Walk Among the Tombstones: A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel

by Lawrence Block

  “I see what you mean.”

  “I started off thinking I’m the target. You know, that the whole thing begins with someone looking to hurt me and take me off. But that’s not true, according to you. It starts with crazies who are getting off on rape and murder. Then they decide to make it pay, and then they decide to go after a drug dealer, and then I’m elected. So I can’t get anywhere backtracking people I know professionally, somebody who maybe thinks I screwed him in a transaction and he sees a good way of getting even. I’m not saying there aren’t any crazy people dealing in the product, but—”

  “No, I follow you. And you’re right. You’re the target incidentally. They’re looking for a dope dealer and you’re one they know of.”

  “But how?” He hesitated. “There was a thought I had.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Well, I don’t think it makes much sense. But I gather my brother tells his story at meetings, right? He sits up in front and tells everybody what he did and where it got him. And I assume he mentions how his brother makes his living. Am I right?”

  “Well, I knew Pete had a brother who dealt drugs, but I didn’t know your name or where you lived. I didn’t even know Pete’s last name.”

  “If you asked him he would have told you. And how hard would it be to get the rest? ‘I think I know your brother. He live in Bushwick?’ ‘No, Bay Ridge.’ ‘Oh, yeah? What street?’ I don’t know. I guess it’s farfetched.”

  “It seems it to me,” I said. “I grant you you’ll find all kinds at an AA meeting, and there’s nothing to stop a serial killer from walking in the doors. God knows a lot of the famous ones were alcoholic, and always under the influence when they did their killing. But I don’t know of any of them that ever got sober in the program.”

  “But it’s possible?”

  “I suppose so. Most things are. Still, if our friends live here in Sunset Park and Peter went to Manhattan meetings—”

  “Yeah, you’re right. They live a mile and a half from me and I’m trying to have them chase into Manhattan in order to hear about me. Of course when I said what I said I didn’t know they were from Brooklyn.”

  “When you said what?”

  He looked at me, the pain stitched into his forehead. “When I told Petey he ought to stop running his mouth about my business at his meetings. When I said maybe that’s how they got onto me, that’s how they picked Francine.” He turned to look out the window at the laundromat. “It was when he drove me to the airport. It was just a flare-up. He was giving me grief about something, I forget what, and I threw that in his face. He looked for a second as though I just kicked him in the pit of the stomach. Then he said something, you know, indicating it washed right over him, that he wasn’t going to take it seriously, he knew I was just spouting out of anger.”

  He turned the key in the ignition. “Fuck this laundry,” he said. “I don’t see a lot of people lining up to make phone calls. Let’s get out of here, huh?”

  “Sure.”

  And, a block or two farther along: “Suppose he kept mulling it over, brooding on it. Suppose it stayed on his mind. Suppose he wondered if it was true.” He darted a glance at me. “You think that’s what sent him out looking to cop? ’Cause I’ll tell you, if I was Petey, that just might do it.”

  BACK in Manhattan he said, “I want to go by his place, knock on his door. You want to keep me company?”

  The lock wasn’t working on the rooming-house door. Kenan drew it open and said, “Great security here. Great place altogether.” We entered and climbed two flights of stairs through that flophouse smell of mice and soiled linen. Kenan walked to a door and listened for a moment, knocked on it, called out his brother’s name. There was no response. He repeated the process with the same result, tried the door and found it locked.

  “I’m afraid what I’ll find in there,” he said, “and at the same time I’m afraid to walk away.”

  I found an expired Visa card in my wallet and loided the door with it. Kenan glanced at me with new respect.

  The room was empty, and a mess. The bed linen was half on the floor, and clothing was piled in disarray on a wooden chair. I spotted the Big Book and a couple of AA pamphlets on the oak bureau. I didn’t see any bottles or drug paraphernalia, but there was a water tumbler on the bedside table and Kenan picked it up and sniffed at it.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “What do you think?”

  The glass was dry inside, but I thought I could smell a residue of alcohol. Still, suggestion would account for it. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d smelled alcohol when there wasn’t any there.

  “I don’t like poking around his things,” Kenan said. “What little he’s got, he’s entitled to his privacy. I just had this vision of him turning blue with the needle still in his arm, you know what I mean?”

  Out on the street he said, “Well, he’s got money. He won’t have to steal. ‘Less he gets into cocaine, that’ll take whatever you got, but he never liked coke much. Petey likes the bass notes, likes to get down as deep as you can go.”

  “I can identify with that.”

  “Yeah. He runs out of dough, he can always sell Francey’s Camry. He hasn’t got the title, but it Blue Books at eight or nine grand, so he can probably find somebody’ll give him a few hundred for it without papers. That’s junkie economics, makes perfect sense.”

  I told him Peter’s joke about the difference between a drunk and a junkie. They’d both steal your wallet, but the junkie would help you look for it.

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Says it all.”

  Chapter 17

  Several things happened over the course of the next week or so.

  I made three trips to Sunset Park, two of them alone, the third in the company of TJ. At loose ends one afternoon, I beeped him and got a call back almost immediately. We met in the Times Square subway station and rode out to Brooklyn together. We had lunch at a deli and café con leche at the Cuban place and walked around some. We talked a lot, and while I didn’t learn a great deal about him, he learned a few things about me, assuming he was listening.

  While we waited for our train back to the city he said, “Say, you don’t have to pay me nothin’ for today. On account of we didn’t do nothin’.”

  “Your time has to be worth something.”

  “If I be workin’, but all I was doin’ was hangin’ around. Man, I been doin’ that for free all my life.”

  Another night I was just about to leave the house and head for a meeting when a call from Danny Boy sent me chasing out to an Italian restaurant in Corona, where three small-time louts had recently blossomed as big spenders. It seemed unlikely—Corona is in northern Queens, and light-years from Sunset Park—but I went anyway and drank San Pellegrino water at the bar and waited for three guys in silk suits to come in and throw their money around.

  The TV was on, and at ten o’clock the Channel 5 newscast included a shot of three men who’d just been arrested for the recent robbing and pistol-whipping of a Forty-seventh Street diamond merchant. The bartender said, “Hey, would you look at that! Those assholes were in here the past three nights, spending money like they couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. I had a kind of a feeling where it came from.”

  “They made it the old-fashioned way,” the man next to me said. “They stole it.”

  I was only a few blocks from Shea Stadium, but that still left me hundreds of miles from the Mets, who had lost a close one to the Cubs that afternoon at Wrigley. The Yankees were at home against the Indians. I walked to the subway and went home.

  ANOTHER time I got a call from Drew Kaplan, who said that Kelly and his colleagues at Brooklyn Homicide wanted Pam to go down to Washington and pay a call at the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at Quantico. I asked when she was going.

  “She’s not,” he said.

  “She refused?”

  “At her attorney’s suggestion.”

  “I don’t know about that,”
I said. “The public-relations department was always where the Feebies were strongest, but what I’ve heard about their division that profiles serial killers is fairly impressive. I think she should go.”

  “Well,” he said, “it’s too bad you’re not her lawyer. It’s her interests I’ve been engaged to protect, my friend. Anyway, the mountain’s coming to Mohammed. They’re sending a guy up tomorrow.”

  “Let me know how it goes,” I said, “insofar as that coincides with what you deem to be the best interests of your client.”

  He laughed. “Don’t get hinky, Matt. Why should she have to schlep down to DC? Let him come here.”

  After the meeting with the profiler he called again to say he was not blown away by the session. “He seemed a little nonchalant to me,” Drew said. “Like someone who’s only killed two women and slashed a third isn’t worth his time. I gather the more of a string a killer puts together, the more it gives them to work with.”

  “That figures.”

  “Yeah, but it’s small consolation to the people at the end of the string. They’d probably just as soon the cops caught the guy early on instead of letting him provide such interesting items for their data base. He was telling Kelly they’ve put together a really solid profile of some yutz out on the West Coast. They could tell you he collected stamps as a boy and how old he was when he got his first tattoo. But they still haven’t apprehended the son of a bitch and I think he said the current count is forty-two, with four more probables.”

  “I can see why Ray and his friend seem small-time.”

  “He wasn’t wild about the frequency, either. He said serial killers generally manifest a higher level of activity. That means they don’t wait months between crimes. He said either they hadn’t hit their stride yet or they were infrequent visitors to New York and did the bulk of their killing elsewhere.”

  “No,” I said. “They know the city too well for that.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Huh?”

  “How do you know how well they knew the city?”

  Because they had sent the Khourys chasing all over Brooklyn, but I couldn’t mention that. “They used two different outer-borough cemeteries for dumping grounds,” I said, “and Forest Park. Who did you ever hear of from out of town who could pick up a girl on Lexington Avenue and wind up in a cemetery in Queens?”

  “Anybody could,” he said, “if he picked up the wrong girl. Let me think what else he said. He said they were probably in their early thirties, probably abused as children. He came up with a lot of very general stuff. There was one other thing he said that gave me a chill.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, this particular guy’s been with the division twenty years, just about since they started it up. He’s coming up on retirement pretty soon and he said he’s just as glad.”

  “Because he’s burned out?”

  “More than that. He said the rate at which these incidents are occurring has been increasing all along in a really nasty way. But the way the curve’s shaping up now, they think these cases are really going to spike between now and the end of the century. Sport-killing, he called it. Says they’re looking for it to be the leisure craze of the nineties.”

  THEY didn’t do this when I first came around, but these days at AA meetings they generally invite newcomers with less than ninety days of sobriety to introduce themselves and give their day count. At most meetings each of these announcements gets a round of applause. Not at St. Paul’s, though, because of a former member who came every night for two months and said before each meeting, “My name is Kevin and I’m an alcoholic and I’ve got one day back. I drank last night but I’m sober today!” People got sick of applauding this statement, and at the next business meeting we voted, after much debate, to drop the applause altogether. “My name is Al,” someone will say, “and I’ve got eleven days.” “Hi, Al,” we say.

  It was a Wednesday when I walked from Brooklyn Heights clear out to Bay Ridge and collected my expense money from Kenan Khoury, and it was the following Tuesday at the eight-thirty meeting when a familiar voice at the back of the room said, “My name is Peter and I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict and I’ve got two days back.”

  “Hi, Peter,” everybody said.

  I had planned to catch up with him during the break but I got caught up in a conversation with the woman sitting next to me, and when I turned to look for him he was gone. I called him from the hotel afterward but he didn’t answer. I called his brother’s house.

  “Peter’s sober,” I said. “At least he was an hour ago. I saw him at a meeting.”

  “I spoke to him earlier today. He said he had most of my money left and nothing bad happened to the car. I told him I didn’t give a shit about the money or the car, I cared about him, and he said he was all right. How’d he look to you?”

  “I didn’t see him. I just heard him speak up, and when I went to look for him he was gone. I just called to let you know he was alive.”

  He said he appreciated it. Two nights later Kenan called and said he was downstairs in the lobby. “I’m double-parked out front,” he said. “You had dinner yet? C’mon downstairs, meet me outside.”

  In the car he said, “You know Manhattan better than I do. Where do you want to go? Pick a place.”

  We went to Paris Green on Ninth Avenue. Bryce greeted me by name and gave us a window table, and Gary waved theatrically from the bar. Kenan ordered a glass of wine and I asked for a Perrier.

  “Nice place,” he said.

  After we’d ordered dinner he said, “I don’t know, man. I got no reason to be in the city. I just got in the car and drove around and I couldn’t think of a single place to go. I used to do that all the time, just drive around, do my part for the oil shortage and the air pollution. You ever do that? Oh, how could you, you don’t have a car. Suppose you want to get away for a weekend? What do you do?”

  “Rent one.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I didn’t think of that. You do that much?”

  “Fairly often when the weather’s decent. My girlfriend and I go upstate, or over to Pennsylvania.”

  “Oh, you got a girlfriend, huh? I was wondering. Two of you been keeping company for a long time?”

  “Not too long.”

  “What’s she do, if you don’t mind my asking.”

  “She’s an art historian.”

  “Very good,” he said. “Must be interesting.”

  “She seems to find it interesting.”

  “I mean she must be interesting. An interesting person.”

  “Very,” I said.

  He was looking better this evening, his hair barbered and his face shaved, but there was still an air of weariness about him, with a current of restlessness moving beneath it.

  He said, “I don’t know what to do with myself. I sit around the house and it just makes me nuts. My wife’s dead, my brother’s doing God knows what, my business is going to hell, and I don’t know what to do.”

  “What’s the matter with your business?”

  “Maybe nothing, maybe everything. I set up something on this trip I just made. I got a shipment due sometime next week.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t tell me about it.”

  “You ever have opiated hash? If you were strictly a boozer you probably didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I got coming in. Grown in eastern Turkey and coming our way via Cyprus, or so they tell me.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “The problem is I should have walked away from the deal. There are people in it I got no reason to trust, and I went in on it for the worst possible reason. I did it to have something to do.”

  I said, “I can work for you in the matter of your wife’s death. I can do that irrespective of how you make your living, and I can even break a few laws on your behalf. But I can’t work for you or with you as far as your profession is concerned.”

  “Petey told me tha
t working for me would lead him back to using. Is that a factor for you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s just something you wouldn’t touch.”

  “I guess so, yes.”

  He thought for a moment, then nodded. “I can appreciate that,” he said. “I can respect it. On the one hand, I’d like to have you with me because I’d be confident with you backing my play. And it’s very lucrative. You know that.”

  “Of course.”

  “But it’s dirty, isn’t it? I’m aware of it. How could I not be? It’s a dirty business.”

  “So get out of it.”

  “I’m thinking about it. I never figured to make it my life’s work. I always figured another couple of years, a few more deals, a little more money in the offshore account. Familiar story, right? I wish they’d just legalize it, make it simple for everybody.”

  “A cop said the same thing just the other day.”

  “Never happen. Or maybe it will. I’ll tell you, I’d welcome it.”

  “Then what would you do?”

  “Sell something else.” He laughed. “Guy I met this past trip, Lebanese like me, I hung out with him and his wife in Paris. ‘Kenan,’ he says, ‘you got to get out of this business, it deadens your soul.’ He wants me to throw in with him. You know what he does? He’s an arms dealer, for Christ’s sake, he sells weapons. ‘Man,’ I said, ‘my customers just kill themselves with the product. Your customers kill other people.’ ‘Not the same,’ he insisted. ‘I deal with nice people, respectable people.’ And he tells me all these important people he knows, CIA, secret services of other countries. So maybe I’ll get out of the dope business and become a big-time merchant of death. You like that better?”

  “Is that your only choice?”

  “Serious? No, of course not. I could buy and sell anything. I don’t know, my old man may have been slightly full of shit with the Phoenician business, but there’s no question our people are traders all over the world. When I dropped out of college, first thing I did was travel. I went visiting relatives. The Lebanese are scattered all over the planet, man. I got an aunt and uncle in Yucatán, I got cousins all through Central and South America. I went over to Africa, some relatives on my mother’s side are in a country called Togo. I never heard of it until I went there. My relatives operate the black market for currency in Lomé, that’s the capital of Togo. They’ve got this suite of offices in a building in downtown Lomé. No sign in the lobby and you got to walk up a flight of stairs, but it’s pretty much out in the open. All day long people are coming in with money to change, dollars, pounds, francs, traveler’s checks. Gold, they buy and sell gold, weigh it and figure the price.