Walk Among the Tombstones: A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel

by Lawrence Block

  I managed a few more interviews before noon, at which time I thought I’d go next door for lunch. Instead I remembered the advice I’d been so quick to hand out to Peter Khoury. I hadn’t been to a meeting myself since Saturday, and here it was Tuesday and I’d 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. She’d 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 I’d 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 Ayoub’s—I’d 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 who’d 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 didn’t seem likely to jibe with what people would have seen. On the other hand, I didn’t 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 didn’t really want to get involved.

  They had been dogging her steps on Thursday, and followed her to Ayoub’s. 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 didn’t know the name of these men, or how to get in touch with them, and—

  I don’t suppose it made much sense, but I wasn’t 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 are a bad thing, she should tell her sister it’s 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 wouldn’t 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 didn’t call him right away. I was exhausted.

  The day had taken it out of me. I hadn’t done that much physically, hadn’t 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 you’re running a story of your own. Unless you’re a pathological liar, a fiction is more arduous to utter than the truth; that’s 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 you’re 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 I’d made some progress, although I didn’t have anything specific to report. He wanted to know if there was anything he could do.

  “Not just yet,” I said. “I’ll be going back to Atlantic Avenue tomorrow to see if the picture fills in a little more. When I’m done there I’ll 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 Elaine’s. 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 we’d 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 don’t 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 wasn’t that bad. It’s the same music they play at Indian restaurants.”

  “But there you don’t 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.

  “Dear God,” she said.

  “The things people do.”

  “There’s just no end, is there? No bottom to it.” She took a sip of water. “The cruelty of it, the utter sadism. Why would anyone—well, why ask why?”

  “I figure it has to be pleasure,” I said. “They must have gotten off on it, not just on the killing but on rubbing his nose in it, jerking him around, telling him she’ll be in the car, she’ll be home when he gets there, then finally letting him find her in pieces in the trunk of the Ford. They wouldn’t have to be sadists to kill her. They could see it as safer that way than to leave a witness who could identify them. But there was no practical advantage in twisting the knife the way they did. They went to a lot of trouble dismembering the body. I’m sorry, this is great table talk, isn’t it?”

  “That’s nothing compared to what a great pre-bedtime story it makes.”

  “Puts you right in the mood, huh?”

  “Nothing like it to get the juices flowing. No, really, I don’t mind it. I mean I mind, of course I mind, but I’m not squeamish. It’s gross, cutting somebody up, but that’s really the least of it, isn’t it? The real shock is that there’s that kind of evil in the world and it can come from out of nowhere and zap you for no good reason at all. That’s what’s awful, and it’s just as bad on an empty stomach as on a full one.”

  WE went back to her apartment and she put on a Cedar Walton solo piano album that we both liked, and we sat together on the couch, not saying much. When the record ended she turned it over, and halfway through Side Two w
e went into the bedroom and made love with a curious intensity. Afterward neither of us spoke for a long time, until she said, “I’ll tell you, kiddo. If we keep on like this, one of these days we’re gonna get good at it.”

  “You think so, huh?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me. Matt? Stay over tonight.”

  I kissed her. “I was planning to.”

  “Mmmm. Good plan. I don’t want to be alone.”

  Neither did I.

  Chapter 4

  I stayed for breakfast, and by the time I got out to Atlantic Avenue it was almost eleven. I spent five hours there, most if it on the street and in shops but some of it in a branch library and on the phone. A little after four I walked a couple of blocks and caught a bus to Bay Ridge.

  When I’d seen him last he’d been rumpled and unshaven, but now Kenan Khoury looked cool and composed in gray gabardine slacks and a muted plaid shirt. I followed him into the kitchen and he told me his brother had gone to work in Manhattan that morning. “Petey said he’d stay here, he didn’t care about work, but how many times are we gonna have the same conversation? I made him take the Toyota so he’s got that to get back and forth. How about you, Matt? You getting anywhere?”

  I said, “Two men about my size took your wife off the street in front of The Arabian Gourmet and hustled her into a dark blue panel truck or van. A similar truck, probably the same one, was tailing her when she left D’Agostino’s. The truck had lettering on the doors, white lettering according to one witness. TV Sales & Service, with the company name composed of indeterminate initials. B & L, H & M, different people saw different things. Two people remembered an address in Queens and one specifically recalled it as Long Island City.”

  “Is there such a firm?”

  “The description’s vague enough so that there are a dozen or more firms that would fit. A couple of initials, TV repair, a Queens address. I called six or eight outfits and couldn’t come up with anybody who runs dark blue trucks or who had a vehicle stolen recently. I didn’t expect to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think the truck was stolen. My guess is that they had your house staked out Thursday morning hoping your wife would go out by herself. When she did they followed her. It probably wasn’t the first time they tailed her, waiting for an opportunity to make their play. They wouldn’t want to steal a truck each time and ride around all day in something that’s liable to show up any hour on the hot-car sheet.”

  “You think it was their truck?”

  “Most likely. I think they painted a phony company name and address on the doors, and once they completed the snatch they painted the old name out and a new name in. By now I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole body’s repainted some color other than blue.”

  “What about the license plate?”

  “It had probably been switched for the occasion, but it hardly matters because nobody got the plate number. One witness thought the three of them had just knocked over the food market, that they were robbers, but all he wanted to do was get inside the store and make sure everybody was all right. Another man thought something funny was going on and he did take a look at the plate, but all he remembered was that it had a nine in it.”

  “That’s helpful.”

  “Very. The men were dressed alike, dark pants and matching work shirts, matching blue windbreakers. They looked to be in uniform, and, between that and the commercial vehicle they were driving, they appeared legitimate. I learned years ago that you can walk in almost anywhere if you’re carrying a clipboard because it looks as though you’re doing your job. They had that edge going for them. Two different people told me they thought they were watching two undercover guys from the INS taking an illegal alien off the street. That’s one reason nobody interfered, that and the fact that it was over and done with before anyone had time to react.”

  “Pretty slick,” he said.

  “The uniform dress did something else, too. It made them invisible, because all people saw was their clothing, and all they remember was that both of them looked the same. Did I mention that they had caps on, too? The witnesses described the caps and the jackets, things they put on for the job and got rid of afterward.”

  “So we don’t really have anything.”

  “That’s not really true,” I said. “We don’t have anything that leads directly to them, but we’ve got something. We know what they did and how they did it, that they’re resourceful, that they planned their approach. How do you figure they picked you?”

  He shrugged. “They knew I was a trafficker. That was mentioned. That makes you a good target. They know you’ve got money and they know you’re not going to call the police.”

  “What else did they know about you?”

  “My ethnic background. The one guy, the first one, he called me some names.”

  “I think you mentioned that.”

  “Raghead, sand nigger. That’s a nice one, huh? Sand nigger. He left out camel jockey, that’s one I used to hear from the Italian kids at St. Ignatius. ‘Hey, Khoury, ya fuckin’ camel jockey!’ Only camel I ever saw was on a cigarette pack.”

  “You think being an Arab made you a target?”

  “It never occurred to me. There’s a certain amount of prejudice, no question about it, but I’m not usually that conscious of it. Francine’s people are Palestinian, did I mention that?”

  “Yes.”

  “They have it tougher. I know Palestinians who say they’re Lebanese or Syrian just to avoid hassles. ‘Oh, you’re Palestinian, you must be a terrorist.’ That kind of ignorant remark, and there are people who have bigoted ideas about Arabs in general.” He rolled his eyes. “My father, for instance.”

  “Your father?”

  “I wouldn’t say he was anti-Arab, but he had this whole theory that we weren’t actually Arabs. Our family’s Christian, see.”

  “I wondered what you were doing at St. Ignatius.”

  “There were times I wondered myself. No, we were Maronite Christians, and according to my old man we were Phoenicians. You ever hear of the Phoenicians?”

  “Back in biblical times, weren’t they? Traders and explorers, something like that?”

  “You got it. Great sailors, they sailed all around Africa, they colonized Spain, they probably reached Britain. They founded Carthage in North Africa, and there were a lot of Carthaginian coins dug up in England. They were the first people to discover Polaris, that’s the North Star, I mean to discover that it was always in the same spot and could be used for navigation. They developed an alphabet that served as the basis for the Greek alphabet.” He broke off, slightly embarrassed. “My old man talked about them all the time. I guess some of it must have soaked in.”

  “It looks like it.”

  “He wasn’t a lunatic on the subject, but he knew a lot about it. That’s where my name comes from. The Phoenicians called themselves the Kena’ani, or Canaanites. My name should be pronounced Keh-nahn, but everyone’s always said Kee-nan.”

  “ ‘Ken Curry’ is the message I got yesterday.”

  “Yeah, that’s typical. I’ve ordered things on the phone and they turn up addressed to Keane & Curry, it sounds like a couple of Irish lawyers. Anyway, according to my father the Phoenicians were a completely different people from the Arabs. They were the Canaanites, they were already a people at the time of Abraham. Whereas the Arabs were descended from Abraham.”

  “I thought the Jews were descendants of Abraham.”

  “Right, through Isaac, who was the legitimate son of Abraham and Sarah. Meanwhile the Arabs were the sons of Ishmael, who was the son Abraham fathered with Hagar. Jesus, here’s something I haven’t thought of in a long time. When I was a kid my father had this mild feud with this grocer around the block on Dean Street, and he used to refer to him as ‘that Ishmaelite bastard.’ God, what a character he was.”

  “Is he still living?”

  “No, he died three years ago. He was diabetic, and over the years it weakened his
heart. When I’m down on myself I tell myself he died of a broken heart because of how his sons turned out. He was hoping for an architect and a doctor and instead he got a drunk and a dope dealer. But that’s not what killed him. His diet killed him. He was diabetic and he was fifty pounds overweight. Me and Petey could have turned out to be Jonas Salk and Frank Lloyd Wright and it wouldn’t have done him any good.”

  AROUND six Kenan made the first of a series of phone calls after the two of us had worked out an approach. He dialed a number, waited for a tone, then punched in his own number and hung up. “Now we wait,” he said, but we didn’t have to wait very long. In less than five minutes the phone rang.

  He said, “Hey, Phil, how’s it going? Great. Here’s the deal. I don’t know if you ever met my wife. The thing is, we had this kidnap threat, I had to send her out of the country. I don’t know what it’s about but I think it has to do with the business, you follow me? So what I’m doing, I’ve got a guy checking it out for me, like a professional. And I wanted, you know, to pass the word, because the sense I got is these people are serious about this and my impression is they’re stone killers. Right. Yeah, that’s the thing, man, we sit here and we’re easy marks, we got plenty of cash and we can’t holler for the law, and that makes us the perfect target for home invasions and every goddam thing . . . Right. So all I’m saying is be careful, you know, and keep an eye and an ear open. And pass the word around, you know, to whoever you think ought to hear it. And if any shit comes down, man, call me, you understand? Right.”