Koko

by Peter Straub

  PART

  SIX

  THE REAL

  RAW TASTE

  “As bad as that?” Pat asked.

  “You don’t know the half of it.” Judy Poole exhaled loudly, oddly satisfied to have at last arrived at this stage of their conversation. It was seven-thirty in the evening of Michael’s third day back home, and the two women had been speaking on the telephone for perhaps twenty-five minutes.

  Judy heard a sigh from Pat Caldwell’s end of the line and quickly asked, “Am I keeping you from anything?”

  “Not really.” She paused. “Harry’s only called me once, so I can’t report anything. They still plan to talk to the police, do they?”

  This point had already been covered within ten minutes of the beginning of this conversation, and Judy took it up again impatiently. “I told you that—they think they know something about why Tina was murdered. Do you think they’re daydreaming? I want to think they’re daydreaming.”

  “All this sounds so familiar,” Pat said. “Harry always knew the inside of a million stories.”

  “Anyhow,” Judy said, reverting to an earlier theme, “you don’t know the worst. I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m incredibly anxious. I can hardly get out of bed in the mornings, and when school’s over and it’s time to come home, I dawdle and dawdle, but I’m hardly even aware of what I’m doing. I go around the school looking for litter. I check to make sure the classroom doors are locked. When I get home, it’s like, I don’t know, some kind of bomb went off and everything got leveled and there’s only this terrible silence left.”

  Judy paused, less for effect than to accommodate the thought that had just surfaced within her. “You know what this is really like? It’s like what happened right after Robbie died. But at least then Michael stayed home, he went to work and he did what he was supposed to do. He was around at night. And I knew what was happening to him, so I knew what to do.”

  “And you don’t know what to do now?”

  “Obviously. That’s why I can hardly make myself come home at night. Michael and I have scarcely had a good conversation in … he hasn’t been working, I can tell you that. You think Harry’s been working? I doubt it.”

  “Harry isn’t my problem,” Pat said promptly. “I wish him luck. I hope he sits down and starts to work. You know he lost his job, don’t you? My brother couldn’t put up with him any longer and let him go.”

  “Your brother sounds like a great man, he always has,” Judy said, for a moment distracted by the old grievance that she had never met Pat Caldwell’s distinguished older brother.

  “Well, I think Charles gave him some money too,” Pat said. “Charles has a good heart, basically. He doesn’t want Harry to suffer—my brother is what I guess you have to call a Christian gentleman.”

  “A Christian gentleman,” Judy said. Envy made her voice go dull and flat. “Are there still such creatures?”

  “In the ranks of fifty-eight-year-old heads of law firms, I guess.”

  “Can I ask you a personal question? I promise you, it’s not just out of curiosity.” She paused, either for effect or out of curiosity. “I want to know about your divorce.”

  “What do you want to know about it?”

  “More or less everything.”

  “Oh, poor Judy,” Pat said. “I see, I guess. It’s never easy—not even getting divorced from Harry Beevers was easy.”

  “He was unfaithful.”

  “Of course he was unfaithful,” Pat said. “Everybody’s unfaithful.” She did not sound at all cynical, saying this.

  “Michael wasn’t.”

  “But you were, which I assume is one of the real topics of this conversation. But if you want to know why I left Harry, I suppose I don’t mind talking about it a little bit. In a way, Ia Thuc was really the reason.”

  “Oh, come on,” Judy said.

  “What he did at Ia Thuc. I don’t even know what it was. I don’t think anyone else knows, either.”

  “You mean he killed those children after all?”

  “I’m sure he killed the children, Judy, but I’m talking about something else. I don’t know what, and I don’t want to know, either. After we had been married ten years, I took a look at him tying his bow tie in the mirror one morning, and I knew that I couldn’t live with him anymore.”

  “Well, what?”

  “It’s too black. I don’t know. Charles told me he thought that Harry had a demon inside him.”

  “You got divorced because you had this mystical feeling about something that happened about ten years before, and for which Harry had already been put on trial and found innocent?”

  “I got divorced because I couldn’t stand the thought that he might touch me again.” She was silent for a moment. “He wasn’t like Michael. Michael feels he has to atone for whatever happened over there, but Harry never felt a second of regret.”

  Judy could say nothing to this.

  “So I looked at him tying his bow tie and I just finally knew and before I even knew I was going to say it I told him that he had to move out and give me a divorce.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Finally he saw that I really meant it, and in order to protect his job with Charles, he left without making much of a fuss.” After a second she added, “Of course I felt that I should give him regular alimony payments, and I have. Harry can live at a decent level for the rest of his life without working.”

  What was a decent level, Judy wondered. Twenty thousand dollars? Fifty thousand? A hundred thousand?

  “I take it that you’re interested in the practicalities of divorce,” Pat eventually said.

  “Can’t fool you, can I?”

  “Everybody else has, why not you too,” Pat said, laughing a little theatrically. “Has Michael said anything?”

  “Enough.” Silence. “No.” Silence. “I don’t know. He’s in a kind of daze because of Tina.”

  “So you haven’t talked about it with him.”

  “It’s like—he’s just sinking out of sight, and he won’t let me pull him back up on land. My land, with me.”

  Pat waited until Judy had stopped crying into the telephone, and then said, “Did you tell him about the man you dated when he was gone?”

  “He asked me,” Judy wailed, losing control again. “It’s not that I wanted to hide it, it’s not that—it’s the way he asked me. It was like—did you ever find the car keys? He was a lot more interested in the girl, Stacy Talbot, than he was in me. I know he hates Bob.”

  “The nice, stable guy who sails and plays tennis.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s not important, but I didn’t know they knew each other.”

  “They met at a faculty Christmas party once, and Michael thought he was conceited. Maybe Bob is a little conceited. But he’s a very dedicated man—he teaches high school English because he thinks it’s important. He doesn’t have to do it.”

  “Sounds like Michael decided he doesn’t ‘have to’ keep his practice.” Or to stay married, Pat silently added.

  “Why doesn’t he have to?” Judy asked in a plaintive voice. “Why did he work so hard to get it, if he doesn’t have to keep it?”

  That was not the question she was really asking, and Pat did not answer it.

  “I feel scared,” Judy said. “It’s so humiliating. I hate it.”

  “Do you think you have a future with your friend?”

  “Bob Bunce doesn’t have much extra room in his life.” Judy now sounded very dry-eyed. “In spite of seeming to have nothing but room in his life. He has his sports car. He has his sailboat and his tennis. He has his job and his students. He has Henry James. He has his mother. I don’t think he’ll ever make room for a wife.”

  “Ah,” Pat said, “but you didn’t start seeing him with the idea of marrying him.”

  “Isn’t that a comfort. Wait a minute …” Judy apparently set down the telephone and was gone for several minutes. Pat Caldwell could hear what sounded
like ice cubes cracking out of a metal tray. There came the chink of glass against glass. “Mr. Bunce fancies the whiskey that comes in a little blue bag with a drawstring. So I helped myself to some of it. Maybe I should have made him come into a little blue bag with a drawstring.”

  Pat heard the ice cubes chinking as Judy raised or lowered her glass.

  “Don’t you ever get lonely?” Judy asked.

  “Give me a call if you need me,” Pat said. “I’ll come up and keep you company, if you like.”

  1

  “What do you mean, the police will be there?” Judy asked. “I think that’s completely ridiculous.”

  It was ten o’clock the next morning, and the Pooles were driving Harry Beevers and Conor Linklater north to the small town of Milburn, New York, for Tina Pumo’s funeral. They had been driving for two hours and, thanks to Harry’s directions, had managed to lose their way in search of a shortcut. Harry now sat with empty hands in the front passenger seat of Michael’s Audi, fiddling with the digital dial of the radio; Judy sat in back with Conor and the unfolded map.

  “You don’t understand the first thing about police work,” Harry said. “Are you always this aggressive about your ignorance?”

  Judy opened both her eyes and her mouth, and Harry hurriedly added, “I apologize, I’m sorry, I should not have said that. Pardon, pardon. I take Tina’s death very personally, and I’m also a little touchy. Honest, Judy—I’m sorry.”

  “Follow the signs to Binghamton,” Conor said. “We’re about forty-fifty miles away now, the way I figure it. Can you find something besides that noise?”

  “This is a murder case,” Harry said, ignoring Conor but changing the station anyhow. “It’s big business. Whoever is in charge of the case will be at the funeral, looking us and everybody else over. This is his chance to meet the cast of characters. And he’s thinking that whoever killed Tina might show up to see him buried. Cops always come to things like this.”

  “I wish Pat could have come with us,” Judy said. “And I hate big bands, all that phony nostalgia.”

  Harry switched off the radio.

  For a time they drove on in silence past a landscape of snowy empty fields and dark stands of trees straight as soldiers in formation. Slashes of grey and black stood out starkly in the snow. Now and then a farmhouse stood like a mirage between the fields and the woods. The map rattled in Conor’s hands, and Judy made a series of little sniffling noises. The past had died, Michael thought, died as part of the present so that now it was really just the past.

  When he had arrived back in Westerholm, a nervous Judy had welcomed him with a kiss in which he could taste resentment. Home. She had asked about Singapore, about Bangkok, about traveling with Harry Beevers; she poured out measures of an expensive whiskey that she must have bought for this moment and which, he saw, she had generously sampled in his absence. She followed him upstairs and watched him unpack. She followed him into the bathroom while he ran a tub. She was still sitting in the bathroom, listening to his edited version of the trip, when he asked her if she had enjoyed her meal with Bob Bunce.

  She gave a jerky nod.

  He had merely remembered to ask, but he felt as though she had shrieked at him, or thrown something at him. She raised her glass and took a swallow of the expensive whiskey.

  He asked the question to which he already knew the answer, and she gave him a prompt, flat denial.

  “Okay,” he said, but he knew, and she knew that he did. She gulped at her drink and walked out of the bathroom.

  “It’s hard to believe that Tina Pumo could have come from a place like this,” Judy said. “He seemed so urbane. Didn’t Tina always seem urbane?”

  That’s right, Michael realized with a shock: Tina would have seemed urbane to Judy.

  “Look good on his tombstone,” Conor said. “ ‘This was one urbane motherfucker.’ ”

  2

  St. Michael’s Cathedral, surprisingly imposing for so small a town, dwarfed the little congregation that had gathered for Anthony Francis Pumo’s funeral. From where the pallbearers stood Michael could see a handful of old women, half a dozen men with weather-roughened faces who must have gone to school with Tina, a few younger couples, single old men and women beautiful in their unreflective dignity, and a gaunt Asian man holding the hand of a beautiful child. Vinh and his daughter. At the back of the church stood a tall moustached man in a handsome suit, and another, younger man in an even handsomer suit whose roguish face looked vaguely familiar. Among the other pallbearers were a stocky, brusque man with a wider, less interesting version of Tina’s face, and a short powerful old man with heavy shoulders and hands like scoops: Tina’s brother, who managed a muffler shop, and his father, a retired farmer.

  An angular old priest with shining white hair described a shy, eager schoolboy who had served “with great honor and distinction in Vietnam” and “proved his inner strength by triumphing in the turbulent waters of the restaurant business in the city that eventually claimed his life.” That was how it looked from here—one of their children had wandered into the forest of New York City and fallen prey to savage animals.

  Out at the cemetery, Pleasant Hill, Michael stood alongside Judy, Beevers, and Conor while the priest read the service. Now and then he looked up at the dull grey granite clouds. He was aware of Tommy Pumo, Tina’s brother, staring at Vinh with outright hostility. Tommy was evidently a difficult character.

  First the father and brother, then all in turn dropped clods of earth onto the lowered coffin.

  As Poole stepped back from the edge of the grave he heard a loud voice coming from further down the hill. Near the row of parked cars, Tommy Pumo was waving his arms at the well-dressed man whose face had seemed familiar in the cathedral. Pumo’s brother took a furious, almost swaggering step forward. The other man smiled and spoke, and Tommy Pumo’s face twisted, and he stepped forward again.

  “Let’s see what’s going on,” Beevers said. He began to move downhill toward the little group of people frozen near the cars.

  “Excuse me, sir,” came a voice from just behind him, and Poole looked back to see the tall moustached man who had been in the congregation. Close up, his moustache was thick and lustrous, but the man conveyed no impression of vanity—he seemed easily authoritative, calm and commanding. He was an inch taller than Michael and very solidly built. “You are Dr. Poole? Mrs. Poole?”

  Harry had stopped moving downhill, and was standing still, looking back up at the man.

  “And you are Mr. Beevers?”

  Beevers’ face went very smooth, as if he had just been paid some tremendous compliment.

  “My name is Lieutenant Murphy, and I am the detective conducting the investigation of your friend’s death.”

  “Aha,” Beevers said to Judy.

  Murphy raised his thick eyebrows.

  “We were wondering when we would meet you.”

  Murphy took it in slowly, easily. “I’d like to have a short talk with you back at the father’s house. You were going there before you left to go back to the city?”

  “We are at your disposal, Lieutenant,” Harry said.

  Smiling, Murphy turned away and walked down the hill.

  Beevers raised his eyebrows and tilted his head in Judy’s direction, wordlessly asking if Poole had told her about Underhill. Poole shook his head. They watched the detective reach the bottom of the hill and say a few words to Pumo’s father.

  “Murphy,” Beevers said. “Isn’t that perfect? Talk about type-casting.”

  “Why does he want to talk to you?” Judy asked.

  “Background checks, filling in the blank spaces, getting the complete picture.” Beevers shoved his hands in his coat pockets and swiveled around to look back at the gravesite. Now only a few of the older people still lingered there. “That little Maggie didn’t show up, damn it. I wonder what she told Murphy about our little jaunt.”

  Beevers intended to say more, but he closed his mouth as another mourner ap
proached them. It was the man at whom Tommy Pumo had shouted.

  “Good cop, bad cop,” Beevers whispered, and turned away, all but whistling.

  The man turned a lopsided grin on Poole and Judy and introduced himself as David Dixon, Tina’s lawyer. “You must be his old service friends. It’s nice to meet you. But haven’t we met before?” He and Michael worked out that they had met at Saigon several years ago.

  Beevers had turned back to the group and Michael introduced everybody. “It’s nice of you to come,” Beevers said.

  “Tina and I spent a lot of time together, working on various little things. I’d like to think we were friends, and not just lawyer and client.”

  “The best clients do become friends,” Harry said, instantly adopting the professional pose Poole had seen in Washington. “I’m a fellow attorney, by the way.”

  Dixon paid no attention to these statements. “I tried to get Maggie Lah to drive up here with me, but she didn’t think she could handle it. And she didn’t know if Tina’s family would know how to take her.”

  “You have Maggie’s number?” Harry asked. “I’d like to get in touch with her, so if you do have it—”

  “Not this second,” Dixon said.

  Michael filled the silence by asking about the Vietnamese chef. He wondered if the man had gone back to the house with the other mourners.

  Dixon guffawed. “He wouldn’t be very welcome at the house. Didn’t you see Tommy Pumo going nuts down there?”

  “He must be taking his brother’s death very hard,” Judy said.

  “It’s more greed than grief,” Dixon said. “Tina left everything, including the restaurant and his loft, to the person he felt had done the most to help him make his place a success.”

  They were all attentive now.

  “Who happened to be Vinh, of course. He’s going to keep the restaurant going. We ought to be open again just about on schedule.”