Small Town

“Never did understand the logic of term limits. But it’s all politics, isn’t it?” The Texan shook his head. “Politics. Why would a man want to involve himself in all of that?”

There was no car meeting him at JFK. He got his bag from the carousel and waited in the taxi queue for a cab. The driver’s name ended in — pour, which probably meant he was an Iranian. Whatever he was, he drove like a cowboy on crystal meth.

His apartment was on East Sixty-seventh, in one of the white brick monstrosities he’d proposed for landmark status. His weekly cleaning woman, a cheerful young Nicaraguan with about twenty English words at her command, had shown up in his absence, and the place was immaculate. He unpacked, checked the mail, and returned phone calls, then ducked around the corner to drink a cup of coffee and read a newspaper.

There was more on the triple homicide on East Twenty-eighth Street. The News had taken to calling the killer the Curry Hill Carpenter, because forensics had determined that he’d used a hammer and a chisel to murder the three women. He had a feeling the name would stick; it had an ominous quality, suggesting the murderer was a craftsman, workmanlike in his attention to details, and the alliteration didn’t hurt. And wasn’t the k or hard c sound supposed to be effective? Wasn’t there a whole riff to that effect in The Sunshine Boys? Cucumber is funny, radish is not. Kokomo and Cucamonga are funny, kumquat is funny. Fort Wayne? Not funny.

Nothing funny about the murders. What was funny — funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha — was the illusion of a link to the murder last month in the Village, the real estate agent who got her neck wrung by the writer. Both premises were cleaned regularly by the same individual. That wasn’t much of a stretch, but when you added in the fact that the individual was also the first person on the scene at both venues it became dramatically more significant.

Funny, too, was the fact that the information had gotten out. Maury Winters, whom he’d last seen getting his pipes cleaned under the table at L’Aiglon d’Or, was the writer’s lawyer, and he supposed Maury must have leaked the story to a press contact. It was the kind of thing that could cloud the open-and-shut case against what’s-his-name, Creighton, and you could be sure Maury would bring it up in court.

He was done with the story, done with a sidebar column playing up the human angle, when something clicked and he checked the names of the victims. The madam was one Mary Mulvaney, forty-four, with an East Side address a few minutes from the UN. But the columnist in the sidebar had referred to her as Molly, and had spun a theory about a propensity for raffish behavior in those whose names ended in — olly. He’d cited Polly Adler, the legendary Prohibition-era madam, and Holly Golightly, the fictional good-time girl in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It didn’t seem like much of an argument to Buckram, not even if you tossed in Ollie North, whom the writer had failed to add to the mix. But now, putting the nickname with the last name—

Jesus, he knew Molly Mulvaney. Had known her, anyway. She’d been a witness twenty-plus years ago, she’d been one of three high-ticket hookers who’d been partying in a Kips Bay penthouse with Tiny Tom Nappi, a midlevel mob guy whose sobriquet derived not from his stature, which was neither tall nor short, but from his sexual equipment, which was rumored to be in the same league with John Dillinger’s and Milton Berle’s. Nappi had said he wanted to die in a room full of booze and pussy and cocaine, and he got his wish, though probably not the way he had in mind. He’d gone to answer the door, and was shot through the peephole. The large-caliber slug went in through his eye and blew out most of the back of his head.

Molly hadn’t seen anything, and was bright enough to have kept her mouth shut even if there had been anything to see. Buckram had caught the case — which they’d solved in the sense that they knew who’d ordered the hit and had a pretty good idea who’d pulled the trigger, but never had enough to charge anybody. And he’d interrogated Molly Mulvaney at length, and liked her. They’d even flirted a little, although he’d made sure it didn’t go beyond that. She wasn’t really in the game, she’d told him. She just liked to party, and the life was kind of exciting, but this was more excitement than she’d signed on for, thank you very much, and what she thought she’d do was get the hell back to Fordham Road and marry a fireman. Or maybe a cop, she’d said, if I knew where to find a real cute one.