’ll be Sherlock and Ratso will be Watson.”
“Boy, if the killer could hear that, I bet he’d be quaking in his boots.”
It did sound pretty ridiculous, I reflected, as I scooped up the last salt and pepper shrimp just ahead of Rambam’s rapacious hand. What the hell did it matter anyway? The whole thing was going to be ten times as hard with Rambam out of the picture. It was true that Ratso and I had solved more than a few high-profile cases on our own, but this time the perpetrator was clearly a serial psycho suffering from an overactive imagination. Times like these required every hand on board, and the whole team working together, not to mix a metaphor. And this was modern-day New York, not Victorian London. The Sherlock-Watson business might be an effective therapeutic game for Ratso—hell, even possibly for myself—but deductive reasoning doesn’t always fare so well when pitted against brutal, violent, twisted, miscreative, undecaffeinated evil. Even with Rambam, this one looked like a bitch from hell.
“Where do you think we should start?” I asked.
“You start with the two murder victims whose backgrounds appear to be clean. Right now we just have an unusual statistical circumstance. For there to be a pattern, there has to be a pattern. Capisce?”
“I think so.”
“Look, if these two supposedly clean guys are really clean, then this particular statistical universe might as well circle the bowl. If you and your pet rodent can’t dig up something on those two guys, then whatever you have on the other three is probably irrelevant. There’s a reason somebody systematically whacks five people. It may not be especially logical. It may not be apparent on the surface. But, trust me, it’s there. These are not Son of Sam affairs or random thrill killings. There’s method in this guy’s madness.”
“There’s also madness in his method,” I said.
“No shit, Sherlock,” said Rambam grimly. “Don’t fucking get careless.”
Before we parted company that afternoon Rambam reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and handed me an envelope that he said contained everything the hard-boiled computer had spit out regarding the case. The envelope did not seem terribly thick. Maybe the hard-boiled computer had other things on its mind. I told Rambam as much. I also told him I thought that all computers were the work of Satan. No, he said, the work of Satan was what Ratso and I would soon be investigating.
Eventually, Rambam went back to that faraway kingdom called Brooklyn, and I walked home alone. Along the way, a refrain from a Billy Joe Shaver song, “Freedom’s Child,” kept running through my head. “Fillin’ up the empty space, left by one who’s gone.” The problem was that there were getting to be so many empty spaces in my life that pretty soon I was going to need a fucking backhoe.
Eighteen
I thought I heard Rambam’s plane flying over my head some time that morning, but it could have been a garbage truck. For all I knew it could’ve been a nuclear missile coming to turn my eyes to jelly. I’d stayed up late the previous night with a bottle of Jameson’s, poring over the rather skimpy results the hard-boiled computer had—rather grudgingly, it seemed to me—spit out. Rambam had told me quite clearly that the hard-boiled computer was at heart merely a rather extensive criminal database that very easily could miss important, even seminal, information just as the cops often did. It ain’t the Bible, Rambam had said. What was it then? I asked. Think of it as a roadmap to hell, Rambam had answered. I didn’t mention it to Rambam at the time, but why would you need a roadmap if you were already there?
Bright and early that morning, around noon, I called Ratso and was rewarded by hearing his loud, rodentlike voice go through my head like a drill bit. We decided to go over the printouts together and Ratso, who seemed to have become more insular as the years had gone by, was able to persuade me to make my annual pilgrimage to his apartment. He would make tea if I would bring some pastries up from the place across the street. Ratso’s apartment would not be the most pleasant garden spot in which to have tea and pastries, but logistically, it did make some sense. One of the two killings in question had taken place in SoHo, only blocks from where he lived on Prince Street.
The sun was peeping out between the clouds and the buildings as I ankled it over to Ratso’s that afternoon, and I had to admit it was bordering on a beautiful day, with all the taxis and pigeons and people milling about like wayward stars in a pleasantly fucked-up universe. Walking’s always a good mode of transport because it clears the mind and sometimes you can even think. I was thinking that it was possible that things weren’t as bad as maybe they’d seemed to be in the recent past. Okay, the cat was gone. There was nothing I could do about that until I crossed the rainbow bridge and met up with her again. But other than that, I was still a free bird, and my pattern of flight was taking me right where I loved to be, into the dark heart of a murder investigation. Happiness, it appeared, really was a warm gun.
It felt, to paraphrase my father, almost good to be alive. Now if Ratso and I could just poke around a bit and find a few blemishes on the backgrounds of the two “clean” victims, we might really get somewhere with this affair. From the very nature of the murders that I was aware of, I could already deduce an avenging angel perpetrating the crimes. Possibly the relative or brother or boyfriend of one of the sexual abuse victims. That would make a lot of sense, always provided the two backgrounds didn’t remain clean after Ratso and I got through with them. Hell, I thought, nothing remained clean after Ratso got through with it.
His apartment, I soon discovered, not to my enormous surprise, also fell into this category. Coke cans and old pizza cartons littered the coffee table, and about forty-nine hockey sticks that had apparently been leaned precariously against the doorj
amb crashed into my cigar as it entered Ratso’s rather fetid airspace. Ratso came out of his lair still wearing his pajamas, which were bright green with dollar signs all over them. I didn’t get to comment on his apparel, however, because I was still trying to extricate myself from all the hockey sticks.
“Great!” he shouted enthusiastically. “My alarm still works.”
“You could’ve just locked the door,” I said, not irrationally.
“Oh, I do. I always keep it triple-locked because I’ve got a lifetime of stuff in here. But when I buzzed you in, I had to take a sudden dump, so I just left the door unlocked for the time it took you to come up in the elevator, then went to take the dump, and you can see the results. Not of the dump, I mean, of your attempted entry into the apartment. What do you think, Sherlock?”
“Very ingenious, Watson, very ingenious! Now if I can remove the hockey stick that’s embedded in my scrotum, maybe I can come into your fucking apartment.”
Once you got past the clutter, browsing Ratso’s little apartment could be quite an educational experience, especially if your areas of interest were pornography, Jesus Christ, Bob Dylan, or Hitler. At the moment, indeed, a fairly salacious porno tape was running on one of Ratso’s many television sets, the sound thankfully muted. A life-size statue of the Virgin Mary looked on in stoic silence as well. On the kitchen counter, along with leftover takeout Chinese food that had to have been there at least several fortnights, there stood a large wicker basket of little black puppetheads, the brothers and sisters of the one currently residing on my mantel at 199B Vandam Street. The way the basket was so prominently positioned, its contents might have been apples for people from Mars. Of course, not that many earthlings ever came into Ratso’s chambers either. I suspect he believed that too much traffic might be a security risk. And then there were the books—shelves and shelves containing every angle and aspect of the lives of Hitler, Jesus, and Bob Dylan. What, I wondered, did the three have in common? Possibly only that Larry “Ratso” Sloman devotedly collected them.
“I see the maid hasn’t come this week,” I said, my eye falling upon Ratso’s old disreputable couch with the skidmarks on it. “Or did you kill her and take her to your Lord?”
“She came all right,” said Ratso, with a measure of pride. “Right there on the couch.”
It was hard for me to believe that I’d once called that same decrepit, soiled sofa home. It was even harder to believe that Ratso was the man the fates had chosen to be my Dr. Watson. Nevertheless, he had many good qualities, almost none of which sprang to mind as I looked at him standing in the middle of his sick, debauched little apartment in his green pajamas with the dollar signs. Call no man useless, I thought.
“Let’s get down to business, Sherlock,” he said at last. “Where are the pastries?”
After a very civilized tea and pastry continental brunch in Ratso’s squalid quarters, I had revised upward my rough calculation of the man’s worth to the investigation. Not only was he perhaps a little too familiar with the living street, he knew someone who lived in the same building in which one of the two murders had occurred. For a private investigator, especially an amateur like myself, this was a bird’s nest on the ground. The cops could waltz right in any time they desired, but even the licensed PI has difficulty interviewing friends, neighbors, and relatives of stiffs.
Call no man useless, I reflected, as Ratso and I marched up Prince Street, headed toward the recent scene of the crime. Apartments turn over fast in New York and the murder had taken place over a week ago, so it was entirely possible that this could be a wipeout even with Ratso’s contact in the building. By now the victim’s place could have been sanitized, painted, and inhabited by anyone from a large, extended Pakistani family to Will and Grace.
“What’s your friend’s name again?” I asked, as we continued up the sidewalk.
“Harry Felcher. He’s a performance artist.”
“Don’t you think we ought to call him and make sure he’s home?”
“He’s a nocturnal creature. Always home in the daytime. He’s a bit like you, Sherlock. Maybe a bit more eccentric.”
“That’s impossible, Watson.”
“Not really. He started out as a female impersonator, but he seems lately to have overidentified with his field of study. Now he actually believes he’s Nina Simone or Billie Holiday.”
“So he’s black?”
“No. He’s white as Peruvian marching powder.”
“Bit of a stretch, isn’t it, Watson? How does he get past not being black?”
“Same way he gets past not having a vagina,” said Ratso, as he hooked a left at the corner.
The building itself looked like the kind of structure in which a murder might have taken place recently. I checked the address against Rambam’s printout. This was the place, all right. But you would’ve known that even without the printout. All you needed was a measure of native sensitivity. It was like looking at the eyes of a person in a photograph that you knew to be dead.
“I’ll buzz Harry, Sherlock,” said Ratso, as he headed across the street.
“Fine, Watson, fine.”
In a matter of moments we were buzzed in and were riding up to the fourth floor in a small elevator that smelled better than the one in Ratso’s building. Cuban cigar smoke, of course, improves anything. Harry Felcher met us at the elevator. He was wearing a bright pink kimono and a lot of lipstick and makeup. He looked like a dead diva, which was not that far off the mark, as he immediately treated us to a few verses of “Over the Rainbow” while he escorted us to his boudoir.
If anything, the place was weirder than Harry. It looked like a miniature neon jungle, with mannequins, wigs, high-heeled stilettos, lingerie of every type imaginable—everything a nice Jewish boy from New York needed in his apartment. Old-time, rather spooky ballroom music was playing on an actual Victrola. Everything smelled like stale perfume.
“Nice place,” said Ratso.
“We like it,” said Felcher.
Who the “we” was was not entirely clear, since there was no sign of anyone else inhabiting the small apartment. Ratso, possessing fewer social graces than myself, was the first to voice the question.
“We?” he said.
“Me and Judy,” said Felcher.
There was an uncomfortable silence in the place for a moment or two. This was broken by Felcher, who began dancing around and singing, “If tiny little bluebirds fly ov-er the rainbow, why, oh, why can’t I?” Ratso and I dutifully gave him a light round of applause. Then it was half-past time to get down to business.
“There was a murder in this building last week,” said Ratso. “Did you know the vic?”
“The vic?” asked Felcher.
“The vic-tim,” said Ratso irritably. “Don Rossetti?”
“I knew Don and his wife, Celeste,” said Felcher, eerily maintaining his Judy Garland voice and mannerisms as he spoke.
“Any idea who murdered him?” Ratso asked.
“No, no Nanette!” Felcher ejaculated. “I don’t like to think about things like that.”
“No one likes to think about things like that,” said Ratso, a bit more patiently. “Except for Sherlock here, of course.”
“Fine, Watson, fine,” I muttered.
Now it truly was a ship of fools, I thought. Here were Ratso and I, playing at being Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, interviewing this Harry Felcher person, who was, to put it kindly, playing at being Judy Garland. Maybe none of us were playing at all. Maybe this was life and life only. Maybe the only thing that was real was the guy who had died in this building.
“Rossetti’s name isn’t on the buzzer,” said Ratso. “Do you know where they lived in the building?”
“But, of course,” said Felcher, with a highly theatrical wave of his arm. “Right down the hall.”
“Tell us everything you know about them,” said Ratso. “This is important, Judy. I mean, Harry.”
“I answer to both,” gushed Felc
her. “Okay, let me see. They were a strange couple. She was a dancer, and like all dancers she was a klutz. She was always breaking a finger or an arm or falling down the stairs and getting a concussion.”
Ratso looked at me knowingly at this point. Felcher, of course, in his total self-absorption, did not notice. He kept rattling on, which was fine with me. I’ve always enjoyed hearing Judy Garland impersonators speak the truth, as they know it, to a world unwilling to be led to the light.
“Don was always a quiet sort of brooding fellow. Never said much, yet there was something about him that made you feel uncomfortable in his presence. Celeste, though, she was an angel. She left a few weeks before it happened. I don’t know why she left. She’s back, by the way, cleaning out the apartment. At least that’s what I think she said.”
This time Ratso and I looked at each other. Just down the hall, apparently, was the woman whom the hard-boiled computer might very well have missed, which meant the cops might very well have missed her as well. Don Rossetti’s clean reputation might be about to be getting a wee bit dirtier. But it was still all conjecture. When you’re standing in the apartment of a full-tilt Judy Garland impersonator, the whole world is, indubitably, conjecture.
“If tiny little bluebirds fly—” Felcher began again. But this time Ratso cut him off rather abruptly.
“Hold it, Judy!” he said, gently but firmly. “Celeste is in the dead man’s apartment right now?”
“It’s number-4C-to-the-right,” sang Judy, hewing tightly to the melody line.
Then she finished with a flourish, pirouetting passionately about the small, cluttered, fetish-fraught living room. Ratso and I stood stolidly by and watched with the eyes of men who were witnessing the wreck of a toy train.
“Why—oh—why—can’t—I?” she sang, in an almost uncanny imitation of the real thing. Maybe it was as close to the real thing as either one of us was ever going to get.
“I think we have what we need, Watson,” I said.
Ten Little New Yorkers Page 8