Walk Among the Tombstones: A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel

by Lawrence Block

  That was when they showed her the knife.

  A switchblade, a big one, really skanky-looking. The second man, the one with the dirty mouth, had the knife, and he said, “You ain’t going nowhere, you fucking cunt.”

  And Ray said, “We’re all going somewhere, we’re going for a little ride, Pammy.”

  That was his name, Ray. The other one called him Ray, that’s how she knew it. The other one’s name, if she heard it then it never registered, because she didn’t have a clue. But the driver was Ray.

  Except they switched, so he wasn’t the driver now. The other one climbed over the seat and got behind the wheel and Ray stayed in back with her, and he kept the knife, and of course he didn’t let her put on her clothes.

  This was where it started getting really hard to remember. She was in the back of the truck and it was dark and she couldn’t see out and they drove and drove and she didn’t have any idea where they were or where they were going. Ray asked her about drugs again, he was hipped on the subject, he told her junkies were just looking to die, that it was a death trip, and that they should all get what they were looking for.

  He made her go down on him. That was better, at least he would shut up, and at least she was, like, doing something.

  Then they were parked again, God knows where, and then there was a lot of sex. They took turns with her and they just did stuff for a long time, and she was like zoning in and out, like she wasn’t really a hundred percent there for part of the time. She was pretty sure that neither of them came. They both got off the first time, on Twenty-fourth Street or wherever it was, but now it was like they didn’t want to come because that would break up the party. They did it to her in, well, all the usual places, and they put other things inside her besides parts of themselves. She wasn’t really too clear on what they used. Some of what they did hurt and some didn’t and it was awful, it was all terrible, and then she remembered something, she hadn’t remembered this before, but there was a point where she got really peaceful.

  Because, see, she knew she was going to die. And it’s not like she wanted to die, because she didn’t, she definitely didn’t, but the thought somehow came to her that that’s what was going to happen, and that was all that was going to happen, and she thought, well, like I can handle that. Like I can live with it, almost, which was ridiculous because that was the point, she couldn’t live, not if she died.

  “Okay, I can handle that.” Just like that, really.

  And then, just as she had really come to terms with it, just as she was enjoying this feeling of peacefulness, Ray said, “You know what, Pammy? You’re going to get a chance. We’re going to let you live.”

  The two of them argued then, because the other man wanted to kill her, but Ray said they could let her go, that she was a whore, that nobody cared about whores.

  But she wasn’t just any whore, he said. She had the best set of tits on the street. He said, “Do you like ’em, Pammy? Are you proud of them?”

  She didn’t know what she was supposed to say.

  “Which one’s your favorite? Come on, eeny meeny miney mo, pick one. Pammy. Pam-mee”—singsong, like a taunting child—“pick a titty, Pammy. Which one’s your favorite?”

  And he had something in his hand, sort of a loop of wire, coppery in the dim light.

  “Pick the one you want to keep, Pammy. One for you and one for me, that’s fair, isn’t it, Pam-mee? You can keep one and I’ll take the other one, and it’s your choice, Pam-mee, you have to choose, you hot little bitch, you have to pick one. It’s Pammy’s choice, you remember Sophie’s Choice, but that was tots and this is tits, Pam-mee, and you better pick one or I’ll take them both.”

  God, he was crazy, and what was she supposed to do, how could she pick one breast? There had to be a way to win this game but she couldn’t think what it was.

  “Look at that, look at that, I touch them and the nipples get hard, you get hot even when you’re scared, even when you’re crying, you little cunt, you. Pick one, Pammy. Which one will it be? This one? This one? What are you waiting for, Pammy? Are you trying to stall? Are you trying to make me angry? Come on, Pammy. Come on. Touch the one you want to keep.”

  God, what was she supposed to do?

  “That one? Are you sure, Pammy?”

  God—

  “Well, I think it’s a good choice, an excellent choice, so that one’s yours and this one’s mine and a deal’s a deal and a trade’s a trade and no trades back, Pam-mee.”

  The wire was a circle around her breast, and there was a wooden handle attached to each end of the wire, like the kind they slipped under the string of a package so you could carry it, and he held the handles and drew his hands apart, and—

  And she was out of her body, just like that, floating without a body, up in the air above the truck and able to look down through the roof of the truck, watching, watching as the wire slipped through her flesh as if through a liquid, watching the breast slide slowly away from the rest of her, watching the blood seep.

  Watching until the blood filled up the whole of her vision, watching it darken, darken, until the world went black.

  Chapter 14

  Kelly was away from his desk. The man who answered his phone at Brooklyn Homicide said he could try to have him paged, if it was important. I said it was important.

  When the phone rang Elaine answered it, said, “Just a minute,” and nodded. I took the phone from her and said hello.

  “My dad remembers you,” he said. “Said you were real eager.”

  “Well, that was a while ago.”

  “So he said. What’s so important they got to beep me in the middle of a meal?”

  “I have a question about Leila Alvarez.”

  “You got a question. I thought you had something for me.”

  “About the surgery she had.”

  “ ‘Surgery.’ That what you want to call it?”

  “Do you know what he used to sever the breast?”

  “Yeah, a fucking guillotine. Where are you coming from with the questions, Scudder?”

  “Could he have used a piece of wire? Piano wire, say, used almost like a garrote?”

  There was a long pause, and I wondered if I’d pronounced the word incorrectly and he didn’t know what I meant. Then, his voice tight, he said, “What the fuck are you sitting on?”

  “I’ve been sitting on it for ten minutes, and I’ve spent five of them waiting for you to call back.”

  “God damn it, what have you got, mister?”

  “Alvarez wasn’t their only victim.”

  “So you said. Also Gotteskind. I read the file and I think you’re right, but where did you get piano wire with Gottes-kind?”

  “There’s another victim,” I said. “Raped, tortured, a breast severed. The difference is she’s alive. I figured you’d want to talk to her.”

  DREW Kaplan said, “Pro bono, huh? You like to tell me why those are the two Latin words everybody knows? By the time I got through Brooklyn Law I’d learned enough Latin to start my own church. Res gestae, corpus juris, lex talionis. Nobody ever says these words to me. Just pro bono. You know what it means, pro bono?”

  “I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

  “The full phrase is pro bono publico. For the public good. Which is why big corporate law firms use the phrase to refer to the minuscule amount of legal work which they deign to undertake for causes they believe in as a sop to their consciences, which are understandably troubled by virtue of the fact that they spend upwards of ninety percent of their time grinding the faces of the poor and billing upwards of two hundred dollars an hour for it. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “That’s the longest sentence I’ve ever heard you speak.”

  “Is that right? Miss Cassidy, as your attorney it’s my duty to caution you against associating with men like this gentleman. Matt, seriously, Miss Cassidy’s a Manhattan resident, the victim of a crime which took place nine months ago in the borough of Queens. I�
�m a struggling lawyer with modest offices on Court Street in the borough of Brooklyn. So how, if you don’t mind my asking, do I come into it?”

  We were in his modest offices, and the banter was just his way of breaking the ice, because he already knew why Pam Cassidy needed a Brooklyn lawyer to see her through interrogation by a Brooklyn homicide detective. I had gone over the situation with him at some length on the phone.

  “I’m going to call you Pam,” he said now. “Is that all right with you?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Or do you prefer Pammy?”

  “No, Pam’s fine. Just so it’s not Pammy.”

  The special significance of that would have been lost on Kaplan. He said, “It’ll be Pam, then. Pam, before you and I go down to see Officer Kelly—it’s Officer, Matt? Or Detective?”

  “Detective John Kelly.”

  “Before we meet with the good detective, let’s get our signals straight. You’re my client. That means I don’t want you questioned by anyone unless I’m at your side. Do you understand?”

  “Sure.”

  “That means from anyone, cops, press, TV reporters sticking microphones in your face. ‘You’ll have to speak with my attorney.’ Let me hear you say that.”

  “You’ll have to speak with my attorney.”

  “Perfect. Somebody calls you on the phone, asks you what the weather’s like outside, what do you say?”

  “You’ll have to speak with my attorney.”

  “I think she’s got it. One more. Guy calls you on the phone, says you’ve just won a free trip to Paradise Island in the Bahamas in connection with a special promotion they’re running. What do you say?”

  “You’ll have to speak with my attorney.”

  “No, him you can tell to fuck off. Everybody else on the planet, however, they have to speak to your attorney. Now we’ll go over some specifics, but generally speaking I only want you answering questions when I’m present, and only if they relate directly to the outrageous crime which was committed upon your person. Your background, your life before the incident, your life since the incident, none of that is anybody’s business. If a line of questioning is introduced that I object to, I’ll cut in and stop you from answering. If I don’t say anything, but if for any reason whatsoever the question bothers you, you don’t answer it. You say that you want to confer privately with your attorney. ‘I want to confer privately with my attorney.’ Let’s hear you say that.”

  “I want to confer privately with my attorney.”

  “Excellent. The point is you’re not charged with anything and you’re not going to be charged with anything, so you’re doing them a favor in the first place, which puts us in a very good position. Now let’s just go over the background one time while we’ve got Matt here, and then you and I can go see Detective Kelly, Pam. Tell me how you happened to ask Matthew Scudder to try to track down the men who abducted and assaulted you?”

  WE had worked out the details before I’d called either John Kelly or Drew Kaplan. Pam needed a story that would make her the initiator of the investigation and leave Kenan Khoury out of it. She and Elaine and I batted it around, and this is what we came up with:

  Pam, nine months after the incident, was trying to get on with her life. This was rendered more difficult by the dread she had that she would be victimized again by the same men. She had even thought of leaving New York to get away from them but felt the fear would remain with her no matter how far she fled.

  Recently she had been with a man to whom she had told the story of the loss of her breast. This fellow, who was a respectable married man and whose name she would not under any circumstances divulge, was shocked and sympathetic. He told her she would not rest easy until the men were caught, and that even if it was impossible to find them it would almost certainly be helpful to her emotional recovery if she herself took some action toward their discovery and apprehension. Since the police had had ample time to investigate and had evidently accomplished nothing, it was his recommendation that she engage a private investigator who could concentrate wholeheartedly upon the case instead of practicing the sort of criminological triage required of policemen.

  There was in fact a private operative he knew and trusted, because this nameless fellow had been a client of mine in the past. He had sent her to me, and in addition had agreed to cover my fee and expenses, with the understanding that his role in all of this would not be divulged to anyone under any circumstances.

  A couple of interviews with Pam had suggested to me that the most effective way to approach the case was by assuming that she had not been their only victim. Indeed, the way they had discussed killing her seemed to indicate that they had in fact committed murder. I had accordingly tried multiple approaches designed to turn up evidence of crimes committed by the same two men either before or after the maiming of my client.

  Library research had turned up two cases which I considered likely, Marie Gotteskind and Leila Alvarez. The Gotteskind case involved abduction by means of a truck, and by securing the Gotteskind file through unconventional channels I had confirmed that it had also involved an amputation. The Alvarez case looked like probable abduction, and was similar, too, in that the victim was abandoned in a cemetery. (Pam had been dropped in Mount Zion Cemetery, in Queens.) When I learned on Thursday that Alvarez’s mutilation, unspecified in the newspaper account, had been identical to Pam’s, it seemed self-evident to me that the same criminals were involved.

  So why didn’t I say anything to Kelly at the time? Most important, I couldn’t ethically do so without my client’s permission, and I had spent the weekend talking her into it and preparing her for what she would have to face. In addition, I wanted to see if any of the other hooks I had in the water would bring in a bite.

  One of these was the movie-of-the-week pitch, which I’d had Elaine try on various sex-crime units around town in the hope of turning up a living victim. Several women had called, although none had proved even remote possibilities, but I’d wanted to wait until the weekend was over before giving up on the line of inquiry.

  Amusingly enough, Pam herself had gotten a telephone call from a woman at the Queens unit, suggesting that she might find it worth her while to contact this Miss Mardell and see what it was all about. At the time she’d had no idea we were trying this particular approach, so she’d been very uncertain with the woman on the phone, but then we all had a good laugh when she mentioned it to me and found out who this movie producer really was.

  As of this afternoon, Monday, I couldn’t see any justification for withholding information from the police, since our so doing would unquestionably hamper their investigation of the two homicides, and since I had no useful course to pursue on my own. I had managed to sell this argument to Pam, who was still more than a little wary of being interrogated again by police officers, but who was more sanguine about it when I told her she could have a lawyer looking after her interests.

  And so they were on their way to see Kelly, and I was done chasing lust murderers, and that was that.

  “I THINK it’ll play,” I told Elaine. “I think it covers everything, all the activities I’ve engaged in since the first call I got, except for anything that has to do with Khoury. I don’t see how anything Pam might tell them could lead them toward the investigation I conducted on Atlantic Avenue or the computer games I watched the Kongs play last night. Pam doesn’t know about any of that so she couldn’t spill it even if she wanted to, she never heard the names of Francine or Kenan Khoury. Come to think of it, I’m not sure she knows why I got into the case in the first place. I think all she knows is her cover story.”

  “Maybe she believes it.”

  “She probably will by the time she’s done telling it. Kap-lan thought it sounded fine.”

  “Did you tell him the real story?”

  “No, there was no reason to do that. He knows what he’s got is incomplete, but he can be comfortable with it. The important thing is that he’ll keep the cops from g
anging up on her and paying more attention to my role in the case than to who did it.”

  “Would they do that?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know what they’d do. There’s a team of serial killers who’ve been doing their little number for over a year now and the NYPD doesn’t even know they exist. It’s going to put a lot of people’s noses out of joint to have a private detective come up with what everybody else missed.”

  “So they’ll kill the messenger.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time. Actually the cops didn’t miss anything obvious. It’s very easy to miss serial murder, especially when different precincts and boroughs get different cases and the unifying elements are the kind that don’t make it into newspaper stories. But they could still hold it against Pam for showing them up, especially given that she’s a hooker and that she didn’t mention that little tidbit first time around.”

  “Is she going to mention is now?”

  “She’s going to mention now that she used to make ends meet by occasionally prostituting herself. We know they’ve got a sheet on her, she was booked a couple of times for prostitution and loitering with intent. They didn’t find that out when they investigated her case because she was the victim, so there was no compelling need to determine whether she had a record.”

  “But you think they should have checked.”

  “Well, it was pretty sloppy,” I said. “Hookers are targets for this all the time because they’re so accessible. They could have checked. It should have been automatic.”

  “But she’s going to tell them she stopped hooking after she got home from the hospital. That she was afraid to go back to it.”

  I nodded. She had quit for a while, scared to death at the thought of getting into a car with a stranger, but old habits die hard and she’d gone back to it. At first she limited herself to car dates, not wanting to risk disappointing or disgusting a man by taking off her shirt, but she’d found that most men didn’t mind her deformity that much. Some found it an interesting peculiarity, while a small minority were extremely excited by it, and became regular clients.