Lawrence Block - A Walk Among the Tombstones

It was too bad. It would have been nice to get lucky for a change.

On the other hand, the night’s work and the seventeen hundred and change it was costing me were by no means wasted. I had learned something, and not just that the three men I was after were very careful planners for a trio of psychopathic sex killers.

The addresses were all in Brooklyn. And they were all in a far more compact area than the whole Khoury case covered. The kidnap and ransom delivery had begun in Bay Ridge, moved to Atlantic Avenue in Cobble Hill, ranged to Flatbush and Farragut and then way over to Veterans Avenue, and then swung back to the drop-off of the remains in Bay Ridge again. That covered a fair chunk of the borough, while their previous activities were spread all over Brooklyn and Queens. Their home base could be anywhere.

But the pay phones weren’t that far apart. I would have to sit down with the list and a map to plot their positions precisely, but I could tell already that they were all in the same general area, on the west side of Brooklyn, north of Khoury’s house in Bay Ridge and south of Green-Wood Cemetery.

Where they’d dumped Leila Alvarez.

One phone was on Sixtieth Street, another on New Utrecht at Forty-first, so it’s not as though they were within walking distance of each other. They had left the house and driven around to make those calls. But it stood to reason that home base was somewhere in that neighborhood, and probably not too far from the one phone they’d used a second time. It was all over, they were all done, all that remained was to rub salt in Kenan Khoury’s wounds, so why drive ten blocks out of the way if you didn’t have to? Why not use the handiest pay phone of the lot?

Which happened to be on Fifth Avenue between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth streets.

I didn’t go into all of that with the boys, and indeed a lot of my own ruminations had to wait until later on. I gave the Kongs five hundred dollars each and told them how much I appreciated what they’d done. They insisted it was fun, even the boring part. Jimmy said he had a headache and a bad case of hacker’s wrist, but that it was worth it.

“You two go down first,” I said. “Put your ties and jackets on and just nonchalant your way out the front door. I’ll want to make sure there’s nothing traceable in the room, and I guess I’ll have to stop at the desk and settle up what I owe for the phone. I left a fifty-dollar deposit but we were hooked into it for over seven hours, and I don’t have any idea what the charges are going to be.”

“Oh, my,” David said. “He just doesn’t get it.”

“It’s amazing,” Jimmy said.

“Huh? What don’t I get?”

“You don’t get to pay any phone charges,” Jimmy said. “First thing I did once we were hooked up was bypass the desk. We could have called Shanghai and there wouldn’t be any record of it at the desk.” He grinned. “You might as well let them keep the deposit, though. Because King had about thirty dollars’ worth of macadamia nuts from the mini-bar.”

“Which means thirty macadamia nuts at a dollar each,” David said.

“But if I were you,” Jimmy said, “I’d just go home.”

After they left I paid TJ. He fanned the sheaf of bills I handed him, looked at me, looked at them again, at me again, and said, “This here for me?”

“Would have been no game without you. You brought the bat and the ball.”

“I figured a hundred,” he said. “I didn’t do much, just sat around, but you was payin’ out a lot of bread and I figured you wasn’t about to leave me out. How much I got here?”

“Five,” I said.

“I knew this’d pay off,” he said. “Me an’ you. I like this detectin’ business. I be resourceful, I good at it, and I like it.”

“It doesn’t usually pay this well.”

“Don’t make no difference. Man, what other line of work I gone find lets me use all the shit I know?”

“So you want to be a detective when you grow up, TJ?”

“Ain’t gonna wait that long,” he said. “Gonna be one now. And that’s where it’s at, Matt.”

I told him his first assignment was to get out of the hotel without drawing the wrong kind of attention from the hotel staff. “It would be easier if you were dressed like the Kongs,” I said, “but we work with what we’ve got. I think you and I should walk out together.”

“White guy your age and a black teenager? You know what they be thinking.”

“Uh-huh, and they can shake their heads over it all they want. But if you walk out by yourself they’ll think you’ve been burgling the rooms, and they might not let you walk.”

“Yeah, you right,” he said, “but you not lookin’ at all the possibilities. Room’s all paid for, right? Checkout time’s like noon. An’ I see where you live, man, and I don’t mean to be dissin’ you, but your room ain’t this nice.”

“No, it’s not. It doesn’t cost me a hundred and sixty dollars a night, either.”

“Well, this room ain’t gonna cost me a dime, Simon, an’ I gonna take me a hot shower an’ dry myself on three towels an’ get in that bed an’ sleep six or seven hours. ’Cause this room ain’t just better than where you live, it’s like ten times better than where I live.”

“Oh.”

“So I gone hang the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the knob and kick back an’ be undisturbed, like. Then noon comes an’ I walk outta here an’ nobody look at me twice, nice young man like me, musta just come an’ delivered somebody’s lunch. Hey, Matt? You think I can call downstairs an’ they’ll gimme a wake-up call at half-past eleven?”

“I think you can count on it,” I said.

Istopped at an all-night coffee shop on Broadway. Someone had left an early edition of the Times in the booth, and I read it along with my eggs and coffee, but nothing much registered. I was too groggy, and what little mental acuity I had insisted on centering itself on the locations of the six pay phones in Sunset Park. I kept yanking the list out of my pocket and studying it, as if the order and precise locations of the phones held a secret message if one only possessed the key. There ought to be someone I could call, claiming a Code Five emergency. “Give me your access code,” I would demand. “Tell me the password.”

The sky was bright with dawn by the time I got back to my hotel. I showered and went to bed, and after an hour or so I gave up and turned on the television set. I watched the morning news program on one of the networks. The secretary of state had just come back from a tour of the Middle East, and they had him on, and followed him with a Palestinian spokesman commenting on the possibilities for a lasting peace in the region.

That brought my client to mind, if he’d ever been far from my thoughts, and when the next interview was with a recent Academy Award winner I hit the Mute button and called Kenan Khoury.

He didn’t answer, but I kept trying, calling every half hour or so until I got him around ten-thirty. “Just walked in the door,” he said. “Scariest part of the trip was just now in the cab coming back from JFK. Driver was this maniac from Ghana with a diamond in his tooth and tribal scars on both cheeks, drove like dying in a traffic accident guaranteed you priority entry to heaven, green card included.”

“I think I had him once myself.”

“You? I didn’t think you ever rode in cabs. I thought you were partial to the subway.”

“I took cabs all last night,” I said. “Really ran up the meter.”

“Oh?”

“In a manner of speaking. I turned up a couple of computer outlaws who found a way to dig some data out of the phone company’s records that the company said didn’t exist.” I gave him an abbreviated version of what we’d done and what I’d learned from it. “I couldn’t reach you for authorization and I didn’t want to wait on this, so I laid it out.”