Lawrence Block - A Walk Among the Tombstones

”Sure.”

”You were right, what you said about meetings. I’ve been wanting to drink ever since I found out about Francey. I mean about her being kidnapped, before they did what they did. I haven’t come close or anything but it’s hard keeping the thought out of my mind. I push it away and it comes right back.”

”Have you been in touch with your sponsor?”

”I don’t exactly have one. They gave me an interim sponsor when I first got sober, and I called him fairly regularly at first but we more or less drifted apart. He’s hard to get on the phone, anyway. I should find a regular sponsor, but for some reason I never got around to it.”

”One of these days—”

”I know. Do you have a sponsor?”

I nodded. ”We got together just last night. We generally have dinner Sunday, go over the week together.”

”Does he give you advice?”

”Sometimes,” I said. ”And then I go ahead and do what I want.”

When I got back to my hotel room, the first call I made was to Jim Faber. ”I was just talking about you,” I told him. ”A fellow asked if my sponsor gives advice, and I told him how I always do exactly what you suggest.”

”You’re lucky God didn’t strike you dead on the spot.”

”I know. But I’ve decided not to go to Ireland.”

”Oh? You seemed determined last night. Did it look different to you after a night’s sleep?”

”No,” I admitted. ”It looked about the same, and this morning I went to a travel agent and managed to get a cheap seat on a flight leaving Friday evening.”

”Oh?”

”And then this afternoon somebody offered me a job and I said yes. You want to go to Ireland for three weeks? I don’t think I can get my money back for the ticket.”

”Are you sure? It’s a shame to lose the money.”

”Well, they told me it was nonrefundable, and I already paid for it. It’s all right, I’m making enough on the job so that I can write off a couple hundred. But I did want to let you know that I wasn’t on my way to the land of Sodom and Begorrah.”

”It sounded like you were setting yourself up,” he said. ”That’s why I was concerned. You’ve managed to hang out with your friend in his saloon and still stay sober—”

”He does the drinking for both of us.”

”Well, one way or another it seems to work. But on the other side of the ocean with your usual support system thousands of miles away, and with you restless to begin with—”

”I know. But you can rest easy now.”

”Even if I can’t take the credit.”

”Oh, I don’t know,” I said. ”Maybe it’s your doing. God works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.”

”Yeah,” he said. ”Doesn’t He just.”

Elaine thought it was too bad I wouldn’t be going to Ireland after all. ”I don’t suppose there was any possibility of postponing the job,” she said.

”No.”

”Or that you’ll be done by Friday.”

”I’ll barely be started by Friday.”

”It’s too bad, but you don’t sound disappointed.”

”I guess I’m not. At least I didn’t call Mick, so that saves having to call again and tell him I changed my mind. To tell you the truth, I’m glad I’ve got the work.”

”Something to sink your teeth into.”

”That’s right. That’s what I really need, more than I need a vacation.”

”And it’s a good case?”

I hadn’t told her anything about it. I thought for a moment and said,

”It’s a terrible case.”

”Oh?”

”Jesus, the things people do to each other. You’d think I’d get used to it, but I never do.”

”You want to talk about it?”

”When I see you. Are we on for tomorrow night?”

”Unless your work gets in the way.”

”I don’t see why it should. I’ll come by for you around seven. If I’m going to be later than that I’ll call.”

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.