Koko (62 page)

Beevers’ eyes shone with his satisfaction in this scheme. For one thing, it got Tim
Underhill out of his hair for a couple of days. Beevers had already asked Conor if
he wanted to go to Milwaukee too, but he had refused. Ben Roehm needed a second carpenter
for a small renovation job, and he had told Conor that Tom Woyzak “wasn’t a problem
anymore.” His niece Ellen had filed for divorce in December. Woyzak had beaten her
up once too often, and was now in a drug and alcohol treatment center.

Mikey surprised Conor by saying, “I’ve been thinking along those lines myself. Do
you want to give it a try, Tim?”

“It could be interesting,” Underhill said.

“Tell me what you think of the newspaper ads first.” Beevers handed Poole the sheet
of paper on which he had printed the messages for the back page of the
Voice:

TIM UNDERHILL—END THE WAR AND COME HOME. CALL HARRY BEEVERS
555-0033.

UNDERHILL—THE GRUNT CAN STOP RUNNING.
555-0033.

“And here’s one of the flyers I had run off.” Beevers stood up and removed the top
sheet from a stack of papers on a bookshelf above his head. “I had three hundred of
these made up at a print shop around the corner. I can put one on every lamppost—he’ll
see it, don’t worry about that.”

On the flyer’s yellow paper was a message in large black letters:

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.

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.

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.

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.

A large sign announcing
WESTERHOLM MEDICAL CENTER
in tasteful, almost unreadable green on brown stood before a large lot. Behind the
lot was a nature preserve. As soon as spring came, this lot would be filled with bulldozers
and excavators. This was the future kingdom of Dr. Sam Stein.

Michael got back into his car and drove home. He had lost
track of what was going on in
Don Giovanni
, and the big voices boomed and cajoled, fighting for air and space. He turned into
his driveway, and the gravel crunched beneath his tires. This was home, he was safe.
Zerlina sang, “In happiness and joy let’s pass our days and nights.” Like a magic
light that could pass through stone, brick, lead, wood, and skin, music streamed through
the world, on its way to somewhere else. Michael drew up before his garage and switched
off the engine. The tape cut off and leaped noisily up into the slot. Michael picked
up the novel beside him and got out of the car. For a moment he saw his wife and Pat
Caldwell looking at him from the living room window. They broke apart as he began
to walk toward the front door.

“The thing is, I like her,” Conor said. “I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but
I not only like her, I think about her a lot. You know what she told me? She said
she likes the way I talk.”

“No kids?” Poole asked.

“Thank God, no. This Woyzak guy never wanted ’em. Kids drove him crazy. But this Woyzak
guy, everything drove him crazy. Didn’t I ever tell you about him?”

Poole shook his head, and Conor ordered another round of drinks and began describing
how he had been reminded of Victor Spitalny as soon as he had met Tom Woyzak. They
were in Donovan’s on the Friday night following Michael’s return from New York on
Monday. On Tuesday night Michael had brought a jumble of clothes in a suitcase to
Conor’s apartment. Every day he drove to his office, where he saw patients and tried
to settle his affairs before returning to South Norwalk.

“What I mean is, nothing really ever disappears. We should have known it’d turn out
to be Spitalny. He was
there.
He was
there in everything.” Conor’s eyes were shining with uncharacteristic inspiration.
“We even talked about him in Washington, remember?”

“I remember. But Beevers was so positive. And I guess I thought Spitalny was dead.
I certainly couldn’t see him calling himself Koko and going out and murdering a bunch
of people.”

Conor nodded. “Well, at least now we’re that far ahead. Beevers says he didn’t get
any responses to his ads yet.”

Poole too had spoken to Beevers, who had spent ten minutes complaining about the way
Tim Underhill had deserted him.

“He’s all pissed off at us, man.”

“He’s pissed off at everybody.”

“I didn’t know about Vinh, though.”

“I guess
we
didn’t know
Vinh
.”

Beevers was still furious that Poole had told Maggie Lah about Underhill, for Maggie
had told Vinh.

“So what are they doing?” Conor asked. “Are Underhill and Vinh and Vinh’s kid all
living in the restaurant?”

“I don’t think so. I think Vinh and his daughter live with relatives. I guess Underhill
used to help Vinh’s family, back in the old days, and Vinh is repaying the favor.”

“I hope your thing works out all right, man,” Conor said.

As soon as Michael had seen Pat Caldwell standing beside Judy in his window, he had
known that his marriage had reached its final stages. Judy had hardly been able to
speak to him, and had soon retreated to her bedroom. Pat, grimacing with the difficulty
of her position and managing by her very sympathy to suggest that she would speak
privately with him later, had said that Judy felt hurt and betrayed by something that
had happened between them. She no longer wanted to stay alone in the house with him.
Pat was there to supply moral courage and womanly support—and to be witness to what
Judy perceived as her humiliation.