Lawrence Block - A Walk Among the Tombstones

”You sounded terrific, honey. But can I try?”

We went over the premise first to make sure she had it down, and then I got through to the Sex Crimes Unit at the Queens County DA’s office and gave her the phone. She was on the phone for almost ten minutes, at once earnest and polished and professional, and when she rang off I felt like applauding.

”What do you think?” she asked. ”A little too sincere?”

”I thought you were perfect.”

”Really?”

”Uh-huh. It’s almost scary to see what a slick liar you are.”

”I know. When I was listening to you I thought, he’s so honest, where did he learn to lie like that?”

”I never knew a good cop who wasn’t a good liar,” I said. ”You’re playing a part all the time, creating an attitude to fit the person you’re dealing with. The same skill’s even more important when you work private, because you’re constantly asking for information you’ve got no legal right to. So if I’m good at it, you can say it’s part of the job description.”

”For me, too,” she said. ”Now that I come to think of it. I’m always acting, it’s what I do.”

”That was great acting last night, incidentally.”

She gave me a look. ”It’s tiring, though, isn’t it? Lying, I mean.”

”You want to quit?”

”Screw that, I’m just getting warmed up. Who else do I do, Brooklyn and Staten Island?”

”Forget Staten Island.”

”Why? No sex crimes in Staten Island?”

”All sex is a crime in Staten Island.”

”Har har.”

”No, they could have a unit, for all I know, although the incidence there is nothing compared to the other boroughs. But I can’t see our three men in a van zooming across the Verrazano Bridge bent on rape and mayhem.”

”So I’ve only got one more call to make?”

”Well,” I said, ”there are also sex-crime units in the various police-department borough commands, and there are frequently rape specialists in individual precincts. You just ask the desk officer to route the call to the appropriate person. I could make a list, but I don’t know how much time you’ve got for this.”

She gave me a come-hither look. ”If you’ve got the money, honey,” she said archly, ”I’ve got the time.”

”As a matter of fact, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get paid for this. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be on Khoury’s payroll.”

”Oh, please,” she said. ”Whenever I find something I like somebody tries to get me to take money for it. No, seriously, I don’t want to get paid. When this is all but a memory you can take me out for a really extravagant dinner somewhere, okay?”

”Whatever you say.”

”And afterward,” she said, ”you can slip me a hundred for cab fare.”

I stayed around while she charmed the daylights out of a staffer in the Brooklyn DA’s Office, then left her with a list of people to call and walked to the library. There was no need for me to supervise her. She was a natural.

In the library I did what I’d started doing the previous morning, working my way through six months’ worth of The New York Times on microfilm. I wasn’t looking for abductions because I didn’t really expect to find any reported as such. Instead I was assuming that they had occasionally snatched someone off the street without anyone witnessing the act, or at least without their reporting it. I was looking for victims who turned up dead in parks or alleys, especially victims who’d been sexually assaulted and mutilated, specifically dismembered.

A problem lay in the fact that touches of that sort weren’t very likely to make the papers. It’s standard police policy to withhold specific details of mutilation in order to spare themselves a variety of aggravations — phony confessions, copycat offenders, false witnesses. For their part, newspapers tend to spare their readers the more graphic details. By the time the news gets to the reader, it’s hard to tell what happened.

Some years ago there was a sex criminal who was killing young boys on the Lower East Side. He lured them onto rooftops, stabbed or strangled them, and amputated and carried off their penises. He was at it long enough for cops on the case to come up with a name for him. They called him Charlie Chopoff.

Naturally enough, the police reporters called him the same thing — but not in print. There was no way any New York newspaper was going to provide that little detail for their readers, and there was no way to use the nickname without the reader having a pretty fair idea as to just what was chopped off. So they didn’t call him anything, and reported only that the killer had mutilated or disfigured his victims, which could cover anything from ritual disembowelment to a lousy haircut.

Nowadays they might be less restrained.

Once I got the hang of it, I was able to go through the weeks with fair speed. I didn’t have to scan an entire paper, just the Metropolitan section, where the local crime news was concentrated. The biggest time waster was the same one I always have in a library, which is a tendency to get sidetracked by something interesting that has nothing to do with what brought me there. Fortunately they don’t carry comics in the Times . Otherwise I’d have had to wrestle with the temptation to wallow in six months’ worth of Doonesbury .

By the time I got out of there I had half a dozen possible cases jotted down in my notebook. One was particularly likely, the victim an accounting major at Brooklyn College who went missing three days before a birdwatcher encountered her one morning in Green-Wood Cemetery. The story said that she’d been subjected to sexual assault and sexual mutilation, which suggested to me that someone had done a job on her with a carving knife. Evidence at the scene indicated that she had been killed elsewhere and dumped at the cemetery, and police had drawn a similar conclusion about Marie Gotteskind, that she had already been dead when her killers discarded her body on the Forest Park Golf course.

I got back to my hotel around six. There were messages from Elaine and both Khourys, along with three slips announcing simply that TJ had called.

I called Elaine first and she reported that she’d made all the calls. ”By the end I was beginning to believe my own cover story,” she said. ”I was thinking to myself, This is fun, but it’ll be even more fun when we make the movie. Except there’s not going to be a movie.”

”I think somebody already made it.”

”I wonder if anybody will actually call.”

I got Kenan Khoury and he wanted to know how things were coming along. I told him I had managed to open up several lines of inquiry, but that I didn’t expect quick results.

”But you think we got a shot,” he said.

”Definitely.”

”Good,” he said. ”Listen, why I called, I’m going to be out of the country on business for a couple of days. I have to go to Europe. I’m flying out tomorrow from JFK and I’ll be coming back Thursday or Friday. Anything comes up, just call my brother. You’ve got his phone number, don’t you?”

I had it on a message slip right in front of me, and I called it after I got off the phone with Kenan. Peter sounded groggy when he answered and I apologized for waking him. He said, ”No, that’s okay, I’m glad you did. I was watching basketball and I dozed off in front of the set. I hate when that happens, I always wind up with a stiff neck. Reason I called, I was wondering if you were planning to go to a meeting tonight.”

”I thought I would, yes.”

”Well, how about if I pick you up and we go together? There’s a Saturday night meeting in Chelsea I got in the habit of going to, nice little group, meets at eight o’clock in the Spanish church on Nineteenth Street.”