Mere Anarchy (16 page)

P
INCHUCK’S
L
AW

TWENTY YEARS IN
the homicide division of the NYPD and, brother, you’ve seen everything. Like when some Wall Street broker juliennes his little petit four over who gets to work the channel changer, or this lovesick rabbi decides to end it all by salting his beard with anthrax and inhaling. That’s why when someone reported a dead body on Riverside Drive at Eighty-third with no bullet holes, no stab wounds, and no signs of struggle I didn’t freak to some film-noir conclusion but put it down to one of the thousand natural shocks the Bard claims the flesh is heir to but don’t ask me which one.

When another stiff turned up in SoHo two days later, though, also without the least trace of foul play, and a third likewise in Central Park, I got out the Dexedrine and told the immortal beloved I’d be working late for a while.

“It’s amazing,” my partner, Mike Sweeney, said as he strung the usual yellow bunting around the crime scene. Mike is a bear of a man who could easily pass for a bear, and has in fact been contacted by zoos to fill in when the real bear was
ill.
“The tabloids are saying it’s a serial killer. Naturally, the serial killers are claiming bias and that they’re always the first ones accused when three or more victims are killed the same way. They’d like the number raised to six.”

“I’ll level with you, Mike, I’ve never seen anything like this one—and you know I’m the guy who collared the Astrology Killer.” The Astrology Killer was a vicious maniac who liked to sneak up and bash people’s heads in while they were yodeling. He was tough to nab because there was so much sympathy for him.

I told Mike to call me if he came up with any sexy clues and I beat it down to the morgue to ask Sam Dogstatter, our coroner, about poison. Sam and I go way back to when he was a young coroner starting out and used to perform autopsies at weddings and sweet sixteens for cigarette money.

“At first I thought it might be a tiny dart,” Sam said. “I tried to check out everybody in New York City who owned a blow gun, but the task was insurmountable. No one realizes half the town’s got one of those six-foot Jívaro jobs and most citizens have carrying permits.”

I brought up the possibility of the Amanita mushroom, which can kill without leaving any trace, but Sam shot it down. “There was only one health-food store that sold really deadly mushrooms, but it stopped years ago when it turned out they weren’t organically grown.”

I thanked Sam and put in a call to Lou Watson, who was excited because he’d gotten a very good set of fingerprints at
the
crime scene, which he instantly traded to another precinct for a rare set of Enrico Caruso’s that were quite valuable. Lou said the lab had come up with a hair. They had also come up with a bald spot. The hair unfortunately matched an eight-year-old kid’s and the bald spot was traced to a row of nine men in the front row of a girlie show, who all had airtight alibis.

Down at headquarters, I chatted with Ben Rogers, my mentor and the man who solved the Yuppie Restaurant Murder Case, where the victims were shot and then lightly dusted with lime and fresh mint. Ben had waited till the killer ran out of fresh mint and was forced to use chopped walnuts, which were traceable by their serial numbers.

“Tell me about the victims,” I said. “Did they have any enemies?”

“Sure, they had enemies,” Ben said, “but their enemies were all at Mar-A-Lago, in Palm Beach. There was a big Enemies Convention and practically every enemy on the East Coast attended.”

I had just left Ben to grab a sandwich when I got word that a hot-off-the-griddle stiff had turned up in a Dumpster on East Seventy-second Street. This time the pristine corpse was Ricky Weems, a young actor who specialized in sensitive rebels and was the star of the TV medical soap opera
When a Mole Darkens
. Only this time a homeless lady caught the action. Wanda Bushkin, who’d once slept every night in a carton on the Lower East Side, had recently moved to a carton
on
Park Avenue. At first, she worried that she wouldn’t get board approval, but when her net worth was shown to be above four dollars and thirty cents she was accepted at the more desirable box.

Bushkin couldn’t sleep on the night in question and caught sight of a man who drove up in a red Hummer, tossed a body, and sped away. At first, she didn’t want to get involved because she had once identified a criminal who then broke off his engagement to her. This time, she described the suspect to our sketch artist, Howard Inchcape, but Inchcape, in a fit of temperament, refused to do the picture unless the suspect would come in and sit for it.

I was trying to reason with Inchcape when my mind suddenly twigged on B. J. Sygmnd, the psychic. Sygmnd was a poor Austrian who’d lost all the vowels in his name in a boating accident. In 1993, I had used Sygmnd to find a cat burglar, whom he rather miraculously picked out from almost a hundred strays. I watched now while he poked around at the victim’s belongings and then went into some kind of trance. His eyeballs widened and he started to speak but the voice that came from him was that of Toshiro Mifune. He said the man I was looking for employed Novocain and worked with drills on molars and bicuspids, and he might even be able to pinpoint the profession but he needed a Ouija board.

A quick computer check corroborated that all the victims were patients of the same DDS, and I knew I’d hit pay dirt. Anesthetizing myself with four fingers of Johnnie Walker, I used a Swiss Army knife to pry out the silver amalgam in
lower
seven, and the next morning sat openmouthed while Dr. Paul W. Pinchuck worked on my cavity.

“This won’t take long,” he said. “Although if you have a little time I should also do the tooth next to it. I’m surprised it hasn’t given you any trouble. You’re not missing anything outside today, anyhow. Can you believe this weather? April set a record for rainfall. It’s this global-warming thing. Because too many people use air conditioners. I don’t need one. Where we live you sleep with the window open even in the hottest weather. I have a good metabolism that way. My wife, too. Both our bodies adjust well. Because we’re very careful about what we eat. No marbleized meat, not too much dairy—plus I exercise. I prefer the treadmill. Miriam likes the StairMaster. And we very much enjoy swimming. We have a house out in Sagaponack. Miriam and I usually begin taking the weekends, the start of April, out in the Hamptons. We love Sagaponack. There’s people if you want to socialize but you can also keep to yourself. I’m not a big social person. We like to read, mostly, and she does origami. We used to have a place in Tappan. There’s a few different ways to go but I usually take I-95. It’s a half hour. We prefer the beach, though. We just put in a new roof. I couldn’t believe the estimate. My God, those contractors get you every which way. Look, it’s like anything else—you get what you pay for. I tell my kids there are no bargains in this life. There’s no free lunch. We have three boys. Seth will be bar mitzvahed in June.”

I began to feel myself gasping for air as Pinchuck’s drill cut through my enamel and I fought the onset of Cheyne-Stokes
breathing.
I sensed my vital signs were ebbing, and I knew I was in trouble when my life began to pass before my eyes and my father was being played by Dame Edna.

Four days later I awoke in the intensive-care unit at Columbia-Presbyterian.

“Thank God you’re made of iron,” Mike Sweeney said, leaning over my bed.

“What happened?” I queried.

“You were very lucky,” Mike said. “Just as you lost consciousness, a Mrs. Fay Noseworthy burst into Pinchuck’s office with a dental emergency. She was an FWI: Flossing While Intoxicated. Apparently it caused her temporary crowns to slip out and she swallowed them. When you hit the floor at Pinchuck’s, she began screaming. Pinchuck panicked and made a run for it. Fortunately, our SWAT team got there just in time.”

“Pinchuck ran? But he seemed just like any regular dentist. He worked on my teeth and chatted.”

“Right now, you get some rest,” Mike said, flashing his Mona Lisa smile, which Sotheby’s had claimed was a forgery. “I’ll explain it all when you’re up on your feet.”

In case you’re wondering where this little homicide tale goes, keep watching the back pages for news out of Albany, where the legislature will be taking up the bill that will lead to Pinchuck’s Law, which makes it a felony for any dentist to endanger the life of a patient by relentless conversation or by saying anything other than “Open wide” or “Please rinse” without a prior court order.

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First published in 2007 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing

A Random House Group Company

This edition published 2008

Copyright © Woody Allen 2007

Woody Allen has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

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The following essays first appeared in
The New Yorker:
‘Caution, Falling Moguls’, ‘The Rejection’, ‘Sing, You Sacher Tortes’, ‘On a Bad Day You Can See Forever’, ‘Attention Geniuses: Cash Only’, ‘Strung Out’, ‘Above the Law, Below the Box Springs’, ‘Thus Ate Zarathustra’, ‘Surprise Rocks Disney Trial’, and ‘Pinchuck’s Law’.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to
The New York Times
for permission to reprint an excerpt from ‘India Jolted as One Legend Abducts Another’ by Celia W. Dugger (
The New York Times
, August 3, 2000), copyright © 2000 by The New York Times Co., and an excerpt from ‘The Year in Ideas: Enhanced Clothing’ by Gina Bellafante (
The New York Times Magazine
, December 15, 2002), copyright © 2002 by Gina Bellafante. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of
The New York Times
.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780091920326

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