Koko

NEED YOUR NOBILITY

AND PATIENCE NOW

CALL THE LIEUTENANT

555-00333

3

Mike Poole nodded at the flyer, said something agreeable, and put it down.

“Think it’ll work?” Conor asked him.

“It might,” Poole said. He looked only half awake. Conor wondered what had happened between Mike and Judy since Tina’s funeral, but he didn’t really have to know the particulars to know that it was coming apart. Back in Washington those few months ago, he would never have seen these signs or put them together in this way. Back in Washington, the only loser in a club of successful men, self-pity had made him drink himself into a stupor. He looked at the glass in his hand and carefully set it down on the table. There was no need for it now. He hoped Mikey would come out of it all right, would do something. Doing something was pretty much the only way out of a situation like Mike’s. It almost didn’t matter what you did.

For a moment Conor considered the idea of inviting Mike to stay with him in South Norwalk and trying to get a job as a kind of unpaid assistant to Ben Roehm—banging on nails and carrying sheetrock would be great therapy. But that was as impossible as it would be for him to go on hospital rounds alongside Mike. Anyhow, Conor hoped that Mike would go along with Beevers’ plan and spend a day or two out in the Midwest looking for Spitalny’s tracks. Anything he did would help him.

“As of now,” Beevers was saying, “this is my full-time job. Once the ads run and the flyers are up, I’m staying here to man the phone. Tim can go to Milwaukee—I think that’s an essential part of our strategy. The three of you should get going on that as soon as possible, and I’m the logical man to stay here.”

“You’re planning to tell us when anything happens, aren’t you, Boss?” Conor asked.

“Absolutely.” Beevers put one hand over his face and shook his head. Then he pointed at Mike with his glass. “What did he do? Ask yourself that. Did he call me right after he found Tim?” He turned to Underhill. “Did he even give me a chance to talk to you? When you guys ask questions, make sure you’re asking the right person.”

“I arranged things so that we could all arrive back in America as quickly as possible,” Mike said. “I’m sorry that you feel cheated of something.”

“Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if you had seen me first, instead of Michael,” Tim said.

“The same thing would have happened,” Harry said. His face had turned a hot, unpleasant shade of red. “I’m just making a point, that’s all. Don’t get paranoid.”

When Mikey decided that he’d had enough and stood up to go, Conor got up too.

“We’ll do some of the flyers this afternoon,” Beevers said. His voice was tight and unhappy. “You guys get to go back to fresh air and clean streets, but there’s work to do here. I’ll let you know if anything happens, but I think he’ll chew on it for a week or so before he makes his move.”

“And I’ll arrange tickets to Milwaukee,” Poole said. “We’ll go as soon as I can get away.”

Conor hated to leave Tim Underhill in that apartment.

They went outside into air that seemed surprisingly springlike, and the warmth of the day as well as what he had been thinking prompted Conor to risk making a fool of himself. “Look, I don’t know why I should say this, Mikey, but if you need a place to stay or anything, just give me a call, you know? You can always stay with me if you need a place.”

Mike didn’t laugh at him—he stuck out his hand and gave him a good handshake. “Why don’t you come along on this trip to Milwaukee?”

“Bread, you know,” Conor said. “Gotta get that bread. I wish I could, though. But really … this whole thing … don’t you think it’s time to hang it up and tell everything to that cop? We’re just following Beevers around, and that’s no good, man.”

“It’ll only be a couple more days, Conor. I’m in a funny period anyhow, and this gives me something to do.”

Conor nodded, wishing he knew what to say or the way to say it, and they parted. After a few steps toward the subway, Conor turned around and watched Mikey walking in the sunlight toward Ninth Avenue. He wondered if he knew where he was going, or if he was really going anywhere at all, and for a second felt like rushing after him.

4

Poole realized that he could walk to the garage on University Place. It would be an enjoyable way to delay his arrival back in Westerholm, a free zone given him by the unseasonal weather. Right now a free zone seemed welcome.

He crossed Ninth Avenue and turned right toward 23rd Street. It occurred to him that he could walk down through the Village, cross Houston Street, and go to SoHo. Maggie Lah was probably still at Saigon. It would be interesting to see what she and Vinh were doing with the restaurant. Poole decided against doing this, but wondered if Maggie would be interested in going to Milwaukee with Underhill and himself. She might be able to identify Spitalny from photographs at his parents’ house. A positive identification from Maggie would be helpful when they made their case to the police. His thoughts drifted along pleasantly as he walked down Ninth Avenue toward Greenwich Village.

5

Maggie, in the meantime, had decided in the middle of a conversation to tell Vinh that the writer Timothy Underhill, Tina’s friend in Vietnam, had secretly come back to America and was now staying in Harry Beevers’ apartment. As far as Maggie was concerned, this information was another proof of Beevers’ instability. She knew that Vinh detested Beevers, and assumed that he would feel as she did about his attempting to continue his private efforts to find the man who had murdered Tina. She also knew that Vinh could be trusted with any secret told him. But his response startled her—he stared at her for a long time, then asked her to repeat what she had just said. All the rest of the afternoon he worked in silence, and around five o’clock, just before Maggie left, said, “I must call him,” and put down his blueprints and went to the telephone in the kitchen.

6

Michael rolled up his windows, put into the tape deck a cassette of Murray Perahia playing Mozart piano concertos, and rolled out onto University Place. Music of great delicacy and melancholy began to come through the speakers. It was the wrong music. Michael ejected the tape, put it back in its case, opened another, and fed it to the machine. The first bars of Don Giovanni filled the car. The opera would get him home.

On the expressway into Westchester County he remembered the Babar books in his trunk—why had he put them there?

Because he wanted to have them with him if he did not go back to Westerholm. He had not wanted to lose them, and if Judy found them she would throw them out.

But an hour later here he was, home again, the good Dr. Poole, turning off at the Westerholm exit, winding in his little car through streets without signs or lights and lined with hedges, beneath branches that would soon begin to bud, across Westerholm’s Main Street with its branches of Laura Ashley and Baskin Robbins, the garage where the proprietor “dialogued” with you about Scientology while he filled your tank, then past the General Washington Inn and the duck pond, “O misery misery, Lascia le donne? Pazzo!” Don Giovanni bawled, “Leave women alone? You’re mad—why I need them more than the bread I eat, than the air I breathe.” On impulse Michael did not turn into his street but kept on going until he had come to the site of Sam Stein’s new medical center.