Koko (70 page)

Michael too had been waiting to ask this question.

After their dinner—“Put some of the ketchup on your kielbasa, Maggie, it’s what we
have here instead of soy sauce”—Mrs. Spitalny had finally gone upstairs and brought
back from wherever they had been cached her pictures of Victor. Both Spitalnys had
resisted showing these photographs, but when they had arrived George had taken charge,
declaring some of them useless, others ridiculous, a few too ugly to be shown. In
the end, they had been shown three photographs: one of a confused-looking boy of eight
or nine on a bicycle, one of a teenage Victor leaning against the hood of an old black
Dodge, and the third the standard end-of-basic-training yearbook photograph.

None of these precisely had resembled the Victor Spitalny remembered by Poole and
Underhill. It was something of a shock that Victor Spitalny had ever looked as innocent
as the boy in the warrior photograph. Leaning against the car with his arms crossed
over his T-shirt, he looked surly but proud, for once in control of himself. In his
pose was a long history of Elvis-worship. Oddly, it was the picture of the little
boy that had most evoked the Victor Spitalny of Vietnam.

“Could you recognize him?” Michael asked.

Maggie nodded, but very slowly. “It had to be him. It was very dark in the loft, and
the face in my memory has been getting vaguer and vaguer—but I’m pretty sure it was
him. Also, the man I saw was crazy, and the boy in the pictures didn’t look crazy.
But if I were a boy and had that man for a father, I’d be crazy too. He thought the
worst thing about his son’s being a deserter was the injury it gave to his own ego.”

“You have those telephone numbers?” Underhill asked.

She nodded again. George and Margaret Spitalny had looked up the numbers of Bill Hopper
and Mack Simroe, both of them
now married, living in their old neighborhood and working in the Valley, and of Deborah
Maczik Tusa. Tomorrow they would rent a car to go back to the South Side. Poole remembered
the unfocused, inward-gazing expression of the unattractive little boy on his bicycle.
Desperate
, someone had said (probably Maggie): that was why the photo of the eight-year-old
Victor Spitalny looked more like the man they had known than the more adult photographs
they had been shown. Only in the face of the boy on the bicycle, with his protruding
ears and big adult front teeth in his child’s face, could you see his desperation.

Back in the double room, Underhill took off the black wide-brimmed hat and long black
coat he must have picked up on Canal Street, and Poole called downstairs and ordered
what looked like the best red wine on the Pforzheimer’s list, a 1974 Chateau Talbot,
and a Sprite for Underhill. They all wanted something to take the taste of their dinner
from their mouths.

“You even put ketchup on your cabbage,” Maggie said to Tim.

“I just asked myself, what would Conor Linklater do if he were here?”

“Who do we call first?” Michael asked. “Debbie, or one of the boys?”

“Would he have written to her?”

“Possible,” Poole said, and dialed Debbie Tusa’s number.

A teenage boy answered the phone and said, “You want my mom? Hey, Mom! Mom! A guy
on the phone!”

“Who’s this?” asked a tired voice a moment later. Poole could hear a television set
bellowing in the background.

He introduced himself and briefly explained what he was doing.

“Who?”

“Vic Spitalny. I believe you used to go out with him when you both attended Rufus
King High School.”

She said nothing for a moment. “Oh, my God. Who are you again?”

Poole again recited his name and history.

“And where did you learn my name?”

“I’ve just been with Victor’s parents.”

“Vic’s parents,” she said. “George and Margaret. Well, well. I haven’t thought about
that poor guy in about ten years, I bet.”

“So you haven’t heard anything from him since he went into the service.”

“Since long before that, Doctor. He dropped out of school in our senior year, and
I had been going out with Nick, that’s the guy I married, for a year already. Nick
and I split up three years ago. How come you’re interested in Vic Spitalny?”

“He kind of slipped out of sight. I’m interested in what happened to him. Why did
you call him ‘that poor guy’ just now?”

“I guess that’s pretty much what he was. I went out with him, after all, so I never
thought he was as bad as the other kids did. In fact I thought he was kind of sweet,
but … Vic wasn’t what you’d call a real oddball, there was at least one guy who was
worse off than what he was, it was just, nobody would give him a chance. He was kind
of shy—he loved working on his car. But I hated going to his house.”

“Why?”

“Old George’s tongue used to drop out of his mouth the second I set foot on the sidewalk—he
was always
touching
me. Ugh. I could see what he was doing to Vic—he just cut him down, all the time.
I just couldn’t take it anymore, eventually. Then Vic dropped out of school. He was
flunking a lot of courses, anyway. And he got drafted.”

“You never heard from him after that?”

“I just heard
about
him,” she said. “It was in all the papers, when he deserted. Pictures and everything.
Right before Nick and me got married. There was Vic on the front page of the
Sentinel.
Second section. All that stuff about his running away when that Dengler guy was killed—everything
about that was
weird.
It was even on TV that night, but I still didn’t believe it. Vic wouldn’t do anything
like that. It all seemed so mixed
up
to me. When the army guys came around after that—you know, investigating—I said,
you guys made a mistake. You got it wrong.”

“What do you think happened, then?”

“I don’t know. I guess I think he’s dead.”

Room service arrived. Underhill let Maggie taste and approve the wine, tipped the
waiter, and brought Michael a glass just as he finished his conversation with Debbie
Tusa. The wine immediately dissolved the greasy taste of the sausage.

“Cheers,” Maggie said.

“She doesn’t even think he deserted.”

“His mother doesn’t either,” Maggie said. Poole looked at her in surprise. She must
have picked up this information on her Maggie-radar.

Bill Hopper, one of Spitalny’s high school friends, said in the course of Michael’s
short conversation with him that he knew nothing about Victor Spitalny, had never
liked him, and didn’t want to know anything about him. Vic Spitalny was a disgrace
to his parents and to Milwaukee. Bill Hopper was of the opinion that George Spitalny,
with whom he worked at the Glax Corporation, was one hell of a good man who had deserved
a better son than that. He went on for a time, then told Poole to get off his case,
and hung up.

“Bill Hopper says our boy was a sicko, and nobody normal liked him.”

“You didn’t have to be normal to dislike Spitalny,” Underhill said.

Poole sipped the wine. His body suddenly felt limp as a sack. “I wonder if there’s
any point in my calling this other guy. I already know what he’s going to say.”

“Aren’t you going on the theory that Spitalny will eventually turn to someone for
help?” Maggie asked innocently. “And here we are in Milwaukee.”

Poole picked up the phone and dialed the last number.

“Simroe.”

Poole began speaking. He felt as though he were reading lines.

“Oh, Vic Spitalny,” Mack Simroe said. “No, I can’t help you find him. I don’t know
anything about him. He just went away, didn’t he? Got drafted. Well, you know that,
right? You were there with him. Umm, how did you get my name?”

“From his parents. I had the impression they thought he was dead.”

“They would,” Simroe said. Poole could hear him smiling. “Look, I think it’s nice
you’re looking for him—I mean, it’s nice
somebody’s
looking for him, but I never even got a postcard from the guy. Have you talked to
Debbie Maczik? Debbie Tusa, she is now?”

Poole said that she had not heard from him either.

“Well, maybe that’s not too surprising.” Simroe’s laugh sounded almost embarrassed.
“Considering, I mean.”

“You think he’d still be that guilty about his desertion?”

“Well, not only that. I mean, I don’t think the whole story ever came out, do you?”

Poole agreed that it had not, and wondered where all this was going.

“Who’s going to go check up on a thing like that? You’d have to go to Bangkok, wouldn’t
you?”

You would, and he had, Poole said.

“So was it just coincidence, or what? It sure seemed funny at the time. The only guy
worse off than he was—the only guy who was as much of a loser as he was, actually
more so.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you,” Poole said.

“Well, Dengler,” Simroe said. “It sure looked funny. I guess I thought he must have
killed him over there.”

“Spitalny knew Dengler before they got to Vietnam?”

“Well, sure. Everybody knew Dengler. All the kids did. You know how everybody knows
the one kid who just can’t get it together, whose clothes are all raggy—Dengler was
a basket case.”

“Not in Vietnam, he wasn’t,” Poole said.

“Well, naturally Spitalny hated Dengler. When you’re down low, you hate whatever’s
beneath you, right?”

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
him
,” Poole said. “He said, a lot of things have changed since high school. Let’s just
make like we never met until now. And in a way, they never had met—Spitalny had never
met
our
Dengler before.”

“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.

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.