The Prisoner of Vandam Street (16 page)

M
atlock had nothing on Kent Perkins when it came to country charm. Add to that Kent’s father confessor–good cop approach, and it was almost like providing a roadmap to a lost soul. But first, of course, we had to get the lost soul to agree to cross the street, climb four flights of stairs, step over a few errant cat turds and beer bottles, and be interviewed by Kent Perkins. It was not going to be an easy task to convince someone to follow this course of action. Particularly, I thought, if she already had her suitcase on the bed.

I was just emerging from the dumper, attending to some early evening ablutions, when I noticed that the end-game had already begun. I would have preferred to have been more actively involved in the end-game, but sometimes that’s not the card life deals you. Sometimes you just have to learn how to play a poor hand well.

“I’m going to call the girl,” said Kent, as he stood by the windows with his cell phone and gazed purposefully across Vandam Street. “Mick! Spotter scope down!”

“Aye, aye, mate,” said Brennan, as he began quickly disassembling the tripod.

“Oy, oy, mate is more like it,” said Piers. “This little adventure could turn into a real disaster. You have a jealous, abusive psycho with a gun living right across the way, and now you’re luring his equally unstable sheila over here. Remember, Kinkster, the rest of us can always leave. You’ve been grounded by Dr. Skinnipipi.”

“Fuck Dr. Skinnipipi,” I said, “and the proctoscope he rode in on.”

“The whole thing is academic anyway,” said Ratso. “Today, even if you can make yourself heard, no one believes what you tell ’em.”

“What?” said McGovern. “Say again? You believe the cat turds are
smellin’?
”

“No, McGovern,” I said. “We were just discussing the voyages of
Magellan.
”

“I can hear you,” said McGovern petulantly. “You don’t have to shout.”

“What he was really saying,” said Piers, with an almost aboriginal insight, “is that the girl may be a dangerous
felon.
”

“Those may well be,” said Kent Perkins, “the truest words we’ll hear all night.”

It’s possible, of course, in this funny old world we live in, for someone to be the bad guy
and
the good guy at the same time. Or the good girl and the bad girl. I knew I was empathizing a bit too heavily with the woman who called herself Tana Petrich. And when you empathize with someone it severely impedes your abilities to think rationally, much less reason deductively. Empathizing with someone, I reflected, was almost as bad as loving them.

“My name is Kent Perkins and I know your name is not Tana Petrich,” said Kent into a cell phone seemingly smaller than a magpie’s testicle.

The big man with the small phone, standing casually by the window as if he were talking to a friend, was a portrait of relaxed confidence. It was almost like he was fishing. He’d hooked the fish when she’d picked up the phone. One false word or reckless nuance and we all knew he’d lose her.

“I’m not a cop or I’d be over there kicking in your door with an arrest warrant and handcuffs right now. Believe it or not, I’m interested in helping you.”

I think at that moment every one of us believed that Kent Perkins could and would help the girl. Even those cynics who thought he was doing what he was doing out of friendship for me or out of some misguided stratagem to bring me out of my malaise were impressed with his cool demeanor and his humanity.

“I know you’re in trouble, but there is a way out. But you’ve got to meet me halfway. I believe I have some information that might just save your life.”

For a telephone conversation of this nature, this was already a long one. It was beginning to look like Kent might, indeed, reel her in. From across the room, McGovern was already giving him an enthusiastic thumbs-up, a gesture that was as well-intentioned as it was poorly timed. I’m not sure Kent even saw it. I’m not sure he saw anything during the torturous course of that call except a last chance to help a lost soul.

Certainly, the words themselves were well-chosen and crucial. But it was the voice itself, simple, sincere, urgent, charitable, that, I believe, made the difference. And, of course, it was high drama. Kent seemed to know that everything was riding on every word. This was no longer just another case. This was no longer a matter of routine, of going through the motions. Maybe it really was nothing more than a common case of domestic abuse, but it was clear that Kent had put his heart into it. He was talking her down from the bridge. And though the spotter scope was now turned away from the window, and the night was dark, and we could no longer see the girl, we could almost feel her glancing at the suitcase on the bed. The conversation continued for a few more moments, then, with a breathtaking suddenness, it reached its conclusion.

“Okay,” said Kent. “I’ll meet you in thirty minutes on the street. Now dry off that big, beautiful vagina of yours and get yourself downstairs, honey.”

The small audience in the loft received Kent’s closing remarks in stunned silence. For a long moment, no one said a word and only the puppethead was smiling. Then Kent gave a small shrug and a somewhat sheepish smile.

“Just seeing if you were paying attention,” he said. “I’d already hung up.”

I
relapsed very badly that evening. Maybe it’s just what happens when you have malaria. Maybe it was brought on by my over-identification with my field of study. Maybe it was the sheer karmic intensity of Kent trying to reel in the big one. Maybe it was none of the above. None of the ceilings or lesbians or stars. All I really remember before getting my ticket punched to Neverland was Kent asking everybody to please leave the loft for a while so he could interview the girl. The next thing I remember was Ratso tucking me into bed like a little child and saying he’d come back later to check on me.

There wasn’t that much to check really. My mind seemed to be floating somewhere over the Mexican-Israeli border. I was having the kind of vivid, twisted, opiumlike, technicolor dreams that normal people never have. I was fucking a girl who couldn’t remember where she was when JFK was assassinated because she wouldn’t be born for two more decades. She thought JFK was an airport, RFK was a football stadium, and Martin Luther King was a street running through her town. The only common ground we ever found was on her futon. She’d never heard of Jack Benny, Humphrey Bogart, or Abbie Hoffman, but she thought Hitler may have been a punk band in the early eighties. We got along pretty well because I didn’t remember much either. All in all, it wasn’t a bad dream.

When I woke up I didn’t know where I was or what time it was. I only knew that I was sporting a monstro erection and drowning in an ocean of sweat. Then I heard the two voices in the living room. A man and a woman. The man, I quickly realized, was Kent Perkins. The woman, I knew in my gut, was the woman who called herself Tana Petrich. The same instincts that told the cat to hate Ratso told me that the next amusement was going to be a tragedy.

“Nobody’s going to grab you or hold you here, young lady,” said Kent. “Nobody’s going to force you to stay here to meet with me. That’s why I’ve put your chair closer to the door.”

“Okay,” she said, rather tentatively.

“I know you’re here tonight because you’re worried about what I might know. Well, it’s not my job here to tell you about yourself. It’s my job here to see if we can help you get into a safer place, out of the bad situation you’re in.”

“But I’m—”

“I know you’re in trouble. I’ve been conducting an ongoing investigation. I’m working for someone who will remain nameless for now, for reasons which I’ll explain later. I’m not a cop. I’m not here to hurt you in any way. In fact, I would like to help you.”

“Thanks, but—”

“You’re a person who is very, very afraid, and I understand that.”

“Do you?”

“I know you’re in a desperate situation with the man across the street.”

“I think I’d—”

“Better go? That’s fine. But I have evidence that could get the police involved. I don’t want them handling this. I think it might be in your better interest to leave them out of it.”

“All right.”

“You know, you’ve got to be the one to help yourself here. I can bring some suggestions to the table, but you’ve got to be the one to take real action to change things. That guy has beaten you nearly to death a few times and now he’s waving a gun around. Frankly, I don’t think your life expectancy’s too long at 198 Vandam. I’ve been an investigator for a long, long time and I’ve seen situations like yours before. Nobody ever de-escalates violence on his own. It just gets worse. So, you see, you’re free to leave, but if you do, you’ll never know whether we might’ve been able to help you.”

“I’m listening.”

“If you’re ready to get out of that bad situation over there, then we need to talk. My friends and I will help you on the condition that you level with us. You have to be sincere with us in order to be true to yourself. And I have to measure your sincerity very carefully to determine whether you’re really worthy of our efforts. We’re talking major rescue endeavor here, with obviously some danger in this for us, too, right?”

“Right. He won’t stop at anything.”

“Okay. I’m ready to continue if you are. I have to measure your sincerity now. Trouble is, sincerity is an intangible thing, right?”

“Right.”

“So, to measure an intangible like sincerity, we have to measure the closest almost-tangible thing—sincerity’s closest cousin—and that’s honesty. Do you understand and agree with that?”

“Yes.”

“So measuring honesty means asking some questions I already know the answers to. This gives me a clear reading of your level of honesty. I can then translate that to imply just how sincere you are, understand?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s start with the first page of this investigative manual. Research reveals you are not the person you’ve been claiming to be. Tana Petrich is not your real name. Honesty test question number one: Say your real name.”

“Is that whole file on me?”

“This whole file is my investigative manual, which contains all the information I’ve been able to amass about you since I started this investigation. I need to use this material to determine whether you are being truthful, honest, and sincere tonight.”

“Give me my first initial. Just to show me you really know who I am. Then I’ll tell you.”

“I could do that except that I need for you to be one hundred percent honest. Giving you the first initial would mean that you’re testing me, not the other way around. You see, for a very good reason, for your own safety and out of real concern for your well-being, I’m the one testing you. It takes a more honest person to answer a question truthfully without prompting like that. If you think you’re here to test me, then you can just hit the door. Go ahead. Walk out of here and turn your back on all this effort. It’s your life, young lady. People getting together and trying to help a total stranger in the middle of New York City may seem too weird to grasp. I understand that. It’s okay. Just leave.”

Confined to my bed like a shut-in, I found myself inextricably caught up in this little drama, like an old-time radio soap opera of the mind. Would the girl leave? Would she stay? Was Kent selling the door too aggressively? Tune in next week to find out.

“Okay, but this better not be a trick,” she said. “My name is Sarah.”

“Great start,” said Kent enthusiastically. “You’re doing great! Shake my hand, Sarah. I know that was difficult.”

In my shivering, frazzled mind I could see Kent Perkins, a big Texas smile on his face, extending a warm hand of friendship to the troubled girl. With talent like that, I thought, he could have made millions as a motivational speaker for large California corporations. I suspected, though, that he knew God didn’t like motivational speakers or large California corporations. That was probably why Kent Perkins, instead, had chosen to be a mender of destinies.

“Sarah,” he said. “Now say your last name.”

“Are you sure you’re not the police?”

“That’s a long name,” said Kent. I could hear him getting up out of his chair, walking over to the girl. “Look at this, Sarah. This is my ID. Right here over my name are the words ‘Private Investigator,’ and here on the back of the card it says, ‘Not affiliated with any law enforcement agency.’ It says that for a reason, Sarah. I couldn’t carry this if I was a cop.”

“Okay. It’s Sarah Kenter. That’s Zarah with a ‘Z,’ though it’s pronounced the regular way.”

“Zarah, that took courage, and I appreciate that very much. I
had
been pronouncing your name wrong. Thanks for straightening me out. Now, Zarah, you have to tell me your date of birth. Not Tana Petrich’s, but Zarah Kenter’s.”

“Three twenty-three seventy-seven.”

“Very good, Zarah. Okay. And now one of the toughest questions. What are you running from?”

“You know who I am, so you obviously know about the Brinks robbery in California.”

“Yes, I sure do.”

“Well, they told me nobody’d get hurt. I was horrified when Ben—”

“Ben who?”

“Let’s call him Ben Felch.”

“Okay. Ben Felch. Go ahead.”

“When Ben started shooting. I was an assistant to a Brinks dispatcher. I could’ve stopped it. Now we’re wanted for murder and interstate flight and robbery and, hell, I don’t know what else.”

“That wasn’t your first caper, was it, Zarah?”

“If you’ve really done your research, you know the answer to that, Mr. Perkins.”

“Call me Kent.”

“Kent. I was recruited because I was clean enough to pass the background and get hired at Brinks. I’d only worked in dispatching for a few months before the holdup.”

“Tell me about this Ben Felch. Where’d you meet him?”

“He was working for my dad in a work-release program out of the California Department of Corrections. My family’s in the flower business and dad hired him under a government grant. He was supposed to be working in the greenhouse, taking care of the plants. I found him attractive. I was just sixteen and ready to experience life a lot more than my parents wanted. They would’ve died if they’d known what we were doing. I’d never been with a real man before and I guess I thought I was in love. He got me kind of addicted to him, you know? We did pot, did a few other drugs, and before long I was pretty strung out. He grew enough marijuana back there, out of sight, to bankroll the Brinks operation. One day he showed me a wad of twenties and said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ ”

Zarah Kenter went on to pour her heart out, not without a few tears, to Kent Perkins, and, though she didn’t know it, to me as well. A nightmare decade of abuse, blackmail, hopelessness, and despair. I heard Kent encouraging her to leave Felch now, leave New York immediately. He would help her get out. He had a friend who had a ranch in Texas. He’d once safely hidden Abbie Hoffman there when the feds were searching for him.

“Who’s Abbie Hoffman?” she asked.

“Abbie Hoffman was many things,” said Kent. “One of them was a federal fugitive, not unlike yourself.”

“Did he get away?” she wanted to know.

“Not really,” said Kent.

Not really, I thought. Only a little piece of him got away. Like Joan of Arc, or Davy Crockett, or Anne Frank, or Che Guevara, or Jesus Christ. Only a little piece of the puzzle ever gets away. No point in telling the poor kid now. Hell, I reckoned, we’re all prisoners of Vandam Street. Zarah Kenter certainly was. And here I lay in my narrow, monastic, Father Damien–like bed, confined to the loft like Nero Wolfe, confined by his gargantuan, sedentary buttocks to his brownstone. Like Sherlock Holmes on a cocaine binge, self-imprisoned in his lonely flat on Baker Street with only the fog for a friend. Yes, Zarah, your little friends are full of shit. No matter what our ZIP code happens to be in this world, one way or another, we’re all prisoners of Vandam Street.

I heard her tell Kent that she believed that the abusive, murderous thug she called Ben Felch would be out of town for another day or two. That would give her a little time, she said. She had a few things she had to do before she got back to Kent. Kent didn’t like it. He wanted her to go with him, get the suitcase off the bed, and leave New York now. He’d take her to the airport, buy her a ticket to Texas. As a private investigator who’d finally ferreted out the truth, he was willing to give her a spiritual pass and she didn’t even know it. Maybe he’d “sold the door” too well.