Koko brt-1

by Peter Straub

  At once an arm emerged out of the blackness behind him and clamped around his neck. Someone standing at his back pulled him off-balance and pushed a thick cloth into his mouth. Harry reached for the knife, but his hand tangled in a glove. Then he remembered it was the wrong pocket anyway, but in that second he was falling back and it was too late for the knife. He heard his handcuffs clatter onto the staircase.

  1

  Maggie saw the policemen first, and asked Michael what he thought had happened. They were halfway down the ramp to the terminal, and the two officers had appeared in the lighted square where the jetway ended. “I don’t know,” Michael said. “Probably—” He looked over his shoulder and saw Tim Underhill just emerging through the door of the plane, half a dozen people back. Maggie took his elbow and stopped moving. Michael looked ahead again and saw the big homicide detective, Lieutenant Murphy, staring at him with a set, furious face beside the two uniformed men. “Take it easy,” Murphy said, and the policemen beside him braced themselves but did not draw their guns. “Keep on coming, people,” Murphy said. The people ahead of Maggie and Poole had stopped short, and now the jetway was crowded with passengers. Murphy motioned the passengers in front toward him, and everyone began shuffling toward the terminal. Maggie was holding tightly onto Poole’s hand.

  “Everybody keep moving,” Murphy said. “Keep moving and keep calm.”

  For a second there had been a shocked silence. Now a bubble of questioning, demanding voices filled the tunnel.

  “Just proceed through the terminal normally,” Murphy said. Poole glanced back at Underhill, who had gone pale but was moving forward with the other passengers behind them. A woman somewhere in their midst shrieked at the sight of the policemen.

  Murphy was watching Underhill, and when Poole and Maggie finally reached the terminal he spoke without looking at them. “Take them aside.”

  One of the policemen took Michael by the arm Maggie was not holding, and pulled him off toward the window beside the gate. Another tried to separate Maggie, but she would not let go of Poole’s arm, and so Poole, Maggie, and the two policemen moved crabwise to an empty space in front of the window. The gate had been roped off, and a wall of people stood at the rope looking in at them. Two uniformed policemen with rifles stood off to the side behind Murphy, out of sight of the passengers in the jetway.

  When Tim Underhill came through, Murphy stepped forward, charged him with the murder of Anthony Pumo, and read him his rights from a white card he had taken from his pocket. The policeman who had taken Maggie aside patted Underhill’s chest and sides, then patted down each leg. Underhill managed to smile.

  “We were going to call you as soon as we got here,” Michael said. Murphy ignored him.

  The other passengers on the flight moved slowly toward the ropes. Most of them were walking backward, not to miss anything. The flight crew had clustered at the end of the ramp and were whispering to each other. Nearly all the passengers stopped moving once they reached the rope, set down their luggage, and stared.

  Murphy’s face flushed a dark red. He turned around and shouted, “Will you clear the area? Will you please get this area clear?” It was not clear if he was shouting at the policemen or the gaping passengers.

  “Please move to the other side of the rope,” said a young detective, a police dandy in a dark blue coat and soft wide-brimmed hat that made an unintentional contrast to Underhill’s own big shabby coat and wide hat. Most of the passengers picked up their carry-on bags and moved toward the opening in the ropes. The entire terminal sounded like a cocktail party.

  “Lieutenant,” Poole said. Maggie glanced up at him, and he nodded.

  “Keep your mouth shut, Dr. Poole,” Murphy said. “I’m arresting you and the girl too. There’ll be plenty of time for you to say whatever you want to say.”

  “What do you think we were doing in Milwaukee? Could you tell me that?”

  “I hate to think what you people were doing, anywhere.”

  “Do you think Maggie Lah would go anywhere or have anything to do with Tina Pumo’s murderer? Does that seem reasonable to you?”

  Murphy nodded to the dandy, who stepped behind Underhill and handcuffed him.

  “Tim Underhill was still in Bangkok when Tina Pumo was killed—check the flight records.”

  Maggie was unable to stay quiet any longer. “I saw the man who killed Tina. He did not look anything like Timothy Underhill, Lieutenant. Somebody is making a fool of you. How did you learn that we were on this flight?”

  “We had an anonymous tip.” Murphy’s face was still the same ugly purple it had turned just before his explosion.

  “Harry Beevers,” Poole said, looking down at Maggie.

  “Look at my passport, Lieutenant,” Underhill said in a quiet, reasonable voice. “I carry it with me. It’s in my coat pocket.”

  “Get his passport,” Murphy said to the dandy, who reached down into the nearest pocket of Underhill’s long shapeless coat and found the small dark green booklet that was his passport.

  “Open it up,” Murphy said.

  The young detective moved closer to Underhill. He opened the passport and riffled through the pages. There appeared to be a great many entries in Underhill’s passport. The dandy found the last page of entries, examined it for a moment, then handed the passport to Murphy.

  “I came back with Beevers and Dr. Poole,” Tim said. “Mass murder was one of the mistakes I managed to avoid.”

  “Mass murder! Mass murder!” echoed through the crowd jammed against the rope.

  Murphy’s flush deepened as he stared at Underhill’s passport. He leafed backwards from the last entry, looking for an earlier arrival in America. At length he dropped his hands, moved his feet, and turned to look at the scene in the terminal. People were pressing against the rope, and the police marksmen stood among the empty plastic chairs. Murphy said nothing for a long time. A flash went off as a tourist took a picture.

  “You people have a lot of explaining to do,” he finally said. He put the passport in his own coat pocket. “Cuff the other two.”

  The two uniformed policemen snapped handcuffs on Poole and Maggie.

  “Did this man Underhill come back from Bangkok on the same flight with you and Beevers and Linklater?”

  Poole nodded.

  “And you chose not to let me know that. You sat in my office and decided to let me chase after the wrong man.”

  “I regret that,” Poole said.

  “But still you people put up those posters all over Chinatown?”

  “Koko had used Underhill’s name.”

  “You wanted to find him yourself?” Murphy asked, seeming just now to have understood this point.

  “Harry Beevers wanted to do something like that. The rest of us went along with him.”

  “You went along with him,” Murphy said, shaking his head. “Where is Beevers now?”

  “Mikey!” a voice called from behind the crowd at the ropes.

  “Conor Linklater was going to meet us here.”

  Murphy turned to one of the uniformed policemen and said, “Bring that man here.” The policeman trotted off toward the gap in the rope, and reached it at about the same time that Conor and Ellen Woyzak appeared at the front of the crowd.

  “Bring them along,” Murphy said, walking off toward the crowd, which began moving away from him.

  “We were in Milwaukee to see if we could learn where Koko is,” Poole called to him. “Instead we found out who he is. If you’ll let me get some stuff out of the trunk of my car, I could show you what I mean.”

  Murphy turned around and glowered at Michael and Maggie, then, with even deeper distaste, at Tim Underhill.

  “Hey, you can’t arrest these people,” Conor started to say. “You want a guy named Victor Spitalny—he’s the one they were checking up on—”

  “No,” Poole said. “Conor, it’s not Spitalny.”

  Conor stopped talking for a wide-eyed moment, and then stepped toward Mur
phy, holding his hands out. “Cuff me.” Ellen Woyzak uttered a noise that combined a screech and a growl. “Put ’em on,” Conor said. “I’m not gonna rest on my morals. I did everything these guys did—the buck passes here. Come on.”

  “Shut up, Conor,” Ellen said.

  Murphy looked as though he wanted to cover his face with his hands. All the policemen watched him as they would a dangerous animal.

  Finally Murphy pointed at Maggie, Poole, and Underhill. “Put these three with me,” he said, and charged toward the crowd like a bull in a bullring. More flashes of light exploded. As soon as he reached the gap in the rope, the crowd broke apart before him.

  “Put them in the lieutenant’s car,” said the dandy. “I’ll take Harry Truman with me.”

  Still red-faced but calmer than he had been in the terminal, Murphy had removed their handcuffs before they finally got into the backseat of his car. One of the young policemen was driving them across the Whitestone Bridge, and Murphy had twisted sideways to listen to them. Every few minutes his radio crackled, and cold air poured in through the imperfectly sealed windows. Another policeman was driving Michael’s car, which they had taken from the airport parking lot and brought alongside Murphy’s, back to the precinct house.

  “On the plane?” Murphy asked. He was no longer as angry as he had been inside the terminal, but he was still suspicious.

  “That’s right,” Poole said. “I suppose that right up until then Maggie and I had been thinking that we were still looking for Victor Spitalny. I guess I knew the truth, but I couldn’t see it—I didn’t want to see it. We had all the evidence we needed, all the pieces, but they just hadn’t been put together.”

  “Until I mentioned Babar,” Maggie said. “Then we both remembered.”

  Poole nodded. He was not about to tell the policeman about his dream of Robbie holding up a lantern beside a dark road.

  “What did you remember?”

  “The song,” Maggie said. “Michael told me what the man in Singapore and the stewardess said to him, and I—I knew what they had heard.”

  “The man in Singapore? The stewardess?”

  Poole explained about Lisa Mayo and the owner of the bungalow where the Martinsons had been killed. “The man in Singapore had heard Koko singing something that sounded to him like rip-a rip-a-rip-a-lo. Lisa Mayo heard the passenger sitting next to Clement Irwin singing something very similar. They both heard the same thing, but they both heard it wrong.”

  “And I knew what it was,” Maggie said. “The song of the elephants. From Babar the King. Here—take a look at it.”

  Poole passed the book he had taken from the back of his car over the top of the seat.

  “What the hell is this?” Murphy asked.

  “It’s how Koko got his name,” Underhill said. “I think there were other meanings, but this is the first one. The most important one.”

  Murphy looked at the page to which the book had been opened. “This is how he got the name?”

  “Read the words,” Poole said, and pointed to the place on the page where the song was printed.“Patali Di Rapata

  Cromda Cromda Ripalo

  Pata Pata

  Ko Ko Ko”

  Murphy read from the yellow songsheet printed on the page.

  “And then we knew,” Poole said. “It was Dengler. Probably we knew long before that. We might have known as soon as we went into his mother’s house.”

  “There is a serious drawback to that theory,” Murphy said. “Private First Class Manuel Orosco Dengler has been dead since 1969. The army positively identified his body. And after the army identified the body, it was shipped back home for burial. Do you think his parents would have accepted someone else’s body?”

  “His father was dead, and his mother was crazy enough to have accepted the body of a monkey, if that’s what they sent her. But because of the extensive mutilation the body had undergone, the army would have strongly advised her to accept their identification,” Poole said. “She never looked at the body.”

  “So whose body was it?” Murphy asked. “The goddamn Unknown Soldier?”

  “Victor Spitalny,” Underhill said. “Koko’s first victim. I wrote the whole scenario in advance—I explained what to do and how to do it. It was a story I used to call ‘The Running Grunt.’ Dengler got Spitalny to join him in Bangkok, killed him, switched dogtags and papers, made sure he was so mutilated nobody could tell who he was, and then took off in the middle of the confusion.”

  “You mean, you put the idea in his head?” Murphy asked.

  “He would have worked out something else if I hadn’t told that story,” Underhill said. “But I think that he used my name because he took the idea of killing Spitalny and deserting from me. He called himself by my name in various places after that, and he caused a lot of rumors that went around about me.”

  “But why did he do it?” Murphy asked. “Why do you think he killed this Spitalny character—in order to desert under another identity?”

  Poole and Underhill glanced at each other. “Well, that’s part of it,” Underhill said.

  “That’s most of it, probably,” Poole said. “We don’t really know about the rest.”

  “What rest?”

  “Something that happened in the war,” Poole said. “Only three people were there—Dengler, Spitalny, and Harry Beevers.”

  “Tell me about the running grunt,” Murphy said.

  2

  A man with deep broken wrinkles in his forehead and an air of aggrieved self-righteousness jumped up from a chair in the hallway outside the lieutenant’s office as soon as Poole, Underhill, Maggie, and Murphy reached the top of the stairs. A cold cigar was screwed into the side of his mouth. He stared at them, plucked the cigar from his mouth, and stepped sideways to look behind them. The sound of the next group came up the stairs, and the man thrust his hands in his pockets and nodded at Murphy as he waited with visible impatience for the others to appear.

  Ellen Woyzak, Conor Linklater, and the young detective in the blue coat and hat reached the top of the steps and turned toward Murphy’s office. The man said, “Hey!” and bent over the railing to see if anyone else was coming. “Where is he?”

  Murphy let the others into his office and motioned for the man to join them. “Mr. Partridge? Come in here, please?”

  Poole had thought the man was another policeman, but saw now that he was not. The man looked angry, as if someone had picked his pocket.

  “What’s the point? You said he was gonna be here, but he ain’t here.”

  Murphy stepped out and held open his door. Partridge shrugged and came slowly down the hall. When he walked into the office he scowled at Poole and the others as if he had found them in his own living room. His clothes were wrinkled and his unpleasant blue-green eyes bulged out of his loose, large-featured face. “So now what?” He shrugged again.

  “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 composi
te 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.