A Walk Among the Tombstones (12 page)

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."

"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."

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 him 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.