A Walk Among the Tombstones (26 page)

"Whatever you say."

"He said once a month? To tell you the truth, I doubt if it's that much. My guess would be seven, eight, ten times a year. It's never been more than that. I shouldn't have lied to him. I should have said, 'Yeah, I been feeling like shit, so I got off, and so what?' Because I can do it a few times a year and it never comes to more than that, and if he has one little taste he's got the whole habit back and they're stealing his shoes when he nods out in the subway. That happened to him, he woke up on the D train in his socks."

"It's happened to a lot of people."

"Including you?"

"No, but it could have."

"You're an alcoholic, right? I had a drink before you came over here. If you asked me I'd say so, I wouldn't lie about it. Why did I lie about it to my brother?"

"He's your brother."

"Yeah, that's part of it. Oh, shit, man. I'm worried about him."

"Nothing you can do at this point."

"No, what am I gonna do, drive through the streets looking for him? We'll go together. You look out one side of the car for the fuckers who killed my wife and I'll look out the other side for my brother. How's that for a plan?" He made a face. "In the meantime I owe you money.

What did we say, twenty-seven hundred?" He had a roll of hundreds in his pocket and counted out twenty-seven of them, which pretty much depleted the roll. He handed the money to me and I found a place to put it. He said, "What now?"

"I'll stay with it," I said. "Some of what I try will depend on where the police investigation leads, but--"

"No," he cut in, "that's not what I mean. What do you do now? You got a date for dinner, you got something doing in the city, what?"

"Oh." I had to think. "I'll probably go back to my room. I've been on my feet all day, I want to take a shower and change my clothes."

"You plan to walk back? Or will you take the subway?"

"Well, I won't walk."

"Suppose I drive you."

"You don't have to do that."

He shrugged. "I have to do something," he said.

IN the car he asked me the location of the famous laundromat and said he wanted to have a look at it.

We drove there and he parked the Buick across the street from it and killed the engine. "So we're on a stakeout," he said. "That's what it's called, right? Or is that only on TV?"

"A stakeout generally goes on for hours," I said. "So I hope we're not on one at the moment."

"No, I just wanted to sit here for a minute. I wonder how many times I drove past this place. It never once occurred to me to stop and make a phone call. Matt, you're sure these guys are the same ones who killed the two women and cut the girl?"

"Yes."

"Because this was for profit and the others were strictly, uh, what's the word? Pleasure? Recreation?"

"I know. But the similarities are too specific and too striking. It has to be the same men."

"Why me?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean why me?"

"Because a drug dealer makes an ideal target, lots of cash and a reason to steer clear of the police. We discussed that before. And one of the men had a thing about drugs. He kept asking Pam if she knew any dealers, if she took drugs. He was evidently obsessed with the subject."

"That's why a drug dealer. That's not why me." He leaned forward, propped his arms on the steering wheel. "Who even knows I'm a dealer?

I haven't been arrested, haven't had my name in the papers. My phone's not tapped and my house isn't bugged. I'm positive my neighbors don't have a clue how I make my money. The DEA investigated me a year and a half ago and they dropped the whole thing because they weren't getting anyplace. The NYPD I don't even think they know I'm alive. You're some degenerate, likes to kill women, wants to get rich knocking off a drug dealer, how do you even know of my existence? That's what I want to know. Why me?"

"I see what you mean."

"I started off thinking I'm the target. You know, that the whole thing begins with someone looking to hurt me and take me off. But that's not true, according to you. It starts with crazies who are getting off on rape and murder. Then they decide to make it pay, and then they decide to go after a drug dealer, and then I'm elected. So I can't get anywhere backtracking people I know professionally, somebody who maybe thinks I screwed him in a transaction and he sees a good way of getting even.

I'm not saying there aren't any crazy people dealing in the product, but--"

"No, I follow you. And you're right. You're the target incidentally.

They're looking for a dope dealer and you're one they know of."

"But how?" He hesitated. "There was a thought I had."

"Let's hear it."

"Well, I don't think it makes much sense. But I gather my brother tells his story at meetings, right? He sits up in front and tells everybody what he did and where it got him. And I assume he mentions how his brother makes his living. Am I right?"

"Well, I knew Pete had a brother who dealt drugs, but I didn't know your name or where you lived. I didn't even know Pete's last name."

"If you asked him he would have told you. And how hard would it be to get the rest? 'I think I know your brother. He live in Bushwick?'

'No, Bay Ridge.' 'Oh, yeah? What street?' I don't know. I guess it's farfetched."

"It seems it to me," I said. "I grant you you'll find all kinds at an AA meeting, and there's nothing to stop a serial killer from walking in the doors. God knows a lot of the famous ones were alcoholic, and always under the influence when they did their killing. But I don't know of any of them that ever got sober in the program."

"But it's possible?"

"I suppose so. Most things are. Still, if our friends live here in Sunset Park and Peter went to Manhattan

meetings--"

"Yeah, you're right. They live a mile and a half from me and I'm trying to have them chase into Manhattan in order to hear about me. Of course when I said what I said I didn't know they were from Brooklyn."

"When you said what?"

He looked at me, the pain stitched into his forehead. "When I told Petey he ought to stop running his mouth about my business at his meetings. When I said maybe that's how they got onto me, that's how they picked Francine." He turned to look out the window at the laundromat. "It was when he drove me to the airport. It was just a flare-up. He was giving me grief about something, I forget what, and I threw that in his face. He looked for a second as though I just kicked him in the pit of the stomach. Then he said something, you know, indicating it washed right over him, that he wasn't going to take it seriously, he knew I was just spouting out of anger."

He turned the key in the ignition. "Fuck this laundry," he said. "I don't see a lot of people lining up to make phone calls. Let's get out of here, huh?"

"Sure."

And, a block or two farther along: "Suppose he kept mulling it over, brooding on it. Suppose it stayed on his mind. Suppose he wondered if it was true." He darted a glance at me. "You think that's what sent him out looking to cop? 'Cause I'll tell you, if I was Petey, that just might do it."

BACK in Manhattan he said, "I want to go by his place, knock on his door. You want to keep me company?"

The lock wasn't working on the rooming-house door. Kenan drew it open and said, "Great security here. Great place altogether." We entered and climbed two flights of stairs through that flophouse smell of mice and soiled linen. Kenan walked to a door and listened for a moment, knocked on it, called out his brother's name. There was no response. He repeated the process with the same result, tried the door and found it locked.

"I'm afraid what I'll find in there," he said, "and at the same time I'm afraid to walk away."

I found an expired Visa card in my wallet and loided the door with it. Kenan glanced at me with new respect.

The room was empty, and a mess. The bed linen was half on the floor, and clothing was piled in disarray on a wooden chair. I spotted the Big Book and a couple of AA pamphlets on the oak bureau. I didn't see any bottles or drug paraphernalia, but there was a water tumbler on the bedside table and Kenan picked it up and sniffed at it.

"I don't know," he said. "What do you think?"

The glass was dry inside, but I thought I could smell a residue of alcohol. Still, suggestion would account for it. It wouldn't be the first time I'd smelled alcohol when there wasn't any there.

"I don't like poking around his things," Kenan said. "What little he's got, he's entitled to his privacy. I just had this vision of him turning blue with the needle still in his arm, you know what I mean?"

Out on the street he said, "Well, he's got money. He won't have to steal. 'Less he gets into cocaine, that'll take whatever you got, but he never liked coke much. Petey likes the bass notes, likes to get down as deep as you can go."

"I can identify with that."

"Yeah. He runs out of dough, he can always sell Francey's Camry.

He hasn't got the title, but it Blue Books at eight or nine grand, so he can probably find somebody'll give him a few hundred for it without papers.

That's junkie economics, makes perfect sense."

I told him Peter's joke about the difference between a drunk and a junkie. They'd both steal your wallet, but the junkie would help you look for it.

"Yeah," he said, nodding. "Says it all."

Several things happened over the course of the next week or so.

I made three trips to Sunset Park, two of them alone, the third in the company of TJ. At loose ends one afternoon, I beeped him and got a call back almost immediately. We met in the Times Square subway station and rode out to Brooklyn together. We had lunch at a deli and cafe con leche at the Cuban place and walked around some. We talked a lot, and while I didn't learn a great deal about him, he learned a few things about me, assuming he was listening.

While we waited for our train back to the city he said, "Say, you don't have to pay me nothin' for today.

On account of we didn't do nothin'."

"Your time has to be worth something."

"If I be workin', but all I was doin' was hangin' around. Man, I been doin' that for free all my life."

Another night I was just about to leave the house and head for a meeting when a call from Danny Boy sent me chasing out to an Italian restaurant in Corona, where three small-time louts had recently blossomed as big spenders. It seemed unlikely-- Corona is in northern Queens, and light-years from Sunset Park-- but I went anyway and drank San Pellegrino water at the bar and waited for three guys in silk suits to come in and throw their money around.

The TV was on, and at ten o'clock the Channel 5 newscast included a shot of three men who'd just been arrested for the recent robbing and pistol-whipping of a Forty-seventh Street diamond merchant. The bartender said, "Hey, would you look at that! Those assholes were in here the past three nights, spending money like they couldn't get rid of it fast enough. I had a kind of a feeling where it came from."

"They made it the old-fashioned way," the man next to me said.

"They stole it."

I was only a few blocks from Shea Stadium, but that still left me hundreds of miles from the Mets, who had lost a close one to the Cubs that afternoon at Wrigley. The Yankees were at home against the Indians. I walked to the subway and went home.

ANOTHER time I got a call from Drew Kaplan, who said that Kelly and his colleagues at Brooklyn Homicide wanted Pam to go down to Washington and pay a call at the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at Quantico. I asked when she was going.

"She's not," he said.

"She refused?"

"At her attorney's suggestion."

"I don't know about that," I said. "The public-relations department was always where the Feebies were strongest, but what I've heard about their division that profiles serial killers is fairly impressive. I think she should go."

"Well," he said, "it's too bad you're not her lawyer. It's her interests I've been engaged to protect, my friend. Anyway, the mountain's coming to Mohammed. They're sending a guy up tomorrow."

"Let me know how it goes," I said, "insofar as that coincides with what you deem to be the best interests of your client."

He laughed. "Don't get hinky, Matt. Why should she have to schlep down to DC? Let him come here."

After the meeting with the profiler he called again to say he was not blown away by the session. "He seemed a little nonchalant to me,"

Drew said. "Like someone who's only killed two women and slashed a third isn't worth his time. I gather the more of a string a killer puts together, the more it gives them to

work with."

"That figures."

"Yeah, but it's small consolation to the people at the end of the string. They'd probably just as soon the cops caught the guy early on instead of letting him provide such interesting items for their data base.

He was telling Kelly they've put together a really solid profile of some yutz out on the West Coast. They could tell you he collected stamps as a boy and how old he was when he got his first tattoo. But they still haven't apprehended the son of a bitch and I think he said the current count is forty-two, with four more probables."

"I can see why Ray and his friend seem small-time."

"He wasn't wild about the frequency, either. He said serial killers generally manifest a higher level of activity. That means they don't wait months between crimes. He said either they hadn't hit their stride yet or they were infrequent visitors to New York and did the bulk of their killing elsewhere."

"No," I said. "They know the city too well for that."

"Why do you say that?"

"Huh?"