Koko (7 page)

“Hand me my briefcase, Tina. It’s somewhere back there against the wall.” Beevers
leaned forward from the side of the bed and extended his arm. Tina groped under the
table for the case. “Take all day, there’s no rush.”

“You pushed your chair over it when you got up,” Pumo said, now invisible beneath
the table. He surfaced with the briefcase in both hands, and held it out.

Beevers put the case on his lap and snapped it open.

Poole leaned over and looked in at a stack of reprints of a familiar page from
Stars and Stripes.
Stapled to it were copies of other newspaper articles. Beevers took out the stack
of papers and said, “There’s one for each of you. Michael is familiar with some of
this material already, but I thought we should all have copies of everything. That
way everybody’ll know exactly what we’re talking about.” He handed the first sheaf
of stapled papers to Conor. “Settle down and pay attention to this.”

“Sieg Heil,”
Conor said, and took the chair beside Michael Poole.

Beevers handed stapled pages to Poole and Pumo, placed the final set beside him on
the bed, closed his case and set it on the floor.

Pumo said, “Take all day, there’s no rush.”

“Touchy, touchy.” Beevers put his papers on his lap, picked them up with both hands,
squinted at them. He set them back in his lap and reached over to his suit jacket
to remove his glasses case from the chest pocket. From the case he took a pair of
oversized glasses with thin, oval tortoise-shell frames. Beevers put the empty case
on top of his suit jacket, then put the glasses on his nose. Again he inspected the
papers.

Poole wondered how often during the day Beevers went through this little charade of
lawyerly behavior.

Beevers looked up from his papers. Bow tie, suspenders, big glasses. “First of all,
mes amis
, I want to say that we’ve all had some fun, and we’ll have a lot more before we leave,
but”—a weighty glance at Conor—“we’re in this room together because we shared some
important experiences.
And
 … we survived these experiences because we could depend on each other.”

Beevers glanced down at the papers in his lap, and Pumo said, “Get to the point, Harry.”

“If you don’t understand how much teamwork
is
the point, you’re missing everything,” Beevers said. He looked up again. “Please
read the articles. There are three of them, one from
Stars and Stripes
, one from the
Straits Times
of Singapore, and the third from the
Bangkok Post.
My brother George, who is a career soldier, knew a little bit about the Koko incidents,
and when the name caught his eye in the
Stars and Stripes
piece, he sent it to me. Then he asked my other, older brother, Sonny—he’s a career
sergeant too, over in Manila—to check out all the Asian papers he could locate. George
did the same on Okinawa—together they could look at nearly all the English language
papers published in the Far East.”

“You have two brothers who’re lifer sergeants?” Conor asked. Sonny and George, lifers
in Manila and Okinawa? From a Mount Avenue family?

Beevers looked at him impatiently. “Eventually these other two pieces turned up in
Singapore and Bangkok papers, and that’s it. I did some research on my own, but read
this stuff first. As you’ll see, our boy’s been busy.”

Michael Poole took a sip of his drink and scanned the topmost article. On January
28, 1981, the corpse of a forty-two-year-old English tourist in Singapore, a free-lance
writer named Clive McKenna, had been found, his eyes and ears bloodily removed, by
a gardener in an overgrown section of the grounds of the Goodwood Park Hotel. A playing
card with the word Koko written on its face had been placed in Mr. McKenna’s mouth.
On February 5, 1982, an appraiser had entered a supposedly empty bungalow just off
Orchard Road in the same city to discover lying face-up and side by side on the living
room floor the bodies of Mr. William Martinson of St. Louis, a sixty-one-year-old
executive of a heavy equipment country active in Asia, and Mrs. Barbara Martinson,
fifty-five, also of St. Louis, who had been accompanying her husband on a business
trip. Mr. Martinson lacked his eyes and ears; in his mouth was a playing card with
the word Koko scrawled across its face.

The
Straits Times
piece, dated three days later, added the information that while the bodies of the
Martinsons had been discovered less than forty-eight hours after their deaths, Clive
McKenna’s body had gone undiscovered for perhaps as long as five days. Roughly ten
days separated the two sets of murders. The Singapore police had many leads, and an
arrest was considered imminent.

The clipping from the
Bangkok Post
, dated July 7, 1982, was considerably more emotional than the others. F
RENCH WRITERS SLAIN
, the headline read. Outrage and dismay were shared by all decent citizens. The provinces
of both tourism and literature had been savaged. Unwelcome events of a violent nature
were particularly threatening to the hotel industry. The shock to morality—therefore
to trade—had potential consequences far beyond the hotel industry, affecting taxicabs,
hire-car firms, restaurants, jewelers, massage parlors, museums and temples, tattooists,
airport staff and baggage handlers, etc. That the crime was almost certainly the work
of undesirable aliens, committed by as well as upon foreigners, had to be not only
remembered but reiterated. Police of all districts were engaged in a commendable effort
of mutual cooperation designed to root out the whereabouts of the assassins within
days. Political hostility to Thailand could not be discounted.

Cocooned within this oddly formal hysteria was the information that Marc Guibert,
48, and Yves Danton, 49, both journalists living in Paris, had been found in their
suite at the Sheraton
Bangkok by a maid on her normal morning cleaning detail. They were tied to chairs
with their throats cut and their eyes and ears removed. The two men had arrived in
Thailand the previous afternoon and were not known to have received any messages or
guests. Cards from an ordinary deck of Malaysian playing cards, the word, or name,
Koko printed by hand on each, had been inserted into the dead men’s mouths.

Tina and Conor continued to read, Tina with an expression of feigned detachment, Conor
in deep concentration. Harry Beevers sat upright, tapping a pencil against his front
teeth, his eyes out of focus.

Printed by hand.
Michael saw exactly how: the letters carved in so deeply you could read the raised
grooves on the back of the card. Poole could remember the first time he had seen one
of the cards protruding from the mouth of a tiny dead man in black pajamas—point for
our side, he’d thought, okay.

Pumo said, “The goddamned war still isn’t over, I guess.”

Conor looked up from his copy of the Bangkok clipping. “Hey, it could be anybody,
man. These guys here say it’s some political thing. To hell with this, anyhow.”

Beevers said, “Do you seriously think it’s a coincidence that this murderer writes
the name Koko on a playing card which he puts into his victims’ mouths?”

“Yeah,” Conor said. “Sure it could be. Or it could be politics, like this guy says.”

“But the fact is, it almost has to be our Koko,” Pumo said slowly. He spread the three
clippings out beside him on the table, as if seeing them all at once made coincidence
even more unlikely. “These were the only articles your brothers could find? No follow-up?”

Beevers shook his head. He then bent over, picked his glass up from the floor, and
made a silent, mocking toast to them without drinking.

“You’re pretty cheerful about this,” Pumo said.

“Someday, my friends, this is going to be a hell of a story. I’m serious, I can definitely
see book rights in this thing. Beyond that, I can see film rights. But to tell you
the truth, I’d settle for a mini-series.”

Conor covered his face with his hands, and Poole said, “Now I know you’re nuts.”

Beevers turned to them with an unblinking gaze. “Some day
I’ll want you to remember who first said that we could all see a lot of money out
of this. If we handle it right.
Mucho dinero
.”

“Hallelujah,” Conor said. “The Lost Boss is gonna make us rich.”

“Consider the facts.”
Beevers held up a palm like a stop sign while he sipped from his glass. “A law school
student who does our data-gathering did some research on my instructions—on the firm’s
time, so we don’t get billed for it. He went through a year’s worth of half a dozen
major metropolitan papers and the wire services. Net result? Apart of course from
St. Louis stories about the Martinsons, there has never been any news story in this
country about Koko or these murders. And the stories in St. Louis papers didn’t mention
the playing cards. They didn’t mention Koko.”

“Is there any possible connection between the victims?” Michael asked.

“
Consider the facts.
An English tourist in Singapore—our researcher looked up McKenna, and he wrote a
travel book about Australia-New Zealand, a couple of thrillers, and a book called
Your Dog Can Live Longer!
With an exclamation point. Maybe he was doing research in Singapore. Who knows? The
Martinsons were a straight Middle-American business couple. His firm sold a load of
bulldozers and cranes throughout the Far East. Then we have two print journalists,
Frenchmen who work for
L’Express.
Guibert and Danton went to Bangkok for the massage parlors. They were longtime friends
who took a
vacances
together every couple of years. They weren’t on an assignment in Bangkok, they were
just cutting up.”

“An Englishmen, two Frenchmen, and two Americans,” Michael said.

“A pretty clear example of random selection,” Beevers said. “I think these people
were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were shopping or sitting at a
bar, and they found themselves talking to a plausible American guy with a lot of stories
who eventually took them off somewhere quiet and wasted them. The original Mr. Wrong.
The All-American psychopath.”

“He didn’t mutilate Martinson’s wife,” Michael said.

“Yeah, he just killed her,” Beevers said. “You want mutilations every time? Maybe
he just took men’s ears because he fought against men in Vietnam.”

“Okay,” Conor said. “Say it’s our Koko. Then what?” He
looked almost unwillingly toward Michael and shrugged. “I mean, I ain’t going to no
cops or nothing. I got nothing to say to them.”

Beevers leaned forward and fixed Conor with the stare of a man attempting to hypnotize
a snake. “I agree with you absolutely.”

“You agree with me?”

“We have nothing to say to the police. At this point, we don’t even know with absolute
certainty that Koko is Tim Underhill.” He straightened up and looked at Poole with
the trace of a smile tugging at his mouth. “Celebrated or not-so-celebrated thriller
writer and Singapore resident.”

Every man in the room but Beevers all but closed his eyes.

“Are his books really nuts?” Conor finally said. “You remember all that crazy stuff
he used to talk about? That book?”

“ ‘The Running Grunt,’ ” Pumo said. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard he published
a couple novels—he talked about it so much I figured he’d never do it.”

“He did it, though,” Poole said. Without wanting to be, he was surprised, even dismayed
that Tina had not read any of Underhill’s novels. “It was called
A Beast in View
when it came out.”

Beevers was watching Poole expectantly, his thumbs tucked behind his rosy suspenders.

“So you really do think it’s Underhill?” Poole asked.

“Consider the facts,”
Beevers said. “Obviously the same person killed McKenna, the Martinsons, and the
two French journalists. So we have a serial murderer who identifies himself by writing
the name Koko on a playing card inserted into the mouths of his victims. What does
that name mean?”

Pumo said, “It’s the name of a volcano in Hawaii. Can we go see Jimmy Stewart now?”

“Underhill told me ‘Koko’ was the name of a song,” Conor said.

“ ‘Koko’ is the name of lots of things, among them one of the few pandas in captivity,
a Hawaiian volcano, a princess of Thailand, and jazz songs by Duke Ellington and Charlie
Parker. There was even a dog named Koko in the Dr. Sam Sheppard murder case. But none
of that means a thing. Koko means
us
—it doesn’t mean anything else.” Beevers crossed his arms over his chest and looked
around at all of them. “And I wasn’t in Singapore or Thailand last year. Were you,
Michael?
Consider the facts.
McKenna was killed right after the Iranian hostages came back to parades and cover
stories—came back as heroes. Did you see that a Vietnam
vet in Indiana flipped out and killed some people around the same time? Hey, am I
telling you something new? How did you feel?”

The others said nothing.

“Me too,” Beevers said. “I didn’t want to feel that, but I felt it. I resented what
they got for just being hostages. That vet in Indiana had the same feelings, and they
pushed him over the edge. What do you suppose happened to Underhill?”

“Or whoever it was,” Poole said.

Beevers grinned at him.

“Look, I think this whole thing is nuts in the first place,” said Pumo, “but did you
ever consider the possibility that Victor Spitalny might be Koko? Nobody’s seen him
since he deserted Dengler in Bangkok fifteen years ago. He could still be living over
there.”

Conor surprised Poole by saying, “Spitalny’s gotta be dead. He
drank
that shit, man.”

Poole kept quiet.

“And there was one more Koko incident after Spitalny disappeared in Bangkok,” Beevers
said. “Even if the original Koko had a copycat, I think good old Victor is in the
clear. No matter where he is.”

“I just wish I could talk to Underhill,” Pumo said, and Poole silently agreed. “I
always liked Tim—I liked him a hell of a lot. You know, if I didn’t have to work out
that mess in my kitchen, I’d be halfway tempted to get on a plane and see if I could
find him. Maybe we could help him out, do something for him.”