A Walk Among the Tombstones Page 8

Page 8

 

  "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 cant take the credit. "

  "Oh, I dont know," I said. "Maybe its your doing. God works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform. "

  "Yeah," he said. "Doesnt He just. "

  ELAINE thought it was too bad I wouldnt be going to Ireland after all. "I dont suppose there was any possibility of postponing the job," she said.

  "No. "

  "Or that youll be done by Friday. "

  "Ill barely be started by Friday. "

  "Its too bad, but you dont sound disappointed. "

  "I guess Im not. At least I didnt call Mick, so that saves having to call again and tell him I changed my mind. To tell you the truth, Im glad Ive got the work. "

  "Something to sink your teeth into. "

  "Thats right. Thats what I really need, more than I need a vacation. "

  "And its a good case?"

  I hadnt told her anything about it. I thought for a moment and said, "Its a terrible case. "

  "Oh?"

  "Jesus, the things people do to each other. Youd think Id 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 dont see why it should. Ill come by for you around seven. If Im going to be later than that Ill call. "

  I HAD a hot bath and a good nights 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 dont know why I stopped doing it, but then I couldnt 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 agents and confirmed what I had already suspected, that my ticket was indeed nonrefundable. "Ordinarily Id say get a doctor to write a letter saying you had to cancel for medical reasons," he said, "but that wouldnt work here because its not the airline youre dealing with, its 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. Id taken a picture of Francine Khoury when I left the house on Colonial Road, and I showed it around at the Fourth Avenue DAgostinos 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 theyd 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 clients 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 DAgostinos 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 shes a good cook. " I must have looked mystified. "No prepared foods, no frozen this and that. Always fresh ingredients. Young as she is, you dont 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 hadnt 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 didnt recognize. She hadnt seen the actual abduction, though, because shed 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.

  I managed a few more interviews before noon, at which time I thought Id go next door for lunch. Instead I remembered the advice Id been so quick to hand out to Peter Khoury. I hadnt been to a meeting myself since Saturday, and here it was Tuesday and Id be spending the evening with Elaine. I called the Intergroup office and learned that there was a twelve-thirty meeting about ten minutes away in Brooklyn Heights. The speaker was a little old lady, as prim and proper in appearance as could be, and her story made it clear that she had not been ever thus. Shed been a bag lady, evidently, sleeping in doorways and never bathing or changing her clothes, and she kept stressing how filthy she had been, how foul she had smelled. It was hard to square the story with the person at the head of the table.

  AFTER the meeting I went back to Atlantic Avenue and picked up where Id left off. I bought a sandwich and a can of cream soda at a deli and interviewed the proprietor while I was there. I ate my lunch standing up outside, then talked to the clerk and a couple of customers at a corner newsstand. I went into Aleppo and talked to the cashier and two of the waiters. I went back to Ayoubs- Id taken to thinking of The Arabian Gourmet by that name, since I kept talking to people who were calling it that. I went back there, and by this time the woman had been able to come up with the name of the customer whod been afraid the men in the blue van had robbed the place. I found the man listed in the phone book, but no one answered when I rang the number.

  I had dropped the insurance-investigation story when I got to Atlantic Avenue because it didnt seem likely to jibe with what people would have seen. On the other hand, I didnt want to leave the impression that anything on the scale of kidnapping and homicide had taken place, or someone might deem it his civic duty to report the matter to the police. The story I put together, and it tended to vary somewhat depending upon my audience of the moment, went more or less along these lines:

  My client had a sister who was considering an arranged marriage to an illegal alien who was hoping to stay in the country. The prospective groom had a girlfriend whose family was bitterly opposed to the marriage. Two men, relatives of the girlfriend, had been harassing my client for days in an attempt to enlist her aid to stop the marriage. She was sympathetic to their position but didnt really want to get involved.

  They had been dogging her steps on Thursday, and followed her to Ayoubs. When she left they got her into the back of their truck on a pretext and drove around with her, trying to convince her. By the time they let her out she was slightly hysterical, and in the course of getting away from them she lost not only the groceries (olive oil, tahini, and so on) but also her purse, which at the time contained a rather valuable bracelet. She didnt know the name of these men, or how to get in touch with them, and-

  I dont suppose it made much sense, but I wasnt pitching it to the networks for a TV pilot, I was just using it to reassure some reasonably solid citizens that it was both safe and noble to be as helpful as possible. I got a lot of gratuitous advice- "Those marriages a
re a bad thing, she should tell her sister its not worth it," for instance. But I also got a fair amount of information.

  I KNOCKED off a little after four and caught a train to Columbus Circle, beating the rush hour by a few minutes. There was mail for me at the desk, most of it junk. I ordered something from a catalog once and now I get dozens of them every month. I live in one small room and wouldnt have room for the catalogs themselves, let alone the products they want me to buy.

  Upstairs, I tossed everything but the phone bill and two message slips, both informing me that "Ken Curry" had called, once at 2:30, and again at 3:45. I didnt call him right away. I was exhausted.

  The day had taken it out of me. I hadnt done that much physically, hadnt spent eight hours hefting sacks of cement, but all those conversations with all those people had taken their toll. You have to concentrate hard, and the process is especially demanding when youre running a story of your own. Unless youre a pathological liar, a fiction is more arduous to utter than the truth; thats the principle on which the lie detector is based, and my own experience tends to bear it out. A full day of lying and role-playing takes it out of you, especially if youre on your feet for most of it.

  I took a shower and touched up my shave, then put the TV news on and listened to fifteen minutes of it with my feet up and my eyes closed. Around five-thirty I called Kenan Khoury and told him Id made some progress, although I didnt have anything specific to report. He wanted to know if there was anything he could do.

  "Not just yet," I said. "Ill be going back to Atlantic Avenue tomorrow to see if the picture fills in a little more. When Im done there Ill come to your place. Will you be there?"

  "Sure," he said. "I got no place to go. "

  I SET the alarm and closed my eyes again, and the clock snatched me out of a dream at half past six. I put on a suit and tie and went over to Elaines. She poured coffee for me and Perrier for herself, and then we caught a cab uptown to the Asia Society, where they had recently opened an exhibit that centered on the Taj Mahal, and thus tied right in with the course she was taking at Hunter. After wed walked through the three exhibit rooms and made the appropriate noises we followed the crowd into another room, where we sat in folding chairs and listened to a soloist perform on the sitar. I have no idea whether he was any good or not. I dont know how you could tell, or how he himself would know if his instrument was out of tune.

  Afterward there was a wine-and-cheese reception. "This need not detain us long," Elaine murmured, and after a few minutes of smiling and mumbling we were on the street.

  "You loved every minute of it," she said.

  "It was all right. "

  "Oh boy," she said. "The things a man will put himself through in the hope of getting laid. "

  "Come on," I said. "It wasnt that bad. Its the same music they play at Indian restaurants. "

  "But there you dont have to listen to it. "

  "Who listened?"

  We went to an Italian restaurant, and over espresso I told her about Kenan Khoury and what had happened to his wife. When I was finished she sat for a moment looking down at the tablecloth in front of her as if there were something written on it. Then she raised her eyes slowly to meet mine. She is a resourceful woman, and a durable one, but just then she looked touchingly vulnerable.