gonna rest on my morals. I did everything these guys did—the buck passes here. Come on.”
“Shut up, Conor,” Ellen said.
Murphy looked as though he wanted to cover his face with his hands. All the policemen watched him as they would a dangerous animal.
Finally Murphy pointed at Maggie, Poole, and Underhill. “Put these three with me,” he said, and charged toward the crowd like a bull in a bullring. More flashes of light exploded. As soon as he reached the gap in the rope, the crowd broke apart before him.
“Put them in the lieutenant’s car,” said the dandy. “I’ll take Harry Truman with me.”
Still red-faced but calmer than he had been in the terminal, Murphy had removed their handcuffs before they finally got into the backseat of his car. One of the young policemen was driving them across the Whitestone Bridge, and Murphy had twisted sideways to listen to them. Every few minutes his radio crackled, and cold air poured in through the imperfectly sealed windows. Another policeman was driving Michael’s car, which they had taken from the airport parking lot and brought alongside Murphy’s, back to the precinct house.
“On the plane?” Murphy asked. He was no longer as angry as he had been inside the terminal, but he was still suspicious.
“That’s right,” Poole said. “I suppose that right up until then Maggie and I had been thinking that we were still looking for Victor Spitalny. I guess I knew the truth, but I couldn’t see it—I didn’t want to see it. We had all the evidence we needed, all the pieces, but they just hadn’t been put together.”
“Until I mentioned Babar,” Maggie said. “Then we both remembered.”
Poole nodded. He was not about to tell the policeman about his dream of Robbie holding up a lantern beside a dark road.
“What did you remember?”
“The song,” Maggie said. “Michael told me what the man in Singapore and the stewardess said to him, and I—I knew what they had heard.”
“The man in Singapore? The stewardess?”
Poole explained about Lisa Mayo and the owner of the bungalow where the Martinsons had been killed. “The man in Singapore had heard Koko singing something that sounded to him like
“And I knew what it was,” Maggie said. “The song of the elephants. From
Poole passed the book he had taken from the back of his car over the top of the seat.
“What the hell is this?” Murphy asked.
“It’s how Koko got his name,” Underhill said. “I think there were other meanings, but this is the first one. The most important one.”
Murphy looked at the page to which the book had been opened. “This is how he got the name?”
“Read the words,” Poole said, and pointed to the place on the page where the song was printed.
Murphy read from the yellow songsheet printed on the page.
“And then we knew,” Poole said. “It was Dengler. Probably we knew long before that. We might have known as soon as we went into his mother’s house.”
“There is a serious drawback to that theory,” Murphy said. “Private First Class Manuel Orosco Dengler has been dead since 1969. The army positively identified his body. And after the army identified the body, it was shipped back home for burial. Do you think his parents would have accepted someone else’s body?”
“His father was dead, and his mother was crazy enough to have accepted the body of a monkey, if that’s what they sent her. But because of the extensive mutilation the body had undergone, the army would have strongly advised her to accept their identification,” Poole said. “She never looked at the body.”
“So whose body
“Victor Spitalny,” Underhill said. “Koko’s first victim. I wrote the whole scenario in advance—I explained what to do and how to do it. It was a story I used to call ‘The Running Grunt.’ Dengler got Spitalny to join him in Bangkok, killed him, switched dogtags and papers, made sure he was so mutilated nobody could tell who he was, and then took off in the middle of the confusion.”
“You mean, you put the idea in his head?” Murphy asked.
“He would have worked out something else if I hadn’t told that story,” Underhill said. “But I think that he used my name because he took the idea of killing Spitalny and deserting from me. He called himself by my name in various places after that, and he caused a lot of rumors that went around about me.”
“But why did he do it?” Murphy asked. “Why do you think he killed this Spitalny character—in order to desert under another identity?”
Poole and Underhill glanced at each other. “Well, that’s part of it,” Underhill said.
“That’s most of it, probably,” Poole said. “We don’t really know about the rest.”
“What rest?”
“Something that happened in the war,” Poole said. “Only three people were there—Dengler, Spitalny, and Harry Beevers.”
“Tell me about the running grunt,” Murphy said.
2
A man with deep broken wrinkles in his forehead and an air of aggrieved self-righteousness jumped up from a chair in the hallway outside the lieutenant’s office as soon as Poole, Underhill, Maggie, and Murphy reached the top of the stairs. A cold cigar was screwed into the side of his mouth. He stared at them, plucked the cigar from his mouth, and stepped sideways to look behind them. The sound of the next group came up the stairs, and the man thrust his hands in his pockets and nodded at Murphy as he waited with visible impatience for the others to appear.
Ellen Woyzak, Conor Linklater, and the young detective in the blue coat and hat reached the top of the steps and turned toward Murphy’s office. The man said, “Hey!” and bent over the railing to see if anyone else was coming. “Where is he?”
Murphy let the others into his office and motioned for the man to join them. “Mr. Partridge? Come in here, please?”
Poole had thought the man was another policeman, but saw now that he was not. The man looked angry, as if someone had picked his pocket.
“What’s the point? You said he was gonna be here, but he ain’t here.”
Murphy stepped out and held open his door. Partridge shrugged and came slowly down the hall. When he walked into the office he scowled at Poole and the others as if he had found them in his own living room. His clothes were wrinkled and his unpleasant blue-green eyes bulged out of his loose, large-featured face. “So now what?” He shrugged again.
“Please sit down,” Murphy said. The young detective took some folding chairs from behind a filing cabinet and began opening them up. When everyone was seated, Murphy perched on the edge of his desk and said, “This gentleman is Mr. Bill Partridge. He is one of the managers of a YMCA men’s residence, and I asked him to join us here this afternoon.”
“Yeah, and now I gotta leave,” Partridge said. “You got nothing for me. I got work to do.”
“One of the rooms under Mr. Partridge’s management was rented to a gentleman calling himself Timothy Underhill,” Murphy said, with more patience than he had displayed at the airport.
“Who skipped out,” said Partridge.
