Walk Among the Tombstones: A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel

by Lawrence Block

  But nobody had to know any of that. So she would be telling them that she had had a couple of jobs waitressing, working off the books in the neighborhood, and that she was being more or less kept by the anonymous benefactor who had referred her to me.

  “And what about you?” Elaine wanted to know. “Aren’t you going to have to see Kelly and give him a statement?”

  “I suppose so, but there’s no rush. I’ll talk to him tomorrow and see if he needs anything formal from me. He may not. I don’t have anything for him, really, because I didn’t uncover any evidence. I just spotted some invisible links between three existing cases.”

  “So for you ze war is over, mein Kapitän?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “I’ll bet you’re exhausted. Do you want to go in the other room and lie down?”

  “I’d rather stay up so that I can get back on my normal schedule.”

  “Makes sense. Are you hungry? Oh my God, you haven’t eaten anything since breakfast, have you? Sit there, I’ll fix us something.”

  WE had a tossed salad and a big bowl of butterfly pasta with oil and garlic. We ate at the kitchen table, and afterward she made tea for herself and coffee for me and we went into the living room and sat together on the couch. At one point she said something uncharacteristically coarse; when I laughed she asked me what was so funny.

  I said, “I love it when you talk street.”

  “You think it’s a pose, huh? You think I’m some sheltered hothouse blossom, don’t you?”

  “No, I think you’re the rose of Spanish Harlem.”

  “I wonder if I could have made it on the street,” she said thoughtfully. “I’m glad I never had to find out. I’ll tell you one thing, though. When this is all over Little Miss Street Smarts is going to come in out of the cold. She can just bundle up her remaining tit and get the hell off the pavement.”

  “Are you planning on adopting her?”

  “No, and we’re damn well not going to be roommates and do each other’s hair, either. But I can get her a place in a decent house or show her how to build a book and work out of her apartment. If she’s smart you know what she’ll do? Run a couple of ads in Screw letting the tit fanciers out there know they can now get one for the price of two. You’re laughing again, was that street talk?”

  “No, it was just funny.”

  “Then you’re allowed to laugh. I don’t know, maybe I should just butt out and let her live her life. But I liked her.”

  “So did I.”

  “I think she deserves better than the street.”

  “Everybody does,” I said. “She may come out of this all right. If they get the guys and there’s a trial, she could have her allotted fifteen minutes of fame. And she’s got a lawyer who’ll make sure that nobody gets her story without paying her for it.”

  “Maybe there’ll be a TV movie.”

  “I wouldn’t rule it out, although I don’t think we can count on Debra Winger playing our friend.”

  “No, probably not. Oh, I got it. Are you with me on this? What you do, you get an actress to play her who’s a postmastectomy patient in real life. I mean, are we talking high concept here or what? You see what a statement we’d be making?” She winked. “That’s my show-biz persona. I bet you like my street act better.”

  “I’d call it a toss-up.”

  “Fair enough. Matt? Does it bother you to work on a case like this and then hand it over to the police?”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  “Why should it? I couldn’t justify keeping it to myself. The NYPD has resources and manpower I don’t have. I’d taken it as far as I could, that end of it, anyway. I’ll still follow up the lead I got last night and see what I can turn up in Sunset Park.”

  “You’re not telling the police about Sunset Park.”

  “No way to do that.”

  “No, Matt? I have a question.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I don’t know if you want to hear it, but I have to ask. Are you sure it’s the same killers?”

  “Has to be. A piece of wire used to amputate a breast? Once with Leila Alvarez, once with Pam Cassidy? Both victims dumped in cemeteries? Give me a break.”

  “I was assuming that the ones who did Pam also did the Alvarez girl. And the woman in Forest Park, the schoolteacher.”

  “Marie Gotteskind.”

  “But what about Francine Khoury? She was not dumped in a cemetery, she did not necessarily have a breast amputated with a garrote, and she was reportedly snatched by three men. If there was one thing Pam was positive of it was that there were only two men. Ray and the other one.”

  “There could have been just two with Khoury.”

  “You said—”

  “I know what I said. Pam also said that they went from the driver’s seat to the back of the truck and back again. Maybe it just looked as though there were three people because when you see two guys enter the back of a truck and then it pulls away you assume somebody was up front to drive it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “We know these guys did Gotteskind. Gotteskind and Alvarez are tied together by the business with the fingers, amputation and insertion, and Alvarez and Cassidy both had the breast cut off, so that means—”

  “They’re all three the same. All right, I follow that.”

  “Well, the Gotteskind eyewitnesses also said there were three men, two who did the snatching and one who drove. That could have been an illusion. Or they could have had three that day, and again the day they did Francine, but one guy was home with the flu the night they picked up Pam.”

  “Home jerking off,” she said.

  “Whatever. We could ask Pam if there were any references to another man. ‘Mike would like her ass,’ something like that.”

  “Maybe they took her breast home for Mike.”

  “ ‘Hey, Mike you should have seen the one that got away.’ ”

  “Spare me, will you? Do you think they’ll get a decent description out of her?”

  “I couldn’t.” She’d said she didn’t remember what the two men looked like, that when she tried to picture them she saw wholly undefined faces, as if they’d been wearing nylon stockings as masks. That had made the original investigation an exercise in futility when they gave her books full of sex-offender mug shots to pore over. She didn’t know what faces she was looking for. They’d tried her with an Identi-Kit technician and that had been hopeless, too.

  “When she was here,” she said, “I kept thinking of Ray Galindez.” He was an NYPD cop and an artist, with an uncanny ability to hook up with a witness and extract a remarkable likeness. Two of his sketches, matted and framed, were on Elaine’s bathroom wall.

  “I had the same thought,” I said, “but I don’t know what he could get out of her. If he’d worked with her a day or two after it happened he might have got somewhere. Now it’s been too long.”

  “What about hypnosis?”

  “It’s possible. She must have blocked the memory, and a hypnotist could possibly unblock her. I don’t know that much about it. Juries don’t necessarily trust it, and I’m not sure I do either.”

  “Why not?”

  “I think hypnotized witnesses can create memories out of their imaginations because of a desire to please. I’m suspicious of a lot of the incest memories I hear about in meetings, memories that suddenly surface twenty or thirty years after the event. I’m sure some of them are real, but I get the sense that more than a few of them are summoned up out of the whole cloth because the patient wants to make her therapist happy.”

  “Sometimes it’s real.”

  “No question. But sometimes it’s not.”

  “Maybe. I’ll grant you it’s the trauma du jour these days. Pretty soon women without incest memories are going to start worrying that their fathers thought they were ugly. You want to play I’m a naughty little girl and you’re my daddy?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re no fu
n. You want to play I’m a hip slick and cool street hooker and you’re sitting behind the wheel of your car?”

  “Would I have to go rent a car?”

  “We could pretend the couch is a car, but that might be a stretch. What can we do that’ll keep our relationship exciting and hot? I’d tie you up but I know you. You’d just go to sleep.”

  “Especially tonight.”

  “Uh-huh. We could pretend you’re into deformities and I’m missing a breast.”

  “God forbid.”

  “Yeah, amen to that. I don’t want to beshrei it, as my mother would say. You know from beshrei? I think it means inviting a Yiddish equivalent of hubris. ‘Don’t even say it, you might give God ideas.’ ”

  “Well, don’t.”

  “No. Honey? Do you want to just go to bed?”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  Chapter 15

  Tuesday I slept late, and Elaine was gone when I woke up. A note on the kitchen table told me to stay as long as I wanted. I helped myself to breakfast and watched CNN for a while. Then I went out and walked around for an hour or so, winding up at the Citicorp Building in time for the noon meeting. Afterward I went to a movie on Third Avenue, walked to the Frick and looked at the paintings, then took a bus down Lexington and caught a five-thirty meeting a block from Grand Central, commuters bracing themselves to pass up the club car.

  The meeting was on the Eleventh Step, the one about seeking to know God’s will through prayer and meditation, and most of the discussion was relentlessly spiritual. When I got out I decided to treat myself to a cab. Two sailed past me, and when a third one pulled up a woman in a tailored suit and flowing bow tie elbowed me out of the way and beat me to it. I hadn’t done any praying or meditating, but I didn’t have a whole lot of trouble figuring out God’s will in the matter. He wanted me to go home by subway.

  There were messages to call John Kelly, Drew Kaplan, and Kenan Khoury. That struck me as an awful lot of people with the same last initial, and I hadn’t even heard from the Kongs yet. There was a fourth message from someone who hadn’t left a name, just a number; perversely, that was the call I returned first.

  I dialed the number, and instead of ringing it responded with a tone. I decided I’d been disconnected and hung up, and then I got it and dialed again, and when the tone sounded I punched in my phone number and hung up.

  Within five minutes my phone rang. I picked it up and TJ said, “Hey, Matt, my man. What’s happenin’?”

  “You got a beeper.”

  “Surprised you, huh? Man, I had five hundred dollars all at once. What you ‘spect me to do, buy a savings bond? They was havin’ a special, you got the beeper and the first three months’ service for a hundred an’ ninety-nine dollars. You want one, I’ll go to the store with you, make sure they treat you right.”

  “I’ll wait awhile. What happens after three months? They take the beeper back?”

  “No, I own it, man. I just got to pay so much a month to keep it on-line. I stop payin’, I still own it, but you call it an’ nothin’ happens.”

  “Not much point in owning it then.”

  “Lotta dudes got ’em, though. Wear ’em all the time an’ you never hear ’em beep because they ain’t paid to stay on-line.”

  “What’s the monthly charge?”

  “They told me but I forget. Don’t matter. Way I figure, by the time the three months is up you’ll be pickin’ up the monthly tab for me just to have me at your beck an’ call.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because I indispensable, man. I a key asset to your operation.”

  “Because you’re resourceful.”

  “See? You’re getting it.”

  I TRIED Drew but he wasn’t at his office and I didn’t want to bother him at home. I didn’t call Kenan Khoury or John Kelly, figuring they could wait. I stopped around the corner for a slice of pizza and a Coke and went to St. Paul’s for my third meeting of the day. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d gone to that many, but it had certainly been a while.

  It wasn’t because I felt in danger of drinking. The thought of a drink had never been further from my mind. Nor did I feel beset by problems, or unable to reach a decision.

  What I did feel, I realized, was a sense of depletion, of exhaustion. The all-nighter at the Frontenac had taken its toll, but its effects had been pretty much offset by a couple of good meals and nine hours of uninterrupted sleep. But I was still very much at the effect of the case itself. I had worked hard on it, letting it absorb me entirely, and now it was finished.

  Except, of course, that it wasn’t. The killers had not even been identified, let alone apprehended. I had done what I recognized as excellent detective work and it had produced significant results, but the case itself had not been brought to anything like a conclusion. So the exhaustion I felt wasn’t part of a glorious feeling of completion. Tired or not, I had promises to keep. And miles to go.

  So I was at another meeting, a safe and restful place. I talked with Jim Faber during the break, and walked out with him at the end of the meeting. He didn’t have time to get a cup of coffee but I walked him most of the way to his apartment and we wound up standing on a street corner and talking for a few minutes. Then I went home and once again I didn’t call Kenan Khoury, but I did call his brother. His name had come up in my conversation with Jim, and neither of us could remember having seen him in the past week. So I dialed Peter’s number but there was no answer. I called Elaine and we talked for a few minutes. She mentioned that Pam Cassidy had called to say she wouldn’t be calling—i.e., Drew had told her not to be in touch with me or Elaine for the time being, and she wanted to let Elaine know so she wouldn’t worry.

  I called Drew first thing the next morning and he said everything had gone well enough and he’d found Kelly hardnosed but not unreasonable. “If you want to wish for something,” he suggested, “wish that the guy turns out to be rich.”

  “Kelly? You don’t get rich in Homicide. There’s no graft in it.”

  “Not Kelly, for God’s sake. Ray.”

  “Who?”

  “The killer,” he said. “The one with the wire, for God’s sake. Don’t you listen to your own client?”

  She wasn’t my client, but he didn’t know that. I asked him why on earth we would want Ray to turn out to be rich.

  “So we can sue his ass off.”

  “I was hoping to see it locked up for the rest of his life.”

  “Yeah, I have the same hope,” he said, “but we both know what can happen in criminal court. But one thing I damn well know is that if they so much as indict the son of a bitch I can get a civil judgment for every dime he’s got. But that’s only worth something if he’s got a few bucks.”

  “You never know,” I said. What I did know was that there weren’t too many millionaires living in Sunset Park, but I didn’t want to mention Sunset Park to Kaplan, and anyway I had no reason to assume that both of them, or all three of them if we were dealing with three, actually lived there. For all I knew, Ray had a suite at the Pierre.

  “I know I’d like to find somebody to sue,” he said. “Maybe the bastards used a company truck. I’d like to find some collateral defendant somewhere down the line so that I can at least get her a decent settlement. She deserves it after what she went through.”

  “And that way your pro bono work would turn out to be cost-effective, wouldn’t it?”

  “So? There’s nothing wrong with that, but I’ve got to tell you that my end of it isn’t my chief concern. Seriously.”

  “Okay.”

  “She’s a damn good kid,” he said. “Tough and gutsy, but there’s a core of innocence about her, do you know what I mean?”

  “I know.”

  “And those bastards really put her through it. Did she show you what they did to her?”

  “She told me.”

  “She told me, too, but she also showed me. You think the knowledge prepares you, but believe me, the visua
l impact is staggering.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “Did she also show you what she’s got left, so you could appreciate the extent of her loss?”

  “You’ve got a dirty mind, you know that?”

  “I know,” I said. “At least that’s what everybody tells me.”

  I CALLED John Kelly’s office and was told he was in court. When I gave my name the cop I was talking to said, “Oh, he’ll want to talk to you. Give me your number, I’ll beep him for you.” A little while later Kelly got back to me and we arranged to meet at a place called The Docket around the corner from Borough Hall. The place was new to me, but it felt just like places I knew in downtown Manhattan, bar-restaurants with a clientele that ran to cops and lawyers and a decor that featured a lot of brass and leather and dark wood.

  Kelly and I had never met, a point we both overlooked when we set up the meeting, but as it turned out I had no trouble recognizing him. He looked just like his father.

  “I been hearing that all my life,” he said.

  He picked up his beer from the bar and we took a table in back. Our waitress had a snub nose and infectious good humor, and she knew my companion. When he asked her about the pastrami she said, “It’s not lean enough for you, Kelly. Take the roast beef.” We had roast beef sandwiches on rye, the meat sliced thin and piled high, accompanied by crisp french fries and a horseradish sauce that would bring tears to the eyes of a statue.

  “Good place,” I said.

  “Can’t beat it. I eat here all the time.”

  He had a second bottle of Molson’s with his sandwich. I ordered a cream soda, and when that got a headshake from the waitress I said I’d have a Coke. I saw this register with Kelly, although he didn’t comment at the time. When she brought our drinks, though, he said, “You used to drink.”

  “Your father mentioned that? I wasn’t hitting it all that heavy when I knew him.”

  “I didn’t get it from him. I made a few calls, asked around. I hear you had your troubles with it and then you stopped.”