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

  “I was a detective.”

  “Had a gold shield, huh?”

  “That’s right. I was attached to the Sixth Precinct in the Village for several years, and before I was stationed for a little while in Brooklyn. That was the Seventy-eighth Precinct, that’s Park Slope and just north of it, the area they’re calling Boerum Hill.”

  “Yeah, I know where it is. I grew up in the Seventy-eighth Precinct. You know Bergen Street? Between Bond and Nevins?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s where we grew up, me and Petey. You’ll find a lot of people from the Middle East in that neighborhood, within a few blocks of Court and Atlantic. Lebanese, Syrians, Yemenites, Palestinians. My wife was Palestinian, her folks lived on President Street just off Henry. That’s South Brooklyn, but I guess they’re calling it Carroll Gardens now. That coffee all right?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “You want more, just speak up.” He started to say something else, then turned to face his brother. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “I don’t think this is going to work out.”

  “Tell him the situation, babe.”

  “I just don’t know.” He turned to me, spun a chair around, sat down straddling it. “Here’s the deal, Matt. Okay to call you that?” I said it was. “Here’s the deal. What I need to know is whether I can tell you something without worrying who you’re gonna tell it to. I guess what I’m asking is to what extent you’re still a cop.”

  It was a good question, and I’d often pondered it myself. I said, “I was a policeman for a lot of years. I’ve been a little less of one every year since I left the job. What you’re asking is if what you tell me will stay confidential. Legally, I don’t have the status of attorney. What you tell me isn’t privileged information. At the same time, I’m not an officer of the court, either, so I’m no more obliged than any other private citizen to report matters that come to my attention.”

  “What’s the bottom line?”

  “I don’t know what the bottom line is. It seems to move around a lot. I can’t offer you a lot in the way of reassurance, because I don’t know what it is you’re thinking about telling me. I came all the way out here because Pete didn’t want to say anything over the phone, and now you don’t seem to want to say anything here, either. Maybe I should go home.”

  “Maybe you should,” he said.

  “Babe—”

  “No,” he said, getting to his feet. “It was a good idea, man, but it’s not working out. We’ll find ’em ourselves.” He took a roll of bills from his pocket and peeled off a hundred, extending it across the table to me. “For your cabs out and back and for your time, Mr. Scudder. I’m sorry we dragged you all the way out here for nothing.” When I didn’t take the bill he said, “Maybe your time’s worth more than I figured. Here, and no hard feelings, huh?” He added a second bill to the first and I still didn’t reach for it.

  I pushed back my chair and stood up. “You don’t owe me anything,” I said. “I don’t know what my time’s worth. Let’s call it an even-up trade for the coffee.”

  “Take the money. For Christ’s sake, the cab had to be twenty-five each way.”

  “I took the subway.”

  He stared at me. “You came out here on the subway? Didn’t my brother tell you to take a cab? What do you want to save nickels and dimes for, especially when I’m paying for it?”

  “Put your money away,” I said. “I took the subway because it’s simpler and faster. How I get from one place to another is my business, Mr. Khoury, and I run my business the way I want. You don’t tell me how to get around town and I won’t tell you how to sell crack to schoolchildren, how does that strike you?”

  “Jesus,” he said.

  To Pete I said, “I’m sorry we wasted each other’s time. Thanks for thinking of me.” He asked me if I wanted to ride back to the city, or at least a lift to the subway stop. “No,” I said, “I think I’d like to walk around Bay Ridge a little. I haven’t been out here in years. I had a case that brought me to within a few blocks of here, right on Colonial Road but a little ways to the north. Right across from the park. Owl’s Head Park, I think it is.”

  “That’s eight, ten blocks from here,” Kenan Khoury said.

  “That sounds right. The guy who hired me was charged with killing his wife, and the work I did for him helped get the charges dropped.”

  “And he was innocent?”

  “No, he killed her,” I said, remembering the whole thing. “I didn’t know that. I found out after.”

  “When there was nothing you could do.”

  “Sure there was,” I said. “Tommy Tillary, that was his name. I forget his wife’s name, but his girlfriend was Carolyn Cheatham. When she died, he wound up going away for it.”

  “He killed her, too?”

  “No, she killed herself. I fixed it so it looked like murder, and I fixed it so he would go away for it. I got him out of one scrape that he didn’t deserve to get out of, so it seemed fitting to get him into another one.”

  “How much time did he do?”

  “As much as he could. He died in prison. Somebody stuck a knife in him.” I sighed. “I thought I’d go walk past his house, see if it brought back any memories, but they seem to have come back all by themselves.”

  “It bother you?”

  “Remembering, you mean? Not particularly. I can think of a lot of things I’ve done that bother me more.” I looked around for my coat, then remembered I hadn’t worn one. It was spring outside, sport jacket weather, although it would be going down into the forties in the evening.

  I started for the door and he said, “Hold it a minute, will you, Mr. Scudder?”

  I looked at him.

  “I was out of line,” he said. “I apologize.”

  “You don’t have to apologize.”

  “Yes I do. I flew off the handle. This is nothing. Earlier today I broke a phone, I got a busy signal and I flew into a rage and smashed the receiver against the wall until the housing splintered.” He shook his head. “I never get like that. I’ve been under a strain.”

  “There’s a lot of that going around.”

  “Yeah, I suppose there is. The other day some guys kidnapped my wife, cut her up in little pieces wrapped in plastic and sent her back to me in the trunk of a car. Maybe that’s the same strain everybody else is under. I wouldn’t know.”

  Pete said, “Easy, babe—”

  “No, I’m all right,” Kenan said. “Matt, sit down a minute. Let me just run the whole thing down for you, top to bottom, and then you decide if you want to walk or not. Forget what I said before. I’m not worried, who you’re gonna tell or not tell. I just don’t want to say it out loud ’cause it makes it all real, but it’s real already, isn’t it?”

  HE took me through it, giving me the story essentially as I recounted it earlier. There were some details I supplied that came out later in my own investigation, but the Khoury brothers had already unearthed a certain amount of data on their own. Friday they found the Toyota Camry where she’d parked it on Atlantic Avenue, and that had led them to The Arabian Gourmet, while the bags of groceries in the trunk had let them know about her stop at D’Agostino’s.

  When he was done telling it I declined the offer of another cup of coffee and accepted a glass of club soda. I said, “I have some questions.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What did you do with the body?”

  The brothers exchanged glances, and Pete gestured for Kenan to go ahead. He took a breath and said, “I have this cousin, he’s a veterinarian, has an animal hospital on—well, it doesn’t matter where it is, it’s in the old neighborhood. I called him and told him I needed private access to his place of business.”

  “When was this?”

  “This was Friday afternoon that I called him and Friday night that I got the key from him and we went over there. He has a unit, I guess you would call it an oven, that he uses for cremating people’s pets that he puts to sleep. We took
the, uh, we took the—”

  “Easy, babe.”

  He shook his head, impatient. “I’m all right, I just don’t know how to say it. What do you call it? We took the pieces of, of Francine, and we cremated her.”

  “You unwrapped all of the, uh—”

  “No, what for? The tape and plastic burned along with everything else.”

  “But you’re sure it was her.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, we unwrapped enough to, uh, to be sure.”

  “I have to ask all this.”

  “I understand.”

  “The point is there’s no corpse left, is that correct?”

  He nodded. “Just ashes. Ashes and bone chips, is what it amounts to. You think cremation and you think you’ll wind up with nothing but powdery ash, like what comes out of a furnace, but that’s not how it works. There’s an auxiliary unit he’s got for pulverizing the bone segments so it’s less obvious what you’ve got.” He raised his eyes to meet mine. “When I was in high school I worked afternoons at Lou’s place. I wasn’t going to mention his name. Fuck it, what difference does it make? My father wanted me to become a doctor, he thought this would be good training. I don’t know if it was or not, but I was familiar with the place, the equipment.”

  “Does your cousin know why you wanted to use his place?”

  “People know what they want to know. He couldn’t have figured I wanted to slip in there at night and give myself a rabies shot. We were there all night. The unit he has is pet size, we had to do several loads and let the unit cool down in between. Jesus, it’s killing me to talk about it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault. Did Lou know I used the cooker? I figure he had to know. He has to have a pretty good idea what kind of business I’m in. He probably figures I killed a competitor and wanted to get rid of the evidence. People see all this shit on television and they think that’s how the world works.”

  “And he didn’t object?”

  “He’s family. He knew it was urgent and he knew it wasn’t something we should talk about. And I gave him some money. He didn’t want to take it, but the guy’s got two kids in college so how can he not take it? It wasn’t that much.”

  “How much?”

  “Two grand. That’s pretty low-budget for a funeral, isn’t it? I mean you can spend more than that on a casket.” He shook his head. “I got the ashes in a tin can in the safe downstairs. I don’t know what to do with them. No idea what she would have wanted. We never discussed it. Jesus, she was twenty-four years old. Nine years younger than me, nine years less a month. We were married two years.”

  “No children.”

  “No. We were gonna wait one more year and then—oh, Jesus, this is terrible. It bother you if I have a drink?”

  “No.”

  “Petey says the same. Fuck it, I’m not having one. I had one pop Thursday afternoon after I talked on the phone with them and I haven’t had anything since. I get the urge and I just push it away. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to feel this. You think I did the wrong thing? Taking her to Lou’s place, cremating her. You think that was wrong?”

  “I think it was unlawful.”

  “Yeah, well, I wasn’t too worried about that aspect of it.”

  “I know you weren’t. You were just trying to do what was decent. But in the process you destroyed evidence. Dead bodies hold a great deal of information for someone who knows what to look for. When you reduce a body to ashes and bone chips, all that information is lost.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It might be helpful to know how she died.”

  “I don’t care how. All I want to know is who.”

  “One might lead to the other.”

  “So you think I did the wrong thing. Jesus, I couldn’t call the cops, hand them a sack full of cuts of meat, say, ‘This is my wife, take good care of her.’ I never call the cops, I’m in a business where you don’t, but if I had opened the trunk of the Tempo and she was there in one piece, dead but intact, maybe, maybe, I’d have reported it. But this way—”

  “I understand.”

  “But you think I did the wrong thing.”

  “You did what you had to do,” Peter said.

  Isn’t that what everybody always does? I said, “I don’t know a lot about right and wrong. I probably would have done the same thing, if I’d had a cousin with a crematorium in his back room. But what I would have done is beside the point. You did what you did. The question is, where do you go from here?”

  “Where?”

  “That’s the question.”

  IT wasn’t the only question. I asked a great many questions, and I asked most of them more than once. I took them both back and forth over their story, and I wrote down a lot of notes in my notebook. It began to look as though the segmented remains of Francine Khoury constituted the only piece of tangible evidence in the entire affair, and they had gone up in smoke.

  When I finally closed my notebook the two Khoury brothers sat waiting for a word from me. “On the face of it,” I said, “they look pretty safe. They made their play and carried it off without giving you a clue who they are. If they left tracks anywhere, they haven’t shown up yet. It’s possible someone at the supermarket or the place on Atlantic Avenue recognized one of them or caught a license number, and it’s worth an intensive investigation to try to turn up such a witness, but he’s no more than hypothetical at this point. The odds are that there won’t be a witness, or that what he saw won’t lead anywhere.”

  “You’re saying we got no chance.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying an investigation has to do something besides work with the clues they left behind. One starting point lies in the fact that they got away with almost half a million dollars. There’s two things they could do, and either one could spotlight them.”

  Kenan thought about it. “Spend it’s one of them,” he said. “What’s the other?”

  “Talk about it. Crooks talk all the time, especially when they’ve got something to brag about, and sometimes they talk to people who’ll happily sell them out. The trick is to get the word out so those people know who the buyer is.”

  “You’ve got an idea how to do that?”

  “I’ve got a lot of ideas,” I admitted. “Earlier you wanted to know to what extent I was still a cop. I don’t know, but I still approach this kind of problem the way I did when I carried a badge, turning it this way and that until I can get some kind of grip on it. In a case like this one I can immediately see several different lines of investigation to pursue. There’s every chance in the world that none of them will lead anywhere, but they’re still the approaches that ought to be tried.”

  “So you want to give it a shot?”

  I looked down at my notebook. I said, “Well, I have two problems. The first one I think I mentioned to Pete on the phone. I’m supposed to go to Ireland the end of the week.”

  “On business?”

  “Pleasure. I just made the arrangements this morning.”

  “You could cancel.”

  “I could.”

  “You lose any money canceling, your fee from me’d make that up to you. What’s the other problem?”

  “The other problem’s what use you’ll make of whatever I might turn up.”

  “Well, you know the answer to that.”

  I nodded. “That’s the problem.”

  “Because you can’t make a case against them, prosecute them for kidnapping and homicide. There’s no evidence of any crime committed, there’s just a woman who disappeared.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you must know what I want, what the point of all this is. You want me to say it?”

  “You might as well.”

  “I want those fuckers dead. I want to be there, I want to do it, I want to see them die.” He said this calmly, levelly, in a voice with no emotion in it. “That’s what
I want,” he said. “Right now I want it so bad I don’t want anything else. I can’t imagine ever wanting anything else. That about what you figured?”

  “Just about.”

  “People who’d do something like this, take an innocent woman and turn her into cutlets, does it bother you what happens to them?”

  I thought about it, but not for very long. “No,” I said.

  “We’ll do what has to be done, me and my brother. You won’t have a part of that.”

  “In other words I’d just be sentencing them to death.”

  He shook his head. “They sentenced themselves,” he said. “By what they did. You’re just helping play out the hand. What do you say?”

  I hesitated.

  He said, “You’ve got another problem, don’t you? My profession.”

  “It’s a factor,” I said.

  “That line about selling crack to schoolchildren. I don’t, uh, set up shop in the schoolyard.”

  “I didn’t figure you did.”

  “Properly speaking, I’m not a dealer. I’m what they call a trafficker. You understand the distinction?”

  “Sure,” I said. “You’re the big fish that manages to stay out of the nets.”

  He laughed. “I don’t know that I’m big particularly. In certain respects the middle-level distributors are the biggest, do the most volume. I deal in weight, meaning I either bring product in in quantity or I buy it from the person who brings it in and turn it over to someone who sells smaller amounts. My customer probably does more business than I do because he’s buying and selling all the time, where I may only do two or three deals a year.”

  “But you make out all right.”

  “I make out. It’s hazardous, you’ve got the law to worry about and you’ve got people looking to rip you off. Where the risks are high the rewards are generally high also. And the business is there. People want the product.”

  “By product you mean cocaine.”

  “Actually I don’t do much with coke. Most of my business is heroin. Some hash, but mostly heroin the past couple of years. Look, I’ll tell you right out, I’m not gonna apologize for it. People take it, they get hooked, they rob their mother’s purse, they break into houses, they OD and die with needles in their arms, they share needles and get AIDS. I know the whole story. There’s people who make guns, people who distill liquor, people who grow tobacco. How many people a year die of liquor and tobacco compared to the number die from drugs?”