Lawrence Block - A Walk Among the Tombstones

The medical examination had been detailed, of course, and there was a lot to report. Death had come as a result of multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen, any of several of which would have been fatal. There was evidence of repeated sexual assault, with traces of semen in her anus, her vagina, and her mouth, as well as in one of the knife wounds. Forensic measurements indicated that at least two different knives had been used on her, and suggested that both could be kitchen knives, with one having a longer and wider blade than the other. An analysis of the semen indicated the presence of at least two assailants.

In addition to the knife wounds, the nude body showed multiple bruises indicating that the victim had been subjected to a beating.

Finally, and I missed this on first reading, the medical examiner’s report supplied the information that the thumb and index finger of the victim’s left hand had been severed. The two digits had been recovered, the index finger from her vagina, the thumb from her rectum.

Cute.

Reading the file had a numbing, deadening effect on me. That’s very likely why I missed the thumb-and-finger item first time through. The report of the woman’s injuries and the image they conjured up of her last moments was more than the mind wanted to take in. Other entries in the file, interviews with parents and coworkers, had painted a picture of the living Marie Gotteskind, and the medical report took that living person and turned her into dead and grossly mistreated flesh.

I was sitting there, feeling drained and exhausted by what I had just read, when the phone rang. I answered it and a voice I knew said, ”So where’s it at, Matt?”

”Hey, TJ.”

”How you doin’? You a hard man to reach. Be out all the time, goin’ places, doin’ things.”

”I got your message but you didn’t leave a number.”

”Don’t have a number. I was a drug dealer I might could have a beeper. You like it better that way?”

”If you were a dealer you’d have a cellular phone.”

”Now you talkin’. Have me a long car with a phone in it, and just be sittin’ in it thinkin’ long thoughts and doin’ long things. Man, I got to say it again, you hard to reach.

”Did you call more than once, TJ? I only got the one message.”

”Well, see, I don’t always like to waste the quarter.”

”What do you mean?”

”Well, you know, I got your phone figured. It’s like those answering machines, how they pick up after three or four rings, whatever it is? Dude on the desk, he always lets your phone ring four times before he cuts in. And you just got the one room, so it ain’t about to take you more than three rings to get to the phone, ’less you be in the bathroom or something.”

”So you hang up after three rings.”

”And get my quarter back. ’Less I want to leave a message, but why leave a message when I already left one? You come home an’ there’s a whole stack of messages, you think to yourself, ’This TJ, he musta tapped a parking meter, he got all these quarters he don’t know what to do with.’ ”

I laughed.

”So you workin’?”

”As a matter of fact I am.”

”Big job?”

”Fairly big.”

”Any room in it for TJ?”

”Not as far as I can see.”

”Man, you not lookin’ hard enough! Must be something I could do, make up for some of the quarters I burn up callin’ you. What kind of job is it, anyway? You not up against the Mafia, are you?”

”I’m afraid not.”

”Glad to hear it, because those cats are bad, Tad. You see Goodfellas ? Man, they nasty. Oh, damn, my quarter be runnin’ out.”

A recorded voice cut in, demanding five cents for a minute’s worth of phone time.

I said, ”Give me the number and I’ll call you back.”

”Can’t.”

”The number of the phone you’re talking on.”

”Can’t,” he said again. ”Ain’t no number on it. They takin’ ’em off all the pay phones so the players can’t get calls back on ’em. No problem, I got some change.” The phone chimed as he dropped a coin in. ”The dealers, they got certain pay phones where they know the number whether it shows there or not. So it still business as usual, only somebody like you wants to call somebody like me back, ain’t no way to do it.”

”It’s a great system.”

”It’s cool. We still talkin’, ain’t we? Nobody stoppin’ us doin’ what we want to do. They just forcin’ us to be resourceful.”

”By putting in another quarter?”

”You got it, Matt. I be drawin’ on my resources. That’s what you call bein’ resourceful.”

”Where are you going to be tomorrow, TJ?”

”Where I be? Oh, I dunno. Maybe I fly to Paris on the Concorde. I ain’t made up my mind yet.” It struck me that he could take my ticket and go to Ireland, but he wasn’t likely to have a passport. Nor did it seem probable that Ireland was ready for him, or he for Ireland. ”Where I be,” he said heavily. ”I be on the fuckin’ Deuce, man. Where else I gonna be?”

”I thought maybe we could get something to eat.”

”What time?”

”Oh, I don’t know. Say around twelve, twelve-thirty?”

”Which?”

”Twelve-thirty.”

”That’s twelve-thirty in the daytime or in the night?”

”Daytime. We’ll have some lunch.”

”Ain’t no time of the day or night you can’t have lunch,” he said. ”You want me to come by your hotel?”

”No,” I said, ”because there’s a chance I’ll have to cancel and I wouldn’t have any way to let you know. So I don’t want to hang you up. Pick a place on the Deuce and if I don’t show up we’ll make it another time.”

”That’s cool,” he said. ”You know the video arcade? Uptown side of the street, two, three doors from Eighth Avenue? There’s the store with the switchknives in the window, man, I don’t know how they get away with that—”

”They’re sold in kit form.”

”Yeah, an’ they use it for an IQ test. You can’t put the kit together, you have to go back an’ do first grade all over again. You know the store I mean.”

”Sure.”

”Right next to it there’s the entrance to the subway, and before you go down the stairs there’s an entranceway to the video arcade. You know where it’s at?”

”I have a hunch I can find it.”

”Say twelve-thirty?”

”It’s a date, Kate.”

”Hey,” he said. ”You know somethin’? You learnin’.”

I felt better when I got off the phone with TJ. He usually had that effect on me. I made a note of our lunch date, then picked up the Gotteskind material again.

It was the same perpetrators. Had to be. The similarity of MO was too great to be coincidental, and the amputation and insertion of the thumb and forefinger looked like a rehearsal for the more extensive butchery they’d practiced on Francine Khoury.

But what did they do, go into hibernation? Lie low for a year?

It seemed unlikely. Sex-linked violence — serial rape, lust murder — seems to be addictive, like any strong drug that releases you momentarily from the prison of self. Marie Gotteskind’s killers had pulled off a perfectly orchestrated abduction, only to repeat it a year later with very minor variations and, of course, a substantial profit motive. Why wait so long? What were they doing in the meantime?

Could there have been other abductions without anyone drawing a connection to the Gotteskind case? It was possible. The murder rate in the five boroughs is now over seven a day, and most of them don’t get a lot of play in the media. Still, if you take a woman off a street in front of a bunch of witnesses, it makes the papers. If you’ve got a similar case sitting in an open file, you probably hear about it. And you almost have to draw a connection.