Lawrence Block - A Walk Among the Tombstones

“All right.”

He grabbed a bag. “C’mon,” he said. “We’ll take these out to the car. Matt, watch him, huh?”

They left, and TJ and I stood looking down at Raymond Callander. We both had guns, but either of us could have guarded him with a flyswatter at this point. He seemed barely present.

I looked at him and remembered our conversation in the cemetery, that minute or two when something human had been talking. I wanted to talk to him again and see what would come out this time.

I said, “Were you just going to leave Albert there?”

“Albert?” He had to think about it. “No,” he said at length. “I was going to tidy up before I left.”

“What would you do with him?”

“Cut him up. Wrap him. There’s plenty of Hefty bags in the cupboard.”

“And then what? Deliver him to somebody in the trunk of the car?”

“Oh,” he said, remembering. “No, that was for the Arab’s benefit. But it’s easy. You spread them around, put them in dumpsters, trash cans. No one ever notices. Put them in with restaurant garbage and they just pass as meat scraps.”

“You’ve done this before.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “There were more women then you know about.” He looked at TJ. “One black one I remember. She was just about your color.” He heaved a sigh. “I’m tired,” he said.

“It won’t be long.”

“You’re going to leave me with him,” he said, “and he’s going to kill me. That Arab.”

Phoenician, I thought.

“You and I know each other,” he said. “I know you lied to me, I know you broke your promise, that was what you had to do. But you and I had a conversation. How can you just let him kill me?”

Whining, querulous. It was impossible not to think of Eichmann in the dock in Israel. How could we do this to him?

And I thought, too, of a question I had asked him in the graveyard, and I fed his own remarkable answer back to him.

“You got in the truck,” I said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Once you got in the truck,” I said, “you’re just body parts.”

We picked up Kenan as arranged at a quarter to three in the morning in front of a credit jeweler on Eighth Avenue, just around the corner from Albert Wallens’s house. He saw me behind the wheel and asked where his brother was. I said we’d dropped him off a few minutes ago at the house on Colonial Road. He was going to pick up the Toyota, but changed his mind and said he’d go straight to sleep.

“Yeah? Me, I’m so wired you’d have to hit me over the head with a mallet to put me out. No, stay there, Matt. You drive.” He walked around the car, looked in back at TJ, sprawled across the rear seat like a rag doll. “Past his bedtime,” he said. “That flight bag looks familiar, but I hope it’s not full of counterfeit money this time.”

“It’s your hundred and thirty thousand. We did our best. I don’t think there’s any schlock mixed in.”

“If there is it’s no big deal. It’s just about as good as the real stuff. Your best bet’s the Gowanus. You know how to get back on it?”

“I think so.”

“And then the bridge or the tunnel, up to you. My brother offer to take my money into the house with him, keep an eye on it for me?”

“I felt it was part of my job to deliver it personally.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a diplomatic way to put it. I wish I could take back one thing I said to him, telling him he had a junkie mind. That’s a hell of a thing to say to a person.”

“He agreed with you.”

“That’s the worst thing about it, we both of us know it’s true. Yuri surprised to see the money?”

“Astonished.”

He laughed. “I’ll bet. How’s his kid?”

“The doctor says she’ll be all right.”

“They hurt her bad, didn’t they?”

“I gather it’s hard to separate the physical damage from the emotional trauma. They raped her repeatedly and I understand she sustained some internal injuries besides losing the two fingers. She was sedated, of course. And I think the doctor gave Yuri something.”

“He should give us all something.”

“Yuri tried to, as a matter of fact. He wanted to give me some money.”

“I hope you took it.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know why not. It’s uncharacteristic behavior on my part, I’ll tell you that much.”

“Not the way they taught you at the Seventy-eighth Precinct?”

“Not at all what they taught me at the Seven-Eight. I told them I already had a client and I’d been paid in full. Maybe what you said about blood money struck some kind of chord.”

“Man, that makes no sense. You were working and you did good work. He wants to give you something, you ought to take it.”

“That’s okay. I told him he could give TJ something.”

“What did he give him?”

“I don’t know. A couple of bucks.”

“Two hundred,” TJ said.

“Oh, you awake, TJ? I thought you were asleep.”

“No, just closed my eyes is all.”

“You stick with Matt here. I think he’s a good influence.”

“He be lost without me.”

“Is that right, Matt? Would you be lost without him?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “We all would.”

I took the BQE and the bridge, and when we came off it on the Manhattan side I asked TJ where I could drop him.

“Deuce be fine,” he said.

“It’s three in the morning.”

“Ain’t no gate around the Deuce, Bruce. They don’t close it up.”

“Have you got a place to sleep?”

“Hey, I got money in my pocket,” he said. “Maybe I see if they got my old room at the Frontenac. Take me three or four showers, call down for room service. I got a place to sleep, man. You don’t need to be worryin’ about me.”

“Anyway, you’re resourceful.”

“You think you jokin’ but you know it be true.”

“And attentive.”

“Both them things.”

We dropped him at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street and caught a light at Forty-fourth. I looked both ways and there was no one around, but neither was I in a hurry. I waited until it changed.

I said, “I didn’t think you could do it.”

“What? Callander?”

I nodded.

“I didn’t think I could either. I never killed anybody. I’ve been angry enough to kill, one time or another, but anger passes.”

“Yes.”

“He was like nothing, you know? A completely insignificant man. And I thought, how am I going to kill this worm? But I knew I had to do it. So I figured out what I had to do.”

“What was that?”

“I got him talking,” he said. “I asked him a few questions, and he gave little two-word replies, but I kept at it and I got him talking. He told me what they did to Yuri’s kid.”

“Oh.”

“What they did to her and how scared she was and all. Once he got into it he really wanted to talk. Like it was a way for him to have the experience again. See, it’s not like hunting, where after you shoot the deer you get to stuff the head and hang it up on the wall. Once he was done with a woman he was left with nothing but memories, so he welcomed the chance to take them out and dust them off and look at how pretty they are.”

“Did he talk about your wife?”

“Yeah, he did. He liked that he was telling it to me, too. Same as he liked giving her back to me in pieces, rubbing my nose in it. I wanted to shut him up, I didn’t want to hear that, but fuck it, you know? I mean, she’s gone, I fed her to the fucking flames, man. It can’t hurt her no more. So I let him talk all he fucking wanted, and then I could do what I had to do.”

“And then you killed him.”

“No.”

I looked at him.

“I never killed nobody. I’m not a killer. I looked at him and I thought, no, you son of a bitch, I am not gonna kill you.”