“I’m listening.”
“If you’re ready to get out of that bad situation over there, then we need to talk. My friends and I will help you on the condition that you level with us. You have to be sincere with us in order to be true to yourself. And I have to measure your sincerity very carefully to determine whether you’re really worthy of our efforts. We’re talking major rescue endeavor here, with obviously some danger in this for us, too, right?”
“Right. He won’t stop at anything.”
“Okay. I’m ready to continue if you are. I have to measure your sincerity now. Trouble is, sincerity is an intangible thing, right?”
“Right.”
“So, to measure an intangible like sincerity, we have to measure the closest almost-tangible thing—sincerity’s closest cousin—and that’s honesty. Do you understand and agree with that?”
“Yes.”
“So measuring honesty means asking some questions I already know the answers to. This gives me a clear reading of your level of honesty. I can then translate that to imply just how sincere you are, understand?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s start with the first page of this investigative manual. Research reveals you are not the person you’ve been claiming to be. Tana Petrich is not your real name. Honesty test question number one: Say your real name.”
“Is that whole file on me?”
“This whole file is my investigative manual, which contains all the information I’ve been able to amass about you since I started this investigation. I need to use this material to determine whether you are being truthful, honest, and sincere tonight.”
“Give me my first initial. Just to show me you really know who I am. Then I’ll tell you.”
“I could do that except that I need for you to be one hundred percent honest. Giving you the first initial would mean that you’re testing me, not the other way around. You see, for a very good reason, for your own safety and out of real concern for your well-being, I’m the one testing you. It takes a more honest person to answer a question truthfully without prompting like that. If you think you’re here to test me, then you can just hit the door. Go ahead. Walk out of here and turn your back on all this effort. It’s your life, young lady. People getting together and trying to help a total stranger in the middle of New York City may seem too weird to grasp. I understand that. It’s okay. Just leave.”
Confined to my bed like a shut-in, I found myself inextricably caught up in this little drama, like an old-time radio soap opera of the mind. Would the girl leave? Would she stay? Was Kent selling the door too aggressively? Tune in next week to find out.
“Okay, but this better not be a trick,” she said. “My name is Sarah.”
“Great start,” said Kent enthusiastically. “You’re doing great! Shake my hand, Sarah. I know that was difficult.”
In my shivering, frazzled mind I could see Kent Perkins, a big Texas smile on his face, extending a warm hand of friendship to the troubled girl. With talent like that, I thought, he could have made millions as a motivational speaker for large California corporations. I suspected, though, that he knew God didn’t like motivational speakers or large California corporations. That was probably why Kent Perkins, instead, had chosen to be a mender of destinies.
“Sarah,” he said. “Now say your last name.”
“Are you sure you’re not the police?”
“That’s a long name,” said Kent. I could hear him getting up out of his chair, walking over to the girl. “Look at this, Sarah. This is my ID. Right here over my name are the words ‘Private Investigator,’ and here on the back of the card it says, ‘Not affiliated with any law enforcement agency.’ It says that for a reason, Sarah. I couldn’t carry this if I was a cop.”
“Okay. It’s Sarah Kenter. That’s Zarah with a ‘Z,’ though it’s pronounced the regular way.”
“Zarah, that took courage, and I appreciate that very much. I had been pronouncing your name wrong. Thanks for straightening me out. Now, Zarah, you have to tell me your date of birth. Not Tana Petrich’s, but Zarah Kenter’s.”
“Three twenty-three seventy-seven.”
“Very good, Zarah. Okay. And now one of the toughest questions. What are you running from?”
“You know who I am, so you obviously know about the Brinks robbery in California.”
“Yes, I sure do.”
“Well, they told me nobody’d get hurt. I was horrified when Ben—”
“Ben who?”
“Let’s call him Ben Felch.”
“Okay. Ben Felch. Go ahead.”
“When Ben started shooting. I was an assistant to a Brinks dispatcher. I could’ve stopped it. Now we’re wanted for murder and interstate flight and robbery and, hell, I don’t know what else.”
“That wasn’t your first caper, was it, Zarah?”
“If you’ve really done your research, you know the answer to that, Mr. Perkins.”
“Call me Kent.”
“Kent. I was recruited because I was clean enough to pass the background and get hired at Brinks. I’d only worked in dispatching for a few months before the holdup.”
“Tell me about this Ben Felch. Where’d you meet him?”
“He was working for my dad in a work-release program out of the California Department of Corrections. My family’s in the flower business and dad hired him under a government grant. He was supposed to be working in the greenhouse, taking care of the plants. I found him attractive. I was just sixteen and ready to experience life a lot more than my parents wanted. They would’ve died if they’d known what we were doing. I’d never been with a real man before and I guess I thought I was in love. He got me kind of addicted to him, you know? We did pot, did a few other drugs, and before long I was pretty strung out. He grew enough marijuana back there, out of sight, to bankroll the Brinks operation. One day he showed me a wad of twenties and said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ ”
Zarah Kenter went on to pour her heart out, not without a few tears, to Kent Perkins, and, though she didn’t know it, to me as well. A nightmare decade of abuse, blackmail, hopelessness, and despair. I heard Kent encouraging her to leave Felch now, leave New York immediately. He would help her get out. He had a friend who had a ranch in Texas. He’d once safely hidden Abbie Hoffman there when the feds were searching for him.
“Who’s Abbie Hoffman?” she asked.
“Abbie Hoffman was many things,” said Kent. “One of them was a federal fugitive, not unlike yourself.”
“Did he get away?” she wanted to know.
“Not really,” said Kent.
Not really, I thought. Only a little piece of him got away. Like Joan of Arc, or Davy Crockett, or Anne Frank, or Che Guevara, or Jesus Christ. Only a little piece of the puzzle ever gets away. No point in telling the poor kid now. Hell, I reckoned, we’re all prisoners of Vandam Street. Zarah Kenter certainly was. And here I lay in my narrow, monastic, Father Damien–like bed, confined to the loft like Nero Wolfe, confined by his gargantuan, sedentary buttocks to his brownstone. Like Sherlock Holmes on a cocaine binge, self-imprisoned in his lonely flat on Baker Street with only the fog for a friend. Yes, Zarah, your little friends are full of shit. No matter what our ZIP code happens to be in this world, one way or another, we’re all prisoners of Vandam Street.
I heard her tell Kent that she believed that the abusive, murderous thug she called Ben Felch would be out of town for another day or two. That would give her a little time, she said. She had a few things she had to do before she got back to Kent. Kent didn’t like it. He wanted her to go with him, get the suitcase off the bed, and leave New York now. He’d take her to the airport, buy her a ticket to Texas. As a private investigator who’d finally ferreted out the truth, he was willing to give her a spiritual pass and she didn’t even know it. Maybe he’d “sold the door” too well.
Chapter Thirty-six
Every story has to end and every friend has to go back to California. It was two days later, o
n a cold, sun-splattered morning. Much improved, I was standing in the kitchen of the loft next to Pete Myers, watching the maddeningly slow process by which he brewed his special British tea. I’d become fairly addicted to it by this time, so there was nothing to do but watch and wait. Kent Perkins was taking a much-needed nap on the couch. He was still waiting to hear from Zarah Kenter. He still believed she was going to call. As for myself, I wasn’t so sure. It was the basic difference between a dog and a cat, I thought, between a Christian and a Jew. Kent, like an intelligent, loyal dog, believed in people, believed in fairies, believed in happy Hollywood endings. He even believed that California was not a towaway zone. The cat’s eyes and my eyes were the same eyes; we’d already seen far too many things to believe in any of them.
Kent said he had done all he could do. He’d given Zarah his card before she’d left, telling her he was waiting in the full-crouch position to hear from her. It was a 1–800 number and they’d plug her right through to him twenty-four hours a day. He figured she’d call when she was ready. In the meantime, there were millions of other Zarahs out there in the cold, cruel world who might be in need of his help. Kent planned to take the red-eye back to L.A. late that night.
For my part, I’d been improving so steadily that most of the Irregulars had already gone their merry way. Piers was en route to Australia to continue a lifetime of research into the relative weight of the testicles of the magpie. The research, of course, is not without some personal risk to Piers’s person, since the Australian magpie is a very aggressive bird known to dive-bomb and attack passing schoolchildren, nature enthusiasts, and pluperfect assholes. Piers, a rather aggressive man with rather large testicles of his own, I felt sure would be a perfect match for the pesky, pernicious, pusillanimous bird.
McGovern was back at his place on Jane Street. Like all the rest of us, he was probably hearing what he wanted to hear. Despite all the tiresome shouting, enunciating, and repeating ad nauseam, however, I missed McGovern. And I missed Piers. I even missed Brennan, who was off on assignment, I believe, to an important shoot in Upper Baboon’s Asshole. Pete Myers had also announced his departure that afternoon. I would miss Pete and his cooking. Some time after he’d gone I noticed a great many tea bags that he’d thoughtfully left behind in the sands of time.
Unfortunately, I would not get the chance to miss Ratso. He wasn’t leaving, he said, until he was certain there’d be no more relapses. This was, of course, bad news for the cat, but she took it in stride. Ratso did come in handy later that night, driving Kent to the airport. For one brief, shining moment the cat and I were totally alone. Then, of course, faithful as a German train schedule, Ratso returned.
Like so many sacred stray dogs and cats, people come in and go out of your life, and the ones that are the farthest away sometimes seem to be the closest to your heart. Your home is your castle until one day, quite inexplicably, it becomes your prison. One day you see a girl who reminds you of another girl who reminds you why you’re still alone. One day your friend Ratso tells you that he’s been studying the medical literature and he has learned that a malarial relapse virtually guarantees that you will never get syphilis. And so, I tell him, something positive has come out of all of this after all.
Later that night, while Ratso and I were in the midst of a mildly unpleasant altercation regarding a renewed, rather deliberative dumping campaign on the part of the cat, I happened to glance out the window and notice several large cardboard boxes on the sidewalk in front of 198 Vandam Street. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Still later that night, with Ratso crashed on the couch and the cat sleeping soundly on my pillow, I got up to check the refrigerator, figuring that maybe there was a little leftover spotted dick or something.
I made myself a cold roast beef sandwich and was preparing to have a little conversation with the puppethead, when I decided to check out the window and see how the cardboard boxes were doing. They seemed to be getting along fairly well. Not too much flap. I was lighting a cigar when I saw the man known as Ben Felch come out of the building with a suitcase, hail a taxicab, and disappear into the night. It happened so suddenly it almost seemed like a dream. The man was certainly taking a lot of business trips. Three nights before, Zarah had told Kent he’d been gone on another one.
I looked up at Zarah’s window across the street. It was dark. Of course almost every window on Vandam was dark. It was three o’clock in the morning. There was nothing I could do really, and there was no reason to do it. Felch would come back. He’d beat up Zarah again. She’d probably tell people she’d fallen down the stairs. This kind of chronic domestic violence went on all over the world. It was as predictable and as unpreventable as the tides or the phases of the moon. Yet there was no moon that night. I don’t know about the tides, but I tossed and turned and I didn’t get to sleep until just before dawn.
I got up late the next morning. Ratso was having an espresso. I was having a cigar and a cup of English breakfast tea. The cat was having Carved Salmon in Gravy. I gazed down at Vandam Street and saw a homeless woman going through the two cardboard boxes. She had most of their former contents scattered out along the sidewalk. The boxes, apparently, had contained women’s clothing. There were shoes. There was lingerie. There were pants and blouses and tops. There was one nice blue dress.
Chapter Thirty-seven
It took the better part of a week for me to convince the cops to check apartment 412 across the street. They had a record of the 911 call and the police report of that incident and they were not eager to get burned again listening to the rantings and wild imaginings of a malaria patient. When they finally did check the apartment, an old lady named Mrs. Finkelstein was living there with her dog Sparky. She had just moved in recently, she told the cops. Other than that, she was not very friendly or forthcoming with them. The cops, in turn, were not very friendly or forthcoming with me.
Apartments rent fast in New York. Your apartment can be rented before you even know you’re dead. But not everything in New York moves as fast as an apartment. Though I was convinced that a crime had occurred, the cops weren’t buying any. They refused to seriously consider getting a search warrant to search the apartment or the building. It was all circumstantial, they said. All a malarial fantasy. People move out of the city every day, leaving old clothes behind for homeless people to pore over on the sidewalk. Forget about it, they said. There’s not enough there to do anything with.
But they were wrong. There was a lot there. Trouble was, it was all in my head and in my heart. And as many months went by, that was where it stayed. Maybe it was because Zarah had been about the same age as Kacey when I’d first seen her long ago across a crowded room. Maybe it was because malaria had helped me see reality, and reality, I believed, was that Ben Felch had murdered Zarah and gotten away with it. Maybe it was just personal and professional pride; I hadn’t come this far to be just another guest voice on The Simpsons. Whatever it was I believed, however, nobody wanted to hear it. Even Kent Perkins wasn’t sure. A lot of things could’ve happened, he told me one night on the phone. That’s true, I said, but only one of them did. The only reason the girl never called you is because she’s dead, I told him. We don’t know that, he said. One of us does, I told him.
Kent told me not to let it get me down. Cases go unresolved like this all the time, he said. He reminded me of the club I once belonged to many years ago when I was living in L.A. There were only two members in the club: myself and the great musician and composer Van Dyke Parks. Both of us had been doing a fairly adult portion of Peruvian marching powder for some time and we both, quite naturally, were rather depressed. The club was called The Undepressables. Van Dyke and I made a pact that hence forward nothing would ever depress us again. Friends could get sick, go broke, get fired, get divorced, die, kill themselves, kill everybody else, not invite us to their dinner parties—it didn’t matter. The club’s one rule was that although Van Dyke and I were permitted to depress others, we would not permit anyo
ne or anything to depress us. Finally, we got so undepressed that things started getting depressing so we had to disband the club.
I thought now that I probably hadn’t been this depressed since before Van Dyke and I formed The Undepressables. And, of course, I always remembered my father’s wise words: “Cheer up, sonny boy. It only gets worse.” Yet somehow, the cat, the puppethead, and I still managed to navigate the deep waters of life and the shallow ones, the rough ones and the lonely ones.
It must have been about a year after all this shit had happened that McGovern came into the loft one day with the puppethead squeezed in one large hand and a newspaper clipping in the other. I placed the puppethead back on top of the mantel and then walked over and looked at the clipping McGovern had placed on my desk. It was a small story from the back pages of the Daily News. I laughed bitterly when I read it.
The skeletal remains, or skel-e′-tal remains, as Piers Akerman would say, of an unidentified young woman had been found by workmen in a trunk in the basement of a building at 198 Vandam Street. There was no way to accurately determine who the victim was or how long she’d been there. Well, she’s not doing so bad, I thought blackly. The rest of us don’t know who we are either, or how long we’ve been here.
But it was bad enough. Bad enough to haunt your dreams. Bad enough to make you wander aimlessly through the streets of the Village. Bad enough to make you wish you could never want to forget. So I told myself a little story that my old friend, Dr. Jim Bone, had once told me. I told it to myself as if I was telling it to a small child. But really, I suppose, I was only reminding myself that the grief, guilt, and rage would surely destroy me if I didn’t let this go.
The Prisoner of Vandam Street Page 16
