Walk Among the Tombstones: A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel Page 5

  “Alcohol and tobacco are legal.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “It makes some kind of difference. I’m not sure how much.”

  “Maybe. I don’t see it myself. Either case, the product is dirty. It kills people, or it’s the substance they use to kill themselves or each other. One thing in my favor, I don’t advertise what I sell, I don’t have lobbyists in Congress, I don’t hire PR people to tell the public the shit I sell is good for them. The day people stop wanting drugs is the day I find something else to buy and sell, and I won’t whine about it and look for the government to give me a federal subsidy, either.”

  Peter said, “It’s still not lollipops you’re selling, babe.”

  “No, it’s not. The product’s dirty. I never said it wasn’t. But what I do I do clean. I don’t screw people, I don’t kill people, I deal fair and I’m careful who I deal with. That’s why I’m alive and that’s why I’m not in jail.”

  “Have you ever been?”

  “No. I’ve never been arrested. So if that’s a consideration, how it would look, you working for a known dope dealer—”

  “That’s not a consideration.”

  “Well, from an official standpoint, I’m not a known dealer. I won’t say there’s nobody in the Narcotics Squad or the DEA who knows who I am, but I don’t have a record. I’ve never to my knowledge been the official subject of an investigation. My house isn’t bugged and my phone’s not tapped. I’d know if it was, I told you about that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sit still a minute, I want to show you something.” He went into another room and came back with a picture, a five-by-seven color shot in a silver frame. “That’s at our wedding,” he said. “That’s two years ago, not quite two years, be two years in May.”

  He was in a tuxedo and she was all in white. He was smiling hugely, while she was not smiling, as I think I mentioned earlier. She was beaming, though, and you could see that she was radiant with happiness.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “I don’t know what they did to her,” he said. “That’s one of the things I won’t let myself think about. But they killed her and they butchered her, they made some kind of dirty joke out of her, and I have to do something about it because I’ll die if I don’t. I’d do it all myself if I could. In fact we tried, me and Petey, but we don’t know what to do, we don’t have the knowledge, we don’t know the moves. The questions you asked before, the approach you took, if nothing else it showed me that this is an area where I don’t know what I’m doing. So I want your help and I can pay you whatever I have to, money’s not a problem, I’ve got plenty of money and I’ll spend whatever I have to. And if you say no I’ll either find someone else or try to do it myself because what the hell else am I gonna do?” He reached across the table and took the picture away from me and looked at it. “Jesus, what a perfect day that was,” he said, “and all the days since, and then it all turned to shit.” He looked at me. He said, “Yes, I’m a trafficker, a dope dealer, whatever you want to call it, and yes, it’s my intention to kill these fucks. So that’s all out on the table. What do you say? Are you in or out?”

  My best friend, the man I’d planned to join in Ireland, was a career criminal. According to legend, he had one night walked the streets of Hell’s Kitchen carrying a bowler’s bag from which he displayed the severed head of an enemy. I couldn’t swear it happened, but more recently I’d been at his side in a cellar in Maspeth when he severed a man’s hand with one blow of a cleaver. I’d had a gun in my hand that night, and I’d used it.

  So if I was still very much a cop in some respects, in other ways I had undergone considerable change. I’d long since swallowed the camel; why strain at the gnat?

  “I’m in,” I said.

  Chapter 3

  I got back to my hotel a little after nine. I’d had a long session with Kenan Khoury, filling pages of my notebook with names of friends and associates and family members. I’d gone to the garage to inspect the Toyota, and found the Beethoven cassette still in the tape deck. If there were any other clues in Francine’s car, I couldn’t spot them.

  The other car, the gray Tempo used to deliver her segmented remains, was not available for inspection. The kidnappers had parked it illegally, and sometime in the course of the weekend a tow truck from Traffic had showed up to haul it away. I could have attempted to track it down, but what was the point? It had surely been stolen for the occasion, and had probably been previously abandoned, given the condition of it. A police lab crew might have turned up something in the trunk or interior, stains or fibers or markings of some sort, that would point out a profitable line of investigation. But I didn’t have the resources for that kind of inspection. I’d be running all over Brooklyn to look at a car that wouldn’t tell me a thing.

  In the Buick the three of us traced a long, circuitous course, past the D’Agostino’s and the Arabian market on Atlantic Avenue, then south to the first pay phone at Ocean and Farragut, then south on Flatbush and east on N to the second booth on Veterans Avenue. I didn’t really have to see these sights, there’s not a tremendous amount of information you can glean by staring at a public telephone, but I’ve always found it worthwhile to put in time on the scene, to walk the pavements and climb the stairs and see it all firsthand. It helps make it real.

  It also gave me a way to take the Khourys through it again. In a police investigation, witnesses almost always complain about having to relate the same story over and over to a host of different people. It seems pointless to them, but there’s a point to it. If you tell it enough times to enough different people, maybe you’ll come up with something you’ve previously left out, or maybe one person will hear something that sailed past everybody else.

  Somewhere in the course of things we stopped at the Apollo, a coffee shop on Flatbush. We all ordered the souv-laki. It was good, but Kenan hardly touched his. In the car afterward he said, “I should have ordered eggs or something. Ever since the other night I got no taste for meat. I can’t eat it, it turns my stomach. I’m sure I’ll get over it, but for the time being I’ve got to remember to order something else. It makes no sense, ordering something and then you can’t bring yourself to eat it.”

  PETER drove me home in the Camry. He was staying at Colonial Road, he’d been there since the kidnapping, sleeping on the couch in the living room, and he needed to stop by his room to pick up clothes.

  Otherwise I’d have called a livery service and taken a taxi. I’m comfortable enough on the subway, I rarely feel unsafe on it, but it seemed a false economy to stint on cab fare with ten thousand dollars in my pocket. I’d have felt pretty silly if I ran into a mugger.

  That was my retainer, two banded stacks of hundreds with fifty bills in each, two packets of bills indistinguishable from the eighty packets paid to ransom Francine Khoury. I’ve always had trouble putting a price on my services, but in this case I’d been spared the decision. Kenan had dropped the two stacks on the table and asked if that was enough to start with. I told him it was on the high side.

  “I can afford it,” he said. “I’ve got plenty of money. They didn’t tap me out, they didn’t come close.”

  “Could you have paid the million?”

  “Not without leaving the country. I’ve got an account in the Caymans with half a mil in it. I had just under seven hundred large in the safe here. Actually I probably could have raised the other three here in town, if I made a few phone calls. I wonder.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, crazy thinking. Like suppose I paid the mil, would they have returned her alive? Suppose I never pressed on the phone, suppose I was polite, kissed their asses and all.”

  “They’d have killed her anyway.”

  “That’s what I tell myself, but how do I know? I can’t keep myself from wondering if there was something I could have done. Suppose I played hardball all the way, not a penny paid unless they showed me proof she was alive.”

&nbs
p; “She was probably already dead when they called you.”

  “I pray you’re right,” he said, “but I don’t know. I keep thinking there must have been some way I could have saved her. I keep figuring it was my fault.”

  * * *

  WE took expressways back to Manhattan, the Shore Parkway and the Gowanus into the tunnel. Traffic was light at that hour but Pete took it slow, rarely pushing the Camry past forty miles an hour. We didn’t talk much at first, and the silences tended to stretch.

  “It’s been some couple of days,” he said finally. I asked him how he was holding up. “Oh, I’m all right,” he said.

  “Have you been getting to meetings?”

  “I’m pretty regular.” After a moment he said, “I haven’t had a chance to get to a meeting since this shit started. I’ve been, you know, pretty busy.”

  “You’re no good to your brother unless you stay sober.”

  “I know that.”

  “There are meetings in Bay Ridge. You wouldn’t have to come into the city.”

  “I know. I was gonna go to one last night, but I didn’t get to it.” His fingers drummed the steering wheel. “I thought maybe we’d get back in time to get over to St. Paul’s tonight, but we missed it. It’s gonna be way past nine by the time we get there.”

  “There’s a ten o’clock meeting on Houston Street.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “By the time I get to my room, pick up what I need—”

  “If you miss the ten there’s a midnight meeting. Same place, Houston between Sixth and Varick.”

  “I know where it is.”

  Something in his tone did not invite further suggestion. After a moment he said, “I know I shouldn’t let my meetings slide. I’ll try to make the ten o’clock. The midnight, I don’t know about that. I don’t want to leave Kenan alone for that long.”

  “Maybe you’ll catch a Brooklyn meeting tomorrow during the day.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What about your job? You’re letting that slide?”

  “For the time being. I called in sick Friday and today, but if they wind up letting me go it’s no big deal. Job like that’s not hard to come by.”

  “What is it, messenger work?”

  “Delivering lunches, actually. For the deli on Fifty-seventh and Ninth.”

  “It must be hard, working a get-well job like that while your brother’s raking it in.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I have to keep all that separate, you know? Kenan wanted me to work for him, with him, whatever you want to call it. I can’t be in that business and stay sober. It’s not that you’re around drugs all the time, because actually you’re not, there’s not that much physical contact with the product. It’s the whole attitude, the mind-set, you know what I mean?”

  “Sure.”

  “You were right, what you said about meetings. I’ve been wanting to drink ever since I found out about Francey. I mean about her being kidnapped, before they did what they did. I haven’t come close or anything but it’s hard keeping the thought out of my mind. I push it away and it comes right back.”

  “Have you been in touch with your sponsor?”

  “I don’t exactly have one. They gave me an interim sponsor when I first got sober, and I called him fairly regularly at first but we more or less drifted apart. He’s hard to get on the phone, anyway. I should find a regular sponsor, but for some reason I never got around to it.”

  “One of these days—”

  “I know. Do you have a sponsor?”

  I nodded. “We got together just last night. We generally have dinner Sunday, go over the week together.”

  “Does he give you advice?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “And then I go ahead and do what I want.”

  WHEN I got back to my hotel room, the first call I made was to Jim Faber. “I was just talking about you,” I told him. “A fellow asked if my sponsor gives advice, and I told him how I always do exactly what you suggest.”

  “You’re lucky God didn’t strike you dead on the spot.”

  “I know. But I’ve decided not to go to Ireland.”

  “Oh? You seemed determined last night. Did it look different to you after a night’s sleep?”

  “No,” I admitted. “It looked about the same, and this morning I went to a travel agent and managed to get a cheap seat on a flight leaving Friday evening.”

  “Oh?”

  “And then this afternoon somebody offered me a job and I said yes. You want to go to Ireland for three weeks? I don’t think I can get my money back for the ticket.”

  “Are you sure? It’s a shame to lose the money.”

  “Well, they told me it was nonrefundable, and I already paid for it. It’s all right, I’m making enough on the job so that I can write off a couple hundred. But I did want to let you know that I wasn’t on my way to the land of Sodom and Begorrah.”

  “It sounded like you were setting yourself up,” he said. “That’s why I was concerned. You’ve managed to hang out with your friend in his saloon and still stay sober—”

  “He does the drinking for both of us.”

  “Well, one way or another it seems to work. But on the other side of the ocean with your usual support system thousands of miles away, and with you restless to begin with—”

  “I know. But you can rest easy now.”

  “Even if I can’t take the credit.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s your doing. God works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Doesn’t He just.”

  ELAINE thought it was too bad I wouldn’t be going to Ireland after all. “I don’t suppose there was any possibility of postponing the job,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Or that you’ll be done by Friday.”

  “I’ll barely be started by Friday.”

  “It’s too bad, but you don’t sound disappointed.”

  “I guess I’m not. At least I didn’t call Mick, so that saves having to call again and tell him I changed my mind. To tell you the truth, I’m glad I’ve got the work.”

  “Something to sink your teeth into.”

  “That’s right. That’s what I really need, more than I need a vacation.”

  “And it’s a good case?”

  I hadn’t told her anything about it. I thought for a moment and said, “It’s a terrible case.”

  “Oh?”

  “Jesus, the things people do to each other. You’d think I’d get used to it, but I never do.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “When I see you. Are we on for tomorrow night?”

  “Unless your work gets in the way.”

  “I don’t see why it should. I’ll come by for you around seven. If I’m going to be later than that I’ll call.”

  I HAD a hot bath and a good night’s sleep, and in the morning I went to the bank and added seventy $100 bills to the stash in my safe-deposit box. I deposited two thousand dollars to my checking account and kept the remaining thousand in my hip pocket.

  There was a time when I would have rushed to give it away. I used to spend a lot of idle hours in empty churches, and I tithed religiously, so to speak, stuffing a precise ten percent of the cash I received into the next poor box I passed. This quaint custom had faded away in sobriety. I don’t know why I stopped doing it, but then I couldn’t tell you why I ever started doing it in the first place.

  I could have stuffed my Aer Lingus ticket in the nearest poor box, for all the good I was going to get out of it. I stopped at the travel agent’s and confirmed what I had already suspected, that my ticket was indeed nonrefundable. “Ordinarily I’d say get a doctor to write a letter saying you had to cancel for medical reasons,” he said, “but that wouldn’t work here because it’s not the airline you’re dealing with, it’s an outfit that buys space wholesale from the airlines and offers it at a deep discount.” He offered to try to resell it for
me, and I left it with him and walked to the subway.

  I spent the whole day in Brooklyn. I’d taken a picture of Francine Khoury when I left the house on Colonial Road, and I showed it around at the Fourth Avenue D’Agostino’s and at The Arabian Gourmet on Atlantic Avenue. I was working a colder trail than I would have liked—it was Tuesday now, and the abduction had taken place on Thursday—but there was nothing I could do about that now. It would have been nice if Pete had called me on Friday instead of waiting until the weekend had passed, but they’d had other things to do.

  Along with the picture, I showed around a card from Reliable with my name on it. I was investigating in connection with an insurance claim, I explained. My client’s car had been clipped by another vehicle, which had sped off without stopping, and it would expedite the processing of her claim if we could identify the other party.

  At D’Agostino’s I talked with a cashier, who remembered Francine as a regular customer who always paid cash, a memorable trait in our society but par for the course in dope-dealing circles. “And I can tell you something else about her,” the woman said. “I bet she’s a good cook.” I must have looked mystified. “No prepared foods, no frozen this and that. Always fresh ingredients. Young as she is, you don’t find many that are into cooking. But you never see any TV dinners in her cart.”

  The bag boy remembered her, too, and volunteered the information that she was always a two-dollar tipper. I asked about a truck, and he remembered a blue panel truck that had been parked out front and moved off after her. He hadn’t noticed the make of the truck or the license plate but was reasonably certain of the color, and he thought there was something about TV repair painted on the side.

  They remembered more on Atlantic Avenue because there had been more to notice. The woman behind the counter recognized the picture immediately and was able to tell me just what Francine had bought—olive oil, sesame tahini, foul mudamas, and some other terms I didn’t recognize. She hadn’t seen the actual abduction, though, because she’d been waiting on another customer. She knew something curious had happened, because a customer had come in with some story about two men and a woman running from the store and leaping into the back of a truck. The customer had been concerned that they might have robbed the store and were making a getaway.