The Prisoner of Vandam Street

by Kinky Friedman

  “We’re on to something big, boys!” Kent Perkins ejaculated, as his large Aryan form filled the small sickroom. “I’ve been busy reverse tracing the last known address of Tana Petrich. I’m looking for another woman of around the same age who might’ve blipped off the screen around the same time then resurfaced two or three years later. I can tell you one thing for sure. There’s more here than meets the eye. Whoever took Tana’s name went to a lot of trouble. There’s a deep secret hidden here. Much deeper than just a woman changing her identity to avoid an abusive spouse.”

  During Kent’s little speech, Ratso’s eyes had become bigger than the saucers at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Now that a real private investigator had backed me up with the help of the Internet, he was once again a true believer in my cowboy intuition. His Doctor Watson had returned to form. He was ready to follow my Sherlock through the fires of hell.

  “Justice rides a slow horse,” Kent intoned, “but it always overtakes.”

  “Who said that?” asked Ratso.

  “My great-grandfather,” said Kent. “His name was Lorenzo Dow Posey and he was born in Winnfield, Louisiana. He was a Baptist circuit preacher and he married a Jewish girl from Philadelphia. When they moved back down South, as was rather common back then, she kept her religion a secret. On her deathbed she asked the whole family to gather around, she had something to tell them. To the family’s abject horror, her last words were: ‘Ah’m a Jeeeeeew!’ ”

  “That means you’re Jewish,” said Ratso.

  “I’m only Jewish from the waist up,” said Kent. “But at least now I know why we only tithed $9.95.”

  “It’s a curse,” I said. “Like my father’s old joke about the curse that comes with the Horwitz Diamond.”

  “What’s the curse?” asked Kent.

  “Horwitz,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  In the morning, Brennan came into my quarters with more good news. Pete Myers had brought me a British breakfast in bed, English breakfast tea, fried eggs, fried tomatoes, fried potatoes, fried toast, fried streaky bacon, and beans. Maybe I was off the lost highway and back on the road to recovery because everything tasted killer bee. Mick Brennan looked on approvingly for a moment, made a few solicitous remarks, then launched into his report.

  “Top o’ the mornin’, ol’ bean,” said Brennan jovially. “Good to see you eating a proper English breakfast. I’ve photographed the girl.”

  “Fine, Watson, fine,” I said. “Please give me the details.”

  “I don’t have any details yet, mate. Film’s being developed. But I can tell you this. The girl’s for real. She’s not a figment of your fevered, malarial fantasies. Seen her meself, mate. First independent sighting, in fact. She lives! She walks! She takes off her clothes in front of her window!”

  “Can you describe her, Watson?”

  “Can I describe her? That spotter scope of your mate’s leaves very little to the old imagination, if you know what I mean. She’s a tasty bird. Great big Bristols. Large, wild, unpruned hedgerow.”

  “That may be a bit more information than we need, Watson.”

  “One more thing, mate. Let’s jet this Watson shite, will you? Makes us sound like poofters. Anyway, Ratso’s your Watson, innit he?”

  “Any Watson in a storm, Watson.”

  “Bollocks!” said Brennan. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have the prints.”

  “Fine, Watson, fine. Keep me in the picture, Watson. No pun intended.”

  “Hold on a tick, mate. I saw the bloke as well.”

  “You saw the bloke?”

  “That’s what I said, mate.”

  “Where was the bloke?”

  “On top of the bird.”

  “You mean—”

  “That’s right, mate. They wasn’t playin’ Parcheesi.”

  “These are deep waters, Watson.”

  “Don’t call me Watson.”

  With that word of admonition, Brennan goose-stepped back to his gaseous domain of chemicals in a darkroom somewhere, or possibly back to the spotter scope, or, quite conceivably, back to a pint of Guinness waiting to be poured. Everything was falling into place on this ship of fools we foolishly call the world. Now all I had to do was avoid the horse latitudes, the rocks, the sirens, the icebergs, the shipboard romances, the tyrannical captains, the pirates, the projectile vomiting caused by shipboard viruses, the projectile diarrhea caused by shipboard viruses, the projectile ennui caused by other shipboard passengers. And through the lonely, checkerboard night of the soul at sea, through another lighted porthole, could be seen the lithe form of the blithe woman making love to the dark form of the man who, very possibly, might soon murder her.

  Later that day I emerged from my sick quarters for the first time in what seemed like decades. The loft looked like it’d been caught in the middle of a collision between a ship of fools and a garbage truck. The last man standing appeared to be Pete Myers, who was busily at work upon some arcane creation in the kitchen.

  “What would you like, my lad?” he said. “Good to see you up and about. But you’ve got to keep putting food in you in order to sustain your body’s energy level. So what’s your fancy? Squeak and bubbles? Blood pudding? Spotted dick?”

  “Nothing right now,” I said. “I had a pomegranate on the New Delhi freight train. By the way, where the hell is everybody?”

  “Well, Brennan’s developing his prints from the spotter scope. Ratso’s developing his Freudian theories about how investigating a bit of domestic violence may enhance the sex life of those who happen to view it vicariously. I’m developing a blister on my right hand from preparing the blood pudding. And Piers and McGovern are developing into two large pains in everybody’s arse. They’ve been arguing apparently about your doctor at the hospital. McGovern wants to know if his name is really Dr. Pickaninny. He says if it’s not, the name could be offensive to people of color and he wants to know why the rest of us continue to call him that. Piers tried to explain to McGovern that no one was calling anyone Pickaninny, that the man’s real name is Dr. Skinnipipi and that McGovern is deaf and can’t hear a sodding thing. McGovern insisted that he could hear people calling him Dr. Pickaninny and that it was alarmingly racist. Piers said that was good and then he called McGovern a pickaninny and that set the whole thing off again. Fortunately, they both appear to have taken a French leave at the moment and hopefully it will develop into a beautiful friendship.”

  “Where’s Kent?” I asked, standing by the kitchen window and studying the fateful third-floor window across the street. The table was still there but the vase with the flowers was gone. Maybe she’d thrown it at the guy’s head.

  “Kent said he’s developed a few promising leads. He said he was going out to do some old-fashioned legwork. He said he knew you’d be doing it yourself if you were able.”

  “Drink of my blood and eat of my body,” I said.

  “We do have the blood pudding,” said Myers.

  “We’re going to have blood on Vandam Street if we don’t resolve this matter soon, Watson.”

  Pete Myers did not answer. He merely looked at me and shook his head. Then he went to see if something was burning in the oven. I continued to watch the window and the building and Vandam Street, but all I saw were garbage trucks and pigeons and a few people walking rapidly, stiff-legged, leaning forward into the rain. Did I mention that it was raining? It always seemed to be raining on Vandam Street, and its gray shroud of shabbiness always seemed to remind me of Baker Street. This, however, was not a particularly singular phenomenon. When it’s raining the whole world reminds you of Baker Street.

  It wasn’t too long after that that Kent Perkins came into the loft, shook the rain off his cowboy hat, poured himself a cup of Pete Myers’s hot tea, and sat down in my chair by the desk. He continued to wear his wet clothes, but he was also wearing a big smile on his face.

  “We’re closin’ in, Kink,” he said. “Closin’ in on the bad guys.”

 
“You mean you think there may be more than one of them?”

  “That’s correct,” he said, sipping the tea.

  “Ah, Watson, what you modestly call your ‘old-fashioned legwork’ has confirmed a long-held opinion of my own. Pray tell me more, my dear, loyal, hard-working friend.”

  “I will,” said Kent. “But first, don’t you think you’ve carried this ‘Watson’ business a little too far?”

  “What do you mean by that, Watson?”

  “I mean that everybody can’t be your Watson, nor should they. You’re not being very polite to your friends and it’s not healthy for all of us to be humoring you like this. It’s kind of sad, really. At my firm in L.A., Allied Management Resources, I’d never treat my employees this condescendingly. I realize you were bit many years ago in the jungles of Borneo by a Plasmodium—”

  “Falciparum, Watson. A Plasmodium falciparum.”

  “Okay, so you were bit by a fucking mosquito. That doesn’t give you a license to treat everybody like shit. And speaking of licenses, at least I have a PI’s license and you certainly don’t. What you have is a nasty little Christ complex and Sherlock is your Christ and all your supposed disciples are your Watsons. I don’t like to see you this way, Kink, and, quite frankly, everybody’s getting a little tired of it.”

  “What we have, Watson, is the country doctor, which is you, attempting to be the dime-store psychologist. Well, it won’t fly into my airport, Watson! The game is afoot, Watson! We have work to do and I am afflicted with this accursed malady or, I assure you, I would do it myself! Now what have you discovered, Watson?”

  “I’ve discovered that working with you can be pretty tedious.”

  “Watson, Watson, Watson. How very like you to bemoan the trivial frictions of day-to-day living when matters of mortal consequence pass by under our very window. How refreshingly human of you, Watson. But now we must turn our attentions to the affair at hand. What did you learn in your recent exploration of the living street?”

  Kent’s eyes looked tired. The big smile was now gone from his face. That was fine with me. I hadn’t liked it that much anyway.

  “Okay, Sherlock,” he said rather grudgingly, “if that’s how you want it. I did discover that the stories in the building across the street are numbered differently from this one. That building has a basement; this one doesn’t. The basement counts as the first floor over there so what appears to be the third floor is actually the fourth. Are you with me?”

  “Of course I’m with you, Watson. Where else would I be? Certainly you are to be congratulated. Your simple, pragmatic mind has found the answer to a problem that the very complexity of my approach had not resolved entirely and one, that I might add, has totally eluded the cops. I’m referring, of course, to the phenomenon of my looking one floor down across the street, yet the floor is numbered precisely the same as my own. Damned fine effort, Watson!”

  “Thanks, uh, Sherlock.”

  “What else, Watson? What else have you for me?”

  “I have this,” said Kent, making a rather obscene gesture with his right hand.

  “Ah, Watson, how like you to add a touch of levity to matters of such grave import! What else did you observe?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. I did do a little bit of dumpster-diving behind the other building. It was loaded with all the usual shit you’d expect to find.”

  “Yes, yes, Watson. Garbage in, garbage out.”

  “Anyway, uh, Sherlock, I found this scrap of paper, which might hold some interest for your rapidly deteriorating brain.”

  “Far from it, Watson! Far from it! I see reality now like never before! It is, my dear friend, a heady experience that I recommend highly to all seekers of the truth! It is a strange and singular experience, Watson, into which lesser men might not deign to delve! Seeing reality as it really is, Watson, is like making eye contact with a unicorn!”

  “Maybe you ought to make eye contact with this,” he said, laying the paper down on the desk with a slight flourish.

  I walked over to the desk, lifted Sherlock’s cap, and removed a Cuban cigar. I lopped the butt off the cigar, and set fire to the tip with a kitchen match. I took a patient puff or two, blew a plume of purple smoke toward the building across the street, and, at last, picked up the piece of paper. It was a rent receipt for apartment number 412, dated the previous month. The name on the receipt was Tana Petrich.

  Suddenly, my eyes began swimming and I could not see the words on the paper. I could not see Kent Perkins. All I could see was a man with a gun walking slowly toward me through the foggy Baker Street of the mind.

  Chapter Thirty

  There’s a difference between the cold sweats and the feverish chills, but you are never really able to make the distinction until you vaseline back and forth between the two of them about a hundred and seventeen times in the course of one night. One moment it felt cold enough for Jesus to piss icicles and the very next it was hot enough to pick up Hitler at the airport. If I was on the road to recovery, clearly I was taking a bit of a detour. This was enormously frustrating to me, as a detective and a person, because I felt more confidently than ever that we were very close to getting to the heart of the mystery of Tana Petrich.

  I was not feeling all that well really, even as I stood in the brittle New York sunshine by the windows late the next morning. But feeling well, of course, is relative, and relative to the previous night I was feeling very well indeed. Maybe it was the sense that things were finally coming to more than a mere puppethead that was keeping me going. Sometimes that’s all that keeps you goin’, as my friend Hoover once wrote in a song. And I don’t mean to be casting asparagus upon the puppethead. It was still my best friend in the world, though I didn’t mention that to the Village Irregulars for fear they would be jealous or possibly even try to commit me to wig city. I just stood in the sunshine that there was and sipped some of Pete Myers’s English breakfast tea and smiled a little twisted, serial killer’s half-smile. At least I was ambulatory again. That was always preferable to ridin’ through the desert on a horse with no legs.

  “Care for a bit of brown sugar and cream with your tea, lad?” asked Pete Myers, rather solicitously, I thought.

  “No,” I said. “I’ll take it brown, like my men.”

  “There’s a lad,” said Myers.

  “How about taking some of this?” said Piers, holding up two bottles of Victoria Bitter. “Aussie piss beats limey tea any day.”

  “Where the hell are all the Americans?” I said, looking around the loft and finding four Village Irregulars missing. All I could see was the cat sitting in her rocking chair, smiling smugly, no doubt, at the absence of Ratso.

  “Let me see,” said Pete. “Brennan, who’s lived here so long he might as well be an American, is in his darkroom somewhere developing the prints he shot through the spotter scope. McGovern has a story to file for the paper. Ratso, poor lad, has trekked down to Chinatown. Methinks he’s had his fill of British cooking.”

  “I believe he may have taken a scunner to the spotted dick,” said Piers.

  “And Kent?” I asked.

  Piers and Pete looked at each other rather conspiratorially, it seemed to me. Piers then took a mammoth slug of the VB, leaving only Pete to answer my question.

  “Kent, who, by the way, seems like a very nice, loyal chap, is out pounding the pavement searching for clues for your investigation. Do you think, my lad, that it’s wise to continue pursuing this effort?”

  “Does it have to be wise?” I said, somewhat taken aback. “What if it’s only the right thing to do?”

  “Yes, but lad, is it the right thing to do? There were a number of cases that even your great British hero, Sherlock Holmes, decided at some fine point not to pursue. Possibly, we have no business meddling with these people across the street. Possibly, they’re having their marital problems like any other couple and they’ve done nothing wrong toward any of us and they’ve committed no crime.”

  “Th
e redback spider which lurks in outdoor shithouses in the bush,” said Piers, “can kill a horse in a matter of minutes and a man in much less time. The male of the species, which is invariably eaten by the female, has a long, peculiar, corkscrew-shaped penis. This may be why he is invariably eaten by the female. Shall we investigate this case next? And what do you reckon we should do about the magpie having the largest testicles for its size of any creature in the entire avian kingdom, a condition often causing it to become rather aggressive and to take powerful pecks at passing people, not to mention other magpies? Shall we investigate this aggressive behavior, mate?”

  I could see now that a large number of empty bottles of VB were standing mutely on the counter. Myers looked sober as a judge and everyone else was gone and I knew the cat didn’t drink.

  “And then there’s the singular case of the taipan snake,” Piers was droning on. “Yes, mate, it’s always a case of cold-blooded murder if you happen to be bitten by the taipan. You won’t have time, mate, to upgrade your software. The taipan denatures the blood, breaking it down totally and instantaneously. The taipan can kill a horse in half a second. This is a real killer, mate. Shall we tail him relentlessly throughout the Antipodes?”

  At this point, I could see Myers endeavoring to encourage Piers to pull his lips together, which was no small feat when Piers was on a roll. Piers and I probably talked more than anyone else I currently knew, the difference being that Piers could talk much louder than I could. In my weakened condition I saw no possible advantage in trying to defend my pursuit of the case, so I picked up the cat from the rocker, which always irritated her, and took her back into the bedroom with me.

  Apparently there’d been some sort of mutiny in the ranks. Apparently there’d been some talking behind my back the previous night as I lay in fevered delirium, shouting salutations, I’m told, to deceased friends, and singing mournful verses of the American tune “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” and the Irish tune “The Ballad of Kevin Barry.” I’m not sure which song is sadder and I didn’t recall having sung either of them, but I did know that both men were heroes and they died on different sides of the pond, both tragically alone.