A Walk Among the Tombstones (7 page)

I HAD a hot bath and a good night's sleep, and in the morning I went to the bank and added seventy $100 bills to the stash in my safe-deposit box. I deposited two thousand dollars to my checking account and kept the remaining thousand in my hip pocket.

There was a time when I would have rushed to give it away. I used to spend a lot of idle hours in empty churches, and I tithed religiously, so to speak, stuffing a precise ten percent of the cash I received into the next poor box I passed. This quaint custom had faded away in sobriety. I don't know why I stopped doing it, but then I couldn't tell you why I ever started doing it in the first place.

I could have stuffed my Aer Lingus ticket in the nearest poor box, for all the good I was going to get out of it. I stopped at the travel agent's and confirmed what I had already suspected, that my ticket was indeed nonrefundable. "Ordinarily I'd say get a doctor to write a letter saying you had to cancel for medical reasons," he said, "but that wouldn't work here because it's not the airline you're dealing with, it's an outfit that buys space wholesale from the airlines and offers it at a deep discount."

He offered to try to resell it for me, and I left it with him and walked to the subway.

I spent the whole day in Brooklyn. I'd taken a picture of Francine Khoury when I left the house on Colonial Road, and I showed it around at the Fourth Avenue D'Agostino's and at The Arabian Gourmet on Atlantic Avenue. I was working a colder trail than I would have liked--

it was Tuesday now, and the abduction had taken place on Thursday--

but there was nothing I could do about that now. It would have been nice if Pete had called me on Friday instead of waiting until the weekend had passed, but they'd had other things to do.

Along with the picture, I showed around a card from Reliable with my name on it. I was investigating in connection with an insurance claim, I explained. My client's car had been clipped by another vehicle, which had sped off without stopping, and it would expedite the processing of her claim if we could identify the other party.

At D'Agostino's I talked with a cashier, who remembered Francine as a regular customer who always paid cash, a memorable trait in our society but par for the course in dope-dealing circles. "And I can tell you something else about her," the woman said. "I bet she's a good cook." I must have looked mystified.

"No prepared foods, no frozen this and that. Always fresh ingredients. Young as she is, you don't find many that are into cooking.

But you never see any TV dinners in her cart."

The bag boy remembered her, too, and volunteered the information that she was always a two-dollar tipper. I asked about a truck, and he remembered a blue panel truck that had been parked out front and moved off after her. He hadn't noticed the make of the truck or the license plate but was reasonably certain of the color, and he thought there was something about TV repair painted on the side.

They remembered more on Atlantic Avenue because there had been more to notice. The woman behind the counter recognized the picture immediately and was able to tell me just what Francine had bought--olive oil, sesame tahini, foul mudamas, and some other terms I didn't recognize. She hadn't seen the actual abduction, though, because she'd been waiting on another customer. She knew something curious had happened, because a customer had come in with some story about two men and a woman running from the store and leaping into the back of a truck. The customer had been concerned that they might have robbed the store and were making a getaway.

I managed a few more interviews before noon, at which time I thought I'd go next door for lunch.

Instead I remembered the advice I'd been so quick to hand out to Peter Khoury. I hadn't been to a meeting myself since Saturday, and here it was Tuesday and I'd be spending the evening with Elaine. I called the Intergroup office and learned that there was a twelve-thirty meeting about ten minutes away in Brooklyn Heights. The speaker was a little old lady, as prim and proper in appearance as could be, and her story made it clear that she had not been ever thus. She'd been a bag lady, evidently, sleeping in doorways and never bathing or changing her clothes, and she kept stressing how filthy she had been, how foul she had smelled. It was hard to square the story with the person at the head of the table.

AFTER the meeting I went back to Atlantic Avenue and picked up where I'd left off. I bought a sandwich and a can of cream soda at a deli and interviewed the proprietor while I was there. I ate my lunch standing up outside, then talked to the clerk and a couple of customers at a corner newsstand. I went into Aleppo and talked to the cashier and two of the waiters. I went back to Ayoub's-- I'd taken to thinking of The Arabian Gourmet by that name, since I kept talking to people who were calling it that.

I went back there, and by this time the woman had been able to come up with the name of the customer who'd been afraid the men in the blue van had robbed the place. I found the man listed in the phone book, but no one answered when I rang the number.

I had dropped the insurance-investigation story when I got to Atlantic Avenue because it didn't seem likely to jibe with what people would have seen. On the other hand, I didn't want to leave the impression that anything on the scale of kidnapping and homicide had taken place, or someone might deem it his civic duty to report the matter to the police. The story I put together, and it tended to vary somewhat depending upon my audience of the moment, went more or less along these lines: My client had a sister who was considering an arranged marriage to an illegal alien who was hoping to stay in the country. The prospective groom had a girlfriend whose family was bitterly opposed to the marriage. Two men, relatives of the girlfriend, had been harassing my client for days in an attempt to enlist her aid to stop the marriage.

She was sympathetic to their position but didn't really want to get involved.

They had been dogging her steps on Thursday, and followed her to Ayoub's. When she left they got her into the back of their truck on a pretext and drove around with her, trying to convince her. By the time they let her out she was slightly hysterical, and in the course of getting away from them she lost not only the groceries (olive oil, tahini, and so on) but also her purse, which at the time contained a rather valuable bracelet. She didn't know the name of these men, or how to get in touch with them, and--

I don't suppose it made much sense, but I wasn't pitching it to the networks for a TV pilot, I was just using it to reassure some reasonably solid citizens that it was both safe and noble to be as helpful as possible.

I got a lot of gratuitous advice-- "Those marriages are a bad thing, she should tell her sister it's not worth it," for instance. But I also got a fair amount of information.

I KNOCKED off a little after four and caught a train to Columbus Circle, beating the rush hour by a few minutes. There was mail for me at the desk, most of it junk. I ordered something from a catalog once and now I get dozens of them every month. I live in one small room and wouldn't have room for the catalogs themselves, let alone the products they want me to buy.

Upstairs, I tossed everything but the phone bill and two message slips, both informing me that "Ken Curry" had called, once at 2:30, and again at 3:45. I didn't call him right away. I was exhausted.

The day had taken it out of me. I hadn't done that much physically, hadn't spent eight hours hefting sacks of cement, but all those conversations with all those people had taken their toll. You have to concentrate hard, and the process is especially demanding when you're running a story of your own. Unless you're a

pathological liar, a fiction is more arduous to utter than the truth; that's the principle on which the lie detector is based, and my own experience tends to bear it out. A full day of lying and role-playing takes it out of you, especially if you're on your feet for most of it.

I took a shower and touched up my shave, then put the TV news on and listened to fifteen minutes of it with my feet up and my eyes closed.

Around five-thirty I called Kenan Khoury and told him I'd made some progress, although I didn't have anything specific to report. He wanted to know if there was anything he could do.

"Not just yet," I said. "I'll be going back to Atlantic Avenue tomorrow to see if the picture fills in a little more. When I'm done there I'll come to your place. Will you be there?"

"Sure," he said. "I got no place to go."

I SET the alarm and closed my eyes again, and the clock snatched me out of a dream at half past six. I put on a suit and tie and went over to Elaine's. She poured coffee for me and Perrier for herself, and then we caught a cab uptown to the Asia Society, where they had recently opened an exhibit that centered on the Taj Mahal, and thus tied right in with the course she was taking at Hunter. After we'd walked through the three exhibit rooms and made the appropriate noises we followed the crowd into another room, where we sat in folding chairs and listened to a soloist perform on the sitar. I have no idea whether he was any good or not. I don't know how you could tell, or how he himself would know if his instrument was out of tune.

Afterward there was a wine-and-cheese reception. "This need not detain us long," Elaine murmured, and after a few minutes of smiling and mumbling we were on the street.

"You loved every minute of it," she said.

"It was all right."

"Oh boy," she said. "The things a man will put himself through in the hope of getting laid."

"Come on," I said. "It wasn't that bad. It's the same music they play at Indian restaurants."

"But there you don't have to listen to it."

"Who listened?"

We went to an Italian restaurant, and over espresso I told her about Kenan Khoury and what had happened to his wife. When I was finished she sat for a moment looking down at the tablecloth in front of her as if there were something written on it. Then she raised her eyes slowly to meet mine. She is a resourceful woman, and a durable one, but just then she looked touchingly vulnerable.

"Dear God," she said.

"The things people do."

"There's just no end, is there? No bottom to it." She took a sip of water. "The cruelty of it, the utter sadism. Why would anyone-- well, why ask why?"

"I figure it has to be pleasure," I said. "They must have gotten off on it, not just on the killing but on rubbing his nose in it, jerking him around, telling him she'll be in the car, she'll be home when he gets there, then finally letting him find her in pieces in the trunk of the Ford.

They wouldn't have to be sadists to kill her. They could see it as safer that way than to leave a witness who could identify them. But there was no practical advantage in twisting the knife the way they did. They went to a lot of trouble dismembering the body. I'm sorry, this is great table talk, isn't it?"

"That's nothing compared to what a great pre-bedtime story it makes."

"Puts you right in the mood, huh?"

"Nothing like it to get the juices flowing. No, really, I don't mind it. I mean I mind, of course I mind, but I'm not squeamish. It's gross, cutting somebody up, but that's really the least of it, isn't it? The real shock is that there's that kind of evil in the world and it can come from out of nowhere and zap you for no good

reason at all. That's what's awful, and it's just as bad on an empty stomach as on a full one."

WE went back to her apartment and she put on a Cedar Walton solo piano album that we both liked, and we sat together on the couch, not saying much. When the record ended she turned it over, and halfway through Side Two we went into the bedroom and made love with a curious intensity. Afterward neither of us spoke for a long time, until she said, "I'll tell you, kiddo. If we keep on like this, one of these days we're gonna get good at it."

"You think so, huh?"

"It wouldn't surprise me. Matt? Stay over tonight."

I kissed her. "I was planning to."

"Mmmm. Good plan. I don't want to be alone."

Neither did I.

I stayed for breakfast, and by the time I got out to Atlantic Avenue it was almost eleven. I spent five hours there, most if it on the street and in shops but some of it in a branch library and on the phone. A little after four I walked a couple of blocks and caught a bus to Bay Ridge.

When I'd seen him last he'd been rumpled and unshaven, but now Kenan Khoury looked cool and composed in gray gabardine slacks and a muted plaid shirt. I followed him into the kitchen and he told me his brother had gone to work in Manhattan that morning. "Petey said he'd stay here, he didn't care about work, but how many times are we gonna have the same conversation? I made him take the Toyota so he's got that to get back and forth. How about you, Matt? You getting anywhere?"

I said, "Two men about my size took your wife off the street in front of The Arabian Gourmet and hustled her into a dark blue panel truck or van. A similar truck, probably the same one, was tailing her when she left D'Agostino's. The truck had lettering on the doors, white lettering according to one witness.

TV Sales & Service, with the company name composed of indeterminate initials. B & L, H & M, different people saw different things. Two people remembered an address in Queens and one specifically recalled it as Long Island City."

"Is there such a firm?"

"The description's vague enough so that there are a dozen or more firms that would fit. A couple of initials, TV repair, a Queens address. I called six or eight outfits and couldn't come up with anybody who runs dark blue trucks or who had a vehicle stolen recently. I didn't expect to."

"Why not?"

"I don't think the truck was stolen. My guess is that they had your house staked out Thursday morning hoping your wife would go out by herself. When she did they followed her. It probably wasn't the first time they tailed her, waiting for an opportunity to make their play. They wouldn't want to steal a truck each time and ride around all day in something that's liable to show up any hour on the hot-car sheet."