Walk Among the Tombstones: A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel

by Lawrence Block

  We avoided using the L-word, although love is surely what I felt for her, and she for me. We avoided discussing the possibility of getting married, or living together, although I know I thought about it and had no doubt that she did. But we didn’t talk about it. It was the thing we didn’t talk about, except when we were not talking about love, or about what she did for a living.

  Sooner or later, of course, we would have to think about these things, and talk about them, and even deal with them. Meanwhile we took it all one day at a time, which was how I had been taught to take all of life ever since I stopped trying to drink whiskey faster than they could distill it. As someone pointed out, you might as well take the whole business a day at a time. That, after all, is how the world hands it to you.

  AT a quarter to four the same Thursday afternoon the telephone rang at the Khoury house on Colonial Road. When Kenan Khoury answered it a male voice said, “Hey, Khoury. She never came home, did she?”

  “Who is this?”

  “None of your fuckin’ business is who it is. We got your wife, you Arab fuck. You want her back or what?”

  “Where is she? Let me talk to her.”

  “Hey, fuck you, Khoury,” the man said, and broke the connection.

  Khoury stood there for a moment, shouting “hello” into a dead phone and trying to figure out what to do next. He ran outside, went to the garage, established that his Buick was there and her Camry was not. He ran the length of the driveway to the street; looked in either direction, returned to the house, and picked up the phone. He listened to the dial tone and tried to think of someone to call.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said out loud. He put the phone down and yelled “Francey!”

  He dashed upstairs and burst into their bedroom, calling her name. Of course she wasn’t there, but he couldn’t help himself, he had to check every room. It was a big house and he ran in and out of every room in it, shouting her name, at once the spectator and the participant in his own panic. Finally he was back in the living room and he saw that he had left the phone off the hook. That was brilliant. If they were trying to reach him, they couldn’t get through. He hung up the phone and willed it to ring, and almost immediately it did.

  It was a different male voice this time, calmer, more cultured. He said, “Mr. Khoury, I’ve been trying to reach you and getting a busy signal. Who were you talking to?”

  “Nobody. I had the phone off the hook.”

  “I hope you didn’t call the police.”

  “I didn’t call anybody,” Khoury said. “I made a mistake, I thought I hung up the phone, but I set it down alongside it. Where’s my wife? Let me talk to my wife.”

  “You shouldn’t leave the phone off the hook. And you shouldn’t call anyone.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “And certainly not the police.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to help you get your wife back. If you want her back, that is. Do you want her back?”

  “Jesus, what are you—”

  “Answer the question, Mr. Khoury.”

  “Yes, I want her back. Of course I want her back.”

  “And I want to help you. Keep the line open, Mr. Khoury. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Hello?” he said. “Hello?”

  But the line was dead.

  For ten minutes he paced the floor, waiting for the phone to ring. Then an icy calm settled over him and he relaxed into it. He stopped walking the floor and sat in a chair next to the phone. When it rang he picked it up but said nothing.

  “Khoury?” The first man again, the crude one.

  “What do you want?”

  “What do I want? What the fuck you think I want?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Money,” the man said after a moment. “We want money.”

  “How much?”

  “You fuckin’ sand nigger, where do you get off askin’ the questions? You want to tell me that?”

  He waited.

  “A million dollars. How’s that strike you, asshole?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Look, I can’t talk with you. Have your friend call me, maybe I can talk with him.”

  “Hey, you raghead fuck, what are you tryin’ to—”

  This time it was Khoury who broke the connection.

  IT seemed to him that it was about control.

  Trying to control a situation like this, that was what made you crazy. Because you couldn’t do it. They had all the cards.

  But if you let go of the need to control it, you could at least quit dancing to their music, shuffling around like a trained bear in a Bulgarian circus.

  He went into the kitchen and made himself a cup of thick sweet coffee, preparing it in the long-handled brass pot. While it cooled he got a bottle of vodka from the freezer and poured himself two ounces, drank it down in a single swallow, and felt the icy calm taking him over entirely. He carried his coffee into the other room, and he was just finishing it when the phone rang again.

  It was the second man, the nice one. “You upset my friend, Mr. Khoury,” he said. “He’s difficult to deal with when he’s upset.”

  “I think it would be better if you made the calls from now on.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “Because that way we can get this handled instead of getting all hung up in drama,” he said. “He mentioned a million dollars. That’s out of the question.”

  “Don’t you think she’s worth it?”

  “She’s worth any amount,” he said, “but—”

  “What does she weigh, Mr. Khoury? One-ten, one-twenty, somewhere in that neighborhood?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Something like fifty kilograms, we might say.”

  Cute.

  “Fifty keys at twenty a key, well, run the numbers for me, why don’t you, Mr. Khoury? Comes to a mil, doesn’t it?”

  “What’s the point?”

  “The point is you’d pay a million for her if she was product, Mr. Khoury. You’d pay that if she was powder. Isn’t she worth as much in flesh and blood?”

  “I can’t pay what I don’t have.”

  “You have plenty.”

  “I don’t have a million.”

  “What do you have?”

  He’d had time to think of the answer. “Four hundred.”

  “Four hundred thousand.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s less than half.”

  “It’s four hundred thousand,” he said. “It’s less than some things and it’s more than others. It’s what I’ve got.”

  “You could get the rest.”

  “I don’t see how. I could probably make some promises and call in some favors and raise a little that way, but not that much. And it would take at least a few days, probably more like a week.”

  “You assume we’re in a hurry?”

  “I’m in a hurry,” he said. “I want my wife back and I want you out of my life, and I’m in a big hurry as far as those two things are concerned.”

  “Five hundred thousand.”

  See? There were elements he could control after all. “No,” he said. “I’m not bargaining, not where my wife’s life is concerned. I gave you the top figure right away. Four.”

  A pause, then a sigh. “Ah, well. Silly of me to think I could get the better of one of your kind in a business deal. You people have been playing this game for years, haven’t you? You’re as bad as the Jews.”

  He didn’t know how to answer that, so he left it alone.

  “Four it is,” the man said. “How long will it take you to get it ready?”

  Fifteen minutes, he thought. “A couple of hours,” he said.

  “We can do it tonight.”

  “All right.”

  “Get it ready. Don’t call anyone.”

  “Who would I call?”

  HALF an hour later he was sitting at the kitchen table looking at four hundred thousand dollars. He had a safe in the basement, a big old Mos
ler that weighed over a ton, itself set in the wall and screened by pine paneling and protected by a burglar alarm along with its own lock system. The bills were all hundreds, fifty in each banded stack, eighty stacks each containing five thousand dollars. He’d counted them out and tossed three and four stacks at a time into a woven plastic bushel basket Francine used for laundry.

  She didn’t have to do the laundry herself, for God’s sake. She could hire all the help she needed, he’d told her that often enough. But she liked that, she was old-fashioned, she liked cooking and cleaning and keeping house.

  He picked up the phone, held the receiver at arm’s length, then dropped it in its cradle. Don’t call anyone, the man had said. Who would I call? he’d demanded.

  Who had done this to him? Set him up, stolen his wife away from him. Who would do something like that?

  Well, maybe a lot of people would. Maybe anybody would, if they thought they could get away with it.

  He picked up the phone again. It was clean, untapped. The whole house was free of bugs, as far as that went. He had two devices, both of them supposed to be state of the art, ought to be for what they cost him. One was a telephone-tap alert, installed in the phone line. Any change in the voltage, resistance, or capacitance anywhere on the line and he’d know it. The other was a TrackLock, automatically scanning the radio spectrum for hidden microphones. Five, six grand he’d paid for the two units, something like that, and it was worth it if it kept his private conversations private.

  Almost a shame there hadn’t been cops listening the past couple of hours. Cops to trace the caller, come down on the kidnappers, bring Francey back to him—

  No, last thing he needed. Cops would just fuck up the whole thing beyond recognition. He had the money. He’d pay it, and he’d either get her back or he wouldn’t. Things you can control and things you can’t—he could control paying the money, control how that went to some degree, but he couldn’t control what happened afterward.

  Don’t call anyone.

  Who would I call?

  He picked up the phone one more time and dialed a number he didn’t have to look up. His brother answered on the third ring.

  He said, “Petey, I need you out here. Jump in a cab, I’ll pay for it, but get out here right away, you hear me?”

  A pause. Then, “Babe, I’d do anything for you, you know that—”

  “So jump in a cab, man!”

  “—but I can’t be in anything has to do with your business. I just can’t, babe.”

  “It’s not business.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s Francine.”

  “Jesus, what’s the matter? Never mind, you’ll tell me when I get out there. You’re at home, right?”

  “Yeah, I’m at home.”

  “I’ll get a cab. I’ll be right out.”

  WHILE Peter Khoury was looking for a cabdriver willing to take him to his brother’s house in Brooklyn, I was watching a group of reporters on ESPN discussing the likelihood of a cap on players’ salaries. It didn’t break my heart when the phone rang. It was Mick Ballou, calling from the town of Castlebar in County Mayo. The line was clear as a bell; he might have been calling from the back room at Grogan’s.

  “It’s grand here,” he said. “If you think the Irish are crazy in New York you should meet them on their own home ground. Every other storefront’s a pub, and no one’s out the door before closing hour.”

  “They close early, don’t they?”

  “Too bloody early by half. In your hotel, though, they have to serve drink at any hour to any registered guest that wants it. Now that’s the mark of a civilized country, don’t you think?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “They all smoke, though. They’re forever lighting cigarettes and offering the pack around. The French are even worse that way. When I was over there visiting my father’s people they were peeved with me for not smoking. I believe Americans are the only people in the world who’ve had the sense to give it up.”

  “You’ll still find a few smokers in this country, Mick.”

  “Good luck to them, then, suffering through plane rides and films and all the rules against it in public places.” He told a long story about a man and a woman he’d met a few nights before. It was funny and we both laughed, and then he asked about me and I said I was all right. “Are you, then,” he said.

  “A little restless, maybe. I’ve had time on my hands lately. And the moon’s full.”

  “Is it,” he said. “Here, too.”

  “What a coincidence.”

  “But then it’s always full over Ireland. Good job it’s always raining so you don’t have to look at it all the time. Matt, I’ve an idea. Get on a plane and come over here.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll bet you’ve never been to Ireland.”

  “I’ve never been out of the country,” I said. “Wait a minute, that’s not true, I’ve been to Canada a couple of times and Mexico once, but—”

  “You’ve never been to Europe?”

  “No.”

  “Well, for Jesus’ sake, get on a plane and come over. Bring herself if you want”—meaning Elaine—“or come alone, it makes no matter. I talked to Rosenstein and he says I’d best stay out of the country awhile yet. He says he can get it all straightened out but they’ve got this fucking federal task force and he doesn’t want me on American soil until the all clear’s sounded. I could be stuck in this fucking pesthole another month or more. What’s so funny?”

  “I thought you loved the place, and now it’s a pesthole.”

  “Anywhere’s a pesthole when you haven’t your friends about you. Come on over, man. What do you say?”

  PETER Khoury got to his brother’s house just after Kenan had had still another conversation with the gentler of the kidnappers. The man had seemed rather less gentle this time, especially toward the end of the conversation when Khoury tried to demand some evidence that Francine was alive and well. The conversation went something like this:

  KHOURY: I want to talk to my wife.

  KIDNAPPER: That’s impossible. She’s at a safe house. I’m at a pay phone.

  KHOURY: How do I know she’s all right?

  KIDNAPPER: Because we’ve had every reason to take good care of her. Look how much she’s worth to us.

  KHOURY: Jesus, how do I even know you’ve got her in the first place?

  KIDNAPPER: Are you familiar with her breasts?

  KHOURY: Huh?

  KIDNAPPER: Would you recognize one of them? That would be the simplest way. I’ll cut off one of her tits and leave it on your doorstep, and that will put your mind at rest.

  KHOURY: Jesus, don’t say that. Don’t even say that.

  KIDNAPPER: Then let’s not talk about proof, shall we? We have to trust each other, Mr. Khoury. Believe me, trust is everything in this business.

  That was the whole thing, Kenan told Peter. He had to trust them, and how could he do that? He didn’t even know who they were.

  “I tried to think who I could call,” he said. “You know, people in the business. Someone to stand by me, back me up. Anybody I can think of, for all I know, they’re in on it. How can I rule anybody out? Somebody set this up.”

  “How did they—”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything, all I know is she went shopping and she never came back. She went out, took the car, and five hours later the phone rings.”

  “Five hours?”

  “I don’t know, something like that. Petey, I don’t know what I’m doing here, I got no experience in this shit.”

  “You do deals all the time, babe.”

  “A dope deal’s completely different. You structure that so everybody’s safe, everybody’s covered. This case—”

  “People get killed in dope deals all the time.”

  “Yeah, but there’s generally a reason. Number one, dealing with people you don’t know. That’s the killer. It looks good and it turns into a rip-off. Number two, or mayb
e its number one and a half, dealing with people you think you know but you don’t really. And the other thing, whatever number you want to give it, people get in trouble because they try to chisel. They try to do the deal without the money, figure they’ll make it good afterward. They get in over their heads, they get away with it, and then one time they don’t. You know where that comes from nine times out of ten, it’s people who get into their own product and their judgment goes down the toilet.”

  “Or they do everything right and then six Jamaicans kick the door in and shoot everybody.”

  “Well, that happens,” Kenan said. “It doesn’t have to be Jamokes. What was I reading the other day, Laotians in San Francisco. Every week there’s some new ethnic group looking to kill you.” He shook his head. “The thing is, in a righteous dope deal you can walk away from anything that doesn’t look right. You never have to do the deal. If you’ve got the money, you can spend it somewhere else. If you’ve got the product, you can sell it to somebody else. You’re only in the deal for as long as it works, and you can back yourself up, build in safeguards along the way, and from the jump you know the people and whether or not you can trust them.”

  “Whereas here—”

  “Whereas here we got nothing. We got our thumb up our ass, that’s what we got. I said we’ll bring the money and you bring my wife, they said no. They said that’s not the way it works. What am I gonna say, keep my wife? Sell her to somebody else, you don’t like the way I do business? I can’t do that.”

  “No.”

  “Except I could. He said a million, I said four hundred thousand. I said fuck you, that’s all there is, and he bought it. Suppose I said—”

  The phone rang. Kenan talked a few minutes, making notes on a scratch pad. “I’m not coming alone,” he said at one point. “I got my brother here, he’s coming with me. No arguments.” He listened some more and was about to say something else when the phone clicked in his ear.

  “We gotta roll,” he said. “They want the money in two Hefty bags. That’s easy enough. Why two, I wonder? Maybe they don’t know what four hundred large is, how much space it takes up.”