The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

by George Plimpton

  Noodles knew something of Big Cakes' working habits -that he carried a hunting knife and a large .357 Magnum on the job, both of which he could secrete on his vast bulk without their being noticeable. Noodles himself, be cause of his slender physique, on rare occasions carried a small-calibre pistol, barely the size of a ladies' handbag derringer. Anything larger would have puffed out his suit as if he were carrying a squash.

  He had the little pistol with him in the Mullins apartment-a very sensible precaution with Big Cakes on the loose, since he was well known in their crowd for surges of rage, often unprovoked. At a lunch counter, sitting over a plate of waffles, Big Cakes would wheel his stool around to stare at someone up the line reading a tabloid over a cup of coffee. Others in the vicinity who knew of these eruptions would sidle off their stools. The man drinking his coffee would hardly be aware of what was moving up the counter until he felt a touch on his shoulder and turned to look into Big Cakes' moon-cratered visage and hear, "I don't like your hat, mister."

  Often the man at the counter would not be wearing a hat. It didn't make any difference-anything to get a confrontation going.

  Noodles had never shot his little pistol at anybody. The term "to waste someone" made his lip curl. It was one of the reasons he despised Caporetto. His job for the Mafia, which he prided himself on for its relative subtlety, was to get into the houses of those marked for extinction and leave the traditional message-a fish wrapped in a newspaper-to indicate to whoever woke up that he had a very short time to live. In The Godfather he would have been the man who tucked the horse's head into the marked man's bed. Indeed, Noodles was often asked in Abe's Fish and Stream if he could have pulled off that caper, sneaking into that fancy Hollywood house with a horse's head, quite a bulky thing to lug around, and everything and put it between the satin sheets, with a man asleep in his bed, without help. He had asserted scornfully that he worked alone, and that while he wasn't interested in the business of getting the head, whatever was delivered to him to deliver, he would deliver.

  Noodles had let himself in on the second floor of the Mullins duplex. He looked in on Debbie Sue and Siddthe excitement stirring to see their forms under the sheets. He saw the cat on the window seat, the triangle of his ears against the vague light from the East River Drive. Animals in a house were among the terrors of his professional life, but the cat, a very large one he could see in the shadows, seemed to accept his presence.

  A minute or two later he, too, heard the clatter of the candlestick falling over in the dining room below, the stirring of Debbie Sue and Sidd in their bedroom, their soft voices in discussion, and then from the shadows he had watched them creep along the corridor for the stairwell.

  The strange sounds floating back startled him somewhat, especially the carpet sweeper being drawn back and forth, as if down on the first floor Big Cakes had taken it into his head to clean the place.

  He could see Debbie Sue and Sidd crouched at the top of the stairs, whispering to each other with increasing nervousness. Down the corridor he saw the cat's languid approach, the abrupt movement of one of them, and then the yowl erupting from the stairwell and the crash of furniture below. He watched the pair skitter back along the corridor, and he heard the slam of the bedroom door and even Sidd's forlorn complaint from within that there was no lock to keep out whoever was below and coming up for them.

  At the head of the stairwell the bulkish form of Big Cakes emerged as if from a trap door. Swiftly he started down the hallway. For Noodles McGuire there was no question what had to be done. He aimed his undersized pistol and squeezed off a single shot that hit Cakes in the upper thigh, tripping him up and dropping him to the floor. There, bellowing with pain and rage, Big Cakes rolled onto his side, and reaching for his shoulder holster, he fired two shots from his .357 Magnum at an angle up into the ceiling-hardly aiming at Noodles, barely visible in the gloom, but simply reacting, firing off the shots as he might deliver himself of a couple of angry shouts.

  Al "Big Cakes" Caporetto's evening must have seemed so uncomplicated when it started-just a question of hanging around until one o'clock or so in the morning before getting into Finch's apartment. He had cased it-a walk-up flat with easy access up the fire escape in the back. Once in, he thought how simple to intimidate the guy ... a matter of showing the weirdo the .357 Magnum or the glint of a knife.

  It had started easily-getting onto the fire escape and climbing into the apartment through a rear window. Wiggling in had been a problem-a candlestick going over as he dropped to the floor. But even if the Buddhist came downstairs to see what was going on, so much the better. Wait for him. A wrench of the arm. Maybe draw a knife across it.

  But then out in the darkness of the living room, scouting the place, looking for the stairs leading up to the bedrooms, he must have felt his senses begin to cave in. First, a mysterious question drifted down from above: "Owl?"

  Then the loud eruption of a taxi horn close at hand, the old-fashioned kind that Harpo Marx used to honk. It made him start. Then the soft, inexplicable click of a refrigerator door opening and closing somewhere in the room. A carpet sweeper! The sound of a bird. A distant gunshot. He took out a small pocket flashlight and sailed its beam around the room-paintings, a large clock, a bookcase, a piano with a vase of flowers. It picked up the circular stairs. He headed slowly for it.

  On the bottom step he paused, waiting for another sound so perhaps he could identify what was going on. A radio somewhere? Nothing. Perhaps the vaguest sound of whispering at the top of the stairwell-mice claws skittering on the floor above? He touched his suit to feel the comforting bulge of the .357 Magnum. He aimed the flashlight beam up the curve of the stairs.

  With his first step he had only the barest glimpse of the shape flying down the stairwell toward him, a monsterfilm manifestation preceded by four outstretched sets of claws. Accompanied by a terrifying shriek, it attached itself with a concussive force to his lapels. The blow sent him reeling back. A standing lamp went over. A glimpse of a row of teeth just inches from his face. He toppled back over a coffee table, clearing its surface of cigarette cases, ashtrays, and picture frames. Whatever had attached itself to him dropped off and scurried away, its claws scrabbling on the wood floors. Upstairs, a door slammed.

  All of this might have intimidated anyone else ... who might have thought he was in some kind of booby-trapped spook house. But Caporetto, puzzled though enraged, hurried toward the circular staircase, climbed it, and started down the corridor.(He had heard a door slam.) The monk had to be cowering in one of the bedrooms.

  At the end of the corridor a shape moved against the window-the Buddhist's, Caporetto first thought, but then he realized it was too slight, too thin, the profile too ratlike, and just as he realized he was looking at Noodles McGuire, of all people, the instantaneous spit of flame and the soft thunk of the silencer accompanied the murderous bite of a bullet into his leg. He staggered. His leg gave way. He reached for his Magnum and fired off a pair of random shots. He half rose, and then fell again. His shoulder crashed up against the street-front window and buckled the frame.

  Down in the street, the security man hired by the Mets to watch the entrance to the Mullins apartment was stretched out in the front seat of his car about to bite down on a sandwich.

  It was two in the morning. He had been given a checklist and description of the people in the building, along with a picture of Al "Big Cakes" Caporetto, complete with Cardinals cap. It had been an uneventful night. No one had gone in the entryway since eleven, when the schoolteacher who lived on the fourth floor of the walk-up had let herself in with a key. Robert Temple, who was staying in the Mullins apartment, had gone out around ten and had yet to return. Finch and the girl had been in all evening.

  When he heard the commotion from the Mullinses' second-floor apartment-the yelling, the muffled sound of gunfire, and then the crash of glass as one of the streetfront windows burst out and sent a few panes splintering to the pavement below-the security man's fir
st impression was that a domestic squabble had broken out. But then the severity of it hit home-gunshots, windows breaking, and so forth. He dropped his sandwich. He jumped out of the car and ran across the pavement into the entryway. Faced with a locked front door, he frantically pushed the buttons on the intercom-system panel, hoping someone in one of the apartments above would buzz him in. No such accommodation. His only recourse was to step back and, with a short running start, spring the door open with a shoulder block.

  His success at this-the door, which was relatively flimsy, gave way with a crack-caught the attention of two patrolmen in a squad car that had just parked at the foot of the street. The two had taken the tops off their cardboard containers of coffee. They looked over in time to see what looked like the most blatant kind of break-in -a man launching himself full-blast at an entryway front door and snapping it open. They could see his form advancing up the stairs. They put their coffee containers down quite carefully on the lip of the dashboard and reached for their revolvers.

  I had gone out that night. Gay Talese had called at noon and suggested dinner at Elaine's, a literary hangout up in the East Eighties that I had heard a lot about. It did not sound like the kind of place-in my reclusive frame of mind-that I would enjoy very much.

  The restaurant-a narrow defile with a bar on one side and round tables set along the wall on the other-opened up in the back into a larger room decorated with memorabilia and works by people who apparently went there. Framed book jackets, Paris Review posters, Richard Avedon's famous photograph of his dying father, paintings and so forth, including a curious mural of fuzzy nymphs standing in a purple pool. Talese, who is a small, dapper man, was engulfed by the proprietress, Elaine, who came out from behind the cash register to embrace him. I stood by and waited. I thought what a rare gesture between owner and customer, probably not indulged in since Toots Shor used to pummel and embrace the more famous of the athletes who came into his place.

  We dined in the defile, practically under the overhang of the people standing five deep at the bar. They stood with their drinks, talking among themselves, and watched us order. At our table nobody looked at the people standing at the bar-apparently it was bad form to be seen standing there-although occasionally we looked up to see who was coming in through the door from the street.

  We sat at a round table that almost immediately filled up with Gay's friends. It was hard to tell whether he had invited them or they just sat down there as a matter of course. No matter. I had a much better time than I thought possible. A certain amount of the talk was about Sidd Finch. A lot of them were going to the game the next night. I never let on that he was staying with me. I didn't say much. I said the Mets surely were worried about his rotator cuff. Everyone nodded.

  I left Elaine's at two in the morning. The place was still lively. At the table a novelist from the Midwest, Jim Harrison, was talking about shooting at tennis balls with a bow and arrow. I thought I'd walk home, but after a few blocks I hailed a taxi.

  The end of the Mullins' block was crowded with squad cars-their circling red lights illuminating the building fronts in quick strobe flashes. An ambulance maneuvered down the street. In it, I was to discover later, was Al "Big Cakes" Caporetto, handcuffed and his leg bandaged. Noodles McGuire had been taken away in a squad car, along with the security man from the Mets, who spent a couple of hours at the precinct station before he was able to establish his identity. On the stairwell, hearing the footsteps pounding up behind him, he had turned and shouted "Freeze!" at the two squad-car policemen, frightening them into dropping their guns.

  Nobody who lived on the block seemed to know what had happened. A few residents had come out of their buildings, standing in the warm summer night in their sleeping apparel, bathrobes and such, and gossiping-the drift among them apparently that a big drug bust had taken place down at the end of the street. "Who would have thought the Mullinses!" I heard someone say.

  It took me a while to talk myself back into the apartment. Debbie Sue flung her arms around me. "It's Owl," she said to the policeman at the door. "He's mine." She pulled me into the apartment and shut the door. She showed me the bullet holes and where Big Cakes ("He was here, Owl, he actually was-a huge man") had bumped up against the windows after being shot in the leg at the end of the second-floor hall. She was very proud of her performance. "Oh, Owl, I haven't let on about Sidd. They don't know. Sidd threw Mister Puss at the fat man in the dark."

  "Where is Sidd?"

  I half expected her to say that she had hidden him somewhere in the apartment-settling him in behind a row of clothes in a closet. . . "Owl, I've put him in the cleverest place"-but she did not say that at all.

  "Owl, I don't know. He's gone. He's totally disappeared."

  Sidd had not had an easy time of it. After the gunshots the apartment began to fill with unknown people, many of them shouting "Freeze!" He went out to the apartment stairwell. People were coming up. He retreated to the roof. He tried to let Debbie Sue know where he was-leaning over the parapet and lofting down the sound of the Tibetan long trumpet, the tungchen. By then his throat was completely dry from the taxi-cab horn, the refrigerator door, and the other effects he had tried in the Mullins apartment.

  Up there he felt a certain exhilaration wearing so little. He had on just his underwear. It was a warm night. His bare feet were sensitive to the surfaces he crossed-the tar paper of the roof, the iron of the fire-escape steps that took him down to the garden in the back, the earth there, cool and moist, and then the texture of the cement floor of the underground garage he let himself into next door through the back entrance. He hid in there, listening to the cars, dozens of them in their stalls, just the faintest occasional click of an engine cooling off. Sometimes there were footsteps, the echoing sound of a car door slamming, the engine turning over.

  The garage entrance was on York Avenue. After waiting among the cars for almost an hour, Sidd ventured out to see what was going on. He trotted out in his underdrawers, his arms pumping, so that anyone glancing at him would take him for a predawn jogger. He looked down Seventy-second. The street was still throbbing with activity-the twinkling rose glow of the police beacons like a bonfire opposite the Mullins apartment house.

  He retreated to the garage and wandered down the lines of cars. He found an unlocked tailgate and climbed into the back of a station wagon. A blanket in there smelled vaguely of dog. He curled himself up in it-his notion that when he awoke the ruckus would have calmed down and the police cars gone. He would leave the garage and trot down the street to the end, turn in the entry, ring the buzzer downstairs, and hope that someone in the Mullins apartment, preferably Debbie Sue, would be upstairs to let him in.

  In the back of the station wagon, he pulled the horse blanket up to his chin and, exhausted, fell asleep instantly.

  It was a fitful sleep-a night of distant bells, voices calling from station platforms, a small nightmare about being shanghaied by the crew of a Chinese junk, a storm at sea....

  He was awakened by sunlight streaming through the windows of the station wagon. Startled, he sat up to find that the car was in an outdoor parking lot off a highway. A sign on a nearby shop read "Tuxedo Park, New York." It took him a moment or so to realize he had been driven there earlier that morning by a car owner unaware that he was carrying along someone curled up in the horse blanket in the rear of the wagon.

  Sidd climbed over into the back seat and waited for an hour for the owner to return. His hope was to try to explain things and get some help getting back to New York. The car clock on the dashboard showed a little after noon. The driver never returned. Sidd found a pad and pencil in the glove compartment of the station wagon and wrote the following message:

  "I have taken your horse blanket. I have your licenseplate number and should be able to return into your hands the aforementioned blanket when it is no longer an item of necessity to me. My apologies for this unforgivable act of purloining (just temporarily, I must assure you) your horse blanket."<
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  He stepped out of the car and arranged the blanket, a faded green military color, so that it hung from his shoulders not unlike the robes he had worn as an aspirant in Tibet. The smell of dog was not quite right, but there was something almost familiar and nostalgic about the feeling of the coarse wool against the bare skin of his body. Hunching its folds into a proper conformity around his frame, he started off for the highway.

  It took him over an hour to hitch a ride. He knew that he did not present a figure that inspired trust-tall, barefooted, and in a blanket that gave him the appearance of someone who has just escaped a hotel fire. The cars sailed by, their drivers staring fixedly ahead. It was a question of patience. He rubbed one bare foot against another. He said a few ngags. He rearranged his robes. Finally a man in a pickup truck stopped. A dog was in the back. He stood up with his front paws on the side panel, his body shaking from the wagging of his tail. The driver leaned across the front seat and opened the door.

  "Hop in, Father," he said.

  After they had started off the driver said, "I have given rides to lots of people in this truck. It's almost a hobby, so it's a pleasure to have a member of the cloth," he said, looking over. "There's no one at home but me and the dog. That's Ralph in the back. The wife left fifteen years ago because she said I was too much of a gabber, always talking, even, she said, in my sleep. Well, I like talking and I like meeting people. I even go out looking for hitchhikers. I look for them the way they look for rides. I slam on the brakes. These guys climb in. I've had some interesting ones. Eskimos. An artist who painted nothing but peaches. An evangelist. A retired six-day bicyclist. A guy who once played the calliope in the Clyde-Beatty Cole Bros. circus. I had a foot fetishist once-a guy who leaned over and began admiring my shoe, which was pressed down, you know, on the accelerator. I was delivering a diesel generator to Falmouth, Mass., down on the Cape. I let this guy off just this side of the Canal. Didn't like him. I told him I was turning off just down the line. I never did anything like that before, or since, to one of my passengers. When he got down on the pavement he asked me one last favor. He kept looking down at my shoes. He wanted me to kick him."