“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Tuttle. You’re six tenths, easy.”
“May I have my gun back now?”
“You may not.” But I did give him my linen handkerchief to wipe his mouth with. “Did you pay for those drinks with a credit card?”
“No, I lost them all when I declared bankruptcy. Why?”
“They’ll try to make you pay for that door, that’s why.”
“Let them try.”
“They can sue you.”
“They can get in line,” he said, without apology or regret. For him, lawsuits were just one of those things you ended up with in life, like ingrown toenails.
A red light stopped us at Twenty-first and Broadway. The Flatiron Building sliced through the night sky overhead. I stifled a yawn and glanced at Grandfather’s Rolex. It was three-thirty. Tuttle still didn’t seem the least bit inclined to pack it in.
“I want meat,” he declared lustily. “Meat and wine for my troops.”
“Where does that come from, anyway? I’ve always wondered.”
“My appetite?”
“Your Ethel Merman.”
“I never told you?”
“You never told me.”
He thumbed his chin thoughtfully. “Well, I guess I know you well enough by now …”
“I guess you do.”
Tuttle winked at me. “I’m her illegitimate son, Doof.”
And who’s to say he wasn’t.
I TOOK US TO Billy’s, a crusty-old-workingman’s steak house on Gansevoort and Ninth Avenue in the heart of the wholesale meat packing district, where the streets are still cobbled and the stench of beef never leaves the air. Billy’s stays open all night: In that neighborhood, there’s always someone coming off work or going to work. There’s sawdust on the floor, a tin ceiling, a battered mahogany bar. A pair of gnarled old citizens were perched on stools there, drinking up whiskey. A much younger couple sat at one of the tables, drinking up each other. He had on a tuxedo. She wore his topcoat over her formal gown. Both of them looked trembly and grave and sixteen.
We ordered T-bones and eggs and coffee. Tuttle asked for a shot of brandy to go with his coffee. Lulu elected to snooze in the car. It was well past her bedtime, and there was nothing on Billy’s menu to interest her.
“Why are we doing this, Doof?” Tuttle said, attacking his food hungrily.
“I’m beginning to wonder about that myself,” I said, chewing on my steak. “The meat here is a lot tougher than it used to be.”
“I mean, why are you hanging around with me?”
“I’m beginning to wonder about that, too.” I pushed my plate away. “Tuttle, why are you following Luz?”
“Luz?” He frowned at me, befuddled. “I’m not following Luz.”
“She says you are.”
“Well, she’s wrong.”
“Uh-huh.”
He raised his chin at me. “That’s all you have to say—‘Uh-huh’?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“That you believe me would be nice.”
“Uh-huh.”
He shrugged his big shoulders and went back to work on his steak. Cleaned his plate, sat back with his coffee. “I know of an after-hours club on Eleventh Avenue that has a pool table. How about we head on over there? I’ll kick your butt.”
“And what will you kick it with? I understood you to be broke.”
He mulled this over, poking at the bone on his plate with his steak knife. “Okay, I got it,” he exclaimed, brandishing the knife and a devilish grin. “You lose, I get to cut off one of your pinkies.” This was like out of the old days. Always, there was some crazy dare. Always, there was someone fool enough to take it. Me, usually.
“No chance.”
“Don’t tell me you’re wimping out on me, Doof.”
“Okay, I won’t tell you.”
“Chicken,” he jeered. Honestly, the man hadn’t matured one bit in twenty years. Not like me. “Pussy.”
“That’s me, all right. A great, big ten-fingered pussy.”
And then suddenly his jaw went slack and he was off pursuing his post-graduate degree at Catatonic State again. It seemed to come and go with him, like a tide. “You don’t have to worry about me, Doof.” His voice was almost a whisper now, his eyes glassy. “I just wondered, that’s all. What it would feel like to have your life in your hands. But I won’t do it, honest. I’m fine.”
“Sure you are, Tuttle. We’re all fine.”
“Hey, Doof?”
“Yes, Tuttle?”
He motioned for me to lean closer. I did. “Who’s The King?”
I sighed inwardly. “You are, Tuttle. Come on, I’ll run you home.”
Tuttle Cash lived in the bottom two floors of a rose-colored-brick town house on East Sixty-fifth Street. For me, Tuttle’s place had always been the ultimate New York bachelor apartment. There was a living room with a working fireplace and built-in bookcases and comfortable leather chairs. There was a gourmet kitchen, a snug dining room. Out back a private garden with a patio, a fountain, a shed for firewood and garden tools. Upstairs, there was a paneled study with more bookcases and floor-to-ceiling windows. The master bedroom suite overlooked the garden. Tuttle’s place was exactly the sort of place I thought I’d live in when I came to New York to be a writer. Who knew that only in Hollywood movies did struggling young writers live this way. Who knew that the tab on a place like this was $4,500 a month, which explained why Tuttle was three months behind and on the verge of losing it.
“Care for a nightcap, Doof?” he asked when we pulled up out front. He seemed totally alert now.
“All right.”
Lulu groused at me unhappily. She wanted to be home in her nice warm bed. I insisted she join us. We’re a team. If I work, she works.
One wall of Tuttle’s living room used to be nothing but his trophies and awards and magazine covers. No longer. The living room walls were completely bare now, except for a framed black-and-white photograph that hung over the fireplace. It was a portrait of Tansy standing against a rough fieldstone wall with her hands thrust deep into the pockets of a rakish tweed blazer. She was all cheekbones and attitude, a faintly mocking smile on her lips, her lush blond hair thrown carelessly over one shoulder. It reminded me very much of a Hollywood portrait that the great George Hurrell took of Carole Lombard in the late thirties. I had never seen this picture before. It was superb.
“Who took it, Tuttle?”
“I did,” he said offhandedly.
“I wasn’t aware that you took photographs.”
“I don’t anymore.”
“Let me guess—not good enough, right?”
He limped toward the kitchen. “What’ll it be?”
“What do you have?”
“I have brandy,” he said.
“What else?”
“I have brandy,” he said again.
“Mmm … make it a brandy.”
I heard him open a cupboard in there. Then I heard a crash of broken glass, followed by a heavy thud. I looked down at Lulu. Lulu was looking up at me. I sighed and went into the kitchen. Tuttle was good and passed out on the kitchen floor with his mouth open, a saliva bubble forming between his lips. Tracy does that, too. There were two broken glasses on the floor. No sign of any brandy. I cleaned up the broken glass and put it in the trash. I dragged him by his feet into the living room, wrestled him up onto the sofa and threw his coat over him. I stared at him. Lulu stared at me, wondering if this meant we could go home now.
It meant we could search. For the old Olivetti. For a supply of manila envelopes and stick-on address labels. For bloodstains on a rug, on a table lamp, on a lamp cord. For a sign, one clear sign, that Diane Shavelson’s murder had taken place here.
It meant I could find out for sure.
The living room was tidy. No dust bunnies along the baseboards. No finger smudges on the glass coffee table. Clearly, someone came in to clean up after the man. There was a matched pair of
table lamps for reading. They were ceramic jar lamps, squat and heavy and difficult to wield one-handed. The shades were of white linen. Neither one looked crumpled or damaged. Or brand new, for that matter. Each had been yellowed by sunlight and time. Neither cord looked as if it had been replaced recently.
I found his trophies stashed in the narrow coat closet underneath the staircase. Two whole cartons’ worth. The stubby little bronze fellow with the leather helmet was all by himself on the closet floor, his right arm poised to deliver that famous stiff arm. I picked him up, surprised by just how heavy he was. A Heisman Trophy weighs thirty-five pounds, in case you’re wondering. I examined him for blood, for hair, for any sign he had been used as a weapon. Nothing. I put him back.
We went upstairs. Lulu took the bedroom. I took the study, with its immense walnut desk, its worn leather loveseat, its bookshelves lined with Tuttle’s library of first editions. Tuttle was an ardent fan of what today’s literary scholars and critics dismiss as “the dead white men.” It’s true, they are dead and they were white males. But at least they could write, which is more than I can say for today’s literary scholars and writers. Tuttle collected them. Tuttle read them. He read Jack London and Rudyard Kipling and James Fenimore Cooper. He read John Buchan and Geoffrey Household and Graham Greene. He read the Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs—although I noticed he had parted company with his much-prized complete set of A. C. McClurg & Co. firsts. These Tarzans were A. L. Burt reprints, worth many fewer zeroes.
He read Ring Lardner. He even owned a signed first edition of You Know Me Al. This Tuttle still had. This Tuttle had not sold. The book was right there on the shelf with his other volumes of Lardner. He owned them all.
The piece of paper upon which he had hand-scrawled his poem “As the Crowd Roars” was under glass there on his desk. The Olivetti was not on the desk. Nothing was, except for a brass gooseneck lamp. I examined this for blood or hair. It told me nothing. I sat in the desk chair and started going through the drawers. I found overdue notices from the phone company and from Con Ed. I found a registered letter from the Internal Revenue Service, dated the previous June, informing him that he still owed them $21,356. I found a lined stenographer’s pad that contained an assortment of doodles and random thoughts. On one page he had written, “Subject for short story—Doof. How does he keep going? Doesn’t he fucking KNOW?” I stared at this a long time, then kept looking. I found his passport. He hadn’t left the country in three years. London had been his last stop. I found a passionate love letter from a woman in San Francisco with whom he’d apparently had a fling a year ago. He had also borrowed a thousand dollars from her and not paid her back. I found an invitation to a football team reunion that had come and gone in September. I found a set of blue Tiffany’s boxes that contained bundles of oyster-gray note cards with his name engraved across the top in peacock blue. There were matching envelopes, too. Very proper. Very tasteful. Possibly he’d had a fling with Miss Manners, too.
I found no manila envelopes, no stick-on address labels, no typing paper. I went to the closet and opened it. He had stashed his darkroom equipment in there: an enlarger, trays, chemicals. I found no typewriter. I closed the closet door and looked around the room. And that’s when my eyes fell on the suitcase. It was a gallant, battered old leather one, big as a steamer trunk and covered with decals from the Queen Mary, The Excelsior in Florence, The Dorchester in London, the Ritz Tower in New York. Tuttle used it as a coffee table, laid flat before the loveseat. Heavy leather straps kept it shut. I undid them, my heartbeat quickening. I had a feeling I would find something in there.
I did. But it wasn’t the Olivetti. It was a zippered black leather portfolio, the kind that artists and photographers carry around. Inside of it there was a photo album—more black-and-white photos that he’d taken of Tansy. These were nude shots. They were not pretty nude shots. They were shots of Tansy spread-eagled on a bed, masturbating, her lips pulled back from her teeth in a savage snarl. Tansy chained to a radiator with a black stocking wrapped tightly around her throat and her eyes bulging from her head. Tansy on her hands and knees with alligator clips on her nipples and a plastic bag over her head, her face underneath twisted in horror. Tansy’s body was beautiful, long and graceful and supple. But it was also bruised around the hips and arms, and there were scratches on her stomach and her hair was messed up and her eye makeup smeared. She looked zonked and miserable. Tuttle appeared in some of the photos. Sometimes he was a face in the mirror. Sometimes all I saw was his foot. Or his fist.
Why had he done this to her? Why had she let him? Was this any of my business? Definitely not. There are certain things you never want to know about other people, especially your friends. I felt voyeuristic. I felt dirty. I zipped the portfolio shut and threw it back in the suitcase. And then Lulu came in and nudged me in the leg with her head. She’d found something. I belted the suitcase shut and followed her into Tuttle’s bedroom.
This particular room was not tidy. The bed was unmade. Clothing was strewn all over the floor. Dirty glasses and coffee cups were heaped on the nightstand. It smelled bad in there. It smelled like a lonely man’s room. I know about that. I know what a lonely man’s room smells like. I threw open a window. There was a New York Post on the floor by the bed, open to the pro-football betting lines. Several games were circled in red pencil. But it wasn’t the point spread on the Dolphins-Chiefs game Lulu was intent on showing me. It was something in the closet.
It was the garment bags. There were three of them. They were big and they were blue and they were from Hold Everything.
I told her she was a good girl. She agreed as how she was. Then she waited for me to make my next move. I seemed nailed to the floor. Didn’t know why. What was I expecting to find inside those zippered bags—more attractive single women with blue faces and nice smiles? … What do we have for our contestants, Johnny …? I took a deep breath and unzipped one and flung it open.
It held Tuttle’s summer wardrobe—his seersuckers and khakis. His tropical worsteds were in the next bag I opened, his linen slacks and shirts in the third. I zipped them all back up and closed the closet door and asked myself what the hell I was going to do now. Should I give Tuttle up? Okay, he belonged to the Manhattan Fitness Center. Okay, he was into rough sex. Okay, he owned some Hold Everything garment bags. Did this make him the answer man? Where was the typewriter? What about the fucking typewriter? And what if I was wrong? What if Tuttle Cash had nothing whatsoever to do with these deaths? Could he handle a police probe? How about the media crawling all over him, gnawing on him, devouring him? Christ, I’d found the man with his gun in his mouth. What if I pushed him over the edge?
How much more proof did I need? How much?
He was still snoring away on the sofa under his coat. Dawn was growing near. I could just about make out the shape of the fountain outside the sliding glass door. I kicked off my shoes and loosened my tie and sprawled out in one of the leather chairs. With a grunt, Lulu climbed into my lap. Briefly, I slept. In my dreams I kept seeing those awful photographs of Tansy. Only it was Tracy’s face I was seeing, not hers. It was my baby with a plastic bag over her head. It was my baby with her eyes bugging out.
I awoke with a start. Tuttle and Lulu were snoring in stereo. A weak winter sun was slanting in the glass door. I glanced at Grandfather’s Rolex. It was seven. Outside, they were picking up the trash. Horns were honking. Another day. I yawned and nudged Lulu. She woke up but wouldn’t move. I nudged her again. She got down, grumbling. I got up, grumbling. My back ached, my knees ached, my eyes ached. Plus my left elbow was all swollen from tackling Tuttle to the pavement outside Ten’s. Stiffly, I hobbled into the kitchen in search of coffee. I found some beans in the freezer. I was looking for the grinder, and not having any luck, when I heard a noise. Only, it wasn’t Tuttle.
It was somebody trying to get in the front door.
Nine
THEY HAD A KEY.
Both keys. One to the Medeco dea
dbolt lock that was drilled into the door. The other to the lock that was in the doorknob, which was turning now. The door swung open. Lulu growled. I shushed her. Tuttle just kept on snoring.
“Hey-hey-hey!” a familiar voice called out. “If you got the Java, I got the buns!”
It was Malachi Medvedev, all chipper and combed and cologned. He was an Aqua Velva man, in case you’re interested. He carried a bakery bag and a package of shirts from the laundry. Also that morning’s papers. I could make out the front page of the Daily News, which hadn’t played up the answer man one bit. All they did was give over the entire front page to three giant black question marks.
“How are you, Mal?” I said to him from the kitchen doorway.
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” he replied brightly, looking me up and down. “Hoagy, you look like shit. What’d you do, try to keep up with The King?”
“Something like that.”
“Bad idea. He can drink ’em all under the table. Even the ol’ Mick himself back when the Mick still had it going.” Malachi took off his coat and came bustling into the kitchen with his packages. He put them down on the counter and went right for the coffee grinder, which was in a cupboard over the refrigerator. I felt sure I would have found it within two hours. The only hard part would have been lifting either arm that high. He ground some beans and dumped them into a Melitta filter. He put a kettle on to boil. He said, “I thought you two parted on bad terms.”
“Who, me and Mickey Mantle?”
“You and Tuttle.”
“We patched things up. Kind of.”
Malachi nodded approvingly. “That’s nice. I like to see that. Only, why didn’t you go home? Wait, you had a fight with Merilee, am I right?” He wagged a pudgy finger at me. “You pulled a Hugh Grant on her, am I right?”
“You are not.”
“Then what are you doing here at seven o’clock in the morning?”
“I was just about to ask you that, Mal.”
“I keep an eye on him, like I told ya.” He took the package of shirts into the hall and put them on a table next to the stairs. That’s when he spotted Tuttle there on the sofa. “You didn’t put him to bed? I always put him to bed.”
The Man Who Loved Women to Death Page 19
