A Walk Among the Tombstones (Matthew Scudder #10)

A Walk Among the Tombstones (Matthew Scudder #10) Page 17

"Then how'd you get it?"

"Well, I resourceful. Told you that, didn't I?"

"More than once."

"What I did, I call the operator. Say, 'Hey, girl, somebody screwed up, ain't no number here on the phone, so how do I know where I callin' from?' An' she say how she got no way to tell what the number is of the phone I'm at, so she can't help me."

"That seems unlikely."

"Thought so myself. Thought they got all that equipment, you ask them a number at Information an' they can say it about as fast as you can ask it, so how come they can't give you the number of your own phone? An' I thought, TJ, you fool, they took out the numbers to fuck up dope dealers, an' here you go soundin' just like one. So I dial 0 again, on account of you can call the operator all day long an' never spend no quarter, it a free call. An' you know you get somebody different every time you call. So I got some other chick, an' this time I took all the street out of my voice, I said, 'Perhaps you can help me, miss. I'm at a pay phone and I have to leave the number with my office for a call back, and someone defaced the phone with spray-painted graffiti in such a way that the number is impossible to make out. I wonder if you could possibly check the line and supply it for me.' An' I ain't even through sayin' it when she's readin' off the number for me. Matt? Oh, shit."

The recording had cut in to ask for more money.

"Quarter ran out," he said. "I got to feed in another one."

"Give me the number, I'll call you."

"Can't. I ain't in Brooklyn now, I didn't happen to con nobody out of the number for this particular phone." The phone chimed as his coin dropped. "There, we be all right now. Pretty slick, though, way I got the other number. You there? How come you ain't sayin' nothing'?"

"I'm stunned," I said. "I didn't know you could talk like that."

"What, you mean talk straight? 'Course I can. Just because I street don't mean I be ignorant. They two different languages, man, and you talkin' to a cat's bilingual."

"Well, I'm impressed."

"Yeah? I figured you'd be impressed I got to Brooklyn an' back. What you got for me to do next?"

"Nothing right now."

"Nothin'? Sheee, ought to be something I can do. I did good on this, didn't I?"

"You did great."

"I mean, man didn't have to be a rocket scientist to find his way to Brooklyn an' back. But it was cool how I got the number out of that operator, wasn't it?"

"Definitely."

"I was bein' resourceful."

"Very resourceful."

"But you still ain't got nothin' for me today."

"I'm afraid not," I said. "Check with me in a day or two."

"Check with you," he said. "Man, I'd check with you anytime you say if only you was there to be checked with. You know who oughta have a beeper? Man, you oughta have a beeper. I could beep you, you'd say to yourself, 'Must be TJ tryin' to get hold of me, must be important.' What's so funny?"

"Nothing."

"Then how come you laughin'? I be checkin' with you every day, my man, because I think you need me workin' for you. An' that is final, Lionel."

"Hey, I like that."

"Thought you would," he said. "Been savin' it up for you."

IT rained all day Sunday and I spent most of the day in my room. I had the TV on and switched back and forth between tennis on ESPN and golf on one of the networks. There are days when I can get caught up in a tennis match but this wasn't one of them. I can never get caught up in golf, but the scenery is pretty and the announcers aren't as relentlessly chatty as they are in most other sports, so it's not a bad thing to have going on while I sit thinking about something else.

Jim Faber called in the middle of the afternoon to cancel our standing dinner date. A cousin of his wife's had died and they had to go put in an appearance. "We could meet someplace now for a cup of coffee," he said, "except it's such a lousy day outside."

We spent ten minutes on the phone instead. I mentioned that I was a little worried about Peter Khoury, that he might pick up a drink or a drug. "The way he talked about heroin," I said, "he had me wanting some myself."

"I noticed that about junkies," he said. "They get this wistful quality, like an old man talking about his lost youth. You know you can't keep him sober."

"I know."

"You're not sponsoring him, are you?"

"No, but neither is anybody else. And last night he was using me like a sponsor."

"Be just as well if he didn't formally ask you to be his sponsor. You've already got a professional relationship with his brother, and to an extent with him."

"I thought of that."

"But even if he did, that still doesn't make him your responsibility. You know what constitutes being a successful sponsor? Staying sober yourself."

"It seems to me I've heard that."

"From me, probably. But nobody can keep anybody else sober. I'm your sponsor. Do I keep you sober?"

"No," I said. "I stay sober in spite of you."

"In spite of me or to spite me?"

"Maybe a little of both."

"What's Peter's problem, anyway? Feeling sorry for himself because he can't drink or shoot up?"

"Snort."

"Huh?"

"He stayed away from needles. But yeah, that's most of it. And he's pissed off at God."

"Shit, who isn't?"

"Because what kind of a God would let something like that happen to a wonderful person like his sister-in-law?"

"God pulls that kind of shit all the time."

"I know."

"And maybe he had a reason. Maybe Jesus wants her for a sunbeam. Remember that song?"

"I don't think I ever heard it."

"Well, I hope to God you never hear it from me, because I'd have to be drunk to sing it. Do you figure he was fucking her?"

"Do I figure who was fucking who?"

"Whom. Do you figure Peter was fucking the sister-in-law?"

"Jesus," I said. "Why would I think that? You've got a hell of a mind, you know that?"

"It's the people I hang around with."

"It must be. No, I don't think he was. I think he's just feeling sad, and I think he wants to drink and take dope, and I hope he doesn't. That's all."

I called Elaine and told her I was free for dinner, but she'd already made arrangements for her friend Monica to come over. She said they were going to order Chinese food in, and I was welcome to come over, that way they could order more dishes. I said I would pass.

"You're afraid it'll be an evening of girl talk," she said. "And you're probably right."

Mick Ballou called while I was watching 60 Minutes and we talked for ten or twelve of them. I told him in the same breath that I had booked a trip to Ireland and that I'd had to cancel it. He was sorry I wasn't coming over but glad I'd found something to keep me busy.

I told him a little about what I was doing, but not the sort of person I was working for. He had no sympathy for drug dealers, and occasionally supplemented his income by invading their homes and taking their cash.

He asked about the weather and I said it had been raining all day. He said it was always raining there, that he was finding it hard to recall what the sun looked like. Oh, and had I heard? They'd come up with evidence that Our Lord was Irish.

"Is that so?"

"It is," he said. "Consider the facts. He lived with his parents until He was twenty-nine years old. He went out drinking with the lads the last night of His life. He thought His mother was a virgin, and herself, a good woman, she thought He was God."

THE week started slowly. I hammered away at the Khoury case, if you want to call it that. I managed to get the name of one of the officers who'd caught the Leila Alvarez homicide. She was the Brooklyn College student who'd been dumped in GreenWood Cemetery, and the case belonged not to the Seventy-second Precinct but to Brooklyn Homicide. A Detective John Kelly had headed the investigation, but I had trouble reaching him and was reluctant to leave a name and number.

I saw Elaine Monday and she was disappointed that her phone hadn't been ringing off the hook with calls from rape victims. I told her she might not get any response, that it was like that sometimes, that you had to throw a lot of baited hooks in the water and sometimes you went a long time without a bite. And it was early, I said. It was unlikely the people she spoke to would have made any calls until the weekend was over.

"It was over today," she reminded me. I said if they did make calls it might take them a while to reach people, and it might take the victims a couple of days to make up their minds to call.

"Or not to call," she said.

She was more discouraged when Tuesday passed without a call. When I spoke to her Wednesday evening she was excited. The good news was that three women had called her. The bad news was that none of the calls looked to have anything to do with the men who had killed Francine Khoury.

One was a woman who had been ambushed by a solitary assailant in the hallway of her apartment house. He had raped her and stolen her purse. Another had accepted a ride home from school with someone she took to be another student; he had shown her a knife and ordered her into the backseat, but she had been able to escape.

"He was a skinny kid and he was alone," Elaine said, "so I thought it was stretching it to figure him as a possibility. And the third call was date rape. Or pickup rape, I don't know what you'd call it. According to her, she and her girlfriend picked up these two guys in a bar in Sunnyside. They went for a ride in the guys' car and her girlfriend got carsick so they stopped the car so she could get out and vomit. And then they drove off and left her there. Can you believe that?"

"Well, it's not very considerate," I said, "but I don't think I'd call it rape."

"Funny. Anyway, they drove around for a while and then they went back to her house and they wanted to have sex with her, and she said nothing doing, what kind of a girl do you think I am, blah blah blah, and finally she agreed that she'd fuck one of them, the one she'd been more or less partnered with, and the other one would wait in the living room. Except he didn't, he walked in while they were getting it on and watched, which did little to cool his ardor, as you might have figured."

"And?"

"And afterward he said please please please, and she said no no no, and finally she gave him a blow-job because that was the only way to get rid of him."

"She told you this?"

"In more ladylike terms, but yeah, that's what happened. Then she brushed her teeth and called the cops."

"And reported it as rape?"

"Well, I'd be willing to call it that. It escalated from please please please to Get me off or I'll kick your teeth down your throat, so I'd say that qualifies as rape."

"Oh, sure, if it was that forceful."

"But it doesn't sound like our guys."

"No, not at all."

"I got their numbers just in case you want to follow up on them, and I told them we'd call if the producer decided to pursue it, that the whole project was kind of iffy just now. Was that right?"