Koko (59 page)

“He had to join all us plebs in the dirty city,” Beevers said.

Poole thanked Maggie, ignored Beevers, and sat down at a board room table beside Conor.
Conor said, “Hey.” The resemblance to a grade school persisted. Room B was like a
classroom without a teacher’s desk. Directly before Michael and Conor, on the other
side of the room, was a long green blackboard. Beevers went on saying something about
film rights.

“Are you okay, Mikey?” Conor asked. “You look kinda down.”

Poole saw the copy of
Wuthering Heights
on the passenger seat of his car.

Beevers glared down at them. “Use the brains God gave you, man! Of course the man
is down. He had to leave a beautiful town where the air is clean and they don’t even
have sidewalks, they have hedges, and spend hours on a stinking highway. Where he
came from, Conor, they have partridges and pheasants instead of pigeons. They have
Airedales and deer instead of rats. Wouldn’t you be down? Give the man some understanding.”

“Hey, I’m from South Norwalk,” Conor said. “We don’t have pigeons either. We got seagulls.”

“Garbage birds,” Beevers said.

“Calm down, Harry,” Poole said.

“We can still come out of this okay,” Beevers said. “We just don’t say any more than
we have to.”

“So what happened?” Conor whispered to Michael.

“A patient died this morning.”

“A kid?”

Michael nodded. “A little girl.” He felt impelled to speak her name. “Named Stacy
Talbot.” The act of putting his loss into these specific words had an unexpected and
nearly physical effect on him. His grief did not shrink, but became more concrete:
Stacy’s death took physical form as a leaden casketlike form located deep in his chest.
He, Michael Poole, was intact and whole around this dense, leaden weight within him.
He realized that Conor was the first person to whom he had spoken of her death.

Stacy had been feverish and exhausted when he had last seen her. The lights had hurt
her eyes; her usual gallantry was at low ebb. But she had seemed interested in his
little fund of stories, and had held his hand and told him that she loved the beginning
of
Jane Eyre
, especially the first sentence.

Poole opened the book to read the sentence.
“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”

Stacy was grinning at him.

This morning one of the nurses had tried to head him off as he walked past their station,
but he had barely noticed her. He had been intent on some words Sam Stein had spoken
to him in the first-floor corridor. Stein, who had evaded responsibility for a surgical
error with a combination of cowardice and superiority Michael found repulsive, had
said that he was sorry his medical group had not made more progress with Michael’s
“boys”—the other doctors of his own group practice. Stein was assuming that Michael
would be familiar with the background of this remark, but Michael could fill it in
with informed guesswork. Stein’s own “boys” were building a new medical center in
Westerholm, and wanted to make it the most important in the county. To do that they
needed a good pediatric practice. Michael himself was the stumbling block to the effective
union of their practices, and in his grumpy, conceited way Stein had been asking him
to spare him the trouble and implied insult of having to go after a second-rung pediatric
group. A brand new facility like the one Stein was planning would draw about fifty
percent of all the new people in Westerholm, and maybe a quarter of the houses in
Westerholm changed hands every year. Michael’s partners had been talking things over
with Stein while he had been gone.

Michael had sailed past the gesturing nurse, the germ of a brilliant idea beginning
to form in his mind, and opened the door to Stacy’s room.

He strode into a room where a bald middle-aged man with a grey moustache and a double
chin lay asleep with an IV in his arm and the
Wall Street Journal
open on his chest. The man did not awaken and wink at him like an actor in a farce,
he slept on noiselessly, but Michael felt a change in his inner weather like the sudden
hot airlessness that precedes a tornado. He ducked outside and checked the number
of the room. Of course it was the right room. He ducked back again and looked at the
drugged tycoon. This time he even recognized him. The man was a housing contractor
named Pohlmann whose teenage children went to Judy’s school and whose imitation chateau
with a red tile roof and a five-car garage was located a mile and a half from Poole’s
own house. Michael backed out of Pohlmann’s room.

For an instant only he became aware of the soft old green book in his hand, and it
weighed twenty or thirty pounds. He saw the nurse watching him as she spoke into her
telephone. He knew
what had happened as soon as he saw her eyes. He knew it by the way she put down her
telephone. But he walked up to the station and said, “Where is she?”

“I was afraid you didn’t know, Doctor,” the nurse had said. He had felt as if he were
in an elevator falling through a long shaft, just falling and falling.

“I’m sorry, man,” Conor said. “Must remind you of your own kid.”

“The man is a doctor, Conor,” Beevers said. “He sees things like this all the time.
The man knows how to be detached.”

Detached was just how Dr. Poole felt, though not at all as Beevers imagined.

“Speaking of the man,” Beevers said.

Lieutenant Murphy’s big aggressive-looking head appeared in the meshed window set
into the door. He grinned at them through the window, his mouth set around a pipe,
and opened the door.

“Glad you could all make it,” he said. “Sorry I’m a little late.” He looked like an
athletic college professor in a tweed jacket and fawn trousers. “We’re all set for
the line-up and we will be going down there in a minute, but I wanted to talk to you
about some things before we do that.”

Beevers caught Poole’s eye and coughed into his fist.

Murphy sat opposite them. He took the pipe from his mouth and held it balanced in
his fingertips as if offering it for inspection. It was a big curved black sandblasted
Peterson, with a tarnished silver band around the top of the neck. A plug of grey
tobacco filled the bowl. “We didn’t really have a chance to speak to each other up
in Milburn, though there were some things I was curious about, and at the time it
looked as if we had this case pretty well sewn up.” He looked at each of them in turn.
“I was happy about that, and I guess it showed. But this wasn’t an ordinary case,
not by a long shot, not even an ordinary murder case, if there is such an animal.
There have been some changes since then.”

Murphy looked down at the heavy pipe balanced in his fingers, and Beevers spoke into
the silence. “Are you implying that the man you are holding has given a false confession?”

“Why do you sound hopeful?” Murphy asked him. “Don’t you want us to nail this guy?”

“I didn’t mean to sound hopeful. Of course I want the man apprehended.”

Murphy regarded him steadily for a moment. “There’s a lot of information pertinent
to these cases that has not reached the
public. And that should not reach the public, if we don’t want our investigation to
be compromised. Or actually interfered with, to give you the worst case. I want to
go over some of this information with you people before we go to the line-up, and
Miss Lah, if you know something too, I’d like you to please speak up.”

Maggie nodded.

“Miss Lah has already been very helpful to us.”

“Thank you,” she said very softly.

“You gentlemen all met Mr. Pumo as members of the same platoon in Vietnam? And you
were the lieutenant of that unit, Mr. Beevers?”

“Correct,” Beevers said, smiling with his mouth but glaring at Maggie.

“How many members of that unit besides yourselves are still living, do you know?”

Beevers pursed his lips and cocked his head.

“Dr. Poole?”

“I don’t know, really,” Poole said. “Not many of us are left alive.”

“Do you really not know?” Murphy asked in a level voice. Poole shook his head. “None
of you?”

“I guess we’d be grateful for whatever you can tell us,” Beevers said. “But I’m afraid
I don’t really follow your train of thought.”

Murphy raised his expressive eyebrows. He stuck the pipe in his mouth and puffed.
The dead-looking tobacco glowed red, and the detective let smoke escape his mouth.

“You are familiar with the nickname Koko, however,” he said.

Beevers frowned at Maggie.

“Miss Lah passed on some background information to us. Do you think she was wrong
in doing so?”

Beevers coughed. “Of course not.”

“I’m glad you feel that way.” Murphy’s mouth twitched in a smile. “Besides the three
of you, there seem to be only four survivors of the platoon that took part in the
action at Ia Thuc. A PFC named Wilson Manly is living in Arizona—”

“Manly’s alive?” Conor asked. “Goddamn.”

Poole too was surprised. Like Conor, he had last seen Manly being carried to a stretcher—he
had lost a leg and a lot of blood, and Poole had thought that he would never survive.

“Wilson Manly is disabled, but he owns a security business in Tucson.”

“Security systems?” Conor asked, and Murphy nodded. “Goddamn.”

“Who else?” Poole asked.

“George Burrage is working as a drug counselor in Los Angeles.”

“Spanky,” Conor and Poole said more or less in unison. He too had been carried away
after a firefight, and since nothing more had been heard of him, he too had been presumed
dead.

“They both send their regards to you, and remembered Mr. Pumo very well and were sorry
to hear about what happened to him.”

“Of course,” said Beevers. “You were in the service, weren’t you, Lieutenant? Weren’t
you in Vietnam?”

“I was too young for Vietnam,” Murphy said. “Both Mr. Manly and Mr. Burrage have an
extremely good recall of various incidents involving the use of the name Koko.”

“I bet they do,” said Beevers.

“A PFC named Victor Spitalny might be presumed to be living,” said Murphy. “There
has been no record of him since he went AWOL back in Bangkok in 1969. But given the
circumstances under which he disappeared, I don’t think it’s very likely that he would
suddenly take it into his head to kill journalists and members of his old unit, do
you?”

“Couldn’t say,” Beevers said. “What do you mean, journalists?”

“Whoever calls himself Koko has been killing the foreign and American journalists
who covered the Ia Thuc atrocity story. He’s been very thorough, too.” He regarded
Beevers with a steady detached gaze, and then looked at Poole in the same way. “This
man has killed at least eight people. There is a possibility he killed one other man.”

“Who’s that?” Beevers asked.

“A businessman named Irwin, out at JFK a few weeks ago. We’ve just managed to put
all the information together, using sources from all over the world. It’s hard to
get different police departments to cooperate when they’re right next door to each
other, but we’re proud of ourselves on this one. We’re getting ready, and we’re going
to take our man. But in order to do that, we need your full cooperation. And I have
a feeling I’m not really getting it.”

But before anybody could protest, he took an envelope out of his jacket pocket, opened
the flap, and removed three playing
cards encased in separate clear plastic bags. “Take a look at these, please.”

He used a pencil to separate the cards on the surface of the table. Poole looked at
the three cards. Every blood vessel in his body seemed to constrict. There was the
Rearing Elephant, reproduced three times. “A Legacy of Honor,” read a slogan beneath
the emblem. Poole had not seen a regimental playing card since he had left Vietnam.
The elephant looked angrier than he had remembered.

“Where’d you find these, man?” Conor asked.

Murphy flipped each of the cards face up. There it was, scrawled in the old manner.
KOKO
, three times. Before Beevers was an eight of clubs; before Conor a two of hearts;
before Poole a six of spades. With a bang of his heart Poole saw the faint penciling
of his name at the top of the card before him.

“Mr. Pumo had one of these, with his name on it, in his mouth,” Murphy said.

LINKLATER
and
BEEVERS
, Poole saw, had been lightly penciled on the other cards.

The line-up was a pretext to get the four of them together for questioning. They had
been summoned not to identify a killer, but to be frightened into saying more than
they wished.

Beevers and Conor spoke at the same time: “Where did you get these?”

“You must have gotten pretty close to him.”

Murphy nodded. “We learned where he had been staying through a tip. Unfortunately,
we didn’t find him, so he must have learned somehow—we probably missed him by a couple
of minutes. But we
never
get as close as that without getting him in the end.”

Murphy used his pencil to nudge the cards back into the envelope. “There was one other
survivor from your unit.”

For a moment Poole could not remember who this was.

“You all remember Timothy Underhill.”

“Sure,” Conor said, and the other two nodded.

“What can you tell me about him?”

There was silence for a moment or two.

“I can’t figure you characters out,” Murphy said.

Poole remembered Judy talking about Bob Bunce: lies of denial always transparent.
“We looked for Underhill in Singapore,” he said. Then he stopped talking, because
Harry Beevers’ well-shod foot had come down heavily on his.

“It was what you’d call a lark,” Beevers said. “We were in this interesting part of
the world, on a vacation, and we thought
maybe we could locate him. All we found were traces. People that used to know him,
things like that. We went hither and yon in three countries. Had a ball.”

“You went to a lot of trouble to find an old army buddy,” Murphy said.