A Walk Among the Tombstones

by Lawrence Block

Page 13

 

  "What time?"

  "Oh, I dont know. Say around twelve, twelve-thirty?"

  "Which?"

  "Twelve-thirty. "

  "Thats twelve-thirty in the daytime or in the night?"

  "Daytime. Well have some lunch. "

  "Aint no time of the day or night you cant have lunch," he said. "You want me to come by your hotel?"

  "No," I said, "because theres a chance Ill have to cancel and I wouldnt have any way to let you know. So I dont want to hang you up. Pick a place on the Deuce and if I dont show up well make it another time. "

  "Thats cool," he said. "You know the video arcade? Uptown side of the street, two, three doors from Eighth Avenue? Theres the store with the switchknives in the window, man, I dont know how they get away with that-"

  "Theyre sold in kit form. "

  "Yeah, an they use it for an IQ test. You cant put the kit together, you have to go back an do first grade all over again. You know the store I mean. "

  "Sure. "

  "Right next to it theres the entrance to the subway, and before you go down the stairs theres an entranceway to the video arcade. You know where its at?"

  "I have a hunch I can find it. "

  "Say twelve-thirty?"

  "Its a date, Kate. "

  "Hey," he said. "You know somethin? You learnin. "

  * * *

  I FELT better when I got off the phone with TJ. He usually had that effect on me. I made a note of our lunch date, then picked up the Gotteskind material again.

  It was the same perpetrators. Had to be. The similarity of MO was too great to be coincidental, and the amputation and insertion of the thumb and forefinger looked like a rehearsal for the more extensive butchery theyd practiced on Francine Khoury.

  But what did they do, go into hibernation? Lie low for a year?

  It seemed unlikely. Sex-linked violence- serial rape, lust murder- seems to be addictive, like any strong drug that releases you momentarily from the prison of self. Marie Gotteskinds killers had pulled off a perfectly orchestrated abduction, only to repeat it a year later with very minor variations and, of course, a substantial profit motive. Why wait so long? What were they doing in the meantime?

  Could there have been other abductions without anyone drawing a connection to the Gotteskind case? It was possible. The murder rate in the five boroughs is now over seven a day, and most of them dont get a lot of play in the media. Still, if you take a woman off a street in front of a bunch of witnesses, it makes the papers. If youve got a similar case sitting in an open file, you probably hear about it. And you almost have to draw a connection.

  On the other hand, Francine Khoury had been snatched off the street in front of witnesses, and nobody in the press or the One-Twelve knew the first thing about it.

  Maybe they really had lain low for a year. Maybe one or more of them had been in jail for all or part of that year, maybe a predilection for rape and murder had led to still worse crimes, like writing bad checks.

  Or maybe theyd been active, but in a way that hadnt drawn any attention.

  Either way, I knew something now that I had previously only suspected. They had done this before, for pleasure if not for profit. That lowered the odds against finding them, and at the same time it raised the stakes.

  Because theyd do it again.

  Chapter 7

  Friday I spent the morning at the library, then walked over to Forty-second Street to meet TJ in the video arcade. Together we watched a kid with a ponytail and a wispy blond mustache run up the score on a game called Freeze!!! It had the same premise as most of the games- i. e. , that there were hostile forces in the universe, apt to leap out at you without warning at any moment, bound on doing you harm. If you were quick enough you could survive for a while, but sooner or later one of them would do you in. I couldnt argue with that.

  We left when the boy finally crapped out. On the street TJ told me the players name was Socks because his own never matched. I hadnt noticed. According to TJ, Socks was about the best on the Deuce at what he did, often able to play for hours on a single quarter. There had been other players as good or better, but they didnt come around much anymore. For a moment my mind spun with visions of a previously unknown motive for serial homicide, video-game aces rubbed out by an arcade proprietor because they were eating up his profits, but that wasnt it. You got to a certain level, he explained, and then you couldnt get any better, and eventually you lost interest.

  We had lunch at a Mexican place on Ninth Avenue and he tried to get me to talk about the case I was working on. I left out the details, but I probably wound up telling him more than I intended to.

  "What you need," he said, "you need me workin for you. "

  "Doing what?"

  "Anything you say! You dont want to be runnin all over town, see this, check that. What you want to do is send me. You dont think I can find things out? Man, Im down here on the Deuce every day findin things out. Its what I do. "

  "SO I gave him something," I told Elaine. Wed met at the Baronet on Third Avenue to catch a four oclock movie, then went to a new place shed heard about where they served English tea with scones and clotted cream. "Hed said something earlier that added another item to my list of things to find out, so I figured it was only fair to let him run it down for me. "

  "What was that?"

  "The pay phones," I said. "When Kenan and his brother delivered the ransom, they were sent to a pay phone. They got a call there, and the caller sent them to still another pay phone, where they got a call telling them to leave the money and take a hike. "

  "I remember. "

  "Well, yesterday TJ called me and talked until his quarter dropped, and when I wanted to call him back I couldnt, because the number wasnt posted on the phone he was calling from. I walked around the neighborhood on my way to the library this morning, and most of the phones are like that. "

  "You mean the little slips are missing? I know people will steal absolutely anything, but thats the stupidest thing I ever heard of. "

  "The phone company removes them," I said, "to discourage drug dealers. They beep each other from pay phones, you know how it works, and now they cant do that. "

  "And thats why all the drug dealers are going out of business," she said.

  "Well, Im sure it looked good on paper. Anyway, I got to thinking about those pay phones in Brooklyn, and I wondered if their numbers were posted. "

  "What difference does it make?"

  "I dont know," I said. "Probably somewhere between not much and none at all, which is why I didnt chase out to Brooklyn myself. But I cant see where it would hurt me to have the information, so I gave TJ a couple of dollars and sent him to Brooklyn. "

  "Does he know his way around Brooklyn?"

  "He will by the time he gets back. The first phones a few blocks from the last stop on the Flatbush IRT, so thats fairly easy to find, but I dont know how the hell hes going to get to Veterans Avenue. A bus out of Flatbush, I suppose, and then a long hike. "

  "What kind of neighborhood is it?"

  "It looked all right when I drove through it with the Khourys. I didnt pay a whole lot of attention. A basic white working-class neighborhood, as far as I could tell. Why?"

  "You mean like Bensonhurst or Howard Beach? What I mean is will TJ stand out like a dark thumb?"

  "I never even thought of that. "

  "Because there are parts of Brooklyn where they get funny when a black kid walks down the street, even if he is conservatively dressed in high-top sneakers and a Raiders jacket, and I just know he has one of those haircuts. "

  "Hes got a sort of geometric design cut into the hair on the back of his neck. "

  "I thought he might. I hope he comes back alive. "

  "Hell be all right. "

  Later in the evening she said, "Matt, you were just making work for him, werent you? TJ, I mean. "

  "No, hes saving me a trip. I would have had to run out there myself sooner
or later, or catch a ride with one of the Khourys. "

  "Why? Couldnt you use your old cop tricks to wheedle the number out of the operator? Or look it up in a reverse directory?"

  "You have to know a number to look it up in a reverse directory. A reverse directory has phones listed numerically, and you look up the number and it tells you the location. "

  "Oh. "

  "But there is a book that lists pay phones by location, yes. And yes, I could call an operator and pass myself off as a police officer in order to obtain a number. "

  "So you were just being nice to TJ. "

  "Nice? According to you I was sending him to his death. No, I wasnt just being nice. Looking in the book or conning the operator would give me the number of the pay phone, but it wouldnt tell me if the numbers posted on the phone. Thats what Im trying to find out. "

  "Oh," she said. And, a few minutes later, "Why?"

  "Why what?"

  "Why do you care if the numbers posted on the phone? What difference does it make?"

  "I dont know that it does make a difference. But the kidnappers knew to call those phones. If the numbers posted, well, then there was nothing special about their knowledge. If not, they found out one way or another. "

  "By conning the operator or looking in the book. "

  "Which would mean that they know how to con an operator, or where to find a list of pay phones. I dont know what it would mean. Probably nothing. Maybe I want to get the information because its the only thing about the phones I can find out. "

  "What do you mean?"

  "Its been nagging at me," I said. "Not what I sent TJ for, thats easy enough to find out with or without his help. But I was sitting up last night and it struck me that the only contact with the kidnappers was phone contact. That was the only trace they left of themselves. The abduction itself was clean as a whistle. A few people saw them, and even more people saw them take that schoolteacher off Jamaica Avenue, but they didnt leave anything you could use to reel them in. But they did make some phone calls. They made four or five calls to Khourys house in Bay Ridge. "

  "Theres no way to trace them, is there? After the connection is broken?"

  "There ought to be," I said. "I was on the phone yesterday for over an hour with different phone-company personnel. I found out a lot of things about how the phones work. Every call you make is logged. "

  "Even local calls?"

  "Uh-huh. Thats how they know how many message units you use in each billing period. Its not like a gas meter where theyre just keeping track of the running total. Each call gets recorded and charged to your account. "

  "How long do they keep that data?"

  "Sixty days. "

  "So you could get a list-"

  "Of all the calls made from a particular number. Thats how the data is organized. Say Im Kenan Khoury. I call up, I say I need to know what calls were made from my phone on a given day, and they can give me a printout with the date and time and duration of every call I made. "

  "But thats not what you want. "