No one likes to hear from even a virgin—especially a virgin—that he is no swashbuckler. Actually, I am a complete maverick in the bourgeois world and in no way conform to its mores and norms.
However, when viewed dispassionately, as I realized later, Peggy’s assessment of me was dead accurate. The only real maverick is the criminal, and like most people I am but the occasional breaker of minor ordinances. And now, though Peggy seemed to be related to no policeman, her familial connections to the Department of Sanitation were official enough to give me pause.
“Certainly I have a permit. What do you think.” At the moment of course I did not possess the gun, which Sam had picked from my pocket and discarded, by his own admission, probably in the waste cans at the top of the cellar steps. Good, let it be. In fact, to the devil with this whole business…
“Say, Peggy. If that guy ever shows up here again—I’m talking about Bakewell—you give me three short buzzes, and I’ll call the police.”
I threw up my thumbs, disposing of the matter and with it the burden on my spirit. I have that kind of resilience. It compensates for a certain deficiency of stamina. I had arrived at a similar conclusion on the day I put aside my play. I tried to tell as much that evening to the liberal-lawyer’s wife I had met in playwriting class at The New School, who believing I should soon make my mark in the theater fed me frequently at French restaurants of the second rank (her husband was likely to be found in those of the first), but she monologized endlessly on the lore of the grape, learned in the wine-tasting course given by the Societé des Avaleurs (e.g., the inscription on many a cheap Burgundy, “bottled in our caves,” is meaningless), and then dragged me away to the hotel room in which the investigator cornered us a quarter-hour later, she still in her bra and I in my Reis boxer briefs of burnt orange.
“Sure, Mike,” replied Peggy, never averse to passing up a job. She ripped the page from her pad, balled it, withdrew her calves from the kneehole of the desk, and used the waste can which, concealed there, must have crowded that area and provided a useless reminder to Peggy to keep her thighs joined.
“And while you’re at it, the Tab can and the Blimpie bag,” said I, pointing serially at each. Her response was a silent snarl.
I ducked into the inner office and found that reality ineluctably opposed my capricious decision to forget about Villanova, et al.
Bakewell’s tremendous body covered my studio couch.His nape was applied to one end-bolster; at least two feet of shoe and shin protruded beyond the other. He seemed even deader than before: a small hole had been punctured between his eyes, and a filament of red ran from it along the bridge of his nose, collecting in a pendulous drop at the tip. His coat was open to display the belt buckle over the dome of his belly. A small automatic pistol lay at the top of his fly.
I picked it off. Its muzzle smelled of ignited gunpowder. It was very like my own weapon, of which, alas, I had never written down the serial number. I removed the clip and determined that one shell was gone from the stack that compressed the spring in the base.
I returned the clip to the gun that was either mine or not, and having made certain that the safety was on, put the weapon on my desk and covered it with two weeks of unopened junk mail and the fragment of Cadbury milk chocolate, mint-filled, hitherto mentioned: I had no sweet tooth at the moment. I put my keys in my pocket, having a premonition that I might have need to leave the building soon.
The telephone proceeded to ring several times. Peggy Tumulty was presumably gone again. I picked up the instrument. Peggy always answered by giving the number: a rude practice, by my lights. I utter a hopeful “Yes?” But now I was humiliated to hear it emerge, owing to stress, as a susurrant whimper.
“Teddy, we’re gonna ice you,” said a voice the timbre of which suggested it came through jaws that could have chewed hickory nuts in their shells.
“I’m not Teddy Villanova!” I managed to say, or croak. “I’m Russel—” But already I addressed a dead line.
3
I decided thereupon that any further delay in summoning the constabulary was likely to prove ruinous and was about to dial—alas, now that I needed it, I could not recall the emergency number of the local force, instead remembering, ridiculously, WHItehall 1212, from some bygone thriller concerning Scotland Yard. To dial Information, these days, was to incur an additional charge beyond the quota of message units—I would almost rather be murdered than lose another sou to the phone company, those swine who could have, in their monopoly of wires, made the cops as simple to dial as C-O-P. (I am a man of words, not arithmetic; for the weather I call WENCHES.)
While I was so frozen—ironically, in an attempt to evade being “iced”—who should suddenly penetrate my inner office but two policemen! Beetle-browed, black-eyed, prominent-nosed, blue-jawed, they were both also of the same height and stocky build. One wore a handle-bar mustache, and one was clean-shaven.
He with the bare lip said to me: “You’re busted.” And to the other: “Give him his rights.”
The other seized his navy-blue crotch and said: “I got your rights right here.”
“Now wait a minute,” said I.
After a cursory glance at Bakewell’s body, Mustache asked: “So where’s the piece?”
Not familiar with their jargon, except for the unconvincing version used by actors, I failed to get his meaning as quickly as he wished, and in obvious disapproval of my lethargy he seized my Ban-Lon bosom and, unlike the late Bakewell, got a handful of pectoral as well in fingers stern as tongs. He was of about my own height but considerably more burly than I. He gave me a backhanded stroke to the mouth and then returned the palm smartly across my nose.
Holding my face, though spreading the butts of my hands so that he could hear and be without motive to punish me for obscurity, I said: “Oh, you mean the gun that was used to kill him? Oh.”
“Oh, yes, fag, oh!” he burlesqued me in a still higher falsetto than mine, then thrust his kneecap into my groin. I buckled, clutched, hovered, and finally fell to the floor as if in several parts.
A leather sole, looking quite new, its buff color scarcely besmirched, descended to within a centimeter of my left eyeball, the right being compressed against the floor boards. No threat could have been more effective.
“The desk,” I sniveled, for my nose was running from the slap it had accepted.
They proceeded to remove the drawers from that furnishing and empty onto my body, from a height, the contents thereof, including a Scotch-tape dispenser with a leaden base. From the weight of its blow on the side of my calf, I, being lean of leg, suspected the bone might well have been cracked, but owing to the dominant agony in my testicles I could not be sure.
They ignored the pile of junk mail, and even in my wretchedness I was pleased to see that I had been right about something, though typically of something without profit, for I should only be beaten further until they found the pistol.
Therefore I was forming my sore lips to say “Desk top”—when suddenly they abandoned the search.
“Fuck this,” said the mustachioed patrolman. “It don’t matter. Let’s haul the garbage.”
The clean-lipped cop dropped the final drawer—the double-sized one, for files; happily now empty—onto my head, which given the respective angles received only a glancing blow, and went to Bakewell’s feet while Mustache repaired to the shoulders. I managed to sit up, assuming the simulated lotus position of the yogi who fakes, and watched their remarkable show of strength.
It is a general rule that two large men are hard put to tote even a small drunk between them, the difficulty owing to the density and not the weight itself—sober and tense, he might be lifted as easily as a plank. But the rigor had not yet claimed Bakewell’s corpse. He looked better than 300 pounds and of the consistency of sacked sand.
Yet in one coordinated effort they raised him from the couch and carried him through the contracted doorway. From my squat I could see them until they cleared the outer roo
m and turned into the corridor.
At this point I crawled to the desk, fished out the gun from beneath the mail, crawled to the dumbwaiter, and burrowing under the crumple of my clothes on its platform, found the space beneath (through which I had lost the odd sock), and pushed the pistol into the shaft. I could not hear the report of its striking bottom in the cellar, four levels down; for one, my ears were muffled by the heap of clothing in which my face was buried (the odor of which reminded me that I was overdue at the Laundromat); then too, it could be supposed that a cushion of rubbish lay at the bottom of the shaft, a veritable midden the lowest level of which might well date from the turn of the century and contain whalebone corset stays, celluloid collars, and desiccated French letters discarded by fornicators long dead.
But as yet I was scarcely scot free. Surely the police had not, despite the insouciant obscenity, brushed away the matter of the gun. Also, as I now reflected, a dumbwaiter shaft, especially one in disuse, is a notoriously classic place in which to dispose of a murder weapon. Nor had I remembered to wipe from its smooth blue barrel my dirty, sweaty fingerprints—add bloody to that series: what had seeped from my nose was red.
I decided I had better volunteer to give these officers a full account than to wait for them to return and beat me mute. While their hands were literally full of Bakewell was a splendid time for my purpose.
I got on my feet, though it would be frivolous to say I could yet stand fully erect, and hobbled—yes, as if my shoes were laced each to each; I had by the way reassumed them, unconsciously, while trying to remember the phone number of the police, which of course I could now, not needing it, recall with crystalline clarity as 911—I stumbled to the outer office.
Where Peggy, back again now that all was quiet, said in disgust: “For pity sake, Russ. At noon, already?”
“I suppose you didn’t see or hear anything again!” I cried, lurching towards the hall, but the effort to top her indignation cost me dearly: the floor rose in serrations, and I missed the first illusionary stair-tread and fell to my poor knees.
“I’ve seen you tipsy before”—a lie—“but never low-down and dirty drunk! If you think I’ll put up with this!” But immediately after concluding this scream, which no doubt marked the crest of her rage, she descended to, and wallowed in, a trough of the maudlin. “For heaven’s sake, Russ, call A.A. before it’s too late. Their program really works. They were my brother’s salvation. They’ll give you something to believe in. With God’s help you’ll be a man again one day in the foreseeable future. You’ll—”
In supreme exasperation I managed not only to ignore this but also to rise and stagger through the doorway and look along the corridor. The police and Bakewell’s body were gone, this time not mysteriously: the elevator hummed. I was in no condition to negotiate the stairway.
I turned back and said to Peggy: “Get this, and get it straight: I’m suspected of murder now. I was savagely worked over again. Call the police and say that I want to make a statement voluntarily.”
“Why didn’t you tell those cops I just saw getting on the elevator?” Peggy asked suspiciously.
“You did see them then?” I needed this confirmation; thus far I had been all alone and lonely except for my brutalizers.
“They were carrying that great big man who came in here this morning. Remember, you asked about him? Was he back there drinking with you all along? He was, wasn’t he? He was stinking drunk also.”
“He was dead,” said I. “I don’t know who did it, except that it wasn’t me. Now get on that phone.”
She dialed 911. “Russel Wren wants to make a full statement.” She covered the mouthpiece and said to me: “They want to know about what?”
“About the Bakewell murder.”
She passed this along. Then, to me: “They said to hold on.”
I collapsed in one of the camp chairs. After some moments Peggy heard something that made her say: “I agree,” and hung up.
“What was that?”
She twitched her nose. “They said there wasn’t any such murder reported. They said you were a crank. They said there are a lot of them who tie up the line while the victims of real crimes can’t get through and the perpetrators escape apprehension. They said—”
“Oh, shut your stupid mouth, you halfwit.”
Without another word Peggy took her purse from a bottom drawer and her dun cardigan from the back of the chair, and left the office in a martial stride. Head in heels of hand, I sat there for as long as it took the elevator to rise at her summons, her to climb aboard, turn and step out, and return.
“There’s blood all over it.”
“That’s funny,” said I, staring at my groin, from which the excruciation had now gone, leaving as it were a great humming nullity between waist and knees.
“Well,” said Peggy, “not if he was murdered it wouldn’t be funny.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s really only a few drops, come to think about it,” said Peggy. “He might of had a nosebleed.” But at my display of teeth, she backed away slightly and said: “All right, all right. I believe you. O.K.?”
Actually, I had been gnashing my incisors without reference to her. It was rather the reaction to my having understood, suddenly, that the policemen were bogus. Real cops don’t carry away the bodies of victims. There are ambulance attendants for that, and they employ stretchers with zippered covers. Many a time I had observed the real thing on TV news, though never in the plain air.
But if the worthies who had savaged me and borne away Bakewell were not authentic patrolmen, who were they?
Otherwise unfurnished with advisers, I applied to Peggy, expecting little but the usual boneheadedness, which however might provoke, by contrast, my own powers of reason.
But she surprised me. Not only did she accept my theory that the cops were probably fakes, but went along with the rest of it, yet unvoiced: that they were mobsters, as well. She took the chair alongside mine, and having pointlessly (given our relative positions) pulled her skirt over the knees,said: “They looked Italian to me, and I know Italians when I see them. My best friend at Saint Dottie’s was Treese Conigliaro.”
I blenched at the nasty sound she made of what in the Old Country would have been pronounced Tay-ray-sa Cone-eel-yah-ro, a very lovely name, though surely Peg had learned to say Cunnig-laaroh from good old Treese herself.
“You think these ‘cops,’ then, were mobsters? Mafia types? That would fit with ‘Villanova.’ “I began to count the points on my fingers. “Bakewell was obviously Villa-nova’s enemy—not personally, but acting in Washburn’s interest. After threatening me, the great big man did not leave the building—Sam Polidor was in the lobby all the while. What happened was that Bakewell realized I had nothing to do with this affair. How—I mean how he realized that, when he had not earlier on, remains among the ponderables.”
“What?” asked Peg.
“No matter,” said I. “Maybe he simply ran into Teddy Villanova himself, whom he recognized. Teddy’s response to the threat was to shoot Bakewell between the eyes.” I sighed in despair. “With my gun.” That made no sense. “But how would he come to be carrying my gun, which I had lost only minutes before?” I saw an exit. “Wait a minute…Teddy brings his trash down to the cans, finds my gun in one of them, and thinking it would be handy in his profession, takes it along when he goes back upstairs, meets Bakewell en route, hears the threat, and impulsively kills him. Then, his rage having cooled, realizes he’s stuck with a corpse and a pistol recently fired. He looks for and finds an open, empty office—mine—and puts both body and gun in it.” I was excited by the sheer logic of this progression. “How’s that sound?”
“I don’t know, Russ. That’s pretty farfetched.”
“Nothing can be farfetched in view of this incident,” I said with heat.
Peggy held her hand opposite her chin and flapped its loose fingers. “Too bad there’s no money in it.”
I narrowed my eyes
, playing a part mostly for my own benefit. “Maybe there is…maybe there just is.” Repeating the phrase with slight variations, I actually began to believe in the possible validity of the vague scheme, half-formulated, of which it was a shadowy expression. But first there was another troublesome detail to piece into place: the visit of the fake cops.
“Villanova’s bravoes, of course,” I said, and went on, ignoring Peggy’s raised eyebrows—she read nothing but The National Enquirer, which however for my money uses a much more exotic vocabulary than is at my disposal. “But what baffles is how they just happened to have two policeman’s uniforms, instantly available for such a stunt as this: unless they pull similar ones often. Beyond that, why take away the corpse when, if left there, it would embarrass me and not Villanova? That apparently was his original plan. Why was it altered?”
“There’s one reason, and only one reason alone,” sententiously said Peg. “Bakewell had something on his person that they wanted, something that to look for they wouldn’t have time, because they might be interrupted meanwhile, and also so small it would take time to find because it would be so little and tiny.”
I record this utterance as literally as I can remember it, to demonstrate that despite the brothers Fowler bizarre syntax is often as perspicuous as the king’s English. Peggy’s supposition was also perspicacious. Her elaboration of it, however, proved preposterous.
“Maybe a microdot, a tenth as large as the head of a pin, pasted on his chin like a pimple.”
“That’s from a spy show,” said I. “Not likely with mobsters.”
“All you know.” Peggy moued. “There may be a link between the Syndicate and the Commies.” From which I judged she had lately T-Viewed a movie from the 1950s. “Or the dot could contain a list of all the Cosa Nostra bosses for the whole nation, including Canada and the Caribbean, and a list of their legitimate covers, like diaper services, chinaware distributors, sporting-goods stores, and—”