Walk Among the Tombstones: A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel

by Lawrence Block

“I’d appreciate it.”

  “A phone call or two’s one thing,” he said. “I didn’t have to commit a flagrant breach of departmental regulations and neither did the guy on the job in Queens. But you’re asking for disclosure of confidential materials. That file’s not supposed to leave the office.”

  “It doesn’t have to. All he has to do is take five minutes to fax it.”

  “You want the whole file? Full-scale homicide investigation, there’s got to be twenty, thirty pages in that file.”

  “The department can afford the fax charges.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The mayor keeps telling us the city’s going broke. What’s your interest in it, anyway?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Well, Jesus Christ, Matt. You want it all flowing in one direction, don’t you?”

  “It’s a confidential matter.”

  “No shit. It’s confidential, but departmental files are an open book, is that it?” He lit a cigarette and coughed. He said, “This wouldn’t have anything to do with a friend of yours, would it?”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Your buddy Ballou. This got anything to do with him?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You sure of that?”

  “He’s out of the country,” I said. “He’s been gone for over a month and I don’t know when he’s coming back. And he’s never been big on raping women and leaving them in the middle of the fairway.”

  “I know, he’s a gentleman, he replaces all divots. They’re looking to put together a RICO case against him, but I suppose you already knew that.”

  “I heard something about it.”

  “I hope they make it stick, tuck him away in a federal joint for the next twenty years. But I suppose you feel differently.”

  “He’s a friend of mine.”

  “Yeah, so I’ve been told.”

  “Anyway, he’s got nothing to do with this matter.” He just looked at me, and I said, “I have a client whose wife disappeared. The MO looks similar to the Woodhaven incident.”

  “She was abducted?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “He report it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I guess he had his reasons.”

  “That’s not good enough, Matt.”

  “Suppose he’s in the country illegally.”

  “Half the city’s in the country illegally. You think we catch a kidnap case, the first thing we do is turn the victim over to the INS? And who is this guy, he can’t swing a green card but he’s got the money for a private investigator? Sounds to me like he’s got to be dirty.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Whatever I say, huh?” He put out the cigarette and frowned at me. “The woman dead?”

  “It’s beginning to look that way. If it’s the same people—”

  “Yeah, but why would it be the same people? What’s the connection, the MO of the abduction?” When I didn’t say anything he picked up the check, glanced at it, and tossed it across the table to me. “Here,” he said. “Your treat. You still at the same number? I’ll call you this afternoon.”

  “Thanks Joe.”

  “No, don’t thank me. I have to figure out if there’s any way this is going to come back and haunt me. If not I’ll make the call. Otherwise forget it.”

  I WENT to the noon meeting at Fireside, then back to my room. There was nothing from Durkin, but a message slip indicated that I’d had a call from TJ. Just that—no number, no further message. I crumpled the slip and tossed it.

  TJ is a black teenager I met about a year and a half ago on Times Square. That’s his street name, and if he has another name he’s kept it to himself. I’d found him breezy and saucy and irreverent, a breath of fresh air in the fetid swamp of Forty-second Street, and the two of us had hit it off together. I let him do some minor legwork on a case a little later on with a Times Square handle on it, and since then he’d kept in infrequent contact. Every couple of weeks there would be a call or a series of calls from him. He never left a number and I had no way of getting in touch with him, so his messages were just a way of letting me know he was thinking of me. If he really wanted to contact me he’d keep calling until he caught me at home.

  When he did, we sometimes talked until his quarter ran out, or sometimes we would meet in his neighborhood or mine and I would buy him a meal. Twice I’d given him little jobs to do in connection with cases I was working, and he seemed to get a kick out of the work that couldn’t be explained by the small sums I paid him.

  I went to my room and called Elaine. “Danny Boy says hello,” I said. “And Joe Durkin says you’re a good influence on me.”

  “Of course I am,” she said. “But how does he know?”

  “He says I’m better dressed since we started keeping company.”

  “I told you that new suit is special.”

  “That’s not what I was wearing.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was wearing my blazer. I’ve had the damn thing forever.”

  “Well, it still looks nice. Gray slacks with it? Which shirt and tie?” I told her, and she said, “Well, that’s a nice outfit.”

  “Pretty ordinary, though. I saw a zoot suit last night.”

  “Honestly?”

  “With a drape shape and a reet pleat, according to Danny Boy.”

  “Danny Boy wasn’t wearing a zoot suit.”

  “No, it was an associate of his named—well, it doesn’t matter what his name was. He was also wearing a straw hat with a shocking-pink band. Now if I’d worn something like that to Durkin’s office—”

  “He would have been impressed. Maybe it’s something in your stance, honey, maybe it’s an attitude thing that Durkin’s picking up on. You’re wearing your clothes with more authority.”

  “Because my heart is pure.”

  “That must be it.”

  We kibitzed a little more. She had a class that night and we talked about getting together afterward but decided against it. “Tomorrow’s better,” she said. “Maybe a movie? Except I hate to go on the weekend, everything decent is mobbed. I know, maybe an afternoon movie and dinner after it, assuming you’re not working.” I told her that sounded good.

  I hung up and the man on the desk rang to say I’d had a call while I was on the phone with Elaine. They’ve changed the phone system a few times since I’ve been at the Northwestern. Originally all calls had to go through the switchboard. Then they fixed it so you could dial out directly, but incoming calls were still routed through the board. Now I have a direct line for making or receiving calls, but if I don’t pick up after four rings it gets transferred downstairs. I get my own bill from NYNEX, the hotel doesn’t impose any charges, and I come out of it with a free answering service.

  The call was from Durkin, and I rang him back. “You left something here,” he said. “You want to pick it up or should I toss it?”

  I said I’d be right over.

  He was on the phone when I got to the squad room. He had his chair tilted back and he was smoking a cigarette while another one burned up in the ashtray. At the desk next to his, a detective named Bellamy was peering over the tops of his eyeglasses at the screen of his computer.

  Joe covered the mouthpiece of the phone and said, “I think that’s your envelope there, it’s got your name on it. You left it when you were here earlier.”

  Without waiting for a reply he went back to his conversation. I reached over his shoulder and picked up a nine-by-twelve manila clasp envelope with my name on it. Behind me, Bellamy told the computer, “Well, that makes no fucking sense at all.”

  I didn’t argue the point.

  Chapter 6

  Back in my room I spread a sheaf of curling fax copies on my bed. They had evidently faxed the whole file, thirty-six pages of it. Some of them only had a few lines on them, but others were densely packed with information.

  Shuffling through them, it struck me what
a different proposition all this would have been in my own cop days. We didn’t have copying machines, let alone fax. The only way to see Marie Gotteskind’s file would have required traipsing out to Queens and going through it on the spot, with some anxious cop looking over your shoulder and trying to hurry you along.

  Nowadays you just fed everything into a fax transmitter and it came out by sheer magic five or ten miles away—or on the other side of the world, for that matter. The original file never left the office where it was kept, and no unauthorized person snuck in for a peek at it, so nobody had to get uptight about a breach in security.

  And I had all the time I needed to pore over the Gottes-kind file.

  It’s just as well I did because I had no clear idea what I was looking for. One thing that hasn’t changed a bit since I got out of the Police Academy is the amount of paperwork the job entails. Whatever kind of cop you are, you spend less time doing things than you do establishing a record on paper of what you’ve done. Some of this is the usual bureaucratic horseshit and some comes under the general heading of covering your ass, but much of it is probably inescapable. Police work is a collective effort, with a variety of people contributing to even the simpler sort of investigation, and if it’s not all written down somewhere nobody can get an overview of it and figure out what it amounts to.

  I read everything, and when I got to the end I went back and pulled a few pieces of paper for a second look. One thing that became evident early on was the extraordinary similarity between the Gotteskind abduction and the way Francine Khoury was taken in Brooklyn. I noted the following points of similarity:

  Both women were abducted from commercial streets.

  Both women had parked cars nearby and were shopping on foot.

  Both were seized by a pair of men.

  In both instances, the men were described as being similar in height and weight, and were dressed alike. The Gotteskind kidnappers had worn khaki trousers and navy windbreakers.

  Both women were carried off in trucks. The truck used in Woodhaven was described by several witnesses as a light blue van. One witness identified it specifically as a Ford, and supplied a partial plate number, but it hadn’t led anywhere.

  Several witnesses agreed that the body of the truck was lettered with the name of a household appliance firm. They variously identified the firm as P J Home Appliance, B & J Household Appliance, and variations on the foregoing. A second line read sales and service. There was no address, but witnesses reported that there was a phone number, although no one could supply it. A thorough investigation had failed to link the truck to any of the innumerable companies in the borough that sold and serviced home appliances, and the conclusion seemed warranted that the firm’s name, like the plate number, was spurious.

  Marie Gotteskind was twenty-eight years old and employed as a substitute teacher in the New York City primary schools. For three days, including the day of her abduction, she had filled in for a fourth-grade teacher in Ridgewood. She was about the same height as Francine Khoury and within a few pounds of her in weight, blond and light-complected where Francine was dark-haired and olive-skinned. There was no photograph in the file except for those taken at the scene in Forest Park, but testimony from acquaintances indicated that she was considered attractive.

  There were differences. Marie Gotteskind was unmarried. She had had a few dates with a male teacher whom she’d met on an earlier substitute assignment, but their relationship does not seem to have amounted to much and his alibi for the time of her death was in any case unassailable.

  Marie lived at home with her parents. Her father, a former steamfitter with a disability pension for a job-related injury, operated a small mail-order business from his home. Her mother helped him with the business and also served as a part-time bookkeeper for several neighborhood enterprises. Neither Marie nor either of her parents had any demonstrable connection to the drug subculture. Nor were they Arabs, or Phoenicians.

  The medical examination had been detailed, of course, and there was a lot to report. Death had come as a result of multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen, any of several of which would have been fatal. There was evidence of repeated sexual assault, with traces of semen in her anus, her vagina, and her mouth, as well as in one of the knife wounds. Forensic measurements indicated that at least two different knives had been used on her, and suggested that both could be kitchen knives, with one having a longer and wider blade than the other. An analysis of the semen indicated the presence of at least two assailants.

  In addition to the knife wounds, the nude body showed multiple bruises indicating that the victim had been subjected to a beating.

  Finally, and I missed this on first reading, the medical examiner’s report supplied the information that the thumb and index finger of the victim’s left hand had been severed. The two digits had been recovered, the index finger from her vagina, the thumb from her rectum.

  Cute.

  READING the file had a numbing, deadening effect on me. That’s very likely why I missed the thumb-and-finger item first time through. The report of the woman’s injuries and the image they conjured up of her last moments was more than the mind wanted to take in. Other entries in the file, interviews with parents and coworkers, had painted a picture of the living Marie Gotteskind, and the medical report took that living person and turned her into dead and grossly mistreated flesh.

  I was sitting there, feeling drained and exhausted by what I had just read, when the phone rang. I answered it and a voice I knew said, “So where’s it at, Matt?”

  “Hey, TJ.”

  “How you doin’? You a hard man to reach. Be out all the time, goin’ places, doin’ things.”

  “I got your message but you didn’t leave a number.”

  “Don’t have a number. I was a drug dealer I might could have a beeper. You like it better that way?”

  “If you were a dealer you’d have a cellular phone.”

  “Now you talkin’. Have me a long car with a phone in it, and just be sittin’ in it thinkin’ long thoughts and doin’ long things. Man, I got to say it again, you hard to reach.

  “Did you call more than once, TJ? I only got the one message.”

  “Well, see, I don’t always like to waste the quarter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know, I got your phone figured. It’s like those answering machines, how they pick up after three or four rings, whatever it is? Dude on the desk, he always lets your phone ring four times before he cuts in. And you just got the one room, so it ain’t about to take you more than three rings to get to the phone, ‘less you be in the bathroom or something.”

  “So you hang up after three rings.”

  “And get my quarter back. ‘Less I want to leave a message, but why leave a message when I already left one? You come home an’ there’s a whole stack of messages, you think to yourself, ‘This TJ, he musta tapped a parking meter, he got all these quarters he don’t know what to do with.’ ”

  I laughed.

  “So you workin’?”

  “As a matter of fact I am.”

  “Big job?”

  “Fairly big.”

  “Any room in it for TJ?”

  “Not as far as I can see.”

  “Man, you not lookin’ hard enough! Must be something I could do, make up for some of the quarters I burn up callin’ you. What kind of job is it, anyway? You not up against the Mafia, are you?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Glad to hear it, because those cats are bad, Tad. You see Goodfellas? Man, they nasty. Oh, damn, my quarter be runnin’ out.”

  A recorded voice cut in, demanding five cents for a minute’s worth of phone time.

  I said, “Give me the number and I’ll call you back.”

  “Can’t.”

  “The number of the phone you’re talking on.”

  “Can’t,” he said again. “Ain’t no number on it. They takin’ ’em off all the pay phones so th
e players can’t get calls back on ’em. No problem, I got some change.” The phone chimed as he dropped a coin in. “The dealers, they got certain pay phones where they know the number whether it shows there or not. So it still business as usual, only somebody like you wants to call somebody like me back, ain’t no way to do it.”

  “It’s a great system.”

  “It’s cool. We still talkin’, ain’t we? Nobody stoppin’ us doin’ what we want to do. They just forcin’ us to be resourceful.”

  “By putting in another quarter?”

  “You got it, Matt. I be drawin’ on my resources. That’s what you call bein’ resourceful.”

  “Where are you going to be tomorrow, TJ?”

  “Where I be? Oh, I dunno. Maybe I fly to Paris on the Concorde. I ain’t made up my mind yet.” It struck me that he could take my ticket and go to Ireland, but he wasn’t likely to have a passport. Nor did it seem probable that Ireland was ready for him, or he for Ireland. “Where I be,” he said heavily. “I be on the fuckin’ Deuce, man. Where else I gonna be?”

  “I thought maybe we could get something to eat.”

  “What time?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Say around twelve, twelve-thirty?”

  “Which?”

  “Twelve-thirty.”

  “That’s twelve-thirty in the daytime or in the night?”

  “Daytime. We’ll have some lunch.”

  “Ain’t no time of the day or night you can’t have lunch,” he said. “You want me to come by your hotel?”

  “No,” I said, “because there’s a chance I’ll have to cancel and I wouldn’t have any way to let you know. So I don’t want to hang you up. Pick a place on the Deuce and if I don’t show up we’ll make it another time.”

  “That’s cool,” he said. “You know the video arcade? Uptown side of the street, two, three doors from Eighth Avenue? There’s the store with the switchknives in the window, man, I don’t know how they get away with that—”

  “They’re sold in kit form.”

  “Yeah, an’ they use it for an IQ test. You can’t put the kit together, you have to go back an’ do first grade all over again. You know the store I mean.”