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