The Prisoner of Vandam Street (8 page)

T
hings were not the same in the loft after that night. Oh, life went on, of course. Obla-dee, Obla-dah, all that shit. But a subtle human chemistry had changed between the Village Irregulars and myself, and I doubted if it would ever be the same again. Perhaps unfairly, I perceived their behavior to have become increasingly patronizing and condescending. As for myself, quite frankly, I finally understood how Jesus must have felt when he at last discovered that he’d been betrayed by Judas. In my case, of course, the injury was compounded. There were four Judases, and though at times their behavior more resembled that of the Three Stooges, their collective attitude served as a crushing blow to an already severely weakened spirit.

It was a morning several days after I’d witnessed the horrific attack that no one believed had actually occurred. The loft was populated at the moment only by McGovern, myself, and the cat. I was sitting at my desk sipping some hot Indian tea that Dr. Skinnipipi had apparently recommended McGovern administer to the patient. The tea tasted vaguely like urine but I wasn’t sure whose. It wasn’t helping me. Nothing was helping me. I suppose I’d become somewhat obsessed with what I’d seen, and lately I found myself sitting at the desk, forlornly fondling the little pair of opera glasses and wondering about my sanity.

Piers was a star journalist for the
Sydney Daily Telegraph
and Brennan had major photo assignments on a fairly regular basis, so thankfully the two of them were not in attendance at the loft all the time. Ratso came and went and I did not know, nor particularly wish to know, where he was going or what he was doing. It was enough to have a temporary cessation in the seemingly eternal bickering between him and Mick Brennan, not to mention the ridiculous sumo wrestling between Piers and McGovern. Still, there are times in your life when it’s a good thing not to be left totally alone and I suppose recuperating from a debilitating, delirium-producing illness is one of them.

McGovern was a working journalist, too, of course, but his work schedule, so he told me, was quite flexible and he rarely had to punch any time-clocks or, for that matter, editors. Now, I noticed, true to his word, he was finally getting around to cleaning up the loft. There was something rather poignant actually about the big man walking around the loft with a long-handled barbeque fork, spearing the ubiquitous dried cat turds and depositing them in the garbage bag he carried with him.

“That’s very Gandhilike work you’re doing,” I told him. “And don’t think it goes unappreciated.”

“Thanks, boss,” said McGovern, neatly stabbing a cat turd that had been hiding under the rocking chair. “But I don’t think I’ll be giving up my day job any time soon.”

“According to Piers Akerman,” I said, “Gandhi’s system was so pure that occasionally he drank his own urine.”

“You don’t say.”

“Piers says when those old Indian guys got on the piss, they really got on the piss. Reason I mention it is because this tea tastes like Gandhi’s piss and I was just wondering if Dr. Skinnipipi revealed to you any of its ingredients.”

“Come to think of it, he never told me. And no ingredients were listed on the packets.”

“Probably is Gandhi’s piss then.”

“Well, that’s certainly better than drinking Hemingway’s piss or Elvis’s piss.”

“True. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

Once again I was impressed by McGovern’s apparent selective hearing. It seemed he was able to carry on a conversation perfectly until the moment I realized he was, at which point, like a dog or a horse, he’d pick up some reduced cue no human being could sense, and he’d start up his deafness routine again. Or maybe it would just kick in unconsciously. No, I thought, the bastard is doing it deliberately.

“By the way,” I said, loudly and clearly, “it was nice of you to let Piers sleep on the couch.”

“What?” said McGovern. “Say again? You think it appears that I’m being a grouch?”

“No, McGovern. I ground a lit cigar into my forehead and I said ‘Ouch!’ ”

“Say again? Piers comes from a pouch?”

It had to be deliberate, I thought, as I put the opera glasses away in a desk drawer next to an old black and white photograph of a little girl holding her father’s hand at an airport. Had that little girl been alive today, I believed she would have believed that I saw what I saw. But little girls don’t always grow up. Some of them die when they’re twenty-seven and remain little girls in black and white photographs forever, holding on to their fathers’ hands. We’re all little girls in photographs, if you think about it. Most of us just don’t know it yet.

I was in a rather peculiar situation, I thought. It wasn’t even a matter of whether or not I’d been, or indeed, was, delirious. It was more a matter of indisputable fact. Dead people seemed more willing to understand and accept what I had to say. The living, god bless ’em, just wouldn’t believe me. Unless I was ready to kill everybody in the elevator, I figured, I was going to have a long, lonely ride up to the Penthouse of Truth. But I planned to fool them all. I planned to stick to my guns. Unfortunately, I didn’t believe in carrying a weapon. As I sometimes pointed out to the Village Irregulars, if someone was going to kill me, he’d better remember to bring his own gun. Well, I thought with an odd sense of cheerfulness, maybe some day someone would. Then I’d know how a little girl in an old photograph feels.

S
uddenly the red telephones on either side of my head were ringing and I realized I must have nodded out. McGovern’s large form, slumbering away on the davenport after completion of his cat turd clean-up operation, lent further confirmation to the fact that I’d been asleep. I couldn’t tell how long I’d been out of it but Gandhi’s piss was now stone cold. It’s not a healthy thing to fall asleep while sitting at your desk. It’s also not a healthy thing to listen to two red telephones ringing on either side of your head. I picked up the blower on the left.

“Start talkin’,” I said.

“Kiinnnk,” said a familiar voice, in a deep, familiar humorously condescending manner. It sounded almost like a frog croaking. It was Kent Perkins, my private investigator pal from L.A. Though Kent’s claim to fame was his marriage to Ruth Buzzi, he was a hell of a PI. He’d even started his own agency, Allied Management Resources, which, from everything I’d heard, had taken Los Angeles by storm.

“How’s my second-favorite PI doing?” I asked.

“Who’s your first?”

“Everybody else.”

“Kiiinnnnnnk.”

What always irritated me about the “Kiinnnk” business was that if Kent and I were arguing about something in public, all he had to do was say “Kiinnnk” a few times, quietly, as if he understood me better than I understood myself, and anyone observing would automatically assume that Kent was right and I was wrong. If I kept arguing with him, he’d just say “Kiinnk” a few more times and shake his head and they’d think I was on the very verge of insanity, which, on this particular occasion, sadly, I very possibly was.

As I explained to Kent, in some detail, the violent incident I’d witnessed, I began feeling better and better about the situation. Here at last was a real friend and, maybe more important, a true professional to tell my side of the story to. The Village Irregulars, after all, were amateurs, weekend warriors, and the gang who couldn’t shoot straight. What the hell did they know? Not only that, but the cops that had taken the 911 call were merely uniforms, quite low on the NYPD food chain. This was what it was like, I thought, to be an average citizen in trouble. I knew, of course, that I wasn’t an average citizen. But I was in trouble. Anybody puffing on an unlit cigar and sipping a cold cup of Gandhi’s piss is definitely in trouble.

“One question,” said Kent. “Why didn’t you call Rambam in on this one? It sounds more like it might be his cup of tea.”

I looked down at my own cup of tea but decided not to mention it to Kent. My credibility was already scraping bottom in New York, I didn’t need L.A. piling on.

“I can’t call Rambam,” I said. “He’s off somewhere in South Africa jumping through his asshole with some crack unit, no pun intended, of the South African Royal Mounted Fuckhead Para-troop Squad or whatever they’re called.”

“You don’t seem too happy about it.”

“Of course, I’m not. Rambam could get to the bottom of this. Nobody else around here believes me.”

“Kiinnnnk.”

“I’m telling you, goddamnit, I saw this guy with my own eyes right across the street beating the living shit out of this woman. Don’t tell me
you
don’t believe me. Why would I make something like this up?”

“Oh, I believe you, Kink. It just doesn’t seem to quite add up. What is it you’re not telling me?”

“I’m telling you the whole fucking thing. I saw the guy beat up the woman—”

“Kiinnk.”

“I called 911 and the cops came and they wouldn’t believe me—”

“Kiinnk.”

“My dear friends the Village Irregulars don’t believe me—”

“Kiinnnk.”

“When the guy kills the woman next time maybe then they’ll believe me.”

“Why do all these people say they don’t believe you? There has to be some reason.”

Here is where, I knew, it could get a little dicey. In my desperate state, Kent Perkins, old friend and professional PI that he was, had now come to represent the last twisted thread of spit by which my sanity was hanging. If Kent went against me, I might as well attach a parachute to my head and shove the key to the building in my mouth and put my own head up on the mantel next to the puppethead. But that wouldn’t be fair to the puppethead. He’d worked hard to get where he was, he’d had a lot of ups and downs, and now he was smiling at me, rather patronizingly, I thought, from high above the cheery fire in the fireplace. Well, I wasn’t a head-hunter, I thought. I wasn’t one to take another man’s job. Hell, I’d often thought of him as my last true friend in New York. Now he was staring at me with pity in his eyes.

“You’re not back on Peruvian marching powder, are you?” Kent was asking.

“Hell, no. I stopped snorting cocaine when a priest chased an altar boy out of my left nostril.”

“That kind of talk will endear you to Catholics.”

“Hey, I like Catholics. Some of my best friends are Catholics, or at least they were Catholics. And I like the pope. He always leans to the right.”

“I never have a problem believing someone’s tale of domestic violence. It’s the ugly underbelly of the American family that no one ever sees. I ask you one more time, what haven’t you told me?”

“I’ve been ill.”

“You’ve been ill for almost thirty years. Why bring it up now?”

“Because the fucking doctor has confined me to my fucking loft and the Village Irregulars are now spying upon me and betraying me like Judas did to Jesus!”

“I see.”

“I’ve got malaria. Some relapse from my days in Borneo with the Peace Corps. Can’t leave the loft. Can’t investigate the case myself. I have been delirious at times but, believe me, Kent, I know what I saw two nights ago. Or was it three nights ago?”

“I believe you, Kink. And I already have some ideas about this. We can go over it when I get to New York next week.”

“I didn’t know you were coming to New York. That’s great!”

“I left you a message. At least I left it with someone at your number.”

“All my little helpers,” I said, quoting my father. “But this is great news, Kent. We’ll blow the top off this thing!”

“If it’s any comfort, Kink, you probably did witness an act of domestic violence. The problem is endemic. The statistics are on your side. And, by the way, so am I.”

After I cradled the blower with Kent Perkins I felt better than I’d felt since the whole ordeal had begun. I looked the head of Sherlock Holmes right in the eye. Neither of us blinked.

“The game is afoot, brother,” I said. “And this time we’ll do it with or without Watson.”

“Who was that who called?” shouted McGovern from the couch.

“Just a friend,” I said. “Just an angel from L.A.”

“Say again? What was that? The
bagels
have
decayed?
”

T
he bagels, of course, had not decayed. The only thing that had decayed recently was my relationship with the Village Irregulars. Though they occasionally brought me a newspaper or a cup of hot Gandhi piss or inquired ever so sensitively about my “condition,” basically I now saw them as impediments to my life. They were not only getting in the way of my investigating an act of domestic violence right here on Vandam Street, they were getting in the way of truth. They were obstructing justice, for God’s sake. Or maybe they thought they were doing it for my sake. Either way, they were wrong.

Anyone who gets in the way of justice or truth is doing a disservice to God and man and must be dealt with accordingly. When I was fully recovered, I vowed, I would be making some rather drastic changes in my interpersonal relationships. Heads would roll, in fact. And I wasn’t referring to smiling little wooden heads attached to parachutes.

Because the Irregulars were working against me instead of with me, I was reduced to waiting for them to depart the loft at various hours of the night and then furtively retrieving the opera glasses from the desk drawer and taking up my station by the kitchen window. I spent many a peaceful hour by that window with the cat at my side and a hot cup of Gandhi’s urine or whatever the hell it was steaming on the nearby sill. Though I watched the comings and goings in other windows in the building across the street, I did not see any further activity in the loft I knew to be the scene of the crime. After a few more days had passed, indeed, I wasn’t quite sure if the loft I was observing had been precisely the one in which the evil deed had taken place.

I became obsessed with the imminent arrival of Kent Perkins, whom I was convinced could effect a satisfactory resolution to the matter. As an amateur detective, as a mender of destinies, it disturbed me greatly that the situation remained unresolved. I did not share this information with the Village Irregulars, of course. I did, however, let a few tidbits drop now and then to the cat.

“I don’t see a fucking thing going on in that building. Do you?”

The cat, of course, said nothing. The cat detested violence of any kind, unless the violence was being committed by herself upon some hapless creature far smaller than she was. To her, no doubt, that didn’t really count as violence. It was just a game. It was merely the way of her people. It was simply good, clean, feline fun.

“You’d think we’d see something in that apartment. The very fact that we don’t is singularly odd, don’t you think?”

Apparently, the cat hadn’t thought about it much. Nobody in the world with the exception of myself seemed to give a good goddamn that a woman was practically beaten to within an inch of her life in an apartment right under all of our noses.

“Am I here all alone?”

The cat did not answer. She rarely chose to answer questions of a rhetorical nature.

“Just wait until Perkins gets here! Then you’re going to see some action. Kent will turn the whole damn Village upside-down to get that bastard! He’ll grab hold of this case like a bulldog gnawing a bone. Sorry, that was an unfortunate analogy.”

The cat, however, seemed to take the bulldog reference in stride. In fact, at the moment she seemed to be striding about the loft, staring intently up at the ceiling. It was almost as if she had seen something that no one else could see. Given my current circumstances, I could empathize.

“I’ve known Kent Perkins since long before you were even born. I met him in L.A. about thirty years ago and we discovered we were both from Texas and I’d still trust him with my life which sometimes it seems may not be worth as much as it used to be, but then, of course, you have to allow for inflation. The point is that Rambam employs a lot of extralegal tricks that he can get away with because he works as a lone wolf. A wolf is not a dog. You can’t teach a wolf to sit. Kent does not employ clever stratagems; he employs a large staff of people and delegates authority like a military field general. Believe me, he’s the man for the job. Kent Perkins will not only resurrect my damaged credibility, he’ll pursue this investigation as my proxy agent, and he’ll follow this matter to its logical conclusion. I’ll bet you a million cans of sliced chicken in gravy.”

The cat was not a betting person. Nor did she know or give a shit about knowing Kent Perkins. These days, indeed, she seemed only knowledgeable of two things: how to lick her anus and how to irritate the Kinkster, both of which she was presently engaged in.

“Stop licking your anus!” I yelled.

“Sorry, mate,” said a voice. “Didn’t realize you were up.”

“Hi, Piers,” I responded weakly.

“Some may think I’m an asshole,” said Piers, “but I reckon I haven’t been licking my anus.”

“I was talking to the cat.”

“The cat doesn’t appear to have been licking her anus recently either. Look for yourself. She’s sound asleep in the rocking chair.”

“So she is,” I said.

Had I been talking to the cat all this time or had I merely been talking to myself? I didn’t really know the answer. Was I simply a man talking to a cat or was I drifting dangerously back and forth between reality and some semi-state of delirium?

“I’m worried about you, Kinkster,” said Piers. “Having been born and raised in New Guinea, I have seen the effect a prolonged case of malaria can have upon a man. Sometimes the victim never quite comes back, if you know what I mean. I’ve seen, in fact, several examples of this phenomenon occur in the tropics, resulting in the victim of the disease remaining emotionally unbalanced for the remainder of his often short and typically very unpleasant life. If they conquer the malaria, sometimes they remain in the category of the walking wounded, just a pathetic set of barely ambulatory skeletal remains.”

I loved the way Piers pronounced the word “skeletal.” He placed the emphasis on the second syllable and made the word rhyme with “beetle.”

“We’re not in the tropics,” I reminded him. “This is New York.”

“I know that. And you know that, mate. But the question is does the
Plasmodium falciparum
know it?”

“So what do you want me to do, Piers? Check into a fucking mental hospital?”

“Take a look around at this place and some of its inhabitants and I’d reckon you’re already there, mate.”

“You’ve got a point. McGovern did clean up the cat turds this afternoon though.”

“Well, he did a shithouse job, mate. Take those opera glasses and check out this floor. If your cat were the size of a Bengal tiger she couldn’t have deposited this many droppings or this quantity of manure in one evening. I think McGovern’s part of the problem, mate.”

“You’re right. On the other hand, good help is hard to get.”

“The kind of help you might need, mate, I’m not sure McGovern, Brennan, or Ratso can give you. I’m not sure I can provide it either.”

“What do you mean?” I said uneasily.

Piers walked over to the refrigerator, opened it, took out two bottles of Victoria Bitter, deftly removed the caps, and handed one bottle to me. He drank about half of his VB in one swig. I sipped mine a bit more conservatively, ever mindful of my condition. Piers put his hand on my shoulder and looked me right in the eyes.

“I’ve known you a long time, Kinkster,” he said. “Suzanne and I thought highly enough of you to make you the godfather of our daughter Pia.”

I nodded numbly. I had no idea where Piers was going with this rather out-of-character soliloquy, but it sounded serious. I took a bigger gulp of my VB.

“What I’m telling you, Kink, is that I’ve seen you at your best and I’ve seen you at your worst, but I’ve never seen you like this. I think you may need professional help.”

“Interesting that you say that,” I said. “Great minds think alike, I guess. I was going to keep this a secret, but, as you may know, the only secrets I’ve kept are the ones I’ve forgotten.”

“Very true, mate.”

“Anyway, you know Kent Perkins from L.A.?”

“Of course. Tall, blond Norouija board.”

“Yes, well, he’s now got his own detective agency and he’s coming to New York next week to help me find out the truth about what happened across the street the other night. I can’t leave the loft, and I can’t rely on a bunch of doubting Thomases like the Village Irregulars to be of much assistance either. Kent’s ready to help me tackle the job and he’s a true professional.”

“That wasn’t what I was referring to when I said you might need professional help, mate.”

“You don’t think Kent’s a professional private investigator?”

“I was talking about another kind of professional help, mate.”

“Like?”

“Like a shrink or a psychiatric nurse.”

Suddenly the loft became quiet as a tomb. I was about ready to shit standing. Piers Akerman, one of my oldest, most trusted friends, with a level of maturity far exceeding that of most of the American members of the Village Irregulars, now was seriously doubting my sanity. A shrink or a psychiatric nurse. Fuck him and the koala he rode in on!

Possibly sensing my rising anger, Piers did not say a word. Instead, he turned and went to the refrigerator, from which, not surprisingly, he extracted another VB and proceeded to drink the entire bottle while I stood there in a state of shock, still reeling from his suggestion. Piers, who had many Aussie friends who shit in women’s purses, took out their penises at every inappropriate moment, and carried on in the most outlandish behavior on the freaking face of the earth, thought I was crazy.

“I’m going to take a shower,” said Piers. Still standing by the window in stunned disbelief, I watched him aim his large, antipodean torso toward the rain-room, as if nothing at all had happened.

I didn’t know whether to kill myself or get a haircut. If Ratso or McGovern or Brennan had made the same indictment of my mental condition, it very likely might have glossed right over my shoulders, but coming from Piers, it hit me like a bullet to the heart. Piers was one of the few people I knew who, though younger than me, I’d always looked to for wisdom and advice. Piers, who was almost never serious about anything, now was being very serious, indeed. His words had angered me, confused me, saddened me, surprised me, and yes, even frightened me. In an odd way, I thought, it was a tribute to a man that his words could have such a profound effect upon a friend. That was the trouble. Piers was a friend. And I was, very possibly, a crazy man, standing at a lonely window.

I don’t know how long I stood there like that. Alone, all alone. The cat was still sleeping peacefully on the rocker. The sounds of Piers’s shower like rain falling on the roof of a boxcar in a dream, on the track to Nowhere, Alabama. Then, like Hank Williams himself, I saw the light.

The building across the street was dark and I could see the light clearly, like a lantern in an old church tower, like a lighthouse at sea, a cross on a hill. I knew in my gut that the light was illuminating the same apartment I’d seen before. I grabbed the opera glasses and focused on the window of the place. I saw the table. I saw the flowers in the vase. Then I saw the guy. The same guy. But I didn’t see the woman.

The guy was sitting at the table, doing something I couldn’t quite see. His hands were on the table; they were busy, but it didn’t look like he was eating. More like he was putting together a puzzle or something. Then he stood up and moved a little closer to the window. He turned slightly and I now could see him fairly clearly in profile. He was holding something in his hands. Suddenly, I knew what it was.

“Jesus Christ!” I shouted to a sleeping cat and a showering Piers Akerman. “He’s got a gun!”

I ran for the rain-room like a man possessed. The door was locked and I banged on it with all my might, yelling repeatedly for Piers. At long last, the door opened and out through the steam came Piers Akerman like a stampeding bull elephant with a towel around its waist.

“What the hell is it, mate?” he said. “Is the flat on fire?”

“He’s got a gun!” I shouted. “He’s standing at the window, the light is on, and he’s holding a gun!”

I shoved the opera glasses into Piers’s large hand and we both rounded the corner frantically, narrowly navigating the corridor between the kitchen counter and the refrigerator. Piers almost slipped once and I was very nearly hockey-checked by the espresso machine, but at last, we both reached the window. Piers put the glasses to his eyes, but I could already see that it was too late. The entire front facade of the building was in almost total darkness. The warehouse across the street looked as black as the sea at night under a moonless, starless sky. Where moments earlier I’d seen the lighted apartment, the man with the gun, now there was nothing to be seen. Nothing at all. Piers slowly removed the opera glasses from his eyes.

“Hmmmmm,” he said.