The Prisoner of Vandam Street

by Kinky Friedman

  “The great King Kamehameha,” I said to the cat, “was the man who conquered and united all the islands of Hawaii, except Kauai, into one great kingdom. He was a chief. He was a warrior. He was a king. And do you know what the name Kamehameha means?”

  The cat, now struggling to get away from me and go into the other room, obviously did not know or care. She was never very big on island kingdoms. Too much water under the bridge of her nose.

  “Kamehameha means ‘the Lonely One,’ ” I said, holding the cat firmly in my arms as if she were my last friend in the world. “Sherlock Holmes was lonely, too. So was Sergeant Pepper. All men are lonely when they find the great work they love and believe in. This case is my work. This case is my brother. This case is the very thread by which I cling to sanity and to life itself!”

  Sometime during the course of my little soliloquy the cat had managed to exit the room and Brennan had managed to gain ingress. Now he looked at me with the very same pity in his eyes that I had often observed in the traffic-light eyes of the cat.

  “I won’t bother you with processing details, mate, but we have very clear prints of the bloke and the treacle shot through the spotter scope. They’re clean as the nose on your face. Well, maybe not your nose, mate. But they’re brilliant, aren’t they?”

  Brennan proceeded to spread the prints out across the comforter and he wasn’t wrong. They were brilliant, all right. It was the guy, all right. It was the girl, all right. And, God, if she didn’t look just like Kacey.

  “Watson,” I shouted, holding the prints dramatically in the air, “these may be the pieces of the puzzle that allow us to finally break the case!”

  “That’s good, mate, because I almost broke my neck comin’ up the stairs. Piers is passed out in the doorway.”

  “And this,” I said, looking at the photo of the girl, “may be the piece of the puzzle that finally breaks my heart.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Looking back on events, I can now see, by the pale evanescent light of the celestial jukebox, that my friends, each in his own way, were trying to help me as best they knew how. Unfortunately, friendship is a skill that few of us truly master in the course of our lifetimes. With all of the tiresome projectile preaching and ruthless religious fervor of the past centuries and the current one, we still do not appear to grasp in our narrow, scattered, selfish and single-minded minds the simple message of one of the world’s first great Jewish troublemakers, Jesus Christ.

  Piers and Pete, I feel sure, were becoming convinced that humoring me along on a seemingly meritless adventure might only prolong my illness and bouts of irrationality. They probably thought that tough love might be the right approach to my problems. Brennan, I believe, was probably humoring me all the while, believing that one day I’d just snap out of it or else completely snap my wig and if it was the latter, he’d no doubt have to just keep humoring me forever. Many relationships and marriages exist in this fashion, each party determined to quietly humor the other, each party totally full of shit, each party determined to avoid at all costs the truth, each party eventually reduced to a bitter, constipated, humorless party of one. Well, I’ve always contended that friendship was overrated in the first place, while taking a Nixon in an Australian outback shithouse has always been underrated. Unless, of course, you get bit on the buttocks by a redback spider.

  So much for how the three foreigners were attempting to handle the condition my condition was in. The Americans, for the most part, weren’t that much more effective in dealing with it either. Ratso, who psychologically was well aware of the deterioration occurring within the once-rational brain of his beloved Sherlock, took the Jewish approach to dealing with his grief. He ate more food and most of it seemed to be Chinatown cuisine. I’ve noticed this phenomenon before in my life, Jews eating large quantities of Chinese food whenever their little world takes an unexpected turn, but I’ve never seen Chinese walking into delicatessens when things go awry. What does this tell us about the Jews and the Chinese? Do they need Jesus in their lives? I think not. One of the beautiful things about not believing in Jesus is that you rarely, if ever, misunderstand Him.

  So Ratso wasn’t much help or solace to me either, and McGovern, of course, did not realize half the time that my aberrant behaviors were being caused by malaria. He thought I was planning a trip to Bulgaria.

  Then there was Kent, the true believer, the pilgrim who traveled east to help the Kinkster. Kent, like myself, understood what it meant to become involved with an investigation as tightly as the interwoven threads of life and death. Kent, like myself, knew how it felt to find yourself in the daunting position of being a mender of destinies. Kent, though mildly piqued with the Kinkster at the moment, I knew would rein in his frustrations and help bring the case to its logical conclusion. It wasn’t long, in fact, after my having reflected upon these matters that Kent returned to the loft and more than justified my confidence in him.

  “Okay, Inspector Clouseau,” he quipped, “let’s have a look at the photos.”

  Kent sat down at my desk in the chair he lately seemed to be occupying more frequently than myself. He turned on the desk lamp, which immediately drew the presence of the cat. Even with my warm houserobe over jeans and sweatshirt and mental hospital slippers, the loft seemed cold to me and the cat. Possibly, if we’d imbibed as much alcohol as some of the others, the loft and the world might seem a bit warmer. I, unlike the cat, had been known to take a drink, but the illness appeared to have put me off the piss, as Piers might say.

  “Good Lord, Mick is really talented,” said Kent. “These are the clearest photos I’ve ever seen shot under these conditions. I wish he lived in California.”

  “No you don’t, mate,” said Piers, who’d finally arisen from the hallway.

  “The clarity is so good,” Kent continued enthusiastically, “that I think we’ll soon have the answer to the major question that’s been bothering me.”

  “Which is?” asked Piers.

  “Tell him, Kink,” said Kent.

  I found myself mildly flattered that Kent had passed the baton to me. It might also be a test, I realized, as to just how coherent and cogent were my current thought processes. I took a puff on the cigar I was smoking and took a crack at it gamely.

  “I would say the major question that’s been bothering you is the same one that’s been bothering me,” I said, stalling for time. I took another puff on the cigar and Kent made his traditional little California waving motion with his hand in front of his face as if the smoke was just too much for him. It irritated me to see this and I temporarily lost my train of thought.

  “Well, mate,” said Piers, turning toward me. “What is it that’s troubling you two blokes?”

  “The thing that’s bothering me is that the girl is apparently using the identity of Tana Petrich, which I know because I saw the name on her driver’s license. It was a fact I’d evidently repressed, one which Kent brought out later during hypnosis. Then we find that someone named Tana Petrich evidently died in 1991. So the nagging question, as I see it, is whether this girl is an imposter pretending to be Tana Petrich, or is she really Tana Petrich and, for reasons we don’t as yet know, wants people to think that she’s dead.”

  “Great minds think alike!” he said, jumping out of his chair to congratulate me. “That’s exactly what I would have said. Either the death claim is fraudulent or the identity is fraudulent. Both cannot be real. One of them is phony and we’re about to find out which one it is.”

  “We are?” I said.

  “Of course,” said Kent.

  “How do you propose to do that?” I asked. A fraud perpetrated successfully for over ten years can often evade even the efforts of a major government task force.

  “Easy,” said Kent. “Call Rambam.”

  “Can’t,” I said. “He’s somewhere in India right now, interviewing a dead swami. Can’t even reach him on the shoe phone.”

  “Shit,” said Kent. “This is the part of dete
ctive work that I hate. Rambam’s a lone wolf. He’s highly skilled in extralegal activities. I’ve now got twenty-six employees in my agency in L.A. and I have to be much more careful about how I do things. All private investigators are on both sides of the law, of course. Some are just more on both sides than others.”

  “Yeah, but Rambam only does that shit for me. We’ll have to tackle the problem ourselves, Watson.”

  “I’m afraid so, um, Sherlock,” said Kent. “I was hoping we could avoid having to do it ourselves. I was also hoping we could avoid this Sherlock-Watson shit.”

  “You’re right on that last one, mate,” said Piers.

  “Ah, Watson,” I said, “your earthy vernacular never fails to warm the coldest, most scientific soul. But I know you will not let me down at this grave moment, my dear friend. I am, as you well know, Watson, not a student of the modern technologies. I have made exhaustive studies of footprints and tobacco ashes, but this thing called the Internet, to which you’ve harnessed your very being, is beyond me, not to say beneath me. It is a fad of the moment. It shall pass and be forgotten, Watson. So-called modern technology will also pass and be forgotten. What is left, Watson, after all things impossible have been removed from the equation, will be only the possible as determined by the power of deductive reasoning. Now what do we do next, Watson?”

  “Well, uh, Sherlock,” said Kent. “We will do what Rambam probably would have done but we’ll do it through the services of a second party. I will e-mail these photos to a friend who has access to these kinds of things and I will ask him to resolve the matter for us using any legal means possible. That last phrase is a sort of code, of course. It means, whatever it takes. We should have our answer very soon. Thanks to modern technology and the Internet, of course.”

  “Wonderful, Watson, wonderful! And if someone asks you later how you did it, what will you say?”

  “I’ll give them the same answer I always give them,” said Kent.

  “Which is?” asked Piers.

  “I don’t want to know,” said Kent.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  While Kent Perkins’s mysterious friend tried for a computer match of Tana Petrich’s photo, I paced the loft like a wind-up toy, smoking cigars and contemplating what our next move would be if the photos matched, or if they didn’t match. Energy was coming back to me. Yet because of the stupid doctor’s orders, I couldn’t leave the loft. Not that there was much I could’ve done. I could, I suppose, have tried to stake out apartment number 412 across the street. I might still want to do that, I thought. But for the moment, the better strategy, it seemed, was to pace back and forth, smoke a cigar, listen to the pounding hooves of the lesbians above me, and wait for whatever results Kent’s technological efforts might produce. It was a tedious job and I got to do it.

  Some of the other Irregulars trickled back into the loft after a while, several of them expressing a renewed interest and confidence in the case the way Kent and his PallTech system appeared to be handling it. This got up my sleeve a bit until I thought of something Rambam had told me long ago. He’d called his weapon of choice in crime-solving “the hard-boiled computer.” Reflecting upon it, I realized that Rambam quite possibly relied upon technology even more than Kent. It was simply that Rambam never used the computer or the Internet or PallTech or whatever the satanic system was around me. I only saw Rambam as a man of action. I never observed the sausages as they were being made.

  Hell, I thought. The world was changing. Maybe every private investigator except me was now a technological junkie. I hoped not. As a rule of thumb I resisted change in all its nefarious forms, always remembering the wise words of Joseph Heller: “Every change is for the worse.” Hell, I didn’t even bother to change my underwear. I didn’t, of course, wear any underwear. I preferred to go about commando-style. A little trick I’d picked up in the tropics. Probably about the same time I’d picked up malaria. Probably about the same time my penis had sloughed off in the jungle.

  “There are only two databases for reliably obtaining photos,” Kent was explaining to the small group of lookers-on gathered about the desk. “One is the federal passport database. That one’s harder to get into than Fort Knox. The other one’s the Department of Motor Vehicles database which every state has. What I haven’t told you is that I’ve learned recently that Tana Petrich’s last known address was in Florida.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us that, mate?” asked Brennan.

  “Because you didn’t ask,” said Kent.

  He hadn’t told me that information either, I realized. Some fucking Watson. Holding back vital details from Sherlock. Ah, well, I thought. Good help is hard to find these days.

  “PallTech turned up the Florida address,” Kent continued. “I happen to know a retired state trooper in Florida.”

  “Here I sit, strainin’ my pooper,” I chanted. “Tryin’ to give birth to a Florida state trooper.”

  Kent chuckled politely. Several of the Village Irregulars glanced briefly at each other with worried expressions.

  “What?” said McGovern. “Say again? Who took the pooper-scooper?”

  “Troopah,” said Ratso helpfully. “A Floridah state troopah.”

  “I heard you,” said McGovern petulantly.

  “Well, moving right along now,” said Kent. “I’m now going to upload this beautiful photo of the girl known as Tana Petrich. I’ll upload a digital image of Tana and my friend in Florida will have it along with my request for an identity match all within less than a second. That’s pretty amazing if you think about it.”

  “So your friend gets the digital image,” said Piers thoughtfully.

  “Wrong tense,” said Kent. “He’s already got it.”

  “Pluperfect asshole,” I muttered, but by now nobody was paying me any attention.

  “So the former state troopah searches the Florida DMV database,” said Ratso. “What’s he actually looking for?”

  “There aren’t many Tana Petriches in this country,” said Kent. “Maybe there’s only one. PallTech tells us that she had a Florida driver’s license. Kinky saw the driver’s license and confirmed that the girl herself and her driver’s license photo matched—”

  “You’re relyin’ on his opinion, mate?” said Brennan, gesturing with a VB bottle in my direction.

  “Hypnosis rarely lies,” said Kent. “And PallTech never lies. PallTech has given us Tana’s driver’s license number, which I’ve also e-mailed to my friend. His job now is to find another photo of Tana and then we’ll know if Tana’s really Tana.”

  There were nods of understanding and agreement from most of the Village Irregulars. Pete Myers interrupted me in midpace to give me a hot steaming cup of Ulong Blue Dong or whatever limey tea is supposed to be served at 1:17 p.m. to a man convalescing from malaria. I sipped the tea. I puffed a bit on the cigar.

  “What do we do now, mate?” asked Brennan.

  “Now,” said Kent, “comes the hard part. We wait.”

  It was kind of a funny picture actually. Six men standing around like village idiots, occasionally peering over the shoulder of a large blond-haired man sitting at a desk essentially doing nothing. They looked for all the world like seven city workers standing around watching a machine. Maybe, I thought, the glorious, wonderful, satanic, fucking technological revolution hasn’t come as far as people would like to think.

  Time passes slowly when you’re waiting for a response from a machine that supposedly operates at the speed of light. There was time for three or four hearty rounds of drinking by all of the Village Irregulars except for Kent. There was time for McGovern to break into his stash and pass around another kingsize joint of his “wheelchair weed.” There was time for McGovern to follow up this particular amusement by patronizingly inquiring about my general state of health. I told him it was incredible to me that after all this time my body and mind still often seemed in the grip of malaria. He did his usual, maddening, “Say again?” routine and when I ignored it, he wanted to
know why I was planning a trip to Bavaria.

  Perhaps it was because Kent was trying to maintain the interest of his crowd that he launched into a series of Hollywood celebrity stories, mostly dealing with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. He did, of course, have somewhat of an insider’s knowledge of these men because his wife, Ruth Buzzi, was much adored by both of them. Frank regarded her as his daughter and Dean wanted her on every Dean Martin Roast. The Village Irregulars, like almost all of us, were suckers for firsthand Hollywood celebrity stories. While Kent’s little laptop hummed hopefully, the little group stood around him listening to his tinseltown tales with their eyes popping and their jaws hanging open. Much of this reaction, of course, could have been attributable to the wheelchair weed. As I paced back and forth across the long, cold living room of the loft, I picked up little snippets of conversation. It was interesting. It was kind of like the atmosphere you might find on a stakeout. Some of the most interesting, freewheeling conversations I’d ever had had occurred when I’d been on stakeouts with Rambam.

  “Yeah, I currently own Dean Martin’s old Rolls-Royce,” Kent was saying. “It’s tan and sand. Beautiful car.”

  “How much did it cost?” asked Ratso.

  “Let’s just say,” said Kent, “it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

  “Ever had one of Frank’s cars, mate?” asked Brennan.

  “No,” said Kent. “But Frank really was a loyal, classy guy in his own way—if you were his friend, of course, or maybe just somebody in need of his help. Every year, in fact, he’d call Ruthie on her birthday. He’d say: ‘Let me speak to Ruthie.’ And I’d say: ‘Who’s calling?’ And then he’d say: ‘Frank.’ Then I’d say: ‘Frank who?’ And then there’d always be a long pause. Then he’d say in a low, growling voice you knew not to mess with: ‘Frank Sinatra.’ And I’d say: ‘Just one second, Mr. Sinatra.’ ”