A Walk Among the Tombstones

by Lawrence Block

Page 12

 

  "He would have been impressed. Maybe its something in your stance, honey, maybe its an attitude thing that Durkins picking up on. Youre wearing your clothes with more authority. "

  "Because my heart is pure. "

  "That must be it. "

  We kibitzed a little more. She had a class that night and we talked about getting together afterward but decided against it. "Tomorrows better," she said. "Maybe a movie? Except I hate to go on the weekend, everything decent is mobbed. I know, maybe an afternoon movie and dinner after it, assuming youre not working. " I told her that sounded good.

  I hung up and the man on the desk rang to say Id had a call while I was on the phone with Elaine. Theyve changed the phone system a few times since Ive been at the Northwestern. Originally all calls had to go through the switchboard. Then they fixed it so you could dial out directly, but incoming calls were still routed through the board. Now I have a direct line for making or receiving calls, but if I dont pick up after four rings it gets transferred downstairs. I get my own bill from NYNEX, the hotel doesnt impose any charges, and I come out of it with a free answering service.

  The call was from Durkin, and I rang him back. "You left something here," he said. "You want to pick it up or should I toss it?"

  I said Id be right over.

  He was on the phone when I got to the squad room. He had his chair tilted back and he was smoking a cigarette while another one burned up in the ashtray. At the desk next to his, a detective named Bellamy was peering over the tops of his eyeglasses at the screen of his computer.

  Joe covered the mouthpiece of the phone and said, "I think thats your envelope there, its got your name on it. You left it when you were here earlier. "

  Without waiting for a reply he went back to his conversation. I reached over his shoulder and picked up a nine-by-twelve manila clasp envelope with my name on it. Behind me, Bellamy told the computer, "Well, that makes no fucking sense at all. "

  I didnt argue the point.

  Chapter 6

  Back in my room I spread a sheaf of curling fax copies on my bed. They had evidently faxed the whole file, thirty-six pages of it. Some of them only had a few lines on them, but others were densely packed with information.

  Shuffling through them, it struck me what a different proposition all this would have been in my own cop days. We didnt have copying machines, let alone fax. The only way to see Marie Gotteskinds file would have required traipsing out to Queens and going through it on the spot, with some anxious cop looking over your shoulder and trying to hurry you along.

  Nowadays you just fed everything into a fax transmitter and it came out by sheer magic five or ten miles away- or on the other side of the world, for that matter. The original file never left the office where it was kept, and no unauthorized person snuck in for a peek at it, so nobody had to get uptight about a breach in security.

  And I had all the time I needed to pore over the Gottes-kind file.

  Its just as well I did because I had no clear idea what I was looking for. One thing that hasnt changed a bit since I got out of the Police Academy is the amount of paperwork the job entails. Whatever kind of cop you are, you spend less time doing things than you do establishing a record on paper of what youve done. Some of this is the usual bureaucratic horseshit and some comes under the general heading of covering your ass, but much of it is probably inescapable. Police work is a collective effort, with a variety of people contributing to even the simpler sort of investigation, and if its not all written down somewhere nobody can get an overview of it and figure out what it amounts to.

  I read everything, and when I got to the end I went back and pulled a few pieces of paper for a second look. One thing that became evident early on was the extraordinary similarity between the Gotteskind abduction and the way Francine Khoury was taken in Brooklyn. I noted the following points of similarity:

  1. Both women were abducted from commercial streets.

  2. Both women had parked cars nearby and were shopping on foot.

  3. Both were seized by a pair of men.

  4. In both instances, the men were described as being similar in height and weight, and were dressed alike. The Gotteskind kidnappers had worn khaki trousers and navy windbreakers.

  5. Both women were carried off in trucks. The truck used in Woodhaven was described by several witnesses as a light blue van. One witness identified it specifically as a Ford, and supplied a partial plate number, but it hadnt led anywhere.

  6. Several witnesses agreed that the body of the truck was lettered with the name of a household appliance firm. They variously identified the firm as P J Home Appliance, B & J Household Appliance, and variations on the foregoing. A second line read sales and service. There was no address, but witnesses reported that there was a phone number, although no one could supply it. A thorough investigation had failed to link the truck to any of the innumerable companies in the borough that sold and serviced home appliances, and the conclusion seemed warranted that the firms name, like the plate number, was spurious.

  7. Marie Gotteskind was twenty-eight years old and employed as a substitute teacher in the New York City primary schools. For three days, including the day of her abduction, she had filled in for a fourth-grade teacher in Ridgewood. She was about the same height as Francine Khoury and within a few pounds of her in weight, blond and light-complected where Francine was dark-haired and olive-skinned. There was no photograph in the file except for those taken at the scene in Forest Park, but testimony from acquaintances indicated that she was considered attractive.

  There were differences. Marie Gotteskind was unmarried. She had had a few dates with a male teacher whom shed met on an earlier substitute assignment, but their relationship does not seem to have amounted to much and his alibi for the time of her death was in any case unassailable.

  Marie lived at home with her parents. Her father, a former steamfitter with a disability pension for a job-related injury, operated a small mail-order business from his home. Her mother helped him with the business and also served as a part-time bookkeeper for several neighborhood enterprises. Neither Marie nor either of her parents had any demonstrable connection to the drug subculture. Nor were they Arabs, or Phoenicians.

  The medical examination had been detailed, of course, and there was a lot to report. Death had come as a result of multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen, any of several of which would have been fatal. There was evidence of repeated sexual assault, with traces of semen in her anus, her vagina, and her mouth, as well as in one of the knife wounds. Forensic measurements indicated that at least two different knives had been used on her, and suggested that both could be kitchen knives, with one having a longer and wider blade than the other. An analysis of the semen indicated the presence of at least two assailants.

  In addition to the knife wounds, the nude body showed multiple bruises indicating that the victim had been subjected to a beating.

  Finally, and I missed this on first reading, the medical examiners report supplied the information that the thumb and index finger of the victims left hand had been severed. The two digits had been recovered, the index finger from her vagina, the thumb from her rectum.

  Cute.

  READING the file had a numbing, deadening effect on me. Thats very likely why I missed the thumb-and-finger item first time through. The report of the womans injuries and the image they conjured up of her last moments was more than the mind wanted to take in. Other entries in the file, interviews with parents and coworkers, had painted a picture of the living Marie Gotteskind, and the medical report took that living person and turned her into dead and grossly mistreated flesh.

  I was sitting there, feeling drained and exhausted by what I had just read, when the phone rang. I answered it and a voice I knew said, "So wheres it at, Matt?"

  "Hey, TJ. "

  "How you doin? You a hard man to reach. Be out all the time, goin places, doin things. "

/>   "I got your message but you didnt leave a number. "

  "Dont have a number. I was a drug dealer I might could have a beeper. You like it better that way?"

  "If you were a dealer youd have a cellular phone. "

  "Now you talkin. Have me a long car with a phone in it, and just be sittin in it thinkin long thoughts and doin long things. Man, I got to say it again, you hard to reach.

  "Did you call more than once, TJ? I only got the one message. "

  "Well, see, I dont always like to waste the quarter. "

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, you know, I got your phone figured. Its like those answering machines, how they pick up after three or four rings, whatever it is? Dude on the desk, he always lets your phone ring four times before he cuts in. And you just got the one room, so it aint about to take you more than three rings to get to the phone, less you be in the bathroom or something. "

  "So you hang up after three rings. "

  "And get my quarter back. Less I want to leave a message, but why leave a message when I already left one? You come home an theres a whole stack of messages, you think to yourself, This TJ, he musta tapped a parking meter, he got all these quarters he dont know what to do with. "

  I laughed.

  "So you workin?"

  "As a matter of fact I am. "

  "Big job?"

  "Fairly big. "

  "Any room in it for TJ?"

  "Not as far as I can see. "

  "Man, you not lookin hard enough! Must be something I could do, make up for some of the quarters I burn up callin you. What kind of job is it, anyway? You not up against the Mafia, are you?"

  "Im afraid not. "

  "Glad to hear it, because those cats are bad, Tad. You see Goodfellas? Man, they nasty. Oh, damn, my quarter be runnin out. "

  A recorded voice cut in, demanding five cents for a minutes worth of phone time.

  I said, "Give me the number and Ill call you back. "

  "Cant. "

  "The number of the phone youre talking on. "

  "Cant," he said again. "Aint no number on it. They takin em off all the pay phones so the players cant get calls back on em. No problem, I got some change. " The phone chimed as he dropped a coin in. "The dealers, they got certain pay phones where they know the number whether it shows there or not. So it still business as usual, only somebody like you wants to call somebody like me back, aint no way to do it. "

  "Its a great system. "

  "Its cool. We still talkin, aint we? Nobody stoppin us doin what we want to do. They just forcin us to be resourceful. "

  "By putting in another quarter?"

  "You got it, Matt. I be drawin on my resources. Thats what you call bein resourceful. "

  "Where are you going to be tomorrow, TJ?"

  "Where I be? Oh, I dunno. Maybe I fly to Paris on the Concorde. I aint made up my mind yet. " It struck me that he could take my ticket and go to Ireland, but he wasnt likely to have a passport. Nor did it seem probable that Ireland was ready for him, or he for Ireland. "Where I be," he said heavily. "I be on the fuckin Deuce, man. Where else I gonna be?"

  "I thought maybe we could get something to eat. "