Lawrence Block - A Walk Among the Tombstones

“Only the face.”

“Well,” she said. “That’s something. You’re just an old bear. Did you know that?”

“So you’ve said.”

“Well, it’s true. You’re my bear and I love you.”

“I love you.”

“The whole thing’s very fucking Gift-of-the-Magi, isn’t it? It’s a beautiful story and who can we tell?”

“Nobody diabetic.”

“Send ’em right into sugar shock, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so. Where do you go when you slip away for mysterious appointments? I assumed, you know—”

“That I was going to blow some guy in a hotel room. Well, sometimes I was getting my hair done.”

“Like this morning.”

“Right. And sometimes I was going to my shrink appointment, and—”

“I didn’t know you were seeing a shrink.”

“Uh-huh, twice a week since mid-February. A lot of my identity is bound up in what I’ve been doing all these years, and all of a sudden I’ve got a lot of crap to deal with. I guess it helps to talk to her.” She shrugged. “And I’ve gone to a couple of Al-Anon meetings, too.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, how would you know? I didn’t tell you. I figured they could give me tips on how to deal with you. Instead their program is all about dealing with myself. I call that sneaky.”

“Yeah, they’re devious bastards.”

“Anyway,” she said, “I feel stupid for keeping it all to myself, but I was a whore for a lot of years, and candor’s not part of the job description.”

“As opposed to police work.”

“Right. You poor bear, up all night, running around Brooklyn with crazy people. And it’s going to be hours before you get a chance to sleep.”

“Oh?”

“Uh-huh. You’re my only sexual outlet now, do you realize what that means? I’m likely to prove insatiable.”

“Let’s see,” I said.

And, later, she said, “You really haven’t been with anybody else since we’ve been together?”

“No.”

“Well, you probably will. Most men do. I speak as one with professional knowledge of the subject.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Not today, though.”

“No, not today. But if you do it’s not the end of the world. Just so you come home where you belong.”

“Whatever you say, dear.”

“ ‘Whatever you say, dear.’ You just want to go to sleep. Listen, as far as the other’s concerned, we can get married or not get married, and we can live together or not live together. We could live together without getting married. Could we get married without living together?”

“If we wanted.”

“You think so? You know what it sounds like, it sounds like a Polish joke. But maybe it would work for us. You could keep your squalid hotel room, and several nights a week you’d put on Call Forwarding and spend the night with moi . And we could… you know what?”

“What?”

“I think this is all something we’re going to have to take a day at a time.”

“That’s a good phrase,” I said. “I’ll have to remember that.”

Aday or so later, an anonymous tip led officers of Brooklyn’s Seventy-second Precinct to the house Albert Wallens had inherited upon his mother’s death three years before. There they found Wallens, a twenty-eight-year-old unemployed construction worker with a record of sexual offenses and minor assault charges. Wallens was dead, with a length of piano wire fastened around his neck. In the same basement room they also found what appeared to be the mutilated corpse of another man, but thirty-six-year-old Raymond Joseph Callander, whose employment history included a seven-month hitch as a civilian employee with the New York office of the Drug Enforcement Administration, was still alive. He was removed to Maimonides Medical Center where he regained consciousness but was unable to communicate, making simple cawing sounds until his death two days later.

Evidence discovered in the Wallens house, and in two vehicles found in the adjacent garage, strongly implicated both men in several homicides which police at Brooklyn Homicide had recently determined to be linked, and to be the work of a team of serial killers. Several theories sprang up to explain the death scene, the most persuasive of which suggested that there had been a third man on the team and that he had slain his two partners and made his escape. Another conjecture, given less credence by anyone who had seen Callander or read his injury report at all closely, held that Callander had gone completely out of control, first killing his partner with a garrote, then indulging in a fitful orgy of self-mutilation. Considering that he’d somehow managed to divest himself of hands, feet, ears, eyes, and genitalia, “fitful” would barely begin to describe it.

Drew Kaplan represented Pam Cassidy in her negotiations with a national tabloid. They ran her story, “I Lost a Breast to the Sunset Park Choppers,” and paid her what Kaplan called “a high five-figure price.” In a conversation conducted without her attorney present, I was able to assure Pam that Albert and Ray were indeed the men who had abducted her, and that there was no third man. “You mean Ray really did himself like that?” she wondered. Elaine told her there are some things we aren’t meant to know.

About a week after Callander’s death, which would have made it sometime around the end of the week following our trip to the cemetery, Kenan Khoury called me from downstairs to say that he was double-parked out front. Could I come down and have a cup of coffee or something?

We went around the corner to the Flame and got a table by the window. “I was in the neighborhood,” he said. “Thought I’d stop by, say hello. It’s good to see you.”

It was good to see him, too. He was looking well, and I told him so.

“Well, I made a decision,” he said. “I’m taking a little trip.”

“Oh?”

“More accurately, I’m leaving the country. I cleaned up a lot of loose ends the past few days. I sold the house.”

“That quickly?”

“I owned it outright and I sold it for cash. I sold very cheap. The new owners are Korean, and the old guy came to the closing with his two sons and a shopping bag full of money. Remember Petey saying it was a shame Yuri wasn’t a Greek, he coulda raised so much cash that way? Man, he shoulda been Korean. They’re in a business don’t know from checks, credit cards, payrolls, taxes, nothing. The whole business is conducted in green. I got the cash, they got clear title, and they damn near gave birth when I showed ’em how to use the burglar alarm. They loved that. State of the art, man. They oughta love it.”

“Where are you going?”

“Belize first, to see some relatives. Then Togo.”

“To go in the family business?”

“We’ll see. For a little while, anyway. See if I like it, see if I can stand living there. I’m a Brooklyn boy, you know. Born and raised. I don’t know if I can hack it that far from the old neighborhood. I might be bored to death in a month.”

“Or you might love it.”

“No way to know unless you try, right? I can always come back.”

“Sure.”

“It’s not a bad idea to leave now, though,” he said. “I told you about that hash deal, right?”

“You said you didn’t have much faith in it.”

“Yeah, well, I walked away from it. I had a lot of money in it, too, and I walked. I didn’t walk, you’d have to talk to me through bars.”

“There was a bust?”

“There was indeed, and they had an invitation with my name on it, but this way even if the guys they caught roll over, which I’m sure they will, they still got no real case against me. But what do I need with the bullshit of subpoenas and all that, you know? I’ve never been arrested, so why don’t I get the hell out of the country while I’m still a virgin?”