Koko

by Peter Straub

  “Please sit down,” Murphy said. The young detective took some folding chairs from behind a filing cabinet and began opening them up. When everyone was seated, Murphy perched on the edge of his desk and said, “This gentleman is Mr. Bill Partridge. He is one of the managers of a YMCA men’s residence, and I asked him to join us here this afternoon.”

  “Yeah, and now I gotta leave,” Partridge said. “You got nothing for me. I got work to do.”

  “One of the rooms under Mr. Partridge’s management was rented to a gentleman calling himself Timothy Underhill,” Murphy said, with more patience than he had displayed at the airport.

  “Who skipped out,” said Partridge. “And who ruined his room. I don’t know who, but one of you people owes me back rent and a paint job.”

  “Mr. Partridge,” Murphy said, “do you see the YMCA tenant who called himself Timothy Underhill anywhere in this room?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  “Thank you for coming in, Mr. Partridge,” said Murphy. “I am sorry we took you away from your duties, but I’d like you to see our artist downstairs to work on a composite portrait. If you feel that the department owes you money, you can try submitting a bill to us.”

  “You’re doin’ a great job,” Partridge said, and turned to leave the room.

  Poole called out to him. “Mr. Partridge, what did the man do to his room?”

  Partridge did a half-turn and frowned at Poole. “Let the cop tell you.” He went through the door without closing it behind him.

  The young detective moved to the door and closed it. He grinned at Maggie as he went back to his place beside the desk. He had a broad handsome face, and his teeth shone very white beneath his thick moustache. It occurred to Poole that both Murphy and the younger officer looked like Keith Hernandez, the Met’s first baseman.

  Murphy looked gloomily at Underhill, who sat in the folds of his big coat, holding his hat in his lap. “He was here to give us an identification, of course. Timothy Underhill checked into the YMCA on the Upper West Side on the evening of the day that Clement Irwin was killed at the airport. There is, by the way, no record of anyone named Timothy Underhill passing through Customs to get back into the country at any time during the month of January, so we know that he traveled under another name. We stopped examining the records before the three of you and Mr. Beevers came back, of course, because we knew our man was with us by then.” He shook his head. “Partridge called us as soon as he looked inside Underhill’s room. Once we got in there, we knew we had him. All we had to do was wait.” He took a manila folder out of the middle drawer of the desk. “But after we waited all night, we thought he must have come back just after we showed up and saw our patrol cars. Which means that we missed him by no more than a couple of minutes. Take a look at the pictures of the room.”

  He took a handful of Polaroids from the envelope and passed them to the young detective. Grinning again, the man went straight to Maggie and handed the photographs to her.

  Maggie smiled at him and passed the photographs to Michael without looking at them.

  The walls of the room looked chaotic, with clippings and photographs taped up above a wandering wavelike pattern that rose and fell through gouts of red paint. Another photograph showed a black and white picture of Tina, torn from a newspaper. In the third photograph, the undulating wave pattern finally came into focus. Poole swallowed. It was a crudely drawn mural of the heads and bodies of a lot of children. Chests had been exploded open, heads lolled on lifeless necks. Several of the children were naked, and the photograph clearly showed entry wounds in their trunks and stomachs.

  Painted on another wall were the slogans A DROWSY STIFLED UNIMPASSIONED GRIEF and A MAN OF SORROW AND ACQUAINTED WITH GRIEF.

  Poole passed the photographs to Underhill.

  “I’ll show you the other half of why I met you at the airport,” Murphy said. He took a copy of a typewritten letter from the envelope and gave it to the young detective. “This time give it to Dr. Poole, Dalton.”

  Dalton smiled handsomely at Maggie and handed the sheet of paper to Michael.

  “St. Louis police found it in his desk.”

  So this was how he had persuaded the journalists to come to him—Harry Beevers had been right. Poole read the letter very slowly:

  Dear Mr. Martinson,

  I have decided that it is no longer possible for me to remain silent about the truth of the events which occurred in the I Corps village of Ia Thuc …

  He became aware that Murphy was saying something about Roberto Ortiz’s apartment. The detective was holding up another typed sheet of paper. “It’s identical to the one addressed to Mr. Martinson, except that the writer instructs Mr. Ortiz to reach him at an address on something called”—he glanced at the sheet—“called Plantation Road, in Singapore. Which is where his body was found.”

  “Only these two letters were found?”

  Murphy nodded. “Some of the others must have done as he asked, and destroyed the letters. Anyhow, these letters and the room at the Y were the reason we were so interested in you, Mr. Underhill.”

  “Do you have any idea who placed the anonymous call?”

  “Do you?” Murphy asked.

  “Michael and Connor and I feel it must have been Harry Beevers.”

  “But if he got your friends to lie to me about your whereabouts, why would he send me out to arrest you?”

  “You know why that asshole called the police,” Conor said to Poole. “He was going to meet Koko, and he wanted you out of the way.”

  “So where is Mr. Beevers now? Trying to capture this man by himself?”

  Nobody spoke.

  “Get Beevers on the telephone,” Murphy said, and with a final look at Maggie, Dalton hurried out of the room.

  “If you people are hiding anything more from me, I promise you, you’ll spend a lot of time wishing you hadn’t.”

  They sat in silence until Dalton returned. “Beevers isn’t answering his phone. I left a message for him to call you as soon as he got back, and I sent a car over to his place in case he’s there.”

  “I think our business is over for the moment,” Murphy said. “I really do hope that I am through with you people. All of you are lucky not to be in jail. Now I want you to get out of my way and let me do my job.”

  “Are you going down to Chinatown?” Michael asked.

  “That is none of your business. You’ll find your car out in front, Mr. Poole.”

  “Are there any caves in Chinatown?” Underhill asked. “Anything that might look like a cave?”

  “New York is full of caves,” Murphy said. “Get out of here. Go home and stay there. If you hear from this man Dengler, call me immediately.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” Conor said. “Dengler? Will somebody sort of fill me in on what I missed?”

  Underhill pulled Conor toward him and whispered something in his ear.

  “I want to suggest something to you before you go,” Murphy said. He stood up behind his desk, and his face mottled with the force of the anger he did not allow himself to show. “In the future, when you come across something important to this case, do not mail it to me. Now please let me do my work.”

  He walked out of the office, and Dalton trailed behind him. Conor said, “Mikey, what is this? Dengler?”

  A uniformed policeman appeared in the door and politely told them to go away.

  3

  “I have to call Judy,” Poole said when they got outside. “We have a lot of things to get straight.”

  Maggie suggested that he make the call from Saigon. Poole looked at his watch—four o’clock.

  “Harry loved that bar,” Conor told Ellen. “I think he spent most of his afternoons there.”

  “You’re talking about him as though he was dead,” Ellen said.

  “I think we’re all afraid of that,” said Tim Underhill. “Michael told him our plane was getting in at two, and I bet he somehow managed to arrange a meeting with
Koko around then. So it’s been two hours—if Dengler called Harry in order to turn himself in and Harry tried anything tricky, which would be impossible for Harry not to do, probably nobody could save him now.”

  “Can you explain all this stuff about Dengler now?” Conor asked.

  “That will require a drink,” Tim said. “For you, not for me.”

  Poole opened his car, and Maggie stepped beside him. “There’s someone uptown I want you to meet. My godfather.” He looked at her curiously, but she merely smiled and said, “Can all of us really squeeze into your car?”

  They all could.

  As Michael drove off, Underhill began describing their visit to Milwaukee. Underhill had always been a good describer, and while Poole drove down Seventh Avenue he saw the Spitalnys’ sad kitchen, and George Spitalny’s attempt to seduce Maggie with an old photograph; he saw an enraged man pounding a tire iron against the back of a bus, and snowdrifts like little mountain ranges. Kitty’s Pretty Muff, and the gas flares in the Valley. The smell of sizzling Wesson oil, Helga Dengler’s dog’s eyes. Little M.O. Dengler standing behind the body of a deer he had skinned and gutted.

  “Michael!” Maggie screamed.

  He twirled the wheel just in time to avoid ramming a taxicab. “Sorry. My mind was back there in that terrible house. And I hate the idea of giving up when there’s some chance that Harry is still alive.”

  “And Dengler too,” Underhill said. “Murphy said that New York is full of caves. Maggie, I don’t suppose that you can think of anything in Chinatown that might even faintly resemble a cave?”

  “No,” Maggie said. “Well, not really. I used to go to this place with Pumo that was in an arcade. I suppose it was as close to a cave as you can get in Chinatown.”

  Poole asked where it was.

  “Off Bowery, near Confucius Plaza.”

  “Let’s go take a look at it,” Underhill said.

  “Do you want to?” Poole asked.

  “Don’t you?”

  “Well,” Poole said.

  “You can’t give up now, Poole,” Maggie said. “You ate bad kielbasa in George Spitalny’s kitchen. You waded through Salisbury steak at the Tick Tock Restaurant.”

  “I’m the explorer type,” Poole said. “Conor? Ellen?”

  “Do it, Michael,” Ellen said. “We might as well try.”

  “You can tell she never met Harry Beevers,” Conor said.

  When Michael drove past Mulberry Street in the thick traffic on Canal Street, Underhill peered past the upturned collar of his huge coat and said, “Our friends are out in force. Take a look.”

  Poole glanced through the side window into Chinatown. Down on Mulberry Street, red lights spun on top of police cars drawn up to the curb; other red lights bounced off shop windows on Bayard Street. Poole glimpsed a group of policemen trotting diagonally across the street in a cluster, like a platoon.

  “They’ll find him,” Conor said, sounding as if he wanted to make himself believe it. “Look at all those cops. And we don’t know Beevers tried anything funny with Koko, not really.”

  Now they were passing the entrance to Mott Street. “I don’t see anything down there,” Poole said.

  “It looks like two cops are going door to door,” Underhill said. “But we really don’t have any proof that Harry is down here, do we, or that he tried to double-cross us and Dengler?”

  “He wanted Murphy to stop us before we got any further than the airport,” Poole said. He looked sideways into Elizabeth Street, which was emptier than the others. “That’s proof of something. He wanted us out of the way.”

  Poole turned with the traffic toward the tall white towers of Confucius Plaza.

  “There it is,” Maggie said, gesturing to the far side of the street. Poole looked sideways and saw an opening in the row of shops and restaurants along Bowery. Light penetrated the opening for about five feet, then melted into shadow. Maggie was right. It did look like a cave.

  Poole found a parking spot in front of a fish market on Division Street. When he got out of the car, he saw frozen fish guts and shiny puddles of ice on the sidewalk. “Let’s just try to stay out of Murphy’s way. After we check out the arcade we can go to Saigon, and I can begin figuring out where I’m going to live.”

  They began moving up Bowery in the stiff cold wind that came around the curved towers. A single policeman emerged from Bayard Street onto Bowery, and Michael realized that he did not at all want the policeman to walk into the arcade. Murphy and the rest of the policemen had Mulberry Street, Mott Street, Pell Street—all Poole wanted was the arcade.

  The policeman swiveled toward them, and Poole recognized him—he was the fat-necked young officer who had led Michael upstairs to the meeting on the morning of the line-up. The man looked idly at Poole, then glanced down at Maggie’s legs. He turned his back on them and walked down Bayard Street.

  “Oink,” Maggie whispered.

  Poole watched the young policeman waddle down Bayard Street toward a patrol car beside which a band of uniformed men gazed into the windows of a grocery store while they stood around looking vaguely official.

  Seconds later the five of them stood before the arcade. Maggie took the first step, and as they walked in they fanned out to cover both sides.

  “I wish we were looking for something specific,” Underhill said. He was moving forward slowly, trying to take in every inch of the floor.

  “There’s another level downstairs,” said Conor, who was with Ellen on the arcade’s right side. “Let’s check that out when we’re done up here.”

  “I don’t understand why we’re doing this,” Ellen said. “Don’t you think your friend would have arranged to meet Koko—this Dengler—in a park, or on a corner someplace? Or in an office?”

  Poole nodded, looking at a dusty display of women’s underwear. “If he just planned to meet him, that’s what he would do. But this is Harry Beevers we’re talking about.” He moved past posters for a rock club, and looked back at Conor, who was leaning on the railing of the stairs with his arm around Ellen Woyzak’s shoulders.

  “And the Lost Boss wouldn’t do anything simple,” Conor said. “He’d cook up some plan. He’d tell him to meet him somewhere and plan to meet him somewhere else. He’d want to take him by surprise.”

  They went past the angle in the arcade and stood for a moment looking at cold grey Elizabeth Street.

  “Let’s say Koko finally answered his ads,” Poole said. “It’s not impossible.”

  “Tina always answered my ads.”

  “That’s probably where he got the idea,” Poole said.

  “Okay, but why would he want to meet Koko in a cave?” Ellen asked. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? Because this is the only place Maggie could think of in Chinatown that looks like a cave?” She looked at each of the three men, who did not answer her. “I mean, wouldn’t it make more sense to get him to walk past a certain building and jump out at him? Or something like that?”

  “Harry Beevers once had the time of his life in a cave,” Underhill said. “He went inside it, and when he came out he was a famous person. His whole life had changed.”

  “Let’s check out the stairs,” Conor said. “Afterward we can go back to Saigon and wait for Murphy to tell us what happened.”

  Poole nodded. He had lost heart. Murphy would eventually come across Beevers’ corpse in some tenement room. He would have a card in his mouth, and his face would be mutilated.

  “Shouldn’t there be another light down there?” Maggie asked.

  They were at the top of the stairs, looking down into the darkness.

  “Burned out,” Conor said.

  Weak light came out into the lower level of the arcade from the barber shop. Further back, the light from another shop cast a fan-shaped gleam out onto the tiles.

  “No, it was taken out,” Maggie said. “Look.” She pointed at the empty socket set into the ceiling at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Took it out because it
was burned out,” Conor said.

  “Then what’s that?” Maggie asked. In a corner of the bottom step, a nub of brass was just visible to them.

  “Looks like the bottom of a light bulb to me,” Ellen Woyzack said. “So somebody—”

  “Not somebody. Harry,” Poole said. “He unscrewed the bulb to conceal himself. Let’s go down and have a look.”

  Strung out along the top step, they began to move down the stairs in unison. Harry Beevers had hidden on these steps, after having arranged a police reception for them at the airport. What had happened then?

  “It’s the whole bulb,” Maggie said. She held it to her ear and shook it. “Nothing rattles in there.”

  “Well, looky here,” Conor said.

  Poole took his eyes from the light bulb and saw Conor holding out toward him a shiny pair of handcuffs.

  “Now I believe all this,” Ellen said. “Let’s take the handcuffs to Murphy and get him to come back here with us.” She wrapped her arms around herself and stepped closer to Conor.

  “I think he’d toss us all in the slammer if he saw us down here,” Conor said. “Beevers bought these, right?”

  Poole and Underhill nodded.

  “I want to see about something,” Maggie said, and went down the rest of the way, still clutching the light bulb. Poole watched her go into the barber shop.

  “I think Dengler took out the light bulb,” Conor said. “I bet Dengler was waiting for him when he got here. And he took him somewhere, which means they aren’t too far away.”

  Maggie came out of the barber shop looking very excited. “They saw him. The barbers noticed that the bulb was gone—burned out, they thought—early this afternoon. Later they saw a white man standing on the stairs. They thought he was a policeman.”

  “That’s funny,” Poole said. “Harry always wanted people to think he was a cop.”

  “It wasn’t Harry,” said Underhill. “They saw Dengler.”