Poole felt as though he had just stuck his finger in a socket.
“So when I saw in the paper about Manny Dengler dying over there and Vic running away, I thought there must be more to it. So did most people, most people who knew Manny Dengler, anyhow. But nobody expected to get any postcards from him. I mean …”
When Poole hung up, Underhill was staring at him with eyes like lanterns.
“They knew each other,” Poole said. “They went to school together. According to Mack Simroe, Dengler was the only kid who was even more out of it than Spitalny.”
Underhill shook his head in wonder. “I never even saw them talk to each other, except that once.”
“Spitalny arranged to meet Dengler in Bangkok. He set it up in advance. He was planning to kill him—they worked out a place to meet, just the way he did with the journalists fourteen years later.”
“It was the first Koko murder.”
“Without the card.”
“Because it was supposed to look like mob violence,” Underhill said.
“Goddamn,” Poole said. He dialed Debbie Tusa’s number again, and the same teenage boy yelled, “HEY, MOM! WHO IS THIS GUY?”
“I give up, who are you?” she said when she picked up.
Poole explained who he was and why he was calling again.
“Well, sure Vic knew Manny Dengler. Everybody did. Not to speak to, but to see. I think Vic used to tease him now and then—it was sort of cruel, and I didn’t like it. I thought you knew all about it! That’s why it seemed so mixed up to me. I couldn’t figure out what they were doing together. Nicky, my husband, thought Vic stabbed Manny or something, but that has to be crazy. Because Vic wouldn’t have done anything like that.”
Poole arranged to meet her for lunch the next day.
“Spitalny came into our unit and found Dengler there,” Underhill was saying to Maggie. “But everything has changed about Dengler—he’s loved by everybody. Did he talk to him? Did he make fun of him? What did he do?”
“Dengler talked to
“When they came out of the cave,” Underhill said, “didn’t Dengler say something like ‘Don’t worry about it? Whatever it was, it was a long time ago.’ I thought he meant—”
“I did too—whatever Beevers did in there. I thought he was telling Spitalny to cut himself loose from it.”
“But he was saying it was a long time since Milwaukee,” Underhill said.
“He meant both,” Maggie said. “Backwards and forwards, remember? And he knew that Spitalny wouldn’t be able to handle whatever happened to all of them in there. He knew who Koko was right from the start.” Suddenly Maggie yawned, and closed her eyes like a cat. “Excuse me. Too much excitement. I think I’ll go next door and go to bed.”
“See you in the morning, Maggie,” Underhill said.
Poole walked Maggie to the door, opened it for her, and said “Goodnight.” On impulse he stepped out into the hallway after her.
Maggie raised her eyebrows. “Walking me home?”
“I guess I am.”
Maggie moved down the hallway to her own door. The corridor was noticeably colder than the rooms.
“Tomorrow the Denglers,” Maggie said, putting the key in the lock. She seemed very small, standing in the immense dim corridor. He nodded. The look she gave him deepened and changed in quality. Poole suddenly knew how it would feel to put his arms around Maggie Lah, how her body would fit into his. Then he felt like George Spitalny, drooling over Maggie.
“Tomorrow the Denglers,” he said.
She looked up at him oddly: he could not tell if what he thought he had just seen, the increase in weight and gravity, had been real. It had been like being touched. Poole thought that he wanted Maggie to touch him so badly that he had probably invented everything.
“Want to come in?” she asked.
“I don’t want to keep you up,” Poole said.
She smiled and disappeared around her door.
6
Harry Beevers stood on Mott Street, looking around and thinking that he needed a killing box: someplace where he could watch Koko until it was time to either capture him or kill him. Spitalny would have to be led into a trap where Harry controlled the only way in or out. Harry considered that he was good at setting up killing boxes. Killing boxes were a proven skill. Like Koko, he had to pick his own battleground—draw his victim out into the territory he had chosen.
Some of Harry’s flyers had been ripped off and thrown away, but most of them still called out from lampposts and shop windows. He began to walk south down Mott Street, sharing it on this cold day with only a few hurtling Chinese, heavily bundled and chalky with the cold. All he had to do was find a restaurant that looked quiet enough for his initial rendezvous with Spitalny—he would soothe him with food—and then work out where to take him afterwards. His apartment was out, though in some ways its seclusion was perfect. But he had to take Koko someplace which would in itself constitute an alibi. A dark alley behind a police station would be just about perfect.
Beevers could see himself slumping out of the alley like some heroic Rambo, heavy-shouldered, panting, spattered with his enemy’s blood, gesturing a crowd of stupefied officers toward Spitalny’s body—There’s the man you’re looking for. Jumped me while I was bringing him in.
He had to buy a good knife, that was one thing he had to do. And a pair of handcuffs. You could snap a pair of handcuffs on a man before he knew what was happening. Then you could do what you liked to him. And unlock the handcuffs before the body hit the floor.
On the corner of Bayard Street he hesitated, then turned east toward Confucius Plaza. He came to Elizabeth Street, turned in and walked back north a few steps before deciding it was all wrong—nothing but tenements and murky little Chinese businesses. Koko would see it for a trap right away—he’d know a killing box when he saw one. Harry went back to Bayard Street and continued on toward Bowery.
This was a lot more promising.
Across Bowery stood Confucius Plaza, an immense office and apartment complex. On one corner stood a bank shaped like a modernist pagoda in red lacquer, across the street a Chinese cinema. Cars swept unendingly around a long traffic island that extended from Bowery around the corner into Division Street. At the apex of the traffic island was a tall statue of Confucius.
This was too public for his meeting with Koko. He looked across the street to the Plaza. A lower building, of perhaps fifteen stories, fronted Bowery, blocking from view the lower half of the taller residential tower. The buildings had a slightly molded look that carried the eye along, and behind them, Harry thought, must be a terrace or a plaza—trees and benches.
And that gave it to him—at least half of it. Into his mind had come the image of the park bordered by Mulberry and Baxter streets near the western end of Chinatown. Now this park would be empty, but in the spring and summer the little park was crowded with lawyers, bailiffs, judges, and policemen taking a break from their duties. This was Columbus Park, and Harry knew it well from his early days as a litigator—he had never really connected it to Chinatown in his mind. Columbus Park was an adjunct to the row of government buildings lined up along Centre Street.
The Criminal Courts building stood between Centre and Baxter at the top end of Columbus Park; down at the bottom end was the smaller, more prisonlike structure of the Federal Courthouse; and further south, between Worth and Pearl streets, a block from the park, was the even more penitential structure, grim and dirty and oozing gloom at all seasons, of the New York County Courthouse.
Harry instantly discarded the notion of meeting Koko in a restaurant. He would ask him to meet in Columbus Park. If Koko had moved into Chinatown, he would know the park by now, and if he had not, the idea of meeting in a park would serve to make him feel secure. It was perfect. It would look good in the book too, and play beautifully in
