Ten Little New Yorkers

by Kinky Friedman

  It was starting to rain by the time I got to the little neighborhood bar called “The Ear,” so named because the letter “B” of the word “Bar” was half burned out, as, of course, were most of the clientele. The place was not crowded, but it was full enough to hide a cowboy who was holding his hat out deliberately from behind a boulder in order to draw fire or at least a little attention. The guy who was tailing me parked directly across the street from The Ear, now making no pretense about reading the paper. The relationship between the tail and the tailee was a little bit like love, I reflected, as I entered the place: After the period of courtship is over, you just get right down to it.

  There are icons in this world such as Elvis, Jesus, Che Guevara, and James Dean. Then there are cult celebrities who do not stir instant crowd hysteria but may cause a number of individuals to whisper, “Isn’t that Toulouse-Lautrec?” It is that latter galaxy of smaller stars to which I belong, but even that can have its advantages. Fortunately, Mal, the guy who ran the place, was there behind the bar. I had a few brief words with him, ordered a Guinness, and found an empty table right by the window, taking a seat with my back against the street. This, I figured, had to be a surveillance cop’s dream. Here was a guy in a bright red Indian blanket, a big black cowboy hat, and smoking a big cigar, sitting at a table right by the window. You could tail a guy like that in your sleep. That was exactly what I wanted the cop to think.

  After I’d been nursing the Guinness for a few minutes, Mal made a small announcement to the bar patrons. Shortly after that, I got up and left my drink and headed in the obvious direction of the dumper. Three or four customers gravitated to the same area, whereupon we congregated in a small hallway out of sight of the prying eyes of the street. What Mal and I had cooked up was a typical small pub amusement: a Kinky Friedman look-alike contest. I selected a Jewish-looking ectomorph with a mustache, who was probably an accountant or a homosexual, or, very possibly, a serial killer himself, and I gave him my hat and my coat and stuck a cigar in his mouth. He walked back to my table by the window and sat down in my chair to a light smattering of applause, thereby winning a free round of drinks for himself and his friends, if he had any, which I rather doubted. I took the opportunity to put on a dark, nondescript raincoat and don a black beret that may well have been forlornly hanging there for many years, depending on whether it had been left by Lennon or Lenin. Then I scooted like a dog out the back door into a welcome wall of rain.

  Evading an NYPD surveillance team—I say team, because though I only saw the one guy, I didn’t know who or what else was out there—is always an exhilarating experience. It’s a better high than closing on a house or getting a divorce. Jewish divorces, incidentally, are always the most expensive. That’s because they’re worth it. At any rate, I wandered through the rain-wept streets of the Village for a while, just to be sure that I’d really shaken the tail. I hadn’t given a lot of thought to what my next amusement would be. I figured I’d just drift over in the general direction of McGovern’s place on Jane Street. It was a step up from Ratso’s with the only downside being that you usually had to repeat everything two times, which of course is redundant because if you repeat something that is two times. The serial killer, it should be noted, had now struck six times.

  Walking around in the rain connects all the dots in the world and sometimes helps you see things from a different slant, almost as if those little raindrops really know where they’re going. As if any of us really know where we’re going. So I wondered as I wandered, as the rain continued to fall, as the wheels and the world continued to spin, as paper boats continued to sail upon the asphalt sea, as water turned to wine, and wine turned to blood, and the day turned to night, and lovers turned to each other, and men and women turned gay, and I turned right on Christopher Street.

  The “Ol’ Ben Lucas Clue,” as Ratso had called it, was what was bothering me. Assuming that rather obliquely obvious message had not been left by someone with only a passing familiarity with that song, but rather a passing familiarity with me, it indicated that the killer had to emanate from a relatively small universe of human beings, if, indeed, you want to call a killer like this human. Indeed, if you walked in the rain a while and thought about it, the killer was just about as human as it gets. To paraphrase my father, the term we criminologists like to use for this kind of killer is “a sick fuck.”

  The combination of the song and the Cuban cigars was highly problematical for the Kinkster. It did not necessarily portend that the murderer was a Village Irregular or somebody close to me. A deranged fan, for instance, could have been capable of the same behavior. There were lots of deranged fans out there, as Bob Dylan, Dwight Yoakam, John Cale, or virtually any thinking man’s rock star will tell you. We all tend to have a little deranged fan in us, to overidentify with our field of study, thereby incurring the rain-barrel effect, in which one more tiny imagined slight can produce horrific results. In other words, the killer didn’t necessarily have to know me. The problem was that I was pretty sure that he did.

  We all wear masks. But a monster of this magnitude wears a mask that is all but impenetrable to the naked eye. Was Chinga capable of these acts? Were Mick Brennan or Pete Myers? Even Rambam, Ratso, McGovern? How does anybody ever know until the fateful moment the killer lifts his hand, when the mask falls to the bloody floor? If a human being is capable of these actions, as was clearly the case, then any one of us would appear to be abundantly capable of crawling into the demon’s skull for a while, getting behind the wheel, and going for a little ride. It’s not so strange really. Especially when it’s raining.

  I don’t know how long I roamed the streets like a rambling hunchback, but I eventually found myself in the familiar environs of the Corner Bistro and Jane Street. I had no idea how Cooperman would react to the news that I had eluded their surveillance. Would he merely stake out the loft? Would he redouble efforts to find me? Would he put out an APB to all ships at sea, close the airports, ban smoking in neighborhood bars? I was soaking wet by this time, cold, and exhausted. The thrill of outwitting the cops had just about worn off. As Kris Kristofferson once observed, “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” As somebody else once said, “The policeman is your friend.” As Bukowski once said, “Run with the hunted.” As Meatloaf said, “Two out of three ain’t bad.”

  I was hanging by spit by the time I got to McGovern’s building. Not only did I feel like a fugitive on the run, but it was highly unnerving as the realization had sunken in that the sickest fuck in the city knew a great deal more about me than I knew about him. 2B or not 2B, I thought as I drilled McGovern’s buzzer about eleven times, that really was the fucking question. And the answer, apparently, was that it was not 2B, for McGovern wasn’t home. Visions of Ratso’s skidmarked couch flitted briefly through my mind, but were rejected almost as quickly as they came, no pun intended. I had to think rationally, I told myself. After all, I hadn’t broken any law by evading the cops because ostensibly I wasn’t supposed to be aware that they were following me. What a joke, I thought. The cops following me had pretended like they weren’t following me while I was pretending like I didn’t know I was being followed. It seemed very much like an atheist who goes through life vociferously denying the existence of God right up until the moment the celestial shit hits the fan.

  I resorted at last to the old Kinkster method of pushing every buzzer on the wall. It worked like a Samoan charm. The door buzzed like a large bee, I walked in from the rain, ankled it up one flight of stairs, walked to the far end of the hallway, and sat down on the comfortable, carpeted floor, my back resting against McGovern’s warm door. I must have either nodded out or passed out, but when I awoke I was mildly surprised to see the jolly green giant standing over me.

  “Get inside,” said McGovern. “The cops’re looking for you everywhere.”

  I dutifully followed the big man into the relatively small apartment and immediately plopped down on the sofa Frederick Exley had slep
t on, that large, soft, salmon-colored sofa that had been shipped across the Atlantic twice in its lifetime. When I looked up, McGovern had pulled up a chair close to the sofa and poured us each an adult portion of what I was sure was strong snakepiss. He handed me a glass, I downed about half, and it shook me by the shoulders.

  “Are you positive you weren’t followed here by the cops?” he asked with a surprising degree of intensity.

  “Positive,” I said. “Been wandering free as a bird for hours. I shook ’em at The Ear late this afternoon. The device was a Kinky Friedman impersonator contest.”

  “That’s too fucking bad,” said McGovern almost bitterly.

  “Why is that?” I said.

  “Because the seventh murder went down about three hours ago.”

  Twenty-Seven

  The part of me that’s Indian is very wise,” McGovern was saying as he made coffee the following morning.

  “And what is the part of you that’s Indian telling you?” I inquired.

  “It says, ‘Pale face kemosabe in a heap big pile of deep Nixon.’ ”

  “I see. And what does the Irish part of you say?”

  “The Irish part of me says, ‘Put a little Bushmill’s in the coffee.’ ”

  “Very sensible. And I take it the Indian part is in basic agreement with the Irish part as pertains to putting some firewater in the coffee?”

  “That’s about the only thing they both do agree on. By the way, what is your proud Hebraic background telling you?”

  “Take out life insurance now,” I said.

  The situation, however, was really no joking matter. I longed for the days when I was a lonely, loveless amateur private investigator living with an antisocial cat in a draughty loft beneath the pounding hooves of a lesbian dance class. All that was gone now, I reflected. Flying far away somewhere with Holden Caulfield’s ducks and Martin Luther King’s dreams.

  “It’s most unfortunate,” McGovern was pontificating, “that you eluded the police surveillance at the time that you did. Had they still been tailing you at the time of the seventh murder, it would’ve cleared you beyond a doubt. But with them already suspicious of you, and then you evade the surveillance within hours of the crime, it looks really bad from their point of view. Surely you see that.”

  “Nixon happens,” I said, more cavalierly than I felt. Cavalier was about the only way to go at a time like this, I thought. I recalled that Cavalier had been the name of Breaker Morant’s horse. Breaker was a war hero with poetry in his saddlebags and the Brits had killed him for it. Happened every day. Good, even great, innocent people killed under the charade of what they called the law by gutless bastards. What chance did a maverick like myself have in a world like this? I couldn’t hide at McGovern’s forever. I’d either have to turn myself in to the cops or turn the key of my loft over to Winnie again and cash in my airline miles, which, of course, I didn’t have. I only had miles. Miles and miles of bathroom tiles with green and hungry crocodiles waiting at the corners of my eyes.

  “What do you know about the seventh murder?” I asked McGovern.

  “Much bloodier, less musical,” he said. “Stabbed about a zillion times, mostly in the groin area. They’re not telling me everything, of course. There was, incidentally, a note left next to the body this time. Homicide is keeping its contents very close to the vest, however.”

  “Did it say, ‘Support mental health or I’ll eat you’?”

  “Cheer up,” said McGovern. “Cannibalism can’t be far behind.”

  “But why are the cops after me? Why aren’t they busy pursuing the killer?”

  “That should be obvious, isn’t it?”

  “Not to me. They couldn’t be stupid enough to believe I’m the killer. Cooperman’s smarter than that. In fact, he’s far too savvy to think I killed these people.”

  “I feel sure he doesn’t really believe you killed anybody.”

  “I’m not so sure he won’t bust me anyway. Highly publicized, serial killings create a certain climate of urgency around any cop shop. Sometimes common sense is overtaken by the desire to find a perpetrator. Sometimes any perpetrator will do. It happens often enough.”

  “But that’s not what’s happening here,” said McGovern, as he brought me a steaming cup of coffee laced with a double shot of Black Bush. “What’s happening here is that they think you know something you’re not telling them.”

  “I do.”

  Twenty-Eight

  After McGovern had left for work, I lay on the couch for a while staring at the photo of Carole Lombard that hung on the brick wall next to the fireplace. Something about her eyes reminded me of someone. Was it Heather, or was it someone I loved long ago and was lucky enough to still love today? Or was it someone else? I wasn’t sure, but whoever it was, she was trying to tell me something. This made no sense at all, of course, but that’s how I read it. A woman I knew, or had once known, was trying to communicate with my soul through the eyes of a dead movie star. What’s wrong with that? It wasn’t half as crazy as this murder investigation. The dead bodies were stacking up all over the Village, it seemed, and the two entities that might have half a chance of catching the killer, the NYPD and the Kinkster, were sharing information almost as well as the FBI and the CIA. And the murders were happening so fast it was almost like the killer was expecting to be caught. The only thing I felt certain of was that the killer would not stop until apprehended. An artist knows when to stop; a killer never does.

  It’s the little things, they say, that are important in life. The little things, of course, are also important in death. Based solely on the sketchy nature of McGovern’s initial sources, it was very difficult to draw a great deal of enlightenment. In other words, I needed what the cops had. Conversely, they needed what I had, though, no doubt, they didn’t quite see it that way. It was a shame we both weren’t better team players.

  As I saw it, my options were quite few. If the cops were actively looking for me, the loft on Vandam Street would most certainly be staked out. So I could hole up at McGovern’s for a while, then move from safe house to safe house like a good Robin Hood or a bad Saddam. It was unlikely, however, that the case was ever going to be solved if my lifestyle devolved to that of a fugitive from justice. Sooner or later, it appeared, I would have to confront the authorities and face the music. Parking my ego at the door, it was nevertheless my firm opinion that, unless they got very lucky, the NYPD was not likely to bring this killer to justice.

  In the past there were many times when I hadn’t seen eye to eye with Detective Sergeants Cooperman and Fox and their minions, but this was the first time I’d been so totally shut out of the crime scenes, so utterly excommunicated from the official investigation. Kent Perkins had said that it appeared as if I were being framed, but I didn’t quite see it that way. It felt more to me like I was being taunted. Arrogance, indubitably, is the hallmark of every murderer. This one seemed to be challenging me to take my best shot.

  From the vantage point of McGovern’s couch I reviewed what I knew of the victims, the clues, the virtual leap of deduction I would have to make, not being privy to all the pieces of the puzzle. Beginning with the very first victim’s wallet being discovered in my loft, the case had started by drawing me into it, and now had transformed itself into some fashion of horrific tarbaby that seemed determined not to let me go. Where did one find a knitting needle in the haystack of the city? Where did one find the savagery to drive it into a victim’s brain? The anger to lop a man’s shillelagh off and let him bleed to death? To waste nine good Cuban cigars in the wasting of a human being was an act of unspeakable evil. I thought again of Ratso obliviously singing the catchy, if somewhat crude, little children’s song to the cops. As author of “Ol’ Ben Lucas,” I rather resented its use to mock the dead. But it was unmistakable. Converting the Uncle Ben’s Rice box to read Ol Ben. The victim’s name had been Lucas. The killer knew the song. The killer knew I smoked Cuban cigars. Did that, of itself, mean that the killer
necessarily knew me? Could he be a vigilante, I thought, of the very worst, most primitive kind? A killer who, indeed, may walk about in society while inside, his mind and his soul are unraveling into the depths of depravity? Carole Lombard caught my eye again. What was she trying to tell me?

  I must have nodded out for a while, because when McGovern suddenly burst into the place much earlier than I’d expected, I almost did a double-back-flip off the couch. He seemed to be in a state of almost unbridled excitement as he helped me up from the floor. I took a seat finally in an overstuffed rocking chair beside a pile of old newspapers that seemed to reach the sky.

  “What the hell is it, McGovern?” I said at last.

  “The note!” he ejaculated. “The note!”

  “What note?”

  “The one that was found beside the body of the seventh murder victim.”

  “Ah, yes, Watson. The much-heralded hate mail from the hand of a killer.”

  “A source at the NYPD just provided me with the information with the express understanding that it is to be off the record and not to be printed.”

  “Very wise, Watson, very wise.”

  “I didn’t want to reveal the note’s contents over the phone, so I rushed right over.”

  “Very wise, Watson, very wise.”

  “Okay. You’re sitting down. You’re ready for this?” McGovern flipped through his little reporter’s notebook.