Walk Among the Tombstones: A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel Read online

  “Or not to call,” she said.

  She was more discouraged when Tuesday passed without a call. When I spoke to her Wednesday evening she was excited. The good news was that three women had called her. The bad news was that none of the calls looked to have anything to do with the men who had killed Francine Khoury.

  One was a woman who had been ambushed by a solitary assailant in the hallway of her apartment house. He had raped her and stolen her purse. Another had accepted a ride home from school with someone she took to be another student; he had shown her a knife and ordered her into the backseat, but she had been able to escape.

  “He was a skinny kid and he was alone,” Elaine said, “so I thought it was stretching it to figure him as a possibility. And the third call was date rape. Or pickup rape, I don’t know what you’d call it. According to her, she and her girlfriend picked up these two guys in a bar in Sunnyside. They went for a ride in the guys’ car and her girlfriend got carsick so they stopped the car so she could get out and vomit. And then they drove off and left her there. Can you believe that?”

  “Well, it’s not very considerate,” I said, “but I don’t think I’d call it rape.”

  “Funny. Anyway, they drove around for a while and then they went back to her house and they wanted to have sex with her, and she said nothing doing, what kind of a girl do you think I am, blah blah blah, and finally she agreed that she’d fuck one of them, the one she’d been more or less partnered with, and the other one would wait in the living room. Except he didn’t, he walked in while they were getting it on and watched, which did little to cool his ardor, as you might have figured.”

  “And?”

  “And afterward he said please please please, and she said no no no, and finally she gave him a blow-job because that was the only way to get rid of him.”

  “She told you this?”

  “In more ladylike terms, but yeah, that’s what happened. Then she brushed her teeth and called the cops.”

  “And reported it as rape?”

  “Well, I’d be willing to call it that. It escalated from please please please to Get me off or I’ll kick your teeth down your throat, so I’d say that qualifies as rape.”

  “Oh, sure, if it was that forceful.”

  “But it doesn’t sound like our guys.”

  “No, not at all.”

  “I got their numbers just in case you want to follow up on them, and I told them we’d call if the producer decided to pursue it, that the whole project was kind of iffy just now. Was that right?”

  “Definitely.”

  “So I didn’t come up with anything helpful, but it’s encouraging that I got three calls, don’t you think? And there’ll probably be more tomorrow.”

  There was one call Thursday, and it had seemed promising early on. A woman in her early thirties taking graduate courses at St. John’s University, abducted at knifepoint by three men as she was unlocking her parked car in one of the campus parking lots. They piled into the car with her and drove to Cunningham Park, where they had oral and vaginal sex with her, menaced her throughout with one or more knives, threatened various forms of mutilation, and did in fact cut her on one arm, although the wound may have been inflicted accidentally. When they were done with her they left her there and escaped in her car, which had still not been recovered almost seven months after the incident.

  “But it can’t be them,” Elaine said, “because the guys were black. The ones on Atlantic Avenue were white, weren’t they?”

  “Yeah, that’s one thing everybody agrees on.”

  “Well, these men were black. I kept, you know, returning to that point, and she must have thought I was racist or something, or that I suspected her of being a racist, or I don’t know what. Because why should I keep pounding away at the color of the rapists? But of course it was all-important from my point of view, because it means that she’s out of the picture for our purposes. Unless sometime between now and last August they figured out how to change color.”

  “If they worked that out,” I said, “it’d be worth a lot more than four hundred thousand to them.”

  “Nice. Anyway, I felt like an idiot, but I took her name and number and said we’d call her if we got a green light on the project. You want to hear something funny? She said whether it leads to anything or not she’s glad she called, because it did her good to talk about it. She talked about it a lot right after it happened and she had some counseling but she hasn’t talked about it lately, and it helped.”

  “That must have made you feel good.”

  “It did, because up to then I’d been feeling guilty for putting her through it under false pretenses. She said I was very easy to talk to.”

  “Well, that comes as no surprise to this reporter.”

  “She thought I was a counselor. I think she was leading up to asking if she could come in once a week for therapy. I told her I was an assistant to a producer, and that you needed pretty much the same skills.”

  THAT same day, I finally managed to get hold of Detective John Kelly of Brooklyn Homicide. He remembered that Leila Alvarez case and said it was a terrible thing. She’d been a pretty girl and, according to everyone who knew her, a nice kid and a serious student.

  I said I was doing a piece on bodies abandoned in unusual locations, and I asked if there had been anything unusual about the condition of the body when it was found. He said there’d been some mutilation and I asked if he could give me a little more detail and he said he thought he’d better not. Partly because they were keeping certain aspects of the case confidential, and partly to spare the feelings of the girl’s family.

  “I’m sure you can understand,” he said.

  I tried a couple of other approaches and kept running up against the same wall. I thanked him and I was going to hang up, but something made me ask him if he’d ever worked out of the Seven-eight. He asked why I wanted to know.

  “Because I knew a John Kelly who did,” I said, “except I don’t see how you could be the same man, because he would have to be well past retirement age by now.”

  “That was my dad,” he said. “You say your name’s Scudder? What were you, a reporter?”

  “No, I was on the job myself. I was at the Seven-eight for a while, and then I was at the Six in Manhattan when I made detective.”

  “Oh, you made detective? And now you’re a writer? My dad talked about writing a book, but that’s all it ever was, talk. He retired, oh, it must be eight years now, he’s down in Florida growing grapefruit in his backyard. Lot of cops I know are working on a book, or say they are. Or say they’re thinking about it, but you’re actually doing it, huh?”

  It was time to shift gears. “No,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “That was crap,” I admitted. “I’m working private, it’s what I’ve been doing since I left the department.”

  “So what do you want to know about Alvarez?”

  “I want to know the nature of the mutilation.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to know if it involved amputation.”

  There was a pause, long enough for me to regret the whole line of questioning. Then he said, “You know what I want to know, mister? I want to know just where the fuck you’re coming from.”

  “There was a case in Queens a little over a year ago,” I said. “Three men took a woman off Jamaica Avenue in Woodhaven and left her on a golf course in Forest Park. Along with a lot of other brutality, they cut off two of her fingers and stuck them in, uh, bodily openings.”

  “You got a reason to think it was the same people did both women?”

  “No, but I have reason to believe that whoever did Gotteskind didn’t stop at one.”

  “That was her name in Queens? Gotteskind?”

  “Marie Gotteskind, yes. I’ve been trying to match her killers to other cases, and Alvarez looked possible, but all I know about it is what wound up in the papers.”

  “Alvarez had a finger up her ass.�
��

  “Same with Gotteskind. She also had one in front.”

  “In her—”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re like me, you don’t like to use the words when it’s a dead person. I don’t know, you hang around the MEs, they’re the most irreverent bastards on earth. I guess it’s to insulate themselves from feeling it.”

  “Probably.”

  “But it seems disrespectful to me. These poor people, what else can they hope for but a little respect after they’re dead? They didn’t get any from the person who took their life.”

  “No.”

  “She had a breast missing.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Alvarez. They cut off a breast. From the bleeding, they say she was alive when it happened.”

  “Dear God.”

  “I want to get these fucks, you know? Working Homicide you want to get everybody because there’s no such thing as a little murder, but some of them get to you and this was one that got to me. We really worked it, we checked her movements, we talked to everybody who knew her, but you know how it is. When there’s no connection between the victim and the killer and not much in the way of physical evidence, you can only take it so far. There was very little on-scene evidence because they did her somewhere else, then dumped her in the cemetery.”

  “That was in the paper.”

  “Same thing with Gotteskind?”

  “Yes.”

  “If I’d known about Gotteskind—you say over a year ago?” I gave him the date. “So it’s been sitting in a file in Queens and how am I supposed to know about it? Two corpses with fingers, uh, removed and reinserted, and here I am with my thumb up my ass, and I didn’t mean to say that. Jesus.”

  “I hope it helps.”

  “You hope it helps. What else have you got?”

  “Nothing.”

  “If you’re holding out—”

  “All I know about Gotteskind is what’s in her file. And all I know about Alvarez is what you just told me.”

  “And what’s your connection? Your own personal connection?”

  “I just told you I—”

  “No, no, no. Why the interest?”

  “That’s confidential.”

  “The hell it is. You got no right to hold out.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well, what do you call it, then?”

  I took a breath. I said, “I think I’ve said as much as I have to. I have no special knowledge of either homicide, Gotteskind or Alvarez. I read the one’s file and you told me about the other and that’s the extent of my knowledge.”

  “What made you read the file in the first place?”

  “A newspaper story a year ago, and I called you on the basis of another newspaper story. That’s it.”

  “You got some client you’re covering for.”

  “If I’ve got a client, he’s certainly not for perpetrator, and I can’t see how he’s anything but my own business. Wouldn’t you rather compare the two cases yourself and see if that gives you a wedge into them?”

  “Yeah, of course I’m gonna do that, but I wish I knew your angle.”

  “It’s not important.”

  “I could tell you to come in. Or have you picked up, if you’d rather play it that way.”

  “You could,” I agreed. “But you wouldn’t get a damn thing more than I already told you. You could cost me some time, but you’d be wasting time of your own.”

  “You got your fucking nerve, I’ll say that for you.”

  “Hey, come on,” I said. “You’ve got something now that you didn’t before I called. If you want to cop a resentment I suppose you can hang on to one, but what’s the point?”

  “What am I supposed to say, thank you?” It wouldn’t hurt, I thought, but kept the thought to myself. “The hell with it,” he said. “But I think you’d better let me have your address and phone, just in case I need to get in touch with you.”

  The mistake had been in letting him have my name. I could find out if he was enough of a detective to look me up in the Manhattan book, but why? I gave him my address and phone and told him I was sorry I wasn’t able to answer all his questions, but I had certain responsibilities to a client of mine. “That would have pissed me off when I was on the job,” I said, “so I can understand why it would have the same effect on you. But I have to do what I have to do.”

  “Yeah, that’s a line I’ve heard before. Well, maybe it’s the same people in both cases, and maybe something’ll break if we put ’em side by side. That’d be nice.”

  That was as close to “thank you” as we were going to get, and I was happy to settle for it. I said it would be very nice, and wished him luck. I asked to be remembered to his father.

  Chapter 10

  That night I went to a meeting and Elaine attended her class, and afterward we both took cabs and met at Mother Goose and listened to the music. Danny Boy turned up around eleven-thirty and joined us. He had a girl with him, very tall, very thin, very black and very strange. He introduced her as Kali. She acknowledged the introductions with a nod but didn’t say a word or appear to hear anything anyone else said for a good half hour, at which point she leaned forward, stared hard at Elaine, and said, “Your aura is teal blue and very pure, very beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” Elaine said.

  “You have a very old soul,” Kali said, and that was the last thing she said, and the last sign she gave that she was aware of our presence.

  Danny Boy didn’t have anything much to report, and we mostly just enjoyed the music, chatting about nothing important between sets. It was fairly late when we left. In the cab to her place I said, “You have a very old soul and a teal-blue aura and a cute little ass.”

  “She’s very perceptive,” Elaine said. “Most people don’t notice my teal-blue aura until the second or third meeting.”

  “Not to mention your old soul.”

  “Actually, it would be a good idea not to mention my old soul. You can say what you want about my cute little ass. Where does he find them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If they were all stock bimbettes from Central Casting it would be one thing, but his girls don’t run to type. This one, Kali—what do you figure she was on?”

  “No idea.”

  “Because she certainly seemed to be traveling in another realm. Do people still use psychedelics? She was probably on magic mushrooms, or some hallucinogenic fungus that grows only on decaying leather. I’ll tell you one thing, she could make good money as a dominatrix.”

  “Not if her leather’s decaying. And not unless she could keep her mind on her work.”

  “You know what I mean. She’s got the looks for it, and the presence. Can’t you see yourself groveling at her feet and loving every minute of it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you,” she said. “The Marquis de Suave himself. Remember the time I tied you up?”

  The driver was working hard at hiding his amusement. “Would you please shut up,” I said.

  “Remember? You fell asleep.”

  “That shows how safe I felt in your presence,” I said. “Will you please shut up?”

  “I will wrap myself in my teal-blue aura,” she said, “and I will be very quiet.”

  BEFORE I left the following morning she told me she had a good feeling about the calls from rape victims. “Today’s the day,” she said.

  But she turned out to be wrong, teal-blue aura or not. There were no calls at all. When I talked to her that night she was glum about it. “I guess that’s it,” she said. “Three Wednesday, one yesterday, and now nothing. I thought I was going to be a hero, come up with something significant.”

  “Ninety-eight percent of an investigation is insignificant,” I said. “You do everything you can think of because you don’t know what will be useful. You must have been sensational on the phone because you got a very big response, but it’s pointless to feel like a failure because you didn’t turn up a
living victim of the three stooges. You were looking for a needle in a haystack, and it’s probably a haystack that didn’t have a needle in it in the first place.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean they probably didn’t leave any witnesses. They probably killed every woman they victimized, so you were probably trying to find a woman who doesn’t exist.”

  “Well, if she doesn’t exist,” she said, “then I say to hell with her.”

  TJ WAS calling in every day, sometimes more than once a day. I had given him fifty dollars to check out the two Brooklyn phones, and he couldn’t have come out very far ahead on the deal, because what he hadn’t spent on subways and buses he was sinking into telephone calls. He got a better return on his time shilling for monte dealers or assisting a street peddler or doing any of the other street chores that combined to give him an income. But he still kept pestering me for work.

  Saturday I wrote out a check for my rent and paid the other monthly bills that had come in—the phone bill, my credit card. Looking at the telephone bill made me think again of the calls made to Kenan Khoury’s phone. I had made another attempt a few days before to find a phone-company employee who could figure out a way to supply that data, and had been told once again that it was unobtainable.

  So that was on my mind when TJ called around ten-thirty. “Give me some more phones to check out,” he pleaded. “The Bronx, Staten Island, anywhere.”

  “I’ll tell you what you can do for me,” I said. “I’ll give you a number and you tell me who called it.”

  “Say what?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “No, you said somethin’, man. Tell me what it was.”

  “Maybe you could do it at that,” I said. “Remember how you sweet-talked the operator out of the phone number on Farragut Road?”

  “You mean with my Brooks Brothers voice?”

  “That’s it. Maybe you could use the same voice to find some phone company vice president who can figure out how to come up with a listing of calls to a certain number in Bay Ridge.” He asked a few more questions and I explained what I was looking for and why I was unable to find it.