I CALLED 911 WHILE I floored it down to West Tenth Street, which is not an easy thing to do in midtown Manhattan while you’re running red lights and trying to dodge cabs and messengers on bicycles and potholes the approximate breadth and depth of Ubehebe Crater. Lulu hugged her seat and howled when I took the corner of Thirty-fourth and Fifth Avenue on two wheels, nearly flipping the old Land Rover over onto its back like a turtle. But the stubby old beast righted itself and went bouncing and raiding on down the avenue.
I also left word for Very, who could not be reached.
Cassandra Dee lived a half-block west of Fifth in one of the nicest rows of houses to be found anywhere in the city, if not the whole world. I beat the ambulance there. Not a surprise. Double-parked and jumped out, dashed up the front stoop. There was no answer when I rang the bell. Not a surprise either.
The front door was of solid oak with an iron pry guard around the lock and no sign that anyone had messed with it. There were decorative iron bars over the basement and ground-floor windows. Not so the elegant second-floor parlor windows, which were level with the front door. These were wired to a silent alarm by an armed security service. Fine, let them come—them and their arms both. A pair of big terra-cotta pots flanked the front door, each with some form of small, dead-looking tree in it. I picked up one of the pots and walked it over to the edge of the stoop, groaning, and hurled it through the window closest to me. Then I climbed out on the ledge, kicked in the rest of the window with my ankle boot and jumped inside, broken glass crunching underfoot.
Cassandra was sprawled out next to the phone on her plush white living room rug. She had that same startled expression on her face that she always wore. Only, she generally favored red lipstick, not orange, and she certainly never used to wear it on her forehead in the form of five question marks. Plus those protuberant eyes used to blink sometimes. And she was never, ever silent. How had that plea of hers gone? Call me, fax me, E-mail me, I’m yours.
Well, she wanted him and she got him.
There was no sign of a struggle in the room. No sign of a weapon. There would be no fingerprints. I knew this. I knew all of this by now.
The decor was cool and pale, with lots of low-slung suede things to lounge on, all of it as homey and inviting as a Paramus furniture showroom. Her living room walls were a full-fledged shrine, every square inch of them covered with framed photographs of her—on the cover of People, TV Guide, Esquire, Vanity Fair. On the set of 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace. At Planet Hollywood with Arnold. Backstage with the rock star formerly known as Prince. With Stallone, with Cruise, with Cindy Crawford, with Jim Carrey. All of these photos were autographed. Many of the celebs had added personal messages as well. Sinatra had written, “You’re my kind of chick.” Andre Agassi: “You can serve me anytime.”
Me, I had written: “You keep me on my toes, girlfriend.” It’s true, there was even a picture of her standing with me at some big Hollywood movers-and-shakers bash a while back. I looked bored. Fabulous but bored. I had signed the picture as well as inscribed it. Except I hadn’t done either of those things. It wasn’t my handwriting. It wasn’t even close. I stood there a moment, staring at this little forgery of hers. I looked around at the other signatures, wondering if they were all fakes, too. I wondered why she had done this. Was it to fool people? Which people? Her parents from Bensonhurst? Herself? I wondered how many people she had invited in to see this shrine, and who those people were. I thought about how sad this was. How very, very sad.
I shook myself and went to the front door to let Lulu in. First, she circled the entire downstairs of the house, briskly, nose to the floor. Then, slowly and warily, she approached Cassandra’s body. She stopped cold in her tracks about a foot away from her. And then Lulu did something that was most unusual for her.
She raised up her head and started howling. Not just any howl either. This was a lonely, haunting howl. The kind of howl you hear in the mountains in the night when you’re stuffed inside your sleeping bag out underneath the stars. It was a heartbreaking howl. And it was an unfamiliar howl. I’d certainly never heard such a sound come out of her and I’ve known Lulu since she was eight weeks old. I hadn’t realized before just how much she cared about Cassandra. I guess there weren’t very many people around who were afraid of Lulu. Just Cassandra.
I knelt beside my partner and stroked her, wondering if she would howl like this for me when I was dead, and wishing, wishing I were.
IS IT THE SAME typewriter, Lieutenant?”
“It’s the same typewriter, dude.”
We were seated out on Cassandra’s front stoop waiting for the Human Hemorrhoid to show. The technicians were inside working the scene, not happy with me for tramping broken glass around in there and touching the doorknob and letting Lulu in. Like I cared. Very didn’t seem at all angry, just subdued and down. Lulu had squeezed herself in between my feet, quiet now, but still looking sadder than I’d ever seen her.
“Same typist?”
“They can’t tell about that.” Very’s eyes were on the row of houses across from us. Lucky people lived in those houses. Lucky, alive people. “Different qualities of paper. Plus the answer man’s using a fresh ribbon. Ribbon on your letter was all worn out. He had to strike the keys a whole lot harder.” He got a piece of gum out of his coat pocket, unwrapped it and stuck it in his mouth. “Tell it to me again, dude. What Cassandra said.”
“She said, ‘It’s raining.’”
He looked up at the sky. The sky was gray, streaked here and there with blue. There was no rain. None. “I don’t track it.”
“I don’t either.”
“Must be she was delirious. People say the darnedest things when they’re starting to go.”
“Yes, I believe Art Linkletter did a book on that subject once.”
He glanced at me curiously. “You cool, dude?”
“I think I can safely report that I am not cool, Lieutenant.”
“He must not have realized she was still alive,” Very said, thinking out loud. “When he split, I mean. Maybe she faked she was dead. Bought herself enough time to call you before she went for good.”
“Maybe.”
“Yo, she called you on your car phone. What’s up with that?”
“I was in my car, that’s what.”
“But how’d she know that?”
“She always seemed to know where I was. She was a good reporter. A damned good reporter.”
He sat there, jaw working his gum. “You dug her, am I right?”
“I was fond of her. She was smart. And honest, in her own way. So few people are either of those things anymore.”
“I wanted to get to know her better,” he confessed. “I was thinking maybe we’d freak it, her and me.”
We fell silent. Behind us, the front door was open. I could hear the technicians in there yapping away at each other.
“Dude?”
“Yes, Lieutenant?”
“This isn’t going to go down so good with the inspector. That I was running a test on your letter while Cassandra was getting herself done. That you wouldn’t tell me who wrote it. That I let you have it your way. This isn’t going to go down so good.”
“I know that.”
“You’ll have to give it all up now.”
“I know that, too. You have my full cooperation.”
A dark blue sedan pulled up now with a screech. Out hopped Inspector Dante Feldman, shooting his cuffs and smoothing his white pompadour. Also sneaking worried looks over his shoulder. The press corps—they were a scant half-block behind him, van after van filled with reporters and cameramen and trouble racing down the block toward us. Feldman hurried up the steps and went inside without so much as looking at either of us. Very told me to stay put and went inside after him. I stayed put. I watched the rampage. It was free. It was some rampage.
Within seconds they had taken over the street. Shut it right down. The down-jacketed video guerrillas with their manic urgency and their box-out moves. The frozen-faced, frozen-haired TV reporters with their earnest topcoats and their empty notepads. The news radio boys with their battered black tape recorders and their problem dandruff. The print reporters with their small-time talents and their big-time egos. The photographers with their cameras and lenses hanging from them like so many water canteens. All of them crowding the sidewalk, surging toward Cassandra’s stoop, jostling each other for position, shouting questions at me, at anyone. Three burly cops held them back. It was not easy. There were so many of them. And they were in such a dither. Because nothing, but nothing, gets the press more riled than losing one of their own in the line of so-called duty. Partly this arises out of a genuine sense of grief and loss. Mostly this arises out of a sense that here is a chance to make one of their own into a martyr—and thereby draw more attention to themselves, which is what the press is really and truly all about, in case nobody ever told you. I have been on both sides. I know this.
I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Very, motioning for me to follow him inside. I followed him inside.
Feldman was waiting for me in the entry hall, away from the others, looking at me with what I can only describe as total and complete hate. “I w-want to know r-right now, Hoag!” he sputtered at me angrily. “I want to know just exactly h-how long you’ve known his identity!”
Now Lulu started to howl again.
I shushed her. “I haven’t known anything, Inspector. I’ve suspected.”
“Don’t you split hairs with me, you grandstanding bastard!” His face was very close to mine, his breath reeking of pastrami and garlic pickles.
“I wasn’t sure, Inspector. I had to be sure.”
“Sure?” Feldman gaped at me in dumfounded amazement. “Oh, baby, I’ll give you sure. You sure are the shit heel of the century! You sure are going down for this! Are you insane or do you just enjoy seeing hundreds and hundreds of good cops chasing around this city like fucking fools?”
“The latter, Inspector. You wouldn’t believe how much fun I’ve been having. I just laugh and laugh. My sides ache from laughing so much.”
Feldman glared at me with his hooded black eyes. “Get him the fuck away from me, Lieutenant. Throw him in a fucking dungeon somewhere.”
“He’s promised he’ll cooperate fully, Inspector,” Very spoke up in my defense. What a pal. “I have his word.”
“I don’t care what he fucking promised!” Feldman blustered. “You going to take him in or you want to make a midlife career change?”
Very panicked. “No, sir. I mean, sure thing—whatever you say.”
“Tuttle Cash,” I said. It was what they were waiting to hear. I said it. I said it again. “It’s Tuttle Cash, okay? The answer man is Tuttle Cash.”
Feldman’s eyes widened; the color drained from his face. He shot a look at Very. Very was looking at me, his head bobbing up and down now like one of those dolls people put in the back window of their car.
“For the record, Hoagy,” the inspector said between his teeth, “are we talking about the Tuttle Cash?”
“The one and only.”
“Fuck me,” he gasped. “This is … this is going to be like O.J. all over again. He’s the white O.J. The white fucking O.J.”
To Feldman’s credit, this realization seemed to horrify rather than excite him. It is at moments like these that I tend to decide about people. Dante Feldman wasn’t such a bad guy after all, I decided. Just a hard one.
“Now do you see why I had to be sure, Inspector?”
Feldman’s tongue darted out of his mouth, nervously wetting his lips. He breathed in and out a few times, composing himself. “You could have let us in on this. We’d have put him under surveillance.”
“I did that.”
“By professionals.”
“I used a professional.”
“You could have taken us into your confidence,” he argued.
“No, I couldn’t,” I argued back. “Not with the likes of Cassandra circling around. Her top floor source would have blabbed it to her. And she would have put it on the air in a flash. And an innocent man, a public man, might have been ruined.”
This much Feldman seemed willing to accept, although most grudgingly. “Where does the man live?”
I told him where. “But he’s not home, Inspector. At least he wasn’t a little while ago.”
“Where is he, dude?”
“I don’t know.”
“I want his place sealed now, Lieutenant,” Feldman barked.
“Done.”
I said, “You won’t find the typewriter there. I looked.” Come to think of it, where was the typewriter?
“His restaurant, too,” Feldman ordered. “And his car, if he’s got one.”
“He hasn’t,” I said. “He sold it.”
“Proper paper every step of the way, Lieutenant. I will not be drop-kicked out of court on some bonehead technicality.”
“Yessir.”
Feldman turned back to me. “Sounds like you know King Tut pretty well. Who is he to you?”
I considered that for a long moment. I had so many answers to choose from. Tuttle Cash was my idol, my oldest friend, the best man at my wedding, the man who saved my life. He was all of these things. I could have said any one of them. Only, I didn’t.
I said, “We were on the same team together once.”
I DROVE AROUND FOR awhile. I didn’t much feel like going home. Didn’t want to see anyone. Didn’t want to talk to anyone. I just wanted to go someplace where I could curl up and feel lousy.
I ended up at my place on West Ninety-third Street. I took the X-rated photo album inside with me and stashed it deep in the bedroom closet. I didn’t look at it. I didn’t ever want to look at it. But I didn’t want anyone else to, either. I took off my coat and put down some mackerel for Lulu. It was supper time, but she wouldn’t so much as sniff at it. She was still too upset about Cassandra.
I put some Garner on the stereo and poured myself two fingers of the fifteen-year-old Dalwhinnie and sat in my chair. The Dalwhinnie didn’t hurt one bit. It’s an Upper Spey single malt, a bit fuller than the Macallan. But for some reason the Little Elf wasn’t the ticket at all. He just made me feel sadder. I put on some Grateful Dead instead. Not the tie-dyed, flower-power Dead, but the old Dead, the real Dead, the marauding-huns-in-shitkicker-boots Dead. I turned them up loud and let them blast away. I sipped my scotch, trying not to look at that photo of the three young track stars hanging over the loveseat. Trying to forget that Cassandra had stood in this very room not too many days before telling me how much she looked up to me … It’s raining … Trying to forget that the entire New York City Police Department was now hunting down Tuttle Cash so that they could arrest him for murdering five women. Trying to figure out why. Because it kept coming around to that—why? Why had he killed them? Why had he dragged me into it? Why had he turned the city of New York into a terror zone?
Why?
The phone rang next to me. I let it ring. Poured myself some more scotch, Lulu watching me carefully from her perch on the loveseat. She worries about me when I start drinking alone. She’s afraid I’ll jump the track again and go crashing back into my lost days and nights.
The phone kept on ringing. Damned thing wouldn’t stop. I picked it up.
It was Very, sounding edgy and hyper. “Thought maybe I’d find you there. Housekeeper said that’s where you hang when you want to be alone.”
“It’s nice to know I’m so unpredictable.”
“There’s no sign of him, dude. No one’s seen him. No one’s heard from him. He’s flat-out disappeared. We figure he’s on the run.” Very paused, waiting for me to say something. When I didn’t he said, “Listen, if you have the slightest idea where he might be heading …”
“I haven’t, Lieutenant.”
“Break it down, would you tell me if you did?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes, I am.”
“No offense, but I gotta ask you—whose voice is that I hear in the background?”
“It’s Jerry Garcia.”
He considered this a moment in silence. “You cool, dude?”
“I’m fine, Lieutenant. Although I am getting really tired of you asking me that. Is there anything else?”
“Yeah. Phone home. Housekeeper wants to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“What am I, your answering service? I’m trying to find a serial killer.” He hung up on me.
I called the apartment.
Vic answered on the first ring. “I’m real glad you checked in, Hoag. I have news for you—the man called here.”
“Very? I know. I just got off the phone with him.”
“Not him, Tuttle Cash. He called.”
I froze. “When, Vic?”
“About an hour ago. Pam spoke to him. I told her not to say anything to the lieutenant about it until she cleared it with you.”
“Good thinking, Vic. Exactly what did Tuttle say to her?”
“It was a short conversation,” Vic replied uncomfortably.
“Vic, what did he say?”
“Just three words: ‘Tell Hoagy good-bye.’”
I thanked him and hung up the phone, my mind on what I’d found Tuttle doing when I walked in on him in his office that day. My chest suddenly felt heavy.
The phone rang again. I picked it up. This time it was a woman and she was screeching at me.
“Is this you, Hoagy? Because if it is you better tell me where the fuck it is and I mean right now! Because I don’t take this shit from nobody! I don’t care who the fuck he is, y’know what I’m saying?”
“It’s nice to hear your voice again, Luz.”
“Don’t you start talking pretty at me. I ain’t hearing that shit, man. I want it back and I want it back right now!”
“You want what back, Luz?”
“My baby, that’s what. Your fucking friend stole my Miata from the fucking garage where I fucking keep it and he better—”
“When, Luz?” I leaned forward in my chair. “When?”
“Just now. Maybe half an hour ago. I called down to tell the guy to get it out for me and he’s like, hey, your boyfriend’s already on his way over with it. Motherfucker scammed ’em out of the keys and took off. I am going to cut him, man. I am going to make him so sorry he ever fucked with me. He ain’t going to be worth dipshit when I’m through with him.”
“Luz?”
“Like, nobody rips me off. He even had ’em fill the tank and charge it to my account.”
“Luz!”
“What?”
“Your Miata—what color is it?”
“Red. Like his nose’s gonna be after I hit him.”
“Good-bye, Luz.”
I turned off the stereo and threw on my greatcoat. I ran down the stairs with Lulu hot on my tail and jumped into the Land Rover. I stopped at my own garage, on Amsterdam, and traded the Rover in for the Jag. The Rover doesn’t like to go over 55. The Jag doesn’t like to go under 70.
Then I took off.
IT’S USUALLY A five-hour drive. Six with traffic. Four with luck and a heavy foot. I needed to make it in three. Because he had a head start on me. Because I had to get there before he did.
I knew where he was going. Oh, yeah, I knew.
There are a couple of different ways you can get there. One is to work your way through the northern burbs on the Sawmill River Parkway until you hit the Mass Pike. The other is to hug the shoreline on I-95. I took the shoreline, doing 90, using the breakdown lane to pass any damned car or truck that got in my way. There’s a shortcut I know, Route 395, which forks off the interstate at New London and shoots straight up through the barren desolation of eastern Connecticut into Massachusetts. You can go a half-hour on 395 and not see a single car. You can do 100. I did, Lulu dozing next to me with my scarf wrapped around her. There were patches of ice on the road when I hit the Mass Pike at Worcester. There always are, even in August. Worcester has to be one of the coldest places on earth. I don’t know why. I don’t care why. And then we were on the outskirts of Boston, where all roads converge at the tollbooths. I paid and went on through and we were there.
Cambridge. Home to the most pretentious, overrated Ivy League breeding ground of them all. You know which one I mean—I’m talking about the H-word. Those of us who went there never, ever mention it by name. We prefer to make people force it out of us, thereby drawing even more attention to ourselves. It was here where I achieved so-called higher learning. It was here where I would find Tuttle Cash. He would be here.
Most of the campus is found in Cambridge, on or near the banks of the Charles. Some of it is sited on the other side of the snaking river, across the Larz Anderson Bridge, which puts it in Boston, if you want to get picky. The much reviled Graduate School of Business Administration is across the river, for example. But I wasn’t going to the business school.
I was going to the stadium. The one where they play football on Saturday afternoons in autumn.
There’s a spiked iron fence all the way around it, a big iron gate at the main entrance. The gate was open. I eased the Jag on through it and crossed the empty parking lot, the horseshoe-shaped stadium looming overhead. There’s a chain-link fence across the open end of the horseshoe. The red Miata with the New York license plates was parked there. I shut off the Jag’s engine, dug the torch out of the glovebox and got out, Lulu joining me reluctantly. It was barely in the teens outside. My nose and ears felt it right away. I could hear cars off in the distance on Soldier’s Field Road. Otherwise all was darkness and quiet. I took off one of my cashmere-lined deerskin gloves and felt the hood of the Miata. Still warm. It was just past two in the morning, according to Grandfather’s Rolex. Three hours and fifteen minutes it had taken me. Fast. But was I fast enough?
Lulu took over from there. Followed his trail, black nose to the frozen ground, snarfling, breath rising from her nostrils like a plow horse’s. She led me to the chain-link fence and stopped. I shone the light up at it. It was eight feet high. There was a torn shred of gray flannel caught in the top of it where we stood. From his trousers, no doubt. I pocketed the torch and started climbing. It had been a while since I’d scaled a fence. Only kids and thieves scale fences, and a thief is one thing I’ve never been. But muscle memory is a funny thing. My arms and legs remembered immediately how to get me over the top, trousers intact. I dropped down the last few feet to the ground on the other side and brushed myself off. Lulu came prancing up next to me, arfing triumphantly. She had found her own way in. She can do just about anything when she sets her pea brain to it.
I shone the light ahead of us. Together, we ventured out onto the field where Tuttle Cash was faster and stronger and better than anyone else. The field where nobody, but nobody could catch him.
The field where the crowd roared.
The best and the brightest chanted his name here on those crisp autumn afternoons with their cheeks pink and the band playing and the wind blowing. And it seemed, when he had that ball tucked under his arm, that he was the best and the brightest of them all. Someone blessed. Someone invincible. Maybe all of the Tuttle Cashes on all of the fields seem like invincible young gods on those Saturday afternoons when the wind is blowing. Maybe some of them even stay that way. I never met one who did.
Lulu led me to him. I thought I’d find him on the fifty-yard line—no man’s land. I didn’t. King Tut was in the end zone, under the goalpost, gone. I was too late. I had a feeling I would be. I also had a feeling that maybe it was best this way. Worse things could have happened. A trial could have happened. He had his duffel coat on, no gloves. The gun was still gripped in his right hand. It looked like the same gun I’d taken away from him twice before. I couldn’t tell for sure. I didn’t want to touch it. He’d fired up through his jaw. The bullet came out the top of his head. It was not a neat way to die but it was quick. One eye, the left one, was still open. I closed it. His left hand clutched a piece of paper. I took it from him. It was a lined sheet from a steno pad. On it, scrawled in his handwriting, were two words: Sorry, Doof.
I stood there a while on the hard, pale green December grass, shining the light down at him. Lulu sat there in between my feet, nose quivering. She didn’t howl like she had for Cassandra. She just sat there, waiting for me to tell her what to do. I told her to stay put. She promised she would. Then I went back over the fence and called Very to tell him that it was all over.
The answer man had written his final chapter.