Walk Among the Tombstones: A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel

by Lawrence Block

  “For me, too,” she said. “Now that I come to think of it. I’m always acting, it’s what I do.”

  “That was great acting last night, incidentally.”

  She gave me a look. “It’s tiring, though, isn’t it? Lying, I mean.”

  “You want to quit?”

  “Screw that, I’m just getting warmed up. Who else do I do, Brooklyn and Staten Island?”

  “Forget Staten Island.”

  “Why? No sex crimes in Staten Island?”

  “All sex is a crime in Staten Island.”

  “Har har.”

  “No, they could have a unit, for all I know, although the incidence there is nothing compared to the other boroughs. But I can’t see our three men in a van zooming across the Verrazano Bridge bent on rape and mayhem.”

  “So I’ve only got one more call to make?”

  “Well,” I said, “there are also sex-crime units in the various police-department borough commands, and there are frequently rape specialists in individual precincts. You just ask the desk officer to route the call to the appropriate person. I could make a list, but I don’t know how much time you’ve got for this.”

  She gave me a come-hither look. “If you’ve got the money, honey,” she said archly, “I’ve got the time.”

  “As a matter of fact, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get paid for this. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be on Khoury’s payroll.”

  “Oh, please,” she said. “Whenever I find something I like somebody tries to get me to take money for it. No, seriously, I don’t want to get paid. When this is all but a memory you can take me out for a really extravagant dinner somewhere, okay?”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “And afterward,” she said, “you can slip me a hundred for cab fare.”

  Chapter 8

  I stayed around while she charmed the daylights out of a staffer in the Brooklyn DA’s Office, then left her with a list of people to call and walked to the library. There was no need for me to supervise her. She was a natural.

  In the library I did what I’d started doing the previous morning, working my way through six months’ worth of The New York Times on microfilm. I wasn’t looking for abductions because I didn’t really expect to find any reported as such. Instead I was assuming that they had occasionally snatched someone off the street without anyone witnessing the act, or at least without their reporting it. I was looking for victims who turned up dead in parks or alleys, especially victims who’d been sexually assaulted and mutilated, specifically dismembered.

  A problem lay in the fact that touches of that sort weren’t very likely to make the papers. It’s standard police policy to withhold specific details of mutilation in order to spare themselves a variety of aggravations—phony confessions, copycat offenders, false witnesses. For their part, newspapers tend to spare their readers the more graphic details. By the time the news gets to the reader, it’s hard to tell what happened.

  Some years ago there was a sex criminal who was killing young boys on the Lower East Side. He lured them onto rooftops, stabbed or strangled them, and amputated and carried off their penises. He was at it long enough for cops on the case to come up with a name for him. They called him Charlie Chopoff.

  Naturally enough, the police reporters called him the same thing—but not in print. There was no way any New York newspaper was going to provide that little detail for their readers, and there was no way to use the nickname without the reader having a pretty fair idea as to just what was chopped off. So they didn’t call him anything, and reported only that the killer had mutilated or disfigured his victims, which could cover anything from ritual disembowelment to a lousy haircut.

  Nowadays they might be less restrained.

  ONCE I got the hang of it, I was able to go through the weeks with fair speed. I didn’t have to scan an entire paper, just the Metropolitan section, where the local crime news was concentrated. The biggest time waster was the same one I always have in a library, which is a tendency to get sidetracked by something interesting that has nothing to do with what brought me there. Fortunately they don’t carry comics in the Times. Otherwise I’d have had to wrestle with the temptation to wallow in six months’ worth of Doonesbury.

  By the time I got out of there I had half a dozen possible cases jotted down in my notebook. One was particularly likely, the victim an accounting major at Brooklyn College who went missing three days before a birdwatcher encountered her one morning in Green-Wood Cemetery. The story said that she’d been subjected to sexual assault and sexual mutilation, which suggested to me that someone had done a job on her with a carving knife. Evidence at the scene indicated that she had been killed elsewhere and dumped at the cemetery, and police had drawn a similar conclusion about Marie Gotteskind, that she had already been dead when her killers discarded her body on the Forest Park Golf course.

  I got back to my hotel around six. There were messages from Elaine and both Khourys, along with three slips announcing simply that TJ had called.

  I called Elaine first and she reported that she’d made all the calls. “By the end I was beginning to believe my own cover story,” she said. “I was thinking to myself, This is fun, but it’ll be even more fun when we make the movie. Except there’s not going to be a movie.”

  “I think somebody already made it.”

  “I wonder if anybody will actually call.”

  I got Kenan Khoury and he wanted to know how things were coming along. I told him I had managed to open up several lines of inquiry, but that I didn’t expect quick results.

  “But you think we got a shot,” he said.

  “Definitely.”

  “Good,” he said. “Listen, why I called, I’m going to be out of the country on business for a couple of days. I have to go to Europe. I’m flying out tomorrow from JFK and I’ll be coming back Thursday or Friday. Anything comes up, just call my brother. You’ve got his phone number, don’t you?”

  I had it on a message slip right in front of me, and I called it after I got off the phone with Kenan. Peter sounded groggy when he answered and I apologized for waking him. He said, “No, that’s okay, I’m glad you did. I was watching basketball and I dozed off in front of the set. I hate when that happens, I always wind up with a stiff neck. Reason I called, I was wondering if you were planning to go to a meeting tonight.”

  “I thought I would, yes.”

  “Well, how about if I pick you up and we go together? There’s a Saturday night meeting in Chelsea I got in the habit of going to, nice little group, meets at eight o’clock in the Spanish church on Nineteenth Street.”

  “I don’t think I know it.”

  “It’s a little out of the way, but when I first got sober I was in an outpatient program in that neighborhood and this became my regular Saturday meeting. I don’t get down there as much these days but having the car and all, you know I’ve got Francine’s Toyota—”

  “Yes.”

  “So suppose I pick you up in front of your hotel around seven-thirty? That sound good?”

  I said it sounded fine, and when I left the hotel at seven-thirty he was parked out in front. I was just as glad I didn’t have to walk anywhere. It had been drizzling on and off during the afternoon, and now it was coming down steadily.

  On the way to the meeting we talked about sports. The baseball teams were a month into spring training, with the season opener less than a month away. I’d been having a little trouble getting interested this spring, although I would probably get caught up in it once they got going. For the time being, though, most of the news was about contract negotiations, with one player sulking because he knew he was worth more than $83 million a year. I don’t know, maybe he’s worth it, maybe they’re all worth it, but it makes it hard for me to give a damn whether they win or lose.

  “I think Darryl’s finally ready to dig in and play,” Peter said. “He’s been hitting a ton the past few weeks.”

  “Now that we don’t have hi
m anymore.”

  “Always the way it is, huh? Years we spend waiting for him to reach his full potential, and we got to see him do it in a Dodger uniform.”

  We parked on Twentieth Street and walked around the block to the church. It was Pentecostal, and held services in both Spanish and English. The meeting was in the basement, with perhaps forty people in attendance. I saw a few faces I recognized from other meetings around town, and Pete said hello to quite a few people, one of whom said she hadn’t seen him in a while. He said he’d been going to other meetings.

  The format was one you didn’t encounter that often in New York. After the speaker told his story, the meeting broke up into small groups, with seven to ten people sitting around each of five tables. There was a table for beginners, one for general discussion, one to discuss one of the Twelve Steps, and I forget what else. Pete and I both wound up at the general discussion table, where people tended to talk about what was going on in their lives at the moment and how they were managing to stay sober. I usually seem to get more out of that than discussion that centers around a topic, or on one of the philosophical underpinnings of the program.

  One woman had recently started work as an alcoholism counselor, and she talked about how it was difficult for her to retain her enthusiasm for meetings after spending eight hours dealing with the same issues at her job. “It’s hard to keep it separate,” she said. A man talked about the fact that he had just been diagnosed as HIV-positive, and how he was dealing with that. I talked about the cyclical nature of my work, and how I grew restless when I went too long between jobs and put myself under too much pressure when a job did come along. “It was easy to balance things out when I drank,” I said, “but I can’t do that anymore. Meetings help.”

  Pete talked when it was his turn, mostly commenting on some points other people had made. He didn’t say much about himself.

  At ten o’clock we stood in a big circle and held hands and said the prayer. Outside, the rain had softened some. We walked to the Camry and he asked if I was hungry. I realized that I was. I hadn’t had dinner, just a slice of pizza on the way home from the library.

  “You like Middle Eastern food, Matt? I don’t mean your hole-in-the-wall falafel stand, I mean the real thing. Because there’s a place in the Village that’s really good.” I said it sounded fine. “Or you know what we could do, we could take a run out to the old neighborhood. Unless you spent so much time on Atlantic Avenue lately that you’re sick of it.”

  “It’s out of the way, isn’t it?”

  “Hey, we got a car, right? We got it, we might as well get some use out of it.”

  He took the Brooklyn Bridge. I was thinking that it was beautiful in the rain, and he said, “I love this bridge. I was reading the other day how all the bridges are deteriorating. You can’t just leave a bridge alone, you got to maintain it, and the city does, but not sufficiently.”

  “There’s no money.”

  “How did that happen? For years the city could afford to do whatever it had to do, and now all the time there’s no money. Why is that, do you happen to know?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think it’s just New York. It’s the same story everywhere.”

  “Is it? Because all I see is New York, and it’s like the city is crumbling. The whadayacallit, the infrastructure? Is that the word I want?”

  “I guess.”

  “The infrastructure’s falling apart. There was another water main break last month. What it is, the system is old and everything’s wearing out. Who ever heard of water mains bursting ten, twenty years ago? Do you remember that sort of thing happening?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Lots of things happened that I didn’t notice.”

  “Yeah, well, you got a point. That would go for me, too. Lots of things still happen that I don’t notice.”

  The restaurant he chose was on Court half a block from Atlantic. At his suggestion I had the spinach pie appetizer, which he assured me would be entirely different from the spanakopita they served in Greek coffee shops. He was right. The main course, a casserole of cracked wheat and sauteed chopped meat and onions, was also excellent, but too much for me to finish.

  “So you can take it home,” he said. “You like this place? Nothing fancy, but you can’t beat the food.”

  “I’m surprised they’re open this late.”

  “Saturday night? They’ll be serving until midnight, probably later.” He leaned back in his chair. “Now the way to cap off the meal, if you were to do it right. You ever had something called arak?”

  “Is that anything like ouzo?”

  “Sort of like ouzo. There’s a difference, but yeah, it’s sort of like it. You like ouzo?”

  “I wouldn’t say I liked it. There used to be a bar on the corner of Fifty-seventh and Ninth called Antares and Spiro’s, a Greek joint—”

  “No kidding, with that name.”

  “—and sometimes I’d drop in after a long night drinking bourbon at Jimmy Armstrong’s and have a glass or two of ouzo for a nightcap.”

  “Ouzo on top of bourbon, huh?”

  “As a digestive,” I said. “To settle the stomach.”

  “Settle it once and for all, from the sound of it.” He caught the waiter’s eye, signaled for more coffee. “I really wanted to drink the other day,” he said.

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “That’s the important thing, Pete. Wanting to is normal. This isn’t the first time you wanted to drink since you got sober, is it?”

  “No,” he said. The waiter came and filled our cups. When he’d walked away Pete said, “But it’s the first time I considered it.”

  “Seriously considered it?”

  “Yeah, I would say seriously. I would say so.”

  “But you didn’t do it.”

  “No,” he said. He was looking down into his coffee cup. “What I almost did, I almost copped.”

  “Drugs?”

  He nodded. “Smack,” he said. “You ever have any experience with heroin?”

  “None.”

  “Never even tried it?”

  “Never even considered the possibility. Never even knew anybody who used it, not in the days when I was drinking. Except for the kind of people I had occasion to arrest.”

  “Smack was strictly for lowlife types, then.”

  “That’s how I always saw it.”

  He smiled gently. “You probably knew some people who used it. They just didn’t let you know it.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “I always liked it,” he said. “I never shot it, I only snorted. I was afraid of needles, which was lucky, because otherwise I’d probably be dead of AIDS by now. You know, you don’t have to shoot to develop a jones.”

  “So I understand.”

  “I got dopesick a couple of times and it scared me. I kicked it with the help of booze, and then, well, you know the rest of the story. I kicked junk on my own, but I had to go to a rehab to stop drinking. So it was alcohol that really kicked my ass, but in my heart I’m a junkie as much as I’m a drunk.”

  He took a sip of coffee. “And the thing is,” he said, “it’s a different city out there when you can see it through a junkie’s eyes. I mean, you were a cop and all, and you’ve got street smarts, but if the two of us walk down the street together I’m going to see more dealers than you are. I’m gonna see them and they’re gonna see me and we’re gonna recognize each other. I go anywhere in this city and it wouldn’t take me more than five minutes to find somebody happy to sell me a bag of dope.”

  “So? I walk past bars all day, and so do you. It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

  “I guess. Heroin’s been looking real good lately.”

  “Nobody ever said it was going to be easy, Pete.”

  “It was easy for a while. It’s harder now.”

  In the car he took up the theme again. “I think, why bother? Or I go to a meeting and I’m like, who are
these people? Where are they coming from? All this shit about turning everything over to a Higher Power and then life’s a piece of cake. You believe in that?”

  “That life’s a piece of cake? Not quite.”

  “More like a shit sandwich. No, do you believe in God?”

  “It depends when you ask me.”

  “Well, today. That’s when I’m asking you. Do you believe in God?” I didn’t say anything at first, and he said, “Never mind, I got no right to pry. Sorry.”

  “No, I was just trying to come up with an answer. I guess the reason I’m having trouble is I don’t think the question’s important.”

  “It’s not important whether there’s a God or not?”

  “Well, what difference does it make? Either way I’ve got the day to get through. God or no God, I’m an alcoholic who can’t drink safely. What’s the difference?”

  “The program’s all about a Higher Power.”

  “Yes, but it works the same whether He exists or not, and whether I believe in Him or not.”

  “How can you turn over your will to something you don’t believe in?”

  “By letting go. By not trying to control things. By taking appropriate action and letting things work out the way God wants them to.”

  “Whether He exists or not.”

  “Right.”

  He thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said. “I grew up believing in God. I went to parochial school, I learned what they teach you. I never questioned it. I got sober, they said get a Higher Power, okay, no problem. Then when those fuckers send Francey back in pieces, man, what kind of a God lets something like that happen?”

  “Shit happens.”

  “You never knew her, man. She was a really good woman. Sweet, decent, innocent. A beautiful human being. Being around her made you want to be a better human being yourself. More than that. It made you feel like you could.” He braked at a red light, looked both ways, went on through it. “Got a ticket like that once. Middle of the night, I stop, there’s no one for miles in either direction, so what kind of idiot stands there waiting for the light to change? Fucking cop’s lying doggo halfway down the block with his lights out, gives me a ticket.”