Lawrence Block - A Walk Among the Tombstones

He waved the issue aside. “This is a good business,” he said, “but also it’s no good. You know?”

“I think so.”

“I want to be out of it. That’s one reason I got no cash. I make lots of money, but I don’t want it in cash and I don’t want it in goods. I own parking lots, I own a restaurant, I spread it out, you know? In a little while I’m out of the dope business altogether. A lot of Americans start out as gangsters, yes? And wind up legitimate businessmen.”

“Sometimes.”

“Some are gangsters forever. But not all. Wasn’t for Devorah, I’d be out of it already.”

“Your wife?”

“The hospital bills, the doctors, my God, what it cost. No insurance. We were greenhorns, what did we know from Blue Cross? Doesn’t matter. Whatever it cost I paid. I was glad to pay it. I would have paid more to keep her alive, I would have paid anything. I would have sold the fillings out of my teeth if I could have bought her another day. I paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and she had every day the doctors could give her, and what days they were, the poor woman, what she suffered through. But she wanted all the life she could get, you know?” He wiped a broad hand across his forehead. He was about to say something else but the phone rang. Wordless, he pointed at it.

I picked it up.

The same man said, “Shall we try again? I’m afraid the girl cannot come to the phone. That’s out of the question. How else can we reassure you of her well-being?”

I covered the mouthpiece. “Something your daughter would know.”

He shrugged. “The dog’s name?”

Into the phone I said, “Have her tell you — no, wait a minute.” I covered the phone and said, “They could know that. They’ve been shadowing her for a week or more, they know your schedule, they’ve undoubtedly seen her walking the dog, heard her call him by name. Think of something else.”

“We had a dog before this one,” he said. “A little black-and-white one, it got hit by a car. She was just a small thing herself when we had that dog.”

“But she would remember it?”

“Who could forget? She loved the dog.”

“The dog’s name,” I said into the phone, “and the name of the dog before this one. Have her describe both dogs and furnish their names.”

He was amused. “One dog won’t do. It has to be two.”

“Yes.”

“So that you may be doubly reassured. I’ll humor you, my friend.”

I wondered what he would do.

He’d have called from a pay phone. I was certain of that. He hadn’t stayed on the line long enough for his quarter to run out, but he wasn’t going to change the pattern now, not when it had worked so well for him. He was at a pay phone, and now he had to find out the name and description of two dogs, and then he would have to call me back.

Assume for the moment that he wasn’t calling from the laundromat phone. Assume he was at some phone on the street, far enough from his house that he’d taken a car. Now he would drive back to the house, park, go inside, and ask Lucia Landau the names of her dogs. And then he would drive around to still another phone and relay the information back to me.

Was that how I would do it?

Well, maybe. But maybe not. Maybe I’d spend a quarter and save a little time and running around, and call the house where my partner was guarding the girl. Let him take the gag out of her mouth for a minute and come back with the answers.

If only we had the Kongs.

Not for the first time, I thought how much easier it would be if Jimmy and David were set up in Lucia’s bedroom, with their modem plugged into her Snoopy phone and the computer set up on her dressing table. They could sit on Lucia’s phone and monitor her father’s, and whenever anyone called we’d have an instant trace.

If Ray called home to find out the names of the dogs, we’d be perching on that line, and before he knew what to call the dogs we’d know where they were keeping the girl. Before he had relayed the information to me we could have cars at both locations, to pick him up when he got off the phone and to lay siege to the house.

But I didn’t have the Kongs. All I had was TJ, sitting in a laundromat in Sunset Park and waiting for someone to use the phone. And if he hadn’t been profligate enough to squander half his funds on a beeper, I wouldn’t even have that.

“Makes a person crazy,” Yuri said. “Sitting, staring at the phone, waiting for it to ring.”

And it was taking its time. Evidently Ray — that was how I was thinking of him, and I had come alarmingly close once already to calling him by name — evidently he had not called home, for whatever reason. Figure ten minutes to drive home, ten minutes to get the answers from the girl, ten minutes to get back to a phone and call us. Less if he hurried. More if he stopped to buy a pack of cigarettes, or if she was unconscious and they had to bring her around.

Say half an hour. Maybe more, maybe less, but say half an hour.

If she was dead it could take a little longer. Suppose she was. Suppose they’d killed her right off the bat, killed her before their first call to her father. That, certainly, was the simplest way to do it. No danger of escape. No concern about keeping her quiet.

And if she was dead?

They couldn’t admit it. Once they did there was no ransom. They were far from destitute, they’d taken four hundred thousand from Kenan less than a month ago, but that didn’t mean they didn’t want more. Money was something people always wanted more of, and if they hadn’t there would have been no first call, and probably no kidnapping. It was easy enough to pick a woman off the street at random if all you wanted was the thrill of it. You didn’t need to get cute.

So what would they do?

I figured they would probably try to brazen it out. Say she was out of it, say she’d been drugged and couldn’t focus enough to respond to questions. Or make up some name and insist that was what she’d told them.

We would know they were lying and would be about ninety percent certain Lucia was dead. But you believe what you want to believe, and we would want to believe in the slender possibility that she was alive, and that might lead us to pay the ransom anyway because if we didn’t pay there was no chance, no chance at all.

The phone rang. I snatched it up, and it was some jerk with a wrong number. I got rid of him and thirty seconds later he called back again. I asked him what number he was calling, and he had it right, but it turned out he was trying to call someone in Manhattan. I reminded him he had to dial the area code first. “Oh, God,” he said, “I’m always doing that. I’m so stupid.”

“I got calls like that this morning,” Yuri said. “Wrong numbers. A nuisance.”

I nodded. Had he called while I was getting rid of that idiot? If so, why didn’t he call back? The line was clear now. What the hell was he waiting for?

Maybe I had made a mistake, asking for proof. If she was dead all along I was only forcing it all out into the open. Instead of trying to bluff it through, he might decide to write the operation off and scramble for cover.

In which case I could wait forever for the phone to ring, because we wouldn’t be hearing from him again.

Yuri was right. It made a person crazy, sitting, staring at the phone. Waiting for it to ring.

Actually it took only twelve minutes over the thirty minutes I’d figured as an average. The phone rang and I grabbed it. I said hello, and Ray said, “I’d still like to know how you figure in this. You’d have to be a dealer. Are you a major trafficker?”

“You were going to answer some questions,” I reminded him.

“I wish you’d tell me your name,” he said. “I might recognize it.”