Текст книги "Tongue tied"

Автор книги: Richard Stevenson

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"But how could they kidnap anybody in New York? Are any of them big enough and tough enough to wrestle a man in his forties into a waiting vehicle? Do they possess firearms or other weapons, or drugs they could use on somebody?"

"I don't know about guns," Darren said, "but I suppose they could drug someone. All three of them have extensive experience with pharmaceuticals. They're all rather small, but if they were going to snatch somebody in New York they might have larger friends there who could help them. They go into the city at least once a week and stay with some people in Brooklyn."

"Any idea who these people are?"

"Not really. I've heard them mention Louis somebody, and a Sharon, I think, and somebody they refer to as Strawberry Swirl."

You could practically hear the wheels turn as we all made mental notes on Louis, Sharon and Strawberry Swirl.

"Were Charm, Pheromone and Edward in the city yesterday?" I asked. "That's when the kidnapping took place. Late morning sometime."

"Actually, I think they were," Darren said, his eyes widening. "Or Charm was anyway. We weren't making cheese yesterday. We won't make cheese again until Tuesday. By then Kurt thinks he'll have some new people to work for us who are less obnoxious to have around."

Timmy said, "Don, you haven't tried any cheese yet."

"No," Thad added. "We have but you haven't."

Darren got up from his stool behind the counter. "This stuff will change your life," he said, with no trace of irony. His was supposed to be the generation steeped in irony, but apparently that had all gone by him. Using a small square of parchment paper, Darren retrieved a sample-sized portion of Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese from the refrigerator case. It was grayish, and it resembled a mouse minus its extremities.

"You're serving this cheese chilled," I said. "Shouldn't it be allowed to warm to the task of being eaten, to collect its cheesy thoughts for a while?"

"Ideally, yes," Darren said. "But much of the flavor and nearly all of the healing properties are in the oil of the wool. As you suck the cheese out of the wool, the chewing and sucking combined with the heat of your own saliva release the oil and its protein. One of the sad aspects of modern American life is the haste with which most people devour their food. It was easier for the ancient Incas, of course, to take the time to absorb the healing oils in their llama cheese, because they lived a much less pressured existence."

As I inserted the moist morsel into my mouth, Thad said, "Rural agricultural people have plenty of pressure on them, usually associated with the vagaries of climate. But it is true that the pace of that life is much slower a lot of the time."

"The trouble with the hectic lives we lead," Timmy said, "is that for most of us it's all too rare that we take the time to stop and suck the cheese."

Which was what I was doing at that moment. The cheese itself wasn't bad-ripe, a little salty, with a hint of smoke, and not so gluey as I feared. The wool that was marbled through it, however, was another matter. I was counting on my finely tuned gag reflex to prevent disaster. What if I swallowed this thing whole? Had that ever happened to a Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese devotee? Were there FDA warnings on the package?

I glanced around the shop for a Heimlich-maneuver instructions poster. None was visible, although I knew Timmy was capable of successfully executing the proce-dure. Some years earlier I had seen him apply the maneuver and dislodge what looked like half a strip steak from an old lady's trachea at a Friendly's restaurant near Lake George. So adept was Timmy that upon the first upward thrust under the desperate woman's rib cage, the deadly gob was ejected and shot across the room, knocking over a little boy's Fribble®.

"What do you think?" Thad said.

"It's tasty," I replied. "But sucking a wad of hair takes some getting used to. It's uncommon in our culture."

Timmy said, "Thad, do the Amish chew hair?"

"Not in Pennsylvania, as far as I ever heard. In Indiana maybe they do, or Ohio."

Darren said, "To achieve the full benefits, you really need to eat it every day for several weeks."

Almost as if by plan, we quickly changed the subject back to Charm, Pheromone and Edward, and discussed how we would carry out a visit to them at Charm's father's house up the road.

Chapter 14

"You can ask us anything you want to ask," Charm Stanke-witz said, blowing clove-cigarette smoke in my direction. "But anything we don't feel like talking about, we're not going to talk about. Got that? It'll be up to us, not you, what subjects are covered.

If you want to talk about J-Bird Plankton, maybe we'll answer your questions, and maybe we won't. Just so you understand what the rules are before we get started with this… this whatever."

Charm, Pheromone, Edward and I were seated in the living room/dining room of the converted carriage house near the main Stankewitz house, a gorgeous federal-style former farmhouse that looked as if it had been painted white just minutes before.

The building we were in, apparently a guest house being occupied for the summer by Charm and her friends, was nicely furnished with an assortment of comfortable antique and reproduction nineteenth-century New England country furnishings. The building's current occupants had added some touches of their own, too. A large sound system and a rack full of CDs were perched on the mahogony sideboard, and an array of posters touting queer and feminist causes had been taped to the picture molding. One poster, vividly illustrated, advertised something called the

"Penn State Cuntfest."

Timmy and Thad had remained outside, out of sight. Timmy was in the car, parked at the end of the lane leading to the Stankewitz house, scoping out who came and went.

Thad was to use his FFF guerrilla skills to surreptitiously check out a barn and several smaller outbuildings on the property, whose name, according to a discreet sign hung from a post, was Beech Hill.

I had decided to use a direct approach with Charm, Pheromone and Edward. They were unloading groceries from a Jeep Cherokee when I strolled up to them, identified myself as a private investigator looking into Leo Moyle's kidnapping by the Forces of Free Faggotry, and told them that Kurt Zinsser's old FFF connections had led me to the Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese farm and its employees. Pheromone and Edward had looked startled– near panic was evident just beneath the surface of Edward's frozen gaze-but Charm hardly blinked and immediately invited me into the carriage house. She welcomed me to Bitch Hill and handed me a case of Budweiser to carry up the steps.

"I think it's hilarious," Charm said, "that you think you might find out anything about Leo Moyle's kidnapping from Kurt, that neofascist chucklehead. Politically, he hasn't been able to get it up for about a thousand years, and anyway Jay Plankton and his gang of right-wing enforcers are cultural icons of Kurt's. Fm having a lot of trouble conceptualizing a role for Kurt in what sounds to me like an authentic act of people's justice."

Charm blew more clove-flavored smoke, and Edward and Pheromone sat and stared at me. Charm was slight and wiry in yellow shorts and an orange tank top, with a pug nose, breasts to match, intelligent green eyes and a buzz cut. Pheromone and Edward had the same basic haircut as Charm's, but both were taller, wore jeans and Tshirts, and had long faces with an assortment of studs and rings affixed to them. I could have hung Grandma Strachey's entire set of Christmas tree ornaments on Edward without having to puncture his skin additionally. All three of them were tattooed like sailors out of Jean Genet, with some of the graphics, such as barbed armbands, of the in-your-face variety, and others, among them small anthropods and amphibians, benign or even friendly.

I said to Charm, "I see your point about Kurt. Fie seems to have turned into Andrew Sullivan with wool in his teeth. But it wasn't just Kurt's history with the FFF that led me here."

I described the harassment-by-mail series of incidents that led up to Leo Moyle's abduction, including the arrival on Jay Plankton's desk of a carton of llama turds,

"excrement for the execrable." As I spoke, Charm eyed me coolly, while Pheromone fidgeted and Edward perspired and grew whiter and whiter.

"That's a riot," Charm said after I'd run through the alphabetical list ending in "//for hostage." She puffed on her exotic cigarette and added, "I hope that the / attack is

'irritants for the irritating' or even 'injuries for the injurious.'"

Pheromone and Edward both flinched at this, and I said, "Deliberately injuring someone is a felony. You can go to jail for battery."

"We really wouldn't hurt anybody," Pheromone blurted out, and her brown eyes misted up.

"And kidnapping," I went on, "is a federal crime sometimes punishable by death.

Personally, I'm against capital punishment for both practical and moral reasons, but the US government is still in no mood to join me and the rest of the civilized world in this regard. Whatever his private inclinations, Clinton goes along with public opinion, which remains predominantly bloodthirsty, and Al Gore shows no sign of deviating from the harsh party line. And, of course, should George W. Bush be elected president-which has to be considered both laughable and highly unlikely-you can be assured that he will do at the national level what he has done in Texas. Which has been to snicker as he casually balls up clemency petitions and lobs them into the nearest wastebasket.

Kidnappers, now and for the forseeable future in the United States, can frequently expect to be dispatched to kingdom come via lethal injection, electrocution or firing squad with a minimum of ceremony. Kidnappers who haven't thought about these consequences are making a disastrous mistake."

Pheromone wore a look of horror, and poor Edward, whose only word to me so far had been a barely audible "hi," seemed about to burst into tears. I was not enjoying making these two young people suffer, but my approach did seem as though it would serve to expedite the investigation I had agreed to conduct.

Charm was unimpressed by my theatrics, however, and said so. "You talk such a load of shit, Strachey. If you're trying to get us to confess to assaulting anybody or kidnapping Leo Moyle, you're wasting your time and ours. As much as I savor the picture of that misogyno-fascist Moyle strung up by his tiny balls in some cellar full of rats, I can promise you we wouldn't do it ourselves, and we didn't do it ourselves, or with anyone else. What do you take us for? Do we look like the Tupac Amaru, or what?"

This denial was couched with such exquisitely evasive calculation-Charm Stankewitz was going to make a great White House chief of staff someday-that what should have been obvious for some time now hit me like a ton of Woolly Llama Cheese.

I said, "So the three of you carried out the harassment of Jay Plankton, but not the kidnapping of Leo Moyle? Is that what you're telling me?"

"We're not telling you anything? Charm said emphatically, "but if you want to draw the harmless conclusion of your choice and then be on your way, that would be so-o-o-o cool. Am I making myself sufficiently clear?"

Pheromone and Edward watched me with a look of hope. I said to them, "Your friend Charm is a brilliantly precocious advocate for your various good causes. I just hope she doesn't lead you into… well, I'm sure you've given it a lot of thought. Some remote cell block in the Peruvian penal system, or-more likely-the newly redecorated federal execution suite in Terre Haute."

"Shit!" This was Edward.

"Oh God!" That was Pheromone.

"Charm's right, we didn't kidnap that guy," Edward said plaintively.

"Fuck, no," Pheromone added, underlining the declaration.

"But you sent menacing and repellent notes and substances to Jay Plankton through the mail?"

Charm sat examining her dark cigarette and looking blase, while Pheromone and Edward gave their final freeze-frame look of fear.

"And you filled Plankton's SUV full of toilet paper during a party at his manager's house in Mamaroneck?"

Before Pheromone and Edward had the chance to faint, or shriek and bolt out the door, Charm said, "Sure we did, and so what!"

"I'm no fan of Plankton's either, but you may have broken a few laws."

Charm sneered. "Plankton and his stupid little boys are floaters in the malfunctioning toilet of American broadcasting. What we did was good for the J-Bird and Leo Moyle, and I think it is totally terrific that somebody obviously took our cue and went after these rotten turds in the manner they deserve. Down in the cheese room, we had to listen to these assholes day after day after day, while Kurt ha-haed and hee-heed. I mean, what were we supposed to do, call OSHA? Yes, we did it, and we're proud we did it!"

This last statement may have been too sweeping for Pheromone and Edward, who still stared at me apprehensively. I said, "And you lobbed the tear-gas canister into Plankton's studio yesterday?"

"No way!" Pheromone exclaimed. "We, like, mailed in that shit and stuff, but we didn't throw tear gas, and we never kidnapped that guy, no way!"

Edward also became more vocal. "We just wanted to fuck with Kurt's mind. He's a Republican now, but he talks about his FFF days like he's some Greatest Generation hero, wiping up the floor with Nazis. I mean, like, the movie about the FFF will have Tom Hanks in it playing Kurt. This guy is totally fucked up, and we were just giving him a hard time about it, that's all."

"Then you might or might not be happy to know," I told them, "that until Leo Moyle was kidnapped, Jay Plankton thought of you all as brothers and sisters under the skin, and admirably insolent and hugely entertaining. He talked about putting you all on his show-pending the outcome, of course, of a pre-interview and probably an exhaustive strip search."

"Well, that sucks!" Pheromone said.

"What a bunch of perverts," Edward added.

But Charm had grown thoughtful. "And now he's changed his mind?" she asked.

"Because of the Leo Moyle thing?"

"That would be my guess."

"Oh."

"You can ask him yourself, if you're interested. I'm sure he'll be wanting to be in touch with you. His attorneys will, anyway, along with the police and the FBI. If you didn't do the kidnapping, or even the tear-gas job, it'll probably be easy enough for you to prove it. And if eventually you do go on the air with the J-Bird, I know I'll be sure to tune in."

Pheromone said, "Going on the radio is for shit, so don't try to drag me in on this one, Charm. But I suppose we'll have to tell them we didn't do it. The tear gas or the kidnapping, I mean. We can give them some of our DNA– though I'll bet it's hard to prove a negative unless the J-Bird was, like, raped."

Charm was looking even more worried. "Do you think we'll need a lawyer?"

"That might be wise," I said.

"Shit. I'll have to call Dad in Nimes. He's going to be spitting afterbirth."

On that vivid note, I advised Charm, Pheromone, and Edward to stay put in the Berkshires. I told them that flight from official investigators would be inadvisable. I suggested they tell Kurt Zinsser what they had done and to say that he should expect the police to show up shortly. The three of them took all of this in sullenly, but they all seemed to get my drift and they didn't argue.

Back outside, Thad was just returning to the car. He told me he had given the main house, the barn and the other Stankewitz outbuildings an apparently undetected quick scouring, inside and out, and he could find no trace of Leo Moyle or any other person. He said all the Stankewitz locks were old and simple and "a piece of cake."

Inside the car, though, Timmy was itching to give us his own amazing report. He had been monitoring WCBS all-news radio from New York, and moments earlier he had heard that Leo Moyle had just been released by the FFF largely unharmed. But now Jay Plankton himself had been abducted.

Chapter 15

"It was a beautiful operation," Lyle Barner was telling me. "It could have been carried out by the finest SWAT team in the country, or maybe by the Mossad. Here, this guy's got some of the best security in the city, outside of the Secret Service when Clinton's in town, and these people move in and snatch Plankton up like he's a calzone at Sbarro, and just like that-kapooey!-the J-Bird is up in smoke."

This was said in a Chinese restaurant on Sixty-fifth Street, not far from Jay Plankton's apartment building, at the entrance to which he had been abducted seven hours earlier. Thad and I had dropped Timmy off back in Albany and driven to the city in Thad's truck. Thad and I agreed that for the time being he should steer clear of Barner, so he said he would go spend the night with an old Lancaster County friend in Brooklyn. I had asked him if there was an Amish ethnic enclave in one of the outer boroughs, like the Polish in Greenpoint or the Indians in Jackson Heights, but he said no.

"It was like they'd rehearsed it a hundred times," Barner went on. "At least fourteen people saw the whole thing, and they all said it happened so fast that nobody really knew what had gone down, until Moyle started yelling that he was Leo Moyle of the Jay Plankton Show, and he'd been kidnapped and let go and somebody should summon an officer."

The switch-Moyle for Plankton-had indeed been deft, Barner told me. As the security-service Bronco carrying Plankton pulled up at the entrance to the apartment building and Plankton stepped out with his two armed guards, a second SUV, a green Lincoln Navigator, came up from behind. Two men in black jeans, black turtlenecks and gas masks emerged and fired pepper spray at Plankton and his protectors and at the Bronco's driver. It sounded to me like the feds swooping in and snatching little Elian Gonzalez in Miami, overpowering Donato-the-fisherman-slash-cleaning-service-operator, and gassing the praying grandmothers in front of the house. I wondered, Did I detect the fine hand of Janet Reno here? Much as the Clinton administration must have loathed the J-Bird, an abduction by Justice Department paramilitaries didn't sound like the answer.

An NYPD patrol car arrived at the scene within two minutes of Moyle's release and the J-Bird's capture, Barner said, but the Navigator had made a clean getaway. By the time a description of the vehicle went out, the kidnappers had apparently switched cars. For the Lincoln was soon spotted abandoned under the FDR Drive near Thirty-eighth Street. The car had been stolen earlier that morning, police soon discovered, from in front of a real estate office in New Rochelle. One potential witness thought she had seen the switch from the Navigator to a gray, brown or light blue van, but the description was too vague to be of any help.

Moyle, Barner told me, was taken by patrol car to Lenox Hill Hospital, where he was examined and found to be exhausted but not physically harmed in any serious way. His mental state, however, was described as precarious. This was owing in part to the fearful ordeal overall, but in particular to his two newly acquired tattoos, one on each upper arm. They were both large, still fresh, and a little sore. One pictured big red lips and said, "Kiss Me, Elton". The other said, " I love Ricky Martin".

The tattoos had been applied to Moyle involuntarily while he was tied down, blindfolded, and had a gun held to his head, he told police. He pleaded that word of his new body art not be made public. But Barner, who arrived on the scene twenty minutes after the first patrol car, had to break it to Moyle that the news would almost certainly leak out, probably via hospital employees. Anyway, the issue was soon moot, for the kidnappers-or their friends or cocon-spirators-dropped off digital photos of Moyle's new look at the lobbies of the Times, the Post and the Daily News.

This suggested to Barner, and to me, that more than a few people were involved in whatever was going on here. No ransom note had yet been received by anyone the police knew of. So far, the tattoos were the only message.

Barner said he didn't know much about tattoos, and he asked me, "Can tattoos be removed, or are people stuck with them for the rest of their lives?"

"I don't know," I told him, "but in Massachusetts I ran into a guy who had a tattoo on his arm that said 'Robert Forever', and Robert had turned out to be less than forever.

But the tattoo was still there, so maybe they're hard to shed."

Barner and I were set to meet with Moyle in an hour or so, after his release from Lenox Hill, and tattoo removal seemed to both of us a subject Moyle would be eager to discuss.

I said to Barner, "The tabloids are going to have a lot of fun with this. They undoubtedly adore Moyle at the Post, but public humiliation of a C-list celeb is their meat, and the festering tattoo work sounds to me like surefire page-one stuff. I'm sure that at this very moment the Post has a reporter assigned to getting a quote from Ricky Martin."

Barner looked up from his egg-drop soup. "Moyle's an asshole, yeah, I know. But I really feel kind of sorry for him."

"Why?"

"You know-just what he went through."

"I agree that terrorizing the guy is going way too far," I said. "Moyle must have feared for his life. But as for the tattoos… that's a nice, droll touch. The raging homophobe forced to go around with the brand of Oscar Wilde."

Barner peered at me glumly. "Jesus, Strachey, you're merciless. How would you like it if somebody snatched you and tattooed you with 'Strachey's Hot for Pamela Anderson'?"

"I haven't made a career of denigrating straight women, so the chances of that happening are slight. If it did happen, it wouldn't be rough justice. It would just be absurdist."

"You can call it whatever weird crap you want to," Barner said, "but getting forcibly tattooed like that would make anybody feel like shit. That's all I'm saying. Moyle is an asshole, but he's also a human being."

"Lyle, if Moyle knew you were gay, and it was you who got embroidered-let's say,

'Lyle Is Hot for Al D'Amato'– how sympathetic do you think Moyle would be? Can't you imagine him and Plankton and the fun they'd have on the air with news of a gay NYPD detective involuntarily tattooed?"

"Yeah, that's so. But still… anyway, what would your boyfriend say about it? Didn't you tell me one time he was some kind of priest who forgot to go to seminary or something? He sounds like a much nicer person than you are, Strachey."

"He is," I said, without having to think about that one. "And I'm sure Timothy will share your opinion on this subject, Lyle."

"And what about Thad-the-Amishman that you're cheating on your boyfriend with?

He brags about how he never hurt anybody when he was in the FVV. What do you think Thad's going to say about somebody committing battery on Leo Moyle? Is Thad, the man of peace, gonna just laugh it off, like you?"

I decided to ignore most of this-probably confirming my guilt and duplicity in Barner's mind-and said only, "Yes, Thad's opinion of the tattooing will be closer to yours and Timmy's than to mine. That's true, Lyle. We'll just have to agree to disagree."

This last sounded like some namby-pamby remark from a hack pol on "Sam and Cokie," and Barner had me on the edge of feeling guilty all over again over the way I treated him. But then Barner said this: "I know Diefendor-fcr was with you in Albany and Massachusetts. So, what have you got going, a threesome? Normally I'm too square for that type of kinky stuff. Just ask Dave. But with you and Thad, maybe I could start to act more with it. Timothy (lallahan is a very, very lucky man, in my opinion."

I peered at Barner for a long moment. "You had someone-what? Watching me?

Following me?"

Barner colored just perceptibly but looked at me levelly. "I guess you got to know Diefendorfer quite intimately, Strachey. But maybe you didn't get to know him intimately enough."

"Wait a minute, Lyle. We'll come back to that. Just answer my question. Did you or did you not put a tail on me when I traveled to Albany and Massachusetts yesterday and today?"

The waiter arrived and removed our soup dishes. Then he was back within seconds, and he set down a large dish of rice along with Barner's General Tso's chicken-who was this warrior with a taste for sweet, sticky fowl, anyway?– and my shrimp with mushrooms and snow peas.

When the waiter was gone, Barner said, "Why don't you tell me first, Strachey, did you or didn't you forget to let me in on the fact that your partner working on this case was going to be not myself but somebody else, not even a professional investigator, and that person would be the humpy Dutchman, Thad Diefendorfer? As I understood it, we would be working together, one of the reasons I brought you onto the case. And now-I guess you can tell, because I'm making myself pretty fucking crystal clear-I am all stressed out about this, and I am feeling royally fucked over."

So there I was. I had chosen not to let Barner in on Diefendorfer's involvement in the investigation because I knew that if he knew about it, Lyle would act like a child– i.e., jealous, resentful, distracted, suspicious and petulant. How had I let myself become entangled in this miasma? Oh, right. Barner had once saved my life. Why couldn't it have been somebody else that violent summer night in Albany fifteen years earlier who had bailed me out of a desperate fix-Rex the Wonder Horse, or Miss Marple?

I said to Barner, "Thad was tagging along with me, yes, to be helpful if he could. But you were… you were spying on me. I have to say, Lyle, that I am at this moment disgusted with you."

My strained tactic of displaying moral outrage that might trump Barner's moral outrage did not impress him. For which I was grateful, because I was growing bored with each of us acting morally superior to the other for no very good reason.

Barner said simply, "I had two officers tail you, yeah. It was partly to keep me informed, and it was also to drag your ass out of the smoke and flames if that was to become necessary. Like I did on the Millpond case back in Albany. These two young officers did a nice job, too. You never had a clue." He grinned and dug into his gooey chicken.

I said, "Are they still up there, these two young officers? Are they the ones checking out Charm and her gang, and Kurt Zinsser-who, by the way, no law-enforcement agency would ever have known about had it not been for me?"

"No, my officers tailed you and the Amish eggplant stud back to the city. I sent another detective up to work with the state police detectives out of Springfield to talk to the cheese-farm vandals. I should have a report from them later tonight."

I said, "You mentioned that it was your opinion, Lyle, that I had not come to know Thad Diefendorfer intimately enough. First, let's get it straight that I have not been physically intimate with Thad. Neither has Timmy, heaven for-fend. It's a nice scene to contemplate, but the stars of Timmy's and my zodiac are not so aligned at present. So why don't you just get all the sex stuff involving me, and Thad, and you out of your head? Let's all proceed not in the realm of fantasy but with our feet on the ground in the real world."

Barner sniffed. He was sure I was lying through my teeth. It was sad.

I went on. "But you seemed to be suggesting, Lyle, that intimate knowledge of Thad's behavior-as opposed to, say, intimate knowledge of his nice butt-would be important for me to obtain. What did you mean by that?"

Barner paused for dramatic effect-Fritz Lang must once have taught a course at the police academy-and said, "After Diefendorfer dropped you off at the J-Bird's place, my team followed him over to Brooklyn. He parked his pickup truck on Lorimer Street in Williamsburg and entered a nearby apartment building. The super was in the lobby when Diefendorfer went in, and my officers were able to determine that the subject-that would be your buddy Thaddie-was admitted to a second-floor apartment whose tenant's name meant something to me when I heard it.

"While you were up in Massachusetts, Strachey, I went over the FBI file on the old FFF.

One of Mr. Diefendorfer's cohorts in 1975-76 was a man by the name of Sam Day. The lessee of the Lorimer Street apartment is Sam Day. Sam Day, the super told my officers, is the leader of some type of organization, with people coming and going from that apartment at all hours of the day and night, especially night. I don't think Jay Plankton is being held there. The super says the apartment is small, only one bedroom.

But as a precaution I've got the place under twenty-four-hour surveillance. So what do you think of them apples, Detective Strachey?"

Damned if I knew. Barner was now sounding almost borderline-deranged. But it was funny that Thad had not mentioned to me that the "Lancaster County" friend he was visiting in Brooklyn was his onetime boyfriend in the FFF.

Chapter 16

Moyle lived in a sixties-era white-brick high-rise on Seventy-fourth near Third, and that's where Barner and I met him. He had been spirited out of Lenox Hill Hospital in an ambulance past a mob of reporters and television news vans, then transferred to an NYPD patrol car three blocks away. With the private security force guarding Jay Plankton having screwed up grandly, Moyle was now under the protection of the police.

Jerry Jeris had joined us in Moyle's living room for his second debriefing of the day, the feds having had a go at Moyle at Lenox Hill. Jurisdiction was unclear at this point-had either abductee actually been transported across a state line?-but while Moyle was a relatively minor player in the nation's cultural life, J-Bird Plankton was a man who had twice appeared on the cover of People. As such, any crime against his person was almost by definition a federal offense, if only honorary, and automatically triggered the involvement of the FBI, if not the Department of Defense.