“This little black head ought to work,” said Kent. “What’s it here for? Is Kinky trying to start a collection of American Negro memorabilia?”
“That little puppethead,” said Piers pontifically, “is the way most of us ordinary citizens use to enter the building. Those of us, that is, who are not private investigators from Los Angeles. The puppethead is thrown from yon kitchen window, falls in a slight trajectory—”
“Every rock has a trajectory,” I said, quoting my father’s message to the kids at camp each summer. “Don’t throw rocks.”
“—falls in a slight trajectory,” continued Piers, “into the waiting hands of the potential visitor or housepest. You will observe, of course, as a detective, that the key to the building is wedged firmly in the little smiling mouth of the Negro puppethead. The visitor then extracts said key from said mouth, utilizes it to open the doors of the building, legs it up four floors, and, if admitted to this loft, hands it to the particular care-giver in charge, who then replaces it where you found it, upon the mantel of the fireplace.”
“Novel idea,” said Kent.
“Piers Akerman’s made of cat shit,” I said.
“That’s why I made him my number-two man,” said Kent. “Okay, Kink, let’s get started. Now I learned the technique I will be employing from one of the greatest hypnotists in the world, John Kappas, who also happened to be married to a friend of mine and Ruthie’s, Florence Henderson.”
“What?” said McGovern. “Say again? He was married to Skitch Henderson?”
“No, McGovern,” said Ratso. “Florence Nightingale was married to Hollywood Henderson.”
“Is John Kappas alive or dead?” asked Piers.
“He’s dead,” said Kent.
“He was swinging a gold watch back and forth,” said Brennan, “and he hit himself in the forehead.”
“Can we get on with this now?” said Kent. “I finally understand what it’s like to be Florence Henderson. You guys are worse than the Brady Bunch.”
“You and Florence Henderson have something else in common,” said Brennan, who’d been drinking. “You’re both bloody cunts.”
“The Von Trapp Family Singers are made of cat shit,” I said.
“Block out everything,” said Kent. “Watch this puppethead. I’m going to count down from ten to one and you’re going to get very, very sleepy.”
I watched Kent Perkins slowly swinging the little puppethead back and forth in an arc in front of my face. I watched the puppethead. The cat watched the puppethead. We both started to become very, very sleepy. It’s a funny thing about hypnosis, but whether you believe in it or not, a puppethead in the right hands always seems to do the trick.
“Ten,” said Kent Perkins. “Nine…eight…seven…six…your eyelids are getting heavy, very, very heavy.”
I no longer knew about the cat, but my own eyelids were getting very, very heavy. The puppethead kept swinging back and forth like some kind of cosmic cradle, rocking to and fro with the inexorable certainty of the tides and the seasons, back and forth like love and hate and death and life itself and I saw Robert Louis Stevenson drowning on a shipwrecked vessel flying the Jolly Roger and I saw Edgar Allan Poe dying in a gutter or maybe I didn’t see anything at all.
“Five,” said Kent, “four, three, two, one. I could make him jack off like a monkey right now. Okay, Kink. Now you’re back in the loft standing right over there by the kitchen window. It’s dark on the street. It’s late at night. You’re all alone here in the loft and you look down at the street. Now tell me what you see.”
“Garbage trucks,” I said. “Just garbage trucks.”
“Are the garbage trucks picking up garbage?”
“No. They’re sleeping.”
“Okay. Do you see anything else?”
“I see a homeless man.”
“You see a homeless man. What is the homeless man doing?”
“The homeless man is urinating on a lamppost. The urine looks beautiful and translucent in the lamplight.”
“Okay. Do you see anything else on the street?”
“I see a dog. A stray dog. He looks lost and lonely and sad and brave and beautiful. The cat also sees the dog. The cat doesn’t like the dog. But I like the dog. I think the dog may contain a piece of the spirit of Jesus Christ.”
“Okay. Do you see anything else?”
“I see an empty street and an empty sidewalk and an empty life.”
“You see an empty life? Is it your life?”
“Maybe it’s mine. Maybe it’s everybody else’s. I don’t know yet.”
“When you find out, be sure and tell me.”
“I will.”
“Okay. It’s dark and you and the cat are still standing by the window looking down into the street. Is it still empty?”
“Yes. It’s still—no! There’s a woman running down the middle of the street. It’s starting to rain but she’s not running from the rain. She’s running to the rain.”
“Have you ever seen this woman before?”
“Yes.”
“Where have you seen her?”
“In the lighted window across the street.”
“When did you first see her?”
“A long time ago. Two weeks ago.”
“What was she doing?”
“She was standing in the light. He came in and beat her. I called the cops. They came and investigated and said there was no apartment on that floor and nobody’d seen or heard anything.”
“But you did?”
“I saw him beat her.”
“And you saw him another time?”
“Yes. He was standing in the light with a gun.”
“And what did you do?”
“I called Piers out of the rain-room but by the time he got to the window everything was dark in the building across the street. He didn’t believe me.”
“Piers didn’t believe you? The others didn’t believe you? The cops didn’t believe you? Nobody believed you really believed you actually saw anything? That about right?”
“That’s right. Nobody believed me.”
“I believed you, Kink. I believed you saw what you said you saw.”
“I—I hoped you would.”
“Now you’re back at the window last night and you see the woman running like crazy through the rain. What do you do?”
“I go out after her.”
“Why?”
“I want to help her. She’s wearing a nice blue dress and it’s raining.”
“You go out in the street in the rain against your doctor’s orders?”
“Fuck Dr. Skinnipipi and the nurse he rode in on.”
“That’s the spirit! Now, you see the woman running. Can you see the man as well?”
“Yes. He’s hurt her again and he’s pacing back and forth in his window.”
“Yet you leave him there and you go after the woman? Why?”
“I want to save her.”
“So you go out into the cold and rainy night and you pursue this strange, frightened creature, and finally you catch up to her. What happened then?”
“She said, ‘Taxi!.’ She said, ‘What do you want?’ She said, ‘Why are you following me?’ ”
“And what did you say to her?”
“I said, ‘I saw you. I saw you in the window.’ I said, ‘Let me help you.’ ”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Go away! Everything’s fine. I don’t need your help.’ ”
“That’s what every abused woman in the world who needs help says at first. Did you do anything then?”
“Yes. I—I grabbed her purse when she wouldn’t tell me her name. I wanted to find her name. When I saw her crying there in the rain she reminded me so much of another girl. A girl I used to know. She was surrounded by everything Warren Zevon hated: guns, money, and lawyers, and she was surrounded by everything Warren Zevon loved: drugs, dreams, and lost angels, and she left messages sometimes on my answering machine that sh
e loved me and she was crying and I couldn’t reach her across the California night. She was the love of my life and she died alone and I couldn’t save her.”
“Kacey,” said Kent Perkins.
“Kacey,” said Piers Akerman knowingly, his voice booming through the cosmos like a somber echo of Kent’s.
I was crying now. I could feel the tears on my face. This did not bother me. In fact, it seemed to comfort me. I did not try to wipe away the stream of tears. They felt so natural and right. Like the rain on your face. Like wearing a sad necklace from yesterday.
“So you were trying to save this woman?” said Kent. “Well, maybe you have. Did you find her driver’s license?”
“Yes.”
“What name did you see on that driver’s license?”
“Tana Petrich.”
“Spell that, please.”
“T-a-n-a P-e-t-r-i-c-h.”
“Okay. That ought to do it. Now I’m going to count to three and then snap my fingers. When I snap my fingers you’re not going to remember any of this. You’re going to be relaxed, refreshed, and you’re going to feel great. A rather unusual Kinky condition, I might add. Okay. Here we go. One. Two. Three!”
Then Kent Perkins snapped his fingers. Almost before I knew it, I was feeling relaxed, refreshed, and, well, great. Kent pulled another chair up to the desk and Pete Myers brought me a hot and delicious shepherd’s pie. As I ate, Kent kicked his computer into overdrive.
“I’m running the name Tana Petrich through peoplefinder.net,” he said, laboring like a giant ant over the little laptop. “Peoplefinder.net’s a nationwide service available to PIs. It merges data bases so that even if you’ve only ordered a pizza, you may have left a trail for us to follow.”
“Makes you proud to be an American,” said Brennan.
“How would you know, lad?” said Pete Myers.
“One thing it does do,” said Kent. “It helps you find Tana Petrich in about forty-five seconds.”
Kent wasn’t off by much. I’d barely gotten my second forkful of shepherd’s pie between my choppers when I heard him shouting with excitement.
“We’ve found the girl!” he ejaculated. “Here she is!”
Ratso, Piers, Brennan, and Pete Myers suddenly gravitated to the desk and began eagerly gazing over Kent’s and my shoulders at the little screen. Only McGovern remained snoring away on the couch. Maybe he had the right idea after all.
“One little problem,” said Kent. “There’s a death claim issued against her name in 1991. A death certificate. This person’s been dead for ten years.”
“Hmmmmm,” said Piers. “What’s our next amusement?”
Chapter Twenty-six
The fact that the person you’re trying to help appears to be dead can often take the wind out of an investigation. Sometimes, however, it can have the opposite effect. As for myself, I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind, but Kent seemed positively galvanized by the sudden turn of events. He appeared to have become obsessed with the inexplicable fact that the woman I’d spoken to on the previous night had apparently been legally dead for over ten years.
“Now we’ve got ourselves a real investigation,” said Kent, as he paced back and forth, repeatedly slamming his fist into his palm with nervous energy. “Now we’ve got something to sink our teeth into.”
“We do?” said Ratso, sinking his teeth into what was left of my shepherd’s pie.
“Of course,” said Kent ebulliently. “Can’t you see it?”
“Can’t I see what?” said Ratso.
“Ah, my dear Watson,” I said, “your charming naïveté never fails to lend an interesting, if sometimes mildly irritating, feature to an investigation.”
“Come on, Sherlock,” said Ratso, having finished the shepherd’s pie and seamlessly moved on to a hot, open-faced roast beef sandwich, “it’s obvious that the woman’s a scammer of some kind. She’s walking around with a fraudulent driver’s license. My opinion, if you want to hear it—”
“But of course, my dear Watson.”
“My opinion is that this woman isn’t really an abused woman at all.”
“And, pray, what might she be, my dear Watson?”
“She could be a terrorist, Sherlock. Do you recall the case several years back that McGovern wrote up in the Daily News and dubbed The Mile High Club?”
“Of course, Watson, of course. My powers may be failing but how could even a delirious mind forget an adventure like that?”
“You remember the fake passports you cleverly hid in the cat litter, Sherlock?”
“Who could forget an adventure like that?”
“Well, Sherlock, here’s a mysterious woman with a fake driver’s license. Fake passports. Fake driver’s license. The pattern seems quite clear to me. Something about this woman isn’t very kosher.”
“Something about what you’re eating isn’t very kosher either, Watson.”
“Ah, but I’m not really a practicing Jew, Sherlock.”
“True, Watson, true. Or, quite possibly, you just need a little more practice. At any rate, your aforementioned charming naïveté is beginning to become rather predictable and tiresome. You are decidedly a fixed point in a changing age. Unfortunately, my dear Watson, that fixed point is directly on top of your head.”
“How’s this for an idea? Why don’t you go fuck yourself, Sherlock?”
“Ah, how like you, Watson, to respond emotionally to what, of necessity, must remain a rational approach to our little undertaking. The emotional, warm, human component you invariably bring to a case can only serve to obfuscate matters which could more readily be resolved by the deductive reasoning of a cold, scientific mind. Watson, Watson, Watson. I salute your humanity, however misguided that tragic trait may be.”
“Fuck you, Sherlock! Fuck you and the cocaine syringe you rode in on!”
Kent Perkins, who’d listened to the entire previous mental hospital conversation in a mute state of mild disbelief, now stood up and placed both hands on top of his head in an attitude of mock surrender.
“Where do I go to give up?” he said. “I can’t believe I’m hearing two Jewboys in New York pretending they’re Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, two fictional characters who at the very least were latent homosexuals.”
“What do you mean ‘latent,’ mate?” said Brennan. “We’ve been listenin’ to this poofter rubbish a lot longer than you and, believe me, it doesn’t get better. Way I see it, mate, is Ratso and the Kinkster are right poncey blokes and this whole investigation’s a soddin’ load of cobblers.”
“Now, just a minute, Mick,” said Kent. “I agree with you that Kink and Ratso might do well to drop all this Sherlock-Watson business and give some serious thought to joining the Manhattan Gay Men’s Choir. What I don’t agree with you about is the investigation.”
“Sod the investigation,” said Brennan.
“All my little helpers,” I said, again quoting my father.
“I’m happy to help investigate, mate,” said Brennan. “I just don’t understand exactly what it is we’re tryin’ to investigate.”
“I’m a licensed private investigator,” said Kent, only half-humorously. “Maybe I can help you.”
“No one’s ever been able to help Brennan, mate,” said Piers. “Many men have died trying.”
“And women,” put in Pete Myers.
“Sod off, you flamers,” said Brennan. “I just asked a simple question of the bloke. What is it that all this combined manpower and brain power is supposed to be investigatin’?”
“Patterns,” said Kent. “Ratso was right. There is already a pattern here.”
“They don’t call me Watson for nothing,” said Ratso pridefully.
“Unfortunately,” said Kent, “Ratso has misinterpreted the pattern. He’s put forth the theory that the woman’s false identity on her driver’s license indicates that she’s some kind of con artist or possibly a terrorist, as was the case with the fake identities Kink once discovered on the
passports of real terrorists. The pattern I see, however, is quite different. I see the woman as having a form of repetitive behavior quite common among abused women. I think she changed her identity years ago in order to escape from a previous abusive relationship. Now, still operating under her false identity, she finds herself, as so often happens in these cases, right in the middle of another abusive relationship.”
“As I’ve told you on innumerable occasions, Watson,” I said, “we are all creatures of narrow habit.”
“Speaking of habit,” said McGovern, who’d finally arisen from the couch and now was firing up a large joint and offering it to Kent. “Try some of this.”
“What is it?” said Kent.
“Wheelchair weed,” said McGovern.
“I’ll pass,” said Kent. “I’ve got to keep a clear head.”
“I’ll try a little of that, mate,” said Piers. “I’m second in command.”
Piers took the joint, inhaled deeply several times, then handed the joint to Brennan. Brennan inhaled so deeply he just about sucked all the oxygen out of the room. Then he passed the huge doobie to Ratso, who took a dutiful little pull and handed it over to Pete Myers. I don’t know what Myers did with it because Kent was now gripping me by the shoulders and forcing me to look directly into his righteously ticked-off countenance.
“These are the guys I’m supposed to work with?” he shouted, rather rhetorically, I thought. “This is the team I’m supposed to assemble?”
I glanced over at the Village Irregulars. McGovern was firing up another joint. Brennan and Piers were slugging down the Guinness again. Ratso, hardly partaking of either of these vices, was nonetheless following a pattern true to the way of his people. He was eating.
“All my little helpers,” I said.
Suddenly Kent was standing in the middle of the loft, practically shaking with a fervor that seemed to me very similar to that of a charismatic evangelist preacher. The lesbian dance class in the loft above, which had been particularly brutal all afternoon, now seemed to be thundering on the roof in almost a tribal groove, a heathen counterpoint to Kent’s religiosity. Kent raised both arms dramatically and looked toward the heavens. Amazingly, the lesbian dance class fell silent.
The Prisoner of Vandam Street Page 11
