A Walk Among the Tombstones

by Lawrence Block

Page 23

 

  "But," Jimmy said, "if youre not into the technical side of it, theres really nothing there to keep you on the edge of your chair. "

  TJ, awake now, was standing behind Davids chair and watching the computer screen as if hypnotized. Jimmy went over to the refrigerator for a can of Jolt. I dropped into the one easy chair, and David was right, there was nothing to keep me on the edge of it. I sank back into the cushions, and the next thing I knew TJ was shaking me gently by the shoulder, saying my name.

  I opened my eyes. "I must have been sleeping. "

  "Yeah, you sleepin, all right. You was snorin some earlier. "

  "What time is it?"

  "Almost four. The calls is comin up now. "

  "Can they just get a printout?"

  TJ turned and relayed the request, and the Kongs started giggling. David got control of himself and reminded me that we didnt have a printer with us. My sponsor was a printer, I almost said. Instead I said, "No, of course not. Im sorry, Im still half-asleep. "

  "Stay where you are. Well copy it all down for you. "

  "Ill get you some Jolt," TJ offered. I told him not to bother but he brought me a can of it anyway. I took a sip of it but it really wasnt what I wanted, nor was I entirely certain what I did want. I got to my feet and tried to stretch some of the stiffness out of my back and shoulders, then walked over to the desk where David King was working the computer while Jimmy Hong copied down the information on the screen.

  "There they are," I said.

  They were coming right up on the screen, starting with the first call at 3:38 to tell Kenan Khoury his wife was missing. Then three calls at roughly twenty-minute intervals, the last one logged at 4:54. Kenan had called his brother at 5:18, and the next call hed received came in at 6:04, which must have been just before Peter got to the Colonial Road house.

  Then there was a sixth call at 8:01. That would have been the one ordering them to Farragut Road, where they received the call that sent them chasing out to Veterans Avenue. And then theyd come home, having been assured that Francine would be delivered there, and then they waited in an empty house until 10:04, when the last call came, the one that sent them around the corner to the Ford Tempo with the parcels in its trunk.

  "Wow," David was saying. "This has been, like, the most amazing education. Because we had to keep at it, you know? There was data you needed, so we couldnt quit. When youre just hacking you can only take so much boredom before you go and do something else, but we had to stay with it until we crashed through the boredom and got to what was on the other side of it. "

  "Which was more boredom," Jimmy said.

  "But you learn a lot, you really do. If we had to do this same operation again-"

  "God forbid. "

  "Yeah, but if we did, we could do it in half the time. Less, because the whole speed-search option gets double-timed when you cut back into the-"

  What he said after that was even less comprehensible to me, and Id stopped listening anyway because Jimmy Hong was handing me a sheet of all calls into the Khoury house on the twenty-eighth of March. "I should have told you," I said. "The early ones dont matter, just the seven starting at three-thirty-eight. " I studied the list. Hed copied everything: time of the call, the line number of the caller, the phone number youd dial in order to reach that phone, and the duration of the call. That, too, was more than I needed, but there was no reason to tell him that.

  "Seven calls, each from a different phone," I said. "No, Im wrong. They used one phone twice, for calls two and seven. "

  "Is it what you wanted?"

  I nodded. "How much it gives me is something else again. It could be a lot or a little. I wont know until I get hold of a reverse directory and find out who those phones belong to. "

  They stared at me. I still didnt get it until Jimmy Hong took off his glasses and blinked at me. "A reverse directory? Youve got the two of us here, with everything buried in the deep inner recesses of NPSN, and you think you need a reverse directory?"

  "Because were talking childs play here," David King said. He sat down at the keyboard again. "Okay," he said. "Give me the first number. "

  THEY were all pay phones.

  Id been afraid of that. They had been professionally cautious throughout, and there was no reason to suppose that they wouldnt have taken care to use phones that couldnt be linked to them.

  But a different pay phone each time? That was harder to figure, but one of the Kongs came up with a theory that made sense. They were guarding against the possibility that Kenan Khoury had alerted someone who was in a position to tap in on the line and identify the phone at the other end. By keeping the calls short they could be sure of being away from the scene before anyone who traced the call could get there; by never returning to the same phone, they were covered even if Khoury had the call traced and the telephone staked out.

  "Because tracing a call is instantaneous now," Jimmy told me. "You dont really trace it, not if youre hooked into it with a setup like this. You just look on the screen and read it off. "

  Why the lapse in security on the last call? By then theyd obviously known there was no need for it. Khoury had done everything the way he was supposed to, had made no attempt to interfere with the ransom pickup, and was no longer worth such elaborate precautions. That was the time they could have felt safe enough to use a phone in their own house or apartment, and if only theyd done so I would have had the bastards. If it had started raining, if thered been some compelling reason to stay inside. If nobody had wanted to leave the other two with the ransom money.

  It was too bad. It would have been nice to get lucky for a change.

  On the other hand, the nights work and the seventeen hundred and change it was costing me were by no means wasted. I had learned something, and not just that the three men I was after were very careful planners for a trio of psychopathic sex killers.

  The addresses were all in Brooklyn. And they were all in a far more compact area than the whole Khoury case covered. The kidnap and ransom delivery had begun in Bay Ridge, moved to Atlantic Avenue in Cobble Hill, ranged to Flatbush and Farragut and then way over to Veterans Avenue, and then swung back to the drop-off of the remains in Bay Ridge again. That covered a fair chunk of the borough, while their previous activities were spread all over Brooklyn and Queens. Their home base could be anywhere.

  But the pay phones werent that far apart. I would have to sit down with the list and a map to plot their positions precisely, but I could tell already that they were all in the same general area, on the west side of Brooklyn, north of Khourys house in Bay Ridge and south of Green-Wood Cemetery.

  Where theyd dumped Leila Alvarez.

  One phone was on Sixtieth Street, another on New Utrecht at Forty-first, so its not as though they were within walking distance of each other. They had left the house and driven around to make those calls. But it stood to reason that home base was somewhere in that neighborhood, and probably not too far from the one phone theyd used a second time. It was all over, they were all done, all that remained was to rub salt in Kenan Khourys wounds, so why drive ten blocks out of the way if you didnt have to? Why not use the handiest pay phone of the lot?

  Which happened to be on Fifth Avenue between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth streets.

  * * *

  I DIDNT go into all of that with the boys, and indeed a lot of my own ruminations had to wait until later on. I gave the Kongs five hundred dollars each and told them how much I appreciated what theyd done. They insisted it was fun, even the boring part. Jimmy said he had a headache and a bad case of hackers wrist, but that it was worth it.

  "You two go down first," I said. "Put your ties and jackets on and just nonchalant your way out the front door. Ill want to make sure theres nothing traceable in the room, and I guess Ill have to stop at the desk and settle up what I owe for the phone. I left a fifty-dollar deposit but we were hooked into it for over seven hours, and I dont have any idea what the charges
are going to be. "

  "Oh, my," David said. "He just doesnt get it. "

  "Its amazing," Jimmy said.

  "Huh? What dont I get?"

  "You dont get to pay any phone charges," Jimmy said. "First thing I did once we were hooked up was bypass the desk. We could have called Shanghai and there wouldnt be any record of it at the desk. " He grinned. "You might as well let them keep the deposit, though. Because King had about thirty dollars worth of macadamia nuts from the mini-bar. "

  "Which means thirty macadamia nuts at a dollar each," David said.

  "But if I were you," Jimmy said, "Id just go home. "

  AFTER they left I paid TJ. He fanned the sheaf of bills I handed him, looked at me, looked at them again, at me again, and said, "This here for me?"

  "Would have been no game without you. You brought the bat and the ball. "

  "I figured a hundred," he said. "I didnt do much, just sat around, but you was payin out a lot of bread and I figured you wasnt about to leave me out. How much I got here?"

  "Five," I said.

  "I knew thisd pay off," he said. "Me an you. I like this detectin business. I be resourceful, I good at it, and I like it. "

  "It doesnt usually pay this well. "

  "Dont make no difference. Man, what other line of work I gone find lets me use all the shit I know?"

  "So you want to be a detective when you grow up, TJ?"

  "Aint gonna wait that long," he said. "Gonna be one now. And thats where its at, Matt. "

  I told him his first assignment was to get out of the hotel without drawing the wrong kind of attention from the hotel staff. "It would be easier if you were dressed like the Kongs," I said, "but we work with what weve got. I think you and I should walk out together. "

  "White guy your age and a black teenager? You know what they be thinking. "

  "Uh-huh, and they can shake their heads over it all they want. But if you walk out by yourself theyll think youve been burgling the rooms, and they might not let you walk. "

  "Yeah, you right," he said, "but you not lookin at all the possibilities. Rooms all paid for, right? Checkout times like noon. An I see where you live, man, and I dont mean to be dissin you, but your room aint this nice. "

  "No, its not. It doesnt cost me a hundred and sixty dollars a night, either. "

  "Well, this room aint gonna cost me a dime, Simon, an I gonna take me a hot shower an dry myself on three towels an get in that bed an sleep six or seven hours. Cause this room aint just better than where you live, its like ten times better than where I live. "

  "Oh. "

  "So I gone hang the Do Not Disturb sign on the knob and kick back an be undisturbed, like. Then noon comes an I walk outta here an nobody look at me twice, nice young man like me, musta just come an delivered somebodys lunch. Hey, Matt? You think I can call downstairs an theyll gimme a wake-up call at half-past eleven?"

  "I think you can count on it," I said.

  Chapter 12