Books : Meanwhile Back at the Ranch : Excerpts

Chapter Four

"Why didn't you just say 'Can I have the car, Dad?'" said Rambam, as he reclined comfortably in the backseat.

"Because I need you with me," I said. "I don't know that much about stakeouts."

"What's to know?" said Rambam. "You've got coffee and donuts and you stay up all night listening to Dr. Ruth."

"Has to be Dr. Ruth?"

"Has to be Dr. Ruth. She was once a Jewish terrorist, you know. Fought in the Irqun alongside Menachem Begin. You use a windup radio, of course. Don't want to keep the motor running or run down the battery."

I was scrunched down in the front seat of Rambam's car. He had assigned the seating arrangements; I'd provided the address of the suspect. It was half past Cinderella time. We were parked on a street somewhere in the narrow, soulless bosom of Long Island. The night was as dark as I suspected Rambam's mood would be if he'd known what a long shot the whole exercise probably was.

"There's other stuff you need, of course," Rambam continued, pulling items out of a military duffel bag. "Flashlights with red lenses to avoid using the interior lights. Did I mention the windup radio? Empty milk carton, or, as I usually prefer, empty instant coffee bottle."

"Why do you need that?"

"In case you have to go to the little private investigator's room, you idiot. On a stakeout you can't very well walk outside and urinate on somebody's lawn jockey. And I have trouble fitting my dick into an empty milk carton. A needle-dick like yourself might prefer a milk carton. I lean toward the instant coffee bottle."

"Lean toward it carefully," I said.

There was a dry chuckle from the back of the car. I scanned the dark, cookie-cutter houses up the street. The town looked like it was dead before the virus hit.

"I take it this is part of Operation Moe," said Rambam. "But why exactly are we here on this stakeout?"

"I have reason to believe," I said, "that inside that unassuming suburban house on Long Island lives a possible serial killer."

"All serial killers live inside unassuming suburban houses on Long Island," said Rambam. "How do you know it's the right guy and the right house?"

"Call it a hunchback of Notre Dame," I said.

"That's the kind of answer that can get your bell rung," said Rambam, as he picked up the little portable radio and began winding it with what seemed an unnecessary degree of intensity. "At least Dr. Ruth always gives you a straight answer."

I kept my eyes on the house up the street as we listened to a string of commercials and a mindless sportstalk radio show. Rambam kept turning the dial but was unable to find his favorite Jewish terrorist.

"Where the fuck is Dr. Ruth?" he said in great exasperation.

"She's about as hard to locate as our suspect," I said.

"Do you have any concrete evidence that proves this guy's a serial killer?"

"No. But our presence here is the result of a rather convoluted chain of deductive reasoning. I do have my methods."

This, apparently, was not the answer Rambam was looking for. He laughed darkly in the back of the car.

"Then you don't refer to him as a suspect," he said. "You refer to him as a target."

"Well, whatever the hell you want to call him, he seems to be staying at home."

"Like we should've done. Forget Moe for a minute. What about Larry? That's a missing person's case, you say?"

"That's correct."

"Who's missing? Laurel and Hardy?"

"An eleven-year-old boy named Dylan."

"Every fucking kid is named Dylan these days. Anything else?"

"Yeah. The kid's autistic. Wandered off a playground."

"Anything else?"

"Yeah. But you won't believe it."

"Try me."

"The kid only speaks one word."

"Which is?"

"Shnay."

"Shnay?"

"That's right. Shnay."

The back of the car was silent. The street itself seemed strangely silent. The frenetic crazy fucking New York world seemed suddenly, strangely silent. Very much, I thought, like the sounds inside the mind of an autistic child.

From the back of the car came an extremely unsettling noise. From all appearances it was either Rambam laughing or Rambam choking to death on a donut. If it was the former, he was being alarmingly insensitive to the psychological needs of an autistic child. If it was the latter, it would be rather inconvenient for me because I'd never find the way back to Manhattan by myself. Given the increasingly insular proclivities of modern life, of course, it was within the realm of human possibility, no doubt, for me to remain on this stakeout for the rest of my life. There'd be coffee and donuts, an empty instant coffee bottle to lean toward, and I'd be avoiding marriage, divorce, funerals, social disappointments, the flu, housekeeping, nuisance phone calls, deadbeat friends, children who become hatchet murderers or homosexuals, children who become shrinks or lawyers or MBAs, children in general, adults in particular, the rush hour, taxes, car pools, condo meetings, candiru fish darting up your penis in the Amazon Basin, cancer, crabs, corns, cocaine, conference calls, crepuscular tendencies, the "Dollars and Sense" portion of CNN Headline News, all the rest of television as well, all radio --

"Where the fuck is Dr. Ruth?" ejaculated Rambam from the posterior regions of the vehicle, interrupting my reverie.

Almost all radio, I thought.

"Look," said Rambam, "since you don't have hard evidence, this could be the wrong house or the wrong guy. We could even have the wrong serial killer. You stay here and man the stakeout -- "

"Hold the weddin'," I said, in mild alarm. "Where the hell are you going?"

"Just out on a little recon," said Rambam, an evil leer materializing in the red glow of his flashlight. "It's the fifth house on the right, you say? I'll check out the back entrance and a few of the less obvious windows. I didn't take Peeping Tom High School Equivalency for nothing."

Rambam slipped out of the car and I slipped further down in the front seat from which vantage point I poured another cup of coffee and took another donut out of the bag. There was, no doubt, something to be said for hard evidence, police procedure, criminal profiling, painstaking routine investigative methods. But that had never been the way I'd approached a case in my fairly brief, very lucky life as a middle-aged, Jewish, amateur private investigator.

I believed in Miss Marple. I believed in Sherlock Holmes. I believed that dogs and cats knew secret truths that man, woman, or child would never learn. Maybe child, but by that time it would be too late. I believed that blood will tell. That we're all creatures of narrow habit. That studying human nature could be more enlightening than studying a case file. I believed that in order to effectively determine guilt or innocence, juries should be impaneled entirely from a population of prostitutes, bartenders, and bellmen from sleazy hotels. I believed that cowboy logic, female intuition, native sensitivity, and a perverse mind all counted for more than what some Jehovah's bystander said he saw. I believed that clicking your heels together three times might get you home or it might just mean you're a Nazi.

The fact that I believed all this horseshit was only mildly alarming to me. I lit a cigar and watched a cat cross the street. I thought of the cat back in the loft on Vandam Street. I seriously doubted if the cat was thinking of me. They never do. Or maybe they always do. Then out of nowhere another cat crossed a corner of my mind.

It was in the early morning about three and a half years ago in the Texas summertime. I was driving the kids' laundry from Echo Hill, my family's summer camp for children, into the town of Kerrville sixteen miles away. I was driving the old dusty gray pickup known to the counselors as the Gray Ghost, and I was not alone. My assistant that morning was Mr. Magoo, a black, high-eared dog that my friend Suzie had found on the porch of the Kerrville pound with his eyes still closed. Magoo was only about four inches long when Suzie saved him and bottle-fed him, but ultimately could not save herself and had to go to the people pound, but that's another story.

Magoo spotted it first. A small orange object in the middle of the road that brought the Gray Ghost to an abrupt stop just about the time the sun came up over the mountain. I got out and saw a tiny kitten, no bigger than Magoo had been as he lay on the porch of the pound. The little creature was bleeding very badly and one of its front legs had apparently been broken. I felt it was dying, and as Magoo gently nosed the kitten on the back seat, I set my ears back and gunned the Gray Ghost over to Dr. Hoegemeyer's clinic. I gave them the pathetic little animal and told them to try to save it, whatever it took. The vet who received the kitten told me it'd been shot in the leg. "Another great white hunter," I said.

The kitten's front leg was amputated; they gave him two transfusions and stitched him up with over two hundred stitches. I went over one day with McGovern, who was down visiting the ranch from New York, and we took the frail little thing out of a cage next to a large bulldog and brought him home. McGovern gave the little kitten his medicine and nursed him like a large Irish mother hen. We did not think the kitten would live, but he did. We named him Lucky.

Lucky now lives with Cousin Nancy. He is large and handsome and enjoys good relations with Nancy and Tony and the ten dogs he shares their trailer with. With only his one front paw he's already killed a rattlesnake and more mice than Cousin Nancy cares to think about. Cousin Nancy does not like Lucky to kill mice. She likes mice, too.

Maybe that was when the Rescue Ranch started, I thought. The moment Mr. Magoo and I laid eyes on Lucky. Or maybe it was when old Abbie, the much persecuted, retired hunting dog, went over to end her days in peace at Cousin Nancy's. Abbie was named after Abbie Hoffman who also ran away and hid underground at the ranch --

My thoughts had strayed rather far from the target, I suddenly realized. Stakeouts, it would seem, provided good opportunities sometimes to think of things that you really cared about. I could now see Rambam with a rueful smile on his face coming back to the car in anything but a furtive-like manner. Instead of getting in back, he slid in behind the wheel, gunned the engine, and headed the vehicle back toward Manhattan. We drove in silence for some time. Just as we emerged from the Midtown Tunnel into the city I finally asked Rambam the question that was on my mind.

"So the stakeout was a washout?" I asked.

"Shnay," he said.