The Man Who Loved Women to Death (30 page)

“I did that.”

“By professionals.”

“I used a professional.”

“You could have taken us into your confidence,” he argued.

“No, I couldn’t,” I argued back. “Not with the likes of Cassandra circling around. Her top floor source would have blabbed it to her. And she would have put it on the air in a flash. And an innocent man, a public man, might have been ruined.”

This much Feldman seemed willing to accept, although most grudgingly. “Where does the man live?”

I told him where. “But he’s not home, Inspector. At least he wasn’t a little while ago.”

“Where is he, dude?”

“I don’t know.”

“I want his place sealed
now,
Lieutenant,” Feldman barked.

“Done.”

I said, “You won’t find the typewriter there. I looked.” Come to think of it, where
was
the typewriter?

“His restaurant, too,” Feldman ordered. “And his car, if he’s got one.”

“He hasn’t,” I said. “He sold it.”

“Proper paper every step of the way, Lieutenant. I will not be drop-kicked out of court on some bonehead technicality.”

“Yessir.”

Feldman turned back to me. “Sounds like you know King Tut pretty well. Who is he to you?”

I considered that for a long moment. I had so many answers to choose from. Tuttle Cash was my idol, my oldest friend, the best man at my wedding, the man who saved my life. He was all of these things. I could have said any one of them. Only, I didn’t.

I said, “We were on the same team together once.”

I DROVE AROUND FOR
awhile. I didn’t much feel like going home. Didn’t want to see anyone. Didn’t want to talk to anyone. I just wanted to go someplace where I could curl up and feel lousy.

I ended up at my place on West Ninety-third Street. I took the X-rated photo album inside with me and stashed it deep in the bedroom closet. I didn’t look at it. I didn’t ever want to look at it. But I didn’t want anyone else to, either. I took off my coat and put down some mackerel for Lulu. It was supper time, but she wouldn’t so much as sniff at it. She was still too upset about Cassandra.

I put some Garner on the stereo and poured myself two fingers of the fifteen-year-old Dalwhinnie and sat in my chair. The Dalwhinnie didn’t hurt one bit. It’s an Upper Spey single malt, a bit fuller than the Macallan. But for some reason the Little Elf wasn’t the ticket at all. He just made me feel sadder. I put on some Grateful Dead instead. Not the tie-dyed, flower-power Dead, but the old Dead, the real Dead, the marauding-huns-in-shitkicker-boots Dead. I turned them up loud and let them blast away. I sipped my scotch, trying not to look at that photo of the three young track stars hanging over the loveseat. Trying to forget that Cassandra had stood in this very room not too many days before telling me how much she looked up to me …
It’s raining …
Trying to forget that the entire New York City Police Department was now hunting down Tuttle Cash so that they could arrest him for murdering five women. Trying to figure out why. Because it kept coming around to that—why? Why had he killed them? Why had he dragged me into it? Why had he turned the city of New York into a terror zone?

Why?

The phone rang next to me. I let it ring. Poured myself some more scotch, Lulu watching me carefully from her perch on the loveseat. She worries about me when I start drinking alone. She’s afraid I’ll jump the track again and go crashing back into my lost days and nights.

The phone kept on ringing. Damned thing wouldn’t stop. I picked it up.

It was Very, sounding edgy and hyper. “Thought maybe I’d find you there. Housekeeper said that’s where you hang when you want to be alone.”

“It’s nice to know I’m so unpredictable.”

“There’s no sign of him, dude. No one’s seen him. No one’s heard from him. He’s flat-out disappeared. We figure he’s on the run.” Very paused, waiting for me to say something. When I didn’t he said, “Listen, if you have the slightest idea where he might be heading …”

“I haven’t, Lieutenant.”

“Break it down, would you tell me if you did?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes, I am.”

“No offense, but I gotta ask you—whose voice is that I hear in the background?”

“It’s Jerry Garcia.”

He considered this a moment in silence. “You cool, dude?”

“I’m fine, Lieutenant. Although I am getting really tired of you asking me that. Is there anything else?”

“Yeah. Phone home. Housekeeper wants to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“What am I, your answering service? I’m trying to find a serial killer.” He hung up on me.

I called the apartment.

Vic answered on the first ring. “I’m real glad you checked in, Hoag. I have news for you—the man called here.”

“Very? I know. I just got off the phone with him.”

“Not him, Tuttle Cash. He called.”

I froze. “When, Vic?”

“About an hour ago. Pam spoke to him. I told her not to say anything to the lieutenant about it until she cleared it with you.”

“Good thinking, Vic. Exactly what did Tuttle say to her?”

“It was a short conversation,” Vic replied uncomfortably.

“
Vic,
what did he say?”

“Just three words: ‘Tell Hoagy good-bye.’”

I thanked him and hung up the phone, my mind on what I’d found Tuttle doing when I walked in on him in his office that day. My chest suddenly felt heavy.

The phone rang again. I picked it up. This time it was a woman and she was screeching at me.

“Is this you, Hoagy? Because if it is you better tell me where the fuck it is and I mean
right
now! Because I don’t take this shit from nobody! I don’t care who the fuck he is, y’know what I’m saying?”

“It’s nice to hear your voice again, Luz.”

“Don’t you start talking pretty at me. I ain’t hearing that shit, man. I want it back and I want it back
right
now!”

“You want what back, Luz?”

“My baby, that’s what. Your fucking friend stole my Miata from the fucking garage where I fucking keep it and he better—”

“When, Luz?” I leaned forward in my chair. “When?”

“Just now. Maybe half an hour ago. I called down to tell the guy to get it out for me and he’s like, hey, your boyfriend’s already on his way over with it. Motherfucker scammed ’em out of the keys and took off. I am going to cut him, man. I am going to make him so sorry he ever fucked with me. He ain’t going to be worth dipshit when I’m through with him.”

“Luz?”

“Like,
nobody
rips me off. He even had ’em fill the tank and charge it to my account.”

“Luz!”

“What?”

“Your Miata—what color is it?”

“Red. Like his nose’s gonna be after I hit him.”

“Good-bye, Luz.”

I turned off the stereo and threw on my greatcoat. I ran down the stairs with Lulu hot on my tail and jumped into the Land Rover. I stopped at my own garage, on Amsterdam, and traded the Rover in for the Jag. The Rover doesn’t like to go over 55. The Jag doesn’t like to go under 70.

Then I took off.

IT’S USUALLY A
five-hour drive. Six with traffic. Four with luck and a heavy foot. I needed to make it in three. Because he had a head start on me. Because I had to get there before he did.

I knew where he was going. Oh, yeah, I knew.

There are a couple of different ways you can get there. One is to work your way through the northern burbs on the Sawmill River Parkway until you hit the Mass Pike. The other is to hug the shoreline on I-95. I took the shoreline, doing 90, using the breakdown lane to pass any damned car or truck that got in my way. There’s a shortcut I know, Route 395, which forks off the interstate at New London and shoots straight up through the barren desolation of eastern Connecticut into Massachusetts. You can go a half-hour on 395 and not see a single car. You can do 100. I did, Lulu dozing next to me with my scarf wrapped around her. There were patches of ice on the road when I hit the Mass Pike at Worcester. There always are, even in August. Worcester has to be one of the coldest places on earth. I don’t know why. I don’t care why. And then we were on the outskirts of Boston, where all roads converge at the tollbooths. I paid and went on through and we were there.

Cambridge. Home to the most pretentious, overrated Ivy League breeding ground of them all. You know which one I mean—I’m talking about the
H
-word. Those of us who went there never, ever mention it by name. We prefer to make people force it out of us, thereby drawing even more attention to ourselves. It was here where I achieved so-called higher learning. It was here where I would find Tuttle Cash. He would be here.

Most of the campus is found in Cambridge, on or near the banks of the Charles. Some of it is sited on the other side of the snaking river, across the Larz Anderson Bridge, which puts it in Boston, if you want to get picky. The much reviled Graduate School of Business Administration is across the river, for example. But I wasn’t going to the business school.

I was going to the stadium. The one where they play football on Saturday afternoons in autumn.

There’s a spiked iron fence all the way around it, a big iron gate at the main entrance. The gate was open. I eased the Jag on through it and crossed the empty parking lot, the horseshoe-shaped stadium looming overhead. There’s a chain-link fence across the open end of the horseshoe. The red Miata with the New York license plates was parked there. I shut off the Jag’s engine, dug the torch out of the glovebox and got out, Lulu joining me reluctantly. It was barely in the teens outside. My nose and ears felt it right away. I could hear cars off in the distance on Soldier’s Field Road. Otherwise all was darkness and quiet. I took off one of my cashmere-lined deerskin gloves and felt the hood of the Miata. Still warm. It was just past two in the morning, according to Grandfather’s Rolex. Three hours and fifteen minutes it had taken me. Fast. But was I fast enough?

Lulu took over from there. Followed his trail, black nose to the frozen ground, snarfling, breath rising from her nostrils like a plow horse’s. She led me to the chain-link fence and stopped. I shone the light up at it. It was eight feet high. There was a torn shred of gray flannel caught in the top of it where we stood. From his trousers, no doubt. I pocketed the torch and started climbing. It had been a while since I’d scaled a fence. Only kids and thieves scale fences, and a thief is one thing I’ve never been. But muscle memory is a funny thing. My arms and legs remembered immediately how to get me over the top, trousers intact. I dropped down the last few feet to the ground on the other side and brushed myself off. Lulu came prancing up next to me, arfing triumphantly. She had found her own way in. She can do just about anything when she sets her pea brain to it.

I shone the light ahead of us. Together, we ventured out onto the field where Tuttle Cash was faster and stronger and better than anyone else. The field where nobody, but nobody could catch him.

The field where the crowd roared.

The best and the brightest chanted his name here on those crisp autumn afternoons with their cheeks pink and the band playing and the wind blowing. And it seemed, when he had that ball tucked under his arm, that he was the best and the brightest of them all. Someone blessed. Someone invincible. Maybe all of the Tuttle Cashes on all of the fields seem like invincible young gods on those Saturday afternoons when the wind is blowing. Maybe some of them even stay that way. I never met one who did.

Lulu led me to him. I thought I’d find him on the fifty-yard line—no man’s land. I didn’t. King Tut was in the end zone, under the goalpost, gone. I was too late. I had a feeling I would be. I also had a feeling that maybe it was best this way. Worse things could have happened. A trial could have happened. He had his duffel coat on, no gloves. The gun was still gripped in his right hand. It looked like the same gun I’d taken away from him twice before. I couldn’t tell for sure. I didn’t want to touch it. He’d fired up through his jaw. The bullet came out the top of his head. It was not a neat way to die but it was quick. One eye, the left one, was still open. I closed it. His left hand clutched a piece of paper. I took it from him. It was a lined sheet from a steno pad. On it, scrawled in his handwriting, were two words:
Sorry, Doof.

I stood there a while on the hard, pale green December grass, shining the light down at him. Lulu sat there in between my feet, nose quivering. She didn’t howl like she had for Cassandra. She just sat there, waiting for me to tell her what to do. I told her to stay put. She promised she would. Then I went back over the fence and called Very to tell him that it was all over.

The answer man had written his final chapter.

D
EAR HOAGY,

Message received. And I could tell this one was really from you, not Inspector Feldman. What kind of name is that anyway, Dante Feldman? And who does he think he is comparing me to David Berkowitz on Larry King’s show? Berkowitz was a fat hairy slob, a pig. I am an artist. Doesn’t Feldman realize that yet? Oh well, I guess it’s like they always say—a bad review is better than no review at all. I’d better just get used to it, huh? Comes with the territory!

I don’t know what my price is, in answer to your question. What’s good money these days for a guaranteed No. I bestseller? I read the newspapers. If Newt Gingrich is worth $4.5 million and Colin Powell is worth $6 million then how much am I worth? What does John Grisham get? Not that I consider myself in Grisham’s league yet, but this is exactly the kind of thing I need to know from you, Hoagy. That’s why I brought you in.

Also, what’s included in this figure? As I hope I’ve already made clear to you, I want to hold on to the movie rights. But what about the foreign rights? Would the publisher get those? How about the paperback rights? Audiocassettes? Help me out here, Hoagy. We’re in this together, you know. It’s you and me against the world.

In response to your other question: Will I stop this when we get our deal? I can’t answer that. I don’t know. I only know that I am an artist, as you are, and that I have no control over my artistic impulses. They have a life of their own. I’m just along for the ride. Frankly, I have no idea when the book will be done or even how it will end. I do know that I’m feeling incredibly productive. I wake up every morning looking forward to my work. I’m having the most fun I’ve ever had in my life, Hoagy. I’m just so excited. When I don’t feel that way anymore, when this just starts to feel like routine drudgery
—
I guess that’s when I’ll know it’s over. And time to move on to a new project.