Koko

by Peter Straub

  Murphy looked down at the heavy pipe balanced in his fingers, and Beevers spoke into the silence. “Are you implying that the man you are holding has given a false confession?”

  “Why do you sound hopeful?” Murphy asked him. “Don’t you want us to nail this guy?”

  “I didn’t mean to sound hopeful. Of course I want the man apprehended.”

  Murphy regarded him steadily for a moment. “There’s a lot of information pertinent to these cases that has not reached the public. And that should not reach the public, if we don’t want our investigation to be compromised. Or actually interfered with, to give you the worst case. I want to go over some of this information with you people before we go to the line-up, and Miss Lah, if you know something too, I’d like you to please speak up.”

  Maggie nodded.

  “Miss Lah has already been very helpful to us.”

  “Thank you,” she said very softly.

  “You gentlemen all met Mr. Pumo as members of the same platoon in Vietnam? And you were the lieutenant of that unit, Mr. Beevers?”

  “Correct,” Beevers said, smiling with his mouth but glaring at Maggie.

  “How many members of that unit besides yourselves are still living, do you know?”

  Beevers pursed his lips and cocked his head.

  “Dr. Poole?”

  “I don’t know, really,” Poole said. “Not many of us are left alive.”

  “Do you really not know?” Murphy asked in a level voice. Poole shook his head. “None of you?”

  “I guess we’d be grateful for whatever you can tell us,” Beevers said. “But I’m afraid I don’t really follow your train of thought.”

  Murphy raised his expressive eyebrows. He stuck the pipe in his mouth and puffed. The dead-looking tobacco glowed red, and the detective let smoke escape his mouth.

  “You are familiar with the nickname Koko, however,” he said.

  Beevers frowned at Maggie.

  “Miss Lah passed on some background information to us. Do you think she was wrong in doing so?”

  Beevers coughed. “Of course not.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way.” Murphy’s mouth twitched in a smile. “Besides the three of you, there seem to be only four survivors of the platoon that took part in the action at Ia Thuc. A PFC named Wilson Manly is living in Arizona—”

  “Manly’s alive?” Conor asked. “Goddamn.”

  Poole too was surprised. Like Conor, he had last seen Manly being carried to a stretcher—he had lost a leg and a lot of blood, and Poole had thought that he would never survive.

  “Wilson Manly is disabled, but he owns a security business in Tucson.”

  “Security systems?” Conor asked, and Murphy nodded. “Goddamn.”

  “Who else?” Poole asked.

  “George Burrage is working as a drug counselor in Los Angeles.”

  “Spanky,” Conor and Poole said more or less in unison. He too had been carried away after a firefight, and since nothing more had been heard of him, he too had been presumed dead.

  “They both send their regards to you, and remembered Mr. Pumo very well and were sorry to hear about what happened to him.”

  “Of course,” said Beevers. “You were in the service, weren’t you, Lieutenant? Weren’t you in Vietnam?”

  “I was too young for Vietnam,” Murphy said. “Both Mr. Manly and Mr. Burrage have an extremely good recall of various incidents involving the use of the name Koko.”

  “I bet they do,” said Beevers.

  “A PFC named Victor Spitalny might be presumed to be living,” said Murphy. “There has been no record of him since he went AWOL back in Bangkok in 1969. But given the circumstances under which he disappeared, I don’t think it’s very likely that he would suddenly take it into his head to kill journalists and members of his old unit, do you?”

  “Couldn’t say,” Beevers said. “What do you mean, journalists?”

  “Whoever calls himself Koko has been killing the foreign and American journalists who covered the Ia Thuc atrocity story. He’s been very thorough, too.” He regarded Beevers with a steady detached gaze, and then looked at Poole in the same way. “This man has killed at least eight people. There is a possibility he killed one other man.”

  “Who’s that?” Beevers asked.

  “A businessman named Irwin, out at JFK a few weeks ago. We’ve just managed to put all the information together, using sources from all over the world. It’s hard to get different police departments to cooperate when they’re right next door to each other, but we’re proud of ourselves on this one. We’re getting ready, and we’re going to take our man. But in order to do that, we need your full cooperation. And I have a feeling I’m not really getting it.”

  But before anybody could protest, he took an envelope out of his jacket pocket, opened the flap, and removed three playing cards encased in separate clear plastic bags. “Take a look at these, please.”

  He used a pencil to separate the cards on the surface of the table. Poole looked at the three cards. Every blood vessel in his body seemed to constrict. There was the Rearing Elephant, reproduced three times. “A Legacy of Honor,” read a slogan beneath the emblem. Poole had not seen a regimental playing card since he had left Vietnam. The elephant looked angrier than he had remembered.

  “Where’d you find these, man?” Conor asked.

  Murphy flipped each of the cards face up. There it was, scrawled in the old manner. KOKO, three times. Before Beevers was an eight of clubs; before Conor a two of hearts; before Poole a six of spades. With a bang of his heart Poole saw the faint penciling of his name at the top of the card before him.

  “Mr. Pumo had one of these, with his name on it, in his mouth,” Murphy said.

  LINKLATER and BEEVERS, Poole saw, had been lightly penciled on the other cards.

  The line-up was a pretext to get the four of them together for questioning. They had been summoned not to identify a killer, but to be frightened into saying more than they wished.

  Beevers and Conor spoke at the same time: “Where did you get these?”

  “You must have gotten pretty close to him.”

  Murphy nodded. “We learned where he had been staying through a tip. Unfortunately, we didn’t find him, so he must have learned somehow—we probably missed him by a couple of minutes. But we never get as close as that without getting him in the end.”

  Murphy used his pencil to nudge the cards back into the envelope. “There was one other survivor from your unit.”

  For a moment Poole could not remember who this was.

  “You all remember Timothy Underhill.”

  “Sure,” Conor said, and the other two nodded.

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  There was silence for a moment or two.

  “I can’t figure you characters out,” Murphy said.

  Poole remembered Judy talking about Bob Bunce: lies of denial always transparent. “We looked for Underhill in Singapore,” he said. Then he stopped talking, because Harry Beevers’ well-shod foot had come down heavily on his.

  “It was what you’d call a lark,” Beevers said. “We were in this interesting part of the world, on a vacation, and we thought maybe we could locate him. All we found were traces. People that used to know him, things like that. We went hither and yon in three countries. Had a ball.”

  “You went to a lot of trouble to find an old army buddy,” Murphy said.

  “That’s right,” Beevers said. He looked carefully at Maggie, then candidly back at Murphy. “We had a hell of a trip.”

  “No luck?”

  “The man disappeared.” Beevers’ mouth opened. “Ah. You think this Koko is Tim Underhill?”

  “It’s one of the possibilities we’re considering.” He smiled with as much false candor as Beevers. “He certainly isn’t Wilson Manly or Spanky Burrage. Or any of you.”

  Other questions came crowding up, but Harry asked only the most immediate. “Then who’s the guy who wen
t crazy in Times Square?”

  Murphy pushed himself away from the table. “Let’s go find out.”

  2

  Murphy stayed close to Michael Poole as they walked toward the stairs. “Our friend still won’t give his name. He claims to have forgotten it. In fact, he claims to have been born in New York City at the age of eighteen.” He coughed. “In the back room of a bar called The Anvil.” He gave Poole an almost human glance. “He drew us a map of Pumo’s apartment. Then he clammed up and refused to say anything except that he had a mission to clean up the filth in the world.”

  Murphy led them through the big office space on the ground floor, through a door at the back, and down a wide set of stairs. Over the noise of typewriters clacking in nearby offices, Poole heard Harry Beevers speaking softly and urgently to Maggie Lah.

  “Here we are,” Murphy said, swinging open a broad set of doors that resembled a theater with its rows of banked seats, raised platform, and overhead lights.

  Murphy took them to the second row of seats, where Maggie filed in behind Poole, followed by Beevers and Conor Linklater. Then he stepped to a podium in the central aisle one row behind them, and flipped on the stage lights. He picked up a microphone on a cord, scrutinized it for a switch, and turned it on. “We are here now,” he spoke into the microphone. “Let’s get the screen in place, and you can send the men out.” He frowned down at the podium and flipped another switch. A long screen marked with height registrations rolled out on a track across the stage.

  “Ready,” Murphy said. “Each man on his mark. Once they are onstage, I will direct each man in turn to step forward, tell us a few words about himself, and then step backward.”

  Five men emerged from the left side of the stage and began moving uncertainly toward what Poole supposed were numbers embedded in the stage. At first glance, the three short, dark-haired men in the lineup could have been Victor Spitalny. One wore a grey business suit, one a checked sports jacket, and the third jeans and a denim jacket. The man in the checked jacket looked most like Spitalny, but his eyes were more widely spaced and his chin was broader. He looked bored and impatient. The fourth was a heavyset blond man with a lively cynical Irish face. The fifth man, who was wearing a loose khaki shirt, fatigue pants, and cowboy boots, had shaved his head some time ago and then let it grow out to a uniform dark cap still short enough to show the scalp beneath. He alone smiled at the row of people looking up at him.

  Murphy called out their numbers in a toneless voice.

  “My name is Bill and I work as a bartender on the Upper East Side.”

  “My name is George. I am the leader of the Boy Scout troop in Washington Heights.”

  “My name is Franco and I am from Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn.”

  “My name is Liam. I am in the security business.”

  When number five was called, the last man stepped forward. “I have no name because I have no past.”

  “Oh, my God,” Maggie said. “I don’t believe it.”

  Murphy ordered the fifth man to step back, and then asked all five to leave the stage. When the stage was empty he leaned on the podium and scowled down at Maggie. “Well?”

  “The last man, the one in the middle of his sex change, was wearing Tina’s boots. I’m sure of it. I know who he is.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I mean—I don’t know his real name, but he called himself Dracula and had a long Mohawk before he shaved it off. Tina picked him up at a club last year, or was picked up by him. He was pretending to be a girl. After they got back to the loft, he beat Tina unconscious and stole a lot of things from him. Including the boots he was wearing up there. They were Tina’s favorites. I think they cost a lot of money.”

  “Dracula,” Murphy said.

  “But he isn’t the man I saw in the loft.”

  “No,” Murphy said. “I guess he wouldn’t be. Gentlemen, you may leave. I want to thank you for your cooperation, and I will be speaking to each of you again. Please call me if you can think of anything I ought to know. Miss Lah, will you come back upstairs with me, please?”

  Maggie stood up slightly before the other three and went out into the central aisle where Murphy stood waiting for her. She caught Michael’s eye and raised her eyebrows. Michael nodded, then stood up with the other two.

  3

  After seeing the others into a cab and promising to join them at Harry’s apartment in half an hour, Michael walked back down Tenth Street to wait outside the police station. The weather was still too cold to be really comfortable, but Michael enjoyed standing on Tenth Street in the tingling air. The sunlight lay like gilt on the pretty brownstones across the street. He felt suspended between the end of something and the beginning of something absolutely new. Stacy Talbot had been his last real tie to Westerholm—everything else that held him there could be carried away in a suitcase.

  He saw how he easy it would be to keep watching the television program that his life had become. The bright dailyness of his work, the stream of snuffling children and their worried mothers, Judy and her anxieties, the lax dull partnership of the long mornings, the nice white house, the walks to the duck pond, Bloody Marys at Sunday brunch, the numbing details that rushed you forward minute by minute.

  The door of the police station opened with a click as decisive as the crack of a bone, and Michael turned around and straightened up as Maggie Lah came out. Her beautiful hair caught the sun in a smooth mesh of rich deep lustrous black.

  “Oh, good,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you’d still be here. I couldn’t say anything back in there.”

  “I know.”

  “I really just wanted to see you. Conor is wonderful, but he isn’t too sure about me. And Harry Beevers is a tremendous … distraction.”

  “Especially to Harry Beevers.”

  “They can spare you for a little while?”

  “For as long as you like.”

  “Then they may never get you back,” Maggie said, and put her arm through his. “I want you to help me go someplace. Will you do it?”

  “I’m yours.” Poole suddenly, strongly felt that he and this girl were Tina Pumo’s survivors: as much as Walter and Tommy Pumo, they were the family Tina had left behind.

  “It isn’t very far. It isn’t even much of a place, just a little neighborhood restaurant. Tina and I used to go there—really he used to go there, it was his place and he shared it with me, and I don’t want to feel like sinking into the sidewalk everytime I walk past it. Do you mind?”

  “I’m very pleased,” Poole said. Maggie’s arm was linked with his and she matched him stride for stride. “Is there any other place I can take you to after this one?”

  She glanced up. “There might be.”

  He let her have her own time in which to say whatever she wished to say.

  “I want to know you,” Maggie finally said.

  “I’m glad.”

  “He liked you best of all—of all the men he had been over there with.”

  “That’s very nice to know.”

  “He was always very pleased when you came into Saigon. Part of Tina was not very secure. It meant a lot to him that when you came all the way into town, you would pick his place to come to. That proved to him that you hadn’t forgotten him.”

  “I haven’t forgotten him, Maggie,” he said, and she tightened her grip on his arm.

  They were walking down Sixth Avenue, and the sunlight seemed warmer here than the cross streets. Colorful, ordinary street life flowed around them, students and housewives and businessmen and a few boys in lipstick. At the corner they walked past a hunched, bearded man in rags whose feet had blackened and swollen like footballs. Just past him a blurry-looking man of about Michael’s age thrust at him a paper cup containing a few dimes and quarters. He had a bloody crusty scab on his chin, and in the slits of his eyes his pupils gleamed feverishly, tigerishly. Vietnam. Michael dropped a few quarters in the cup.

  “Not far now,” Maggie said, and her voice was tre
mbling.

  Poole nodded.

  “It’s like living with a big—emptiness.” She threw out her free hand. “It’s so hard. And because I’m afraid, it’s even worse than that. Oh, I’ll tell you about it when we get there.”

  A few minutes later, Maggie led him up the steps into La Groceria. A tall dark-haired woman in black tights led them to a table by the window. The sunlight drifted in the big windows and lay across the polished, rippling pattern of the caramel-colored wooden tabletops. They ordered salads and coffee. “I hate being afraid,” Maggie said. “But all by itself, grief is too much. Grief gets you when you’re not looking. It comes up and blindsides you.” She glanced up at him in a way that mingled intelligence and sympathy. “You were talking to Conor about a patient of yours …?”

  Poole nodded. “Just before I drove down here I learned that she died.” He tried to smile at her, and was glad that he did not have to see the result.

  Her face altered, smoothed out, became more inward. “In Taipei my mother used to catch rats with traps in our garden. The traps didn’t kill the rats, they just held them. My mother poured boiling water over them. The rats knew exactly what was going to happen to them. First they fought and jumped at my mother, and then finally everything left them but fear. They just became fear.” A cloud somewhere east of Sixth Avenue separated, and the sunlight doubled in color and intensity. She was looking at him with a troubled but defiant gaze, and Poole experienced her concentrated attention as an undivided blessing. Right now, in the sudden drenching fall of yellow light, he became extraordinarly conscious of the smooth roundness of her arms, the beautiful golden shade of her skin, her small witty sensuous intelligent mouth. Her youth was deceptive, he understood, seeing her in the blaze of light, and if you judged her youth as being one of the central facts of her being, you made a great mistake. A moment ago he had been moved by her sheer prettiness, and now he saw so much more in the wide unblinking face before him that her prettiness became irrelevant.