Walk Among the Tombstones: A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel

by Lawrence Block

  “Sure.”

  “Right next to it there’s the entrance to the subway, and before you go down the stairs there’s an entranceway to the video arcade. You know where it’s at?”

  “I have a hunch I can find it.”

  “Say twelve-thirty?”

  “It’s a date, Kate.”

  “Hey,” he said. “You know somethin’? You learnin’.”

  * * *

  I FELT better when I got off the phone with TJ. He usually had that effect on me. I made a note of our lunch date, then picked up the Gotteskind material again.

  It was the same perpetrators. Had to be. The similarity of MO was too great to be coincidental, and the amputation and insertion of the thumb and forefinger looked like a rehearsal for the more extensive butchery they’d practiced on Francine Khoury.

  But what did they do, go into hibernation? Lie low for a year?

  It seemed unlikely. Sex-linked violence—serial rape, lust murder—seems to be addictive, like any strong drug that releases you momentarily from the prison of self. Marie Gotteskind’s killers had pulled off a perfectly orchestrated abduction, only to repeat it a year later with very minor variations and, of course, a substantial profit motive. Why wait so long? What were they doing in the meantime?

  Could there have been other abductions without anyone drawing a connection to the Gotteskind case? It was possible. The murder rate in the five boroughs is now over seven a day, and most of them don’t get a lot of play in the media. Still, if you take a woman off a street in front of a bunch of witnesses, it makes the papers. If you’ve got a similar case sitting in an open file, you probably hear about it. And you almost have to draw a connection.

  On the other hand, Francine Khoury had been snatched off the street in front of witnesses, and nobody in the press or the One-Twelve knew the first thing about it.

  Maybe they really had lain low for a year. Maybe one or more of them had been in jail for all or part of that year, maybe a predilection for rape and murder had led to still worse crimes, like writing bad checks.

  Or maybe they’d been active, but in a way that hadn’t drawn any attention.

  Either way, I knew something now that I had previously only suspected. They had done this before, for pleasure if not for profit. That lowered the odds against finding them, and at the same time it raised the stakes.

  Because they’d do it again.

  Chapter 7

  Friday I spent the morning at the library, then walked over to Forty-second Street to meet TJ in the video arcade. Together we watched a kid with a ponytail and a wispy blond mustache run up the score on a game called Freeze!!! It had the same premise as most of the games—i.e., that there were hostile forces in the universe, apt to leap out at you without warning at any moment, bound on doing you harm. If you were quick enough you could survive for a while, but sooner or later one of them would do you in. I couldn’t argue with that.

  We left when the boy finally crapped out. On the street TJ told me the player’s name was Socks because his own never matched. I hadn’t noticed. According to TJ, Socks was about the best on the Deuce at what he did, often able to play for hours on a single quarter. There had been other players as good or better, but they didn’t come around much anymore. For a moment my mind spun with visions of a previously unknown motive for serial homicide, video-game aces rubbed out by an arcade proprietor because they were eating up his profits, but that wasn’t it. You got to a certain level, he explained, and then you couldn’t get any better, and eventually you lost interest.

  We had lunch at a Mexican place on Ninth Avenue and he tried to get me to talk about the case I was working on. I left out the details, but I probably wound up telling him more than I intended to.

  “What you need,” he said, “you need me workin’ for you.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Anything you say! You don’t want to be runnin’ all over town, see this, check that. What you want to do is send me. You don’t think I can find things out? Man, I’m down here on the Deuce every day findin’ things out. It’s what I do.”

  “SO I gave him something,” I told Elaine. We’d met at the Baronet on Third Avenue to catch a four o’clock movie, then went to a new place she’d heard about where they served English tea with scones and clotted cream. “He’d said something earlier that added another item to my list of things to find out, so I figured it was only fair to let him run it down for me.”

  “What was that?”

  “The pay phones,” I said. “When Kenan and his brother delivered the ransom, they were sent to a pay phone. They got a call there, and the caller sent them to still another pay phone, where they got a call telling them to leave the money and take a hike.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, yesterday TJ called me and talked until his quarter dropped, and when I wanted to call him back I couldn’t, because the number wasn’t posted on the phone he was calling from. I walked around the neighborhood on my way to the library this morning, and most of the phones are like that.”

  “You mean the little slips are missing? I know people will steal absolutely anything, but that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard of.”

  “The phone company removes them,” I said, “to discourage drug dealers. They beep each other from pay phones, you know how it works, and now they can’t do that.”

  “And that’s why all the drug dealers are going out of business,” she said.

  “Well, I’m sure it looked good on paper. Anyway, I got to thinking about those pay phones in Brooklyn, and I wondered if their numbers were posted.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Probably somewhere between not much and none at all, which is why I didn’t chase out to Brooklyn myself. But I can’t see where it would hurt me to have the information, so I gave TJ a couple of dollars and sent him to Brooklyn.”

  “Does he know his way around Brooklyn?”

  “He will by the time he gets back. The first phone’s a few blocks from the last stop on the Flatbush IRT, so that’s fairly easy to find, but I don’t know how the hell he’s going to get to Veterans Avenue. A bus out of Flatbush, I suppose, and then a long hike.”

  “What kind of neighborhood is it?”

  “It looked all right when I drove through it with the Khourys. I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention. A basic white working-class neighborhood, as far as I could tell. Why?”

  “You mean like Bensonhurst or Howard Beach? What I mean is will TJ stand out like a dark thumb?”

  “I never even thought of that.”

  “Because there are parts of Brooklyn where they get funny when a black kid walks down the street, even if he is conservatively dressed in high-top sneakers and a Raiders jacket, and I just know he has one of those haircuts.”

  “He’s got a sort of geometric design cut into the hair on the back of his neck.”

  “I thought he might. I hope he comes back alive.”

  “He’ll be all right.”

  Later in the evening she said, “Matt, you were just making work for him, weren’t you? TJ, I mean.”

  “No, he’s saving me a trip. I would have had to run out there myself sooner or later, or catch a ride with one of the Khourys.”

  “Why? Couldn’t you use your old cop tricks to wheedle the number out of the operator? Or look it up in a reverse directory?”

  “You have to know a number to look it up in a reverse directory. A reverse directory has phones listed numerically, and you look up the number and it tells you the location.”

  “Oh.”

  “But there is a book that lists pay phones by location, yes. And yes, I could call an operator and pass myself off as a police officer in order to obtain a number.”

  “So you were just being nice to TJ.”

  “Nice? According to you I was sending him to his death. No, I wasn’t just being nice. Looking in the book or conning the operator would give me the number of the p
ay phone, but it wouldn’t tell me if the number’s posted on the phone. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “Oh,” she said. And, a few minutes later, “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you care if the number’s posted on the phone? What difference does it make?”

  “I don’t know that it does make a difference. But the kidnappers knew to call those phones. If the number’s posted, well, then there was nothing special about their knowledge. If not, they found out one way or another.”

  “By conning the operator or looking in the book.”

  “Which would mean that they know how to con an operator, or where to find a list of pay phones. I don’t know what it would mean. Probably nothing. Maybe I want to get the information because it’s the only thing about the phones I can find out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s been nagging at me,” I said. “Not what I sent TJ for, that’s easy enough to find out with or without his help. But I was sitting up last night and it struck me that the only contact with the kidnappers was phone contact. That was the only trace they left of themselves. The abduction itself was clean as a whistle. A few people saw them, and even more people saw them take that schoolteacher off Jamaica Avenue, but they didn’t leave anything you could use to reel them in. But they did make some phone calls. They made four or five calls to Khoury’s house in Bay Ridge.”

  “There’s no way to trace them, is there? After the connection is broken?”

  “There ought to be,” I said. “I was on the phone yesterday for over an hour with different phone-company personnel. I found out a lot of things about how the phones work. Every call you make is logged.”

  “Even local calls?”

  “Uh-huh. That’s how they know how many message units you use in each billing period. It’s not like a gas meter where they’re just keeping track of the running total. Each call gets recorded and charged to your account.”

  “How long do they keep that data?”

  “Sixty days.”

  “So you could get a list—”

  “Of all the calls made from a particular number. That’s how the data is organized. Say I’m Kenan Khoury. I call up, I say I need to know what calls were made from my phone on a given day, and they can give me a printout with the date and time and duration of every call I made.”

  “But that’s not what you want.”

  “No, it’s not. What I want is the calls made to Khoury’s phone, but that’s not how they log them, because there’s no point. They’ve got the technology to tell you what number’s calling you before you even pick up the phone. They can mount a little LED gadget on your phone that’ll display the number of the calling party and you can decide whether or not you want to talk.”

  “That’s not available yet, is it?”

  “No, not in New York, and it’s controversial. It would probably cut down on the nuisance calls and put a lot of telephone perverts out of business, but the police are afraid it’d keep a lot of people from phoning in anonymous tips, because they’d suddenly be a lot less anonymous.”

  “If it were available now, and if Khoury had had it on his phone—”

  “Then we’d know what phones the kidnappers called from. They probably used pay phones, they’ve been professional enough in other respects, but at least we’d know which pay phones.”

  “Is that important?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t know what’s important. But it doesn’t matter because I can’t get the information. It seems to me that if the calls are logged somewhere in the computer there ought to be some way to sort them by the called number, but everyone I talked to said it was impossible. That’s not the way they’re stored, so they can’t be accessed that way.”

  “I don’t know anything about computers.”

  “Neither do I, and it’s a pain in the ass. I try to talk to people and I don’t understand half the words they use.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “That’s how I feel when we watch football.”

  I STAYED over that night, and in the morning I used up some of her message units while she was at the gym. I called a lot of police officers and I told a lot of lies.

  Mostly I claimed to be a journalist doing a roundup piece on criminal abductions for a true-crime magazine. I got a lot of cops who had nothing to say or were too busy to talk to me, and I got a fair number who were happy to cooperate but wanted to talk about cases that were years old or ones in which the criminals had been spectacularly stupid, or had been caught through some particularly clever police work. What I wanted—well, that was the problem, I didn’t really know what I wanted. I was fishing.

  Ideally, I would have loved to hook a live one, somebody who had been abducted and survived. It was conceivable that they had worked their way up to murder, that there had been earlier exploits, joint or individual, in which the victim had been released alive. It was also possible that a victim could have somehow escaped. There was a world of difference, though, between postulating the existence of such a woman and finding her.

  My pose as a free-lance crime reporter wouldn’t do me any good in my search for a live witness. The system is pretty good about shielding rape victims—at least until they get to court, where the defendant’s attorney gets to violate them all over again in front of God and everybody. Nobody was going to give out the names of rape victims over the phone.

  So my pitch changed for the sex-crimes units. I became a private investigator again, Matthew Scudder, retained by a film producer who was making a TV movie of the week about abduction and rape. The actress selected for the lead—I wasn’t authorized to disclose her name at the present time—wanted an opportunity to research the role in depth, specifically by meeting one-on-one with women who had themselves been through this ordeal. She wanted, essentially, to learn as much as she could about the experience short of undergoing it herself, and the women who assisted her would be compensated as technical advisers and could be listed as such in the credits or not, as they preferred.

  Naturally I didn’t want names or numbers, and had no intention of attempting to initiate contact myself. My thought was that perhaps someone from the unit, possibly a woman who had done victim counseling, could make contact with whatever victims struck her as likely prospects. The woman in our scenario, I explained, was abducted by a pair of sadistic rapists who forced her into a truck, brutalized her, and threatened her with grievous physical harm, threatened specifically to maim her. Obviously someone whose experience was in any way parallel to our fictional narrative would be just what we were looking for. If such a woman was interested in helping us out, and perhaps in helping in some small way other women who might be exposed to such treatment in the future, or who had already gone through it, and might find it a cathartic, even a therapeutic, experience to coach a Hollywood actress in what could be a showcase role—

  The whole thing played surprisingly well. Even in New York, where you’re always coming upon film crews shooting location sequences on the street, the mere mention of the movie business tends to turn people’s heads. “Just have anyone who’s interested give me a call,” I wound up, leaving my name and number. “They don’t have to give their names. They can remain anonymous throughout the entire process, if they want.”

  Elaine walked in just as I was finishing my pitch to a woman in the Manhattan Sex Crimes Unit. When I got off the phone she said, “How are you going to get all of these calls at your hotel? You’re never there.”

  “They’ll take messages at the desk.”

  “From people who don’t want to leave a name or number? Look, give them my number. I’m usually here, and if I’m not they’ll at least get an answering machine with a woman’s voice on it. I’ll be your assistant, I can certainly screen the calls and get names and addresses from the ones who are willing to give them. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Are you sure you want to do it?”
>
  “Sure.”

  “Well, I’m delighted. That was the Manhattan unit I was just talking to, and I called the Bronx earlier. I was saving Brooklyn and Queens for last, since we know they’ve operated there. I wanted to work the bugs out of my routine before I called them.”

  “Is it bug-free now? And I don’t want to horn in, but is there any advantage in my making the calls? You sounded low-key and sympathetic as could be, but it seems to me that whenever a man talks about rape there’s the undercurrent of suspicion that he’s getting off on the whole thing.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, all you have to do is say ‘movie of the week’ and the subtext a woman gets is that sisterhood is going to be violated yet again in another tacky exploitation drama. Whereas if I say it the subliminal message is that the whole thing’s under the sponsorship of NOW.”

  “You’re right. I think it went reasonably well, especially on the Manhattan call, but there was a lot of resistance there.”

  “You sounded terrific, honey. But can I try?”

  We went over the premise first to make sure she had it down, and then I got through to the Sex Crimes Unit at the Queens County DA’s office and gave her the phone. She was on the phone for almost ten minutes, at once earnest and polished and professional, and when she rang off I felt like applauding.

  “What do you think?” she asked. “A little too sincere?”

  “I thought you were perfect.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. It’s almost scary to see what a slick liar you are.”

  “I know. When I was listening to you I thought, he’s so honest, where did he learn to lie like that?”

  “I never knew a good cop who wasn’t a good liar,” I said. “You’re playing a part all the time, creating an attitude to fit the person you’re dealing with. The same skill’s even more important when you work private, because you’re constantly asking for information you’ve got no legal right to. So if I’m good at it, you can say it’s part of the job description.”