Lawrence Block - A Walk Among the Tombstones

“When do you leave?”

“Plane leaves from JFK in what, six hours? From here I drive out to a Buick dealer on Rockaway Boulevard and take whatever he’ll give me for the car. ‘Sold,’ I’ll say, ‘provided you throw in a ride to the airport,’ which is like five minutes from there. Unless you want a car, man. You can have it for like half of Blue Book just to save me the aggravation.”

“I can’t use it.”

“Well, I tried. Did my part to try to keep you out of the subways. Would you take it as a gift? I’m serious. Run me out to Kennedy and you can have it. The hell, if you don’t want it you can take it straight over to the car lot yourself, make a few dollars on the deal.”

“I wouldn’t do that and you know it.”

“Well, you could. You don’t want the car, huh? It’s my only remaining loose end. Past few days I saw some of Francine’s relatives, told ’em more or less what happened. I tried to leave out some of the horror of it, you know? But you can only sweeten it up so much and you’re still left with the fact that a good and gentle and beautiful woman is dead for no fucking reason at all.” He put his head in his hand. “Jesus,” he said, “you think you’re over it and it comes and takes you by the throat. Point is I told her folks she had died. I said it was a terrorist thing, it happened overseas, we were in Beirut, it was political, crazy people, you know, and they bought it, or at least I think they bought it. Way I told it, it was quick and painless, the terrorists were killed themselves by the Christian militia, and the service was private and unpublicized because the whole incident had to be hushed up. Some of it’s more or less parallel with the truth. Some I wish was true. The quick and painless part.”

“It may have been quick. You don’t know.”

“I was there at the end, Matt. Remember? He told me what they did to her.” He closed his eyes, breathed deeply. “A change of subject,” he said. “You seen my brother at any of your meetings lately? What’s the matter, that a delicate subject?”

“In a manner of speaking,” I said. “See, AA’s an anonymous program, and one of the traditions is that you don’t tell someone not in the program what gets said at a meeting, or who does or doesn’t attend. I stretched a point before because we were all involved in a case together, but as a general thing that’s probably not a question I can answer.”

“It wasn’t really a question,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I guess I just wanted to feel things out, see what you knew or didn’t know. Fuck it, there’s no way to ease into this. I got a call from the police the night before last. See, the Toyota was registered in my name, so who else would they call?”

“What happened?”

“They found the car abandoned in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“Oh, Jesus, Kenan.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“I know you are, Matt. It’s so fucking sad, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“He was a beautiful guy, he really was. He had his weaknesses, but who the fuck doesn’t, you know?”

“They’re sure that—”

“Nobody specifically saw him go over, and they didn’t recover a body, but they told me the body might never be recovered. I hope it never is. Do you know why?”

“I think so.”

“Yeah, I bet you do. He told you he wanted to be buried at sea, right?”

“Not in so many words. He told me how water was his element, though, and how he wouldn’t want to burn up or be buried in the earth. The implication was clear, and the way he talked about it—”

“Like he was looking forward to it.”

“Yes,” I said. “Like he longed for it.”

“Ah, Jesus. He called me, I don’t know, a day, two days before he did it. If anything happened to him would I make sure he was buried at sea. I said yeah, sure, Petey. I’ll book a stateroom on the QE Fucking Two and slip you out the porthole. And we both laughed, and I hung up and forgot about it, and then they call me up and they found his car on the bridge. He loved bridges.”

“He told me.”

“Yeah? When he was a kid he loved ’em. He was always after our father to drive over bridges. Couldn’t get enough of ’em, thought they were the most beautiful thing in the world. One he jumped off, the Brooklyn, that does happen to be a beautiful bridge.”

“Yes.”

“Same water under it as all the others, though. Ah, he’s at peace, the poor guy. I guess it’s what he always wanted, you come right down to it. The only peace he had in his life was when he had smack in his veins, and aside from the rush the sweetest thing about heroin is it’s just like death. Only it’s temporary. That’s what’s good about it. Or what’s wrong with it, I guess, depending on your point of view.”

And a couple of days after that I was getting ready for bed when the phone rang. It was Mick.

“You’re up early,” I said.

“Am I then?”

“It must be six in the morning there. It’s one o’clock here.”

“Is it,” he said. “My watch stopped, don’t you know, and I called in the hope that you could tell me the time.”

“Well, this must be a good time to call,” I said, “because we’ve got a perfect connection.”

“Clear, is it?”

“As if you were in the next room.”

“Well, I should fucking well hope so,” he said, “as I’m at Grogan’s. Rosenstein got everything cleared up for me. My flight was delayed or I’d have been in hours ago.”

“I’m glad you’re back.”

“No more than I. She’s a grand old country, but you wouldn’t want to live there. But how are you keeping? Burke says you haven’t been around the saloon much.”

“No, not much at all.”

“So why don’t you get yourself down here now?”

“Why not?”

“Good man,” he said. “I’ll put up a pot of coffee for you and crack the seal on a bottle of Jameson. I’ve a great store of tales to tell.”

“I have a few of my own.”

“Ah, we’ll make a night of it, won’t we now? And go to the butchers’ mass in the morning.”

“We might do that,” I said. “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

I am pleased to acknowledge the substantial contributions of the Writers Room, where much of the preliminary work on this book was done, and of the Ragdale Foundation, where it was written. Thanks, too, to George Cabanas and Eddie Lama, and also to Jack Hitt and Paul Tough, who introduced me to the Kongs. And, finally, to Sarah Elizabeth Miles, who swears she’ll do anything — anything! — to get her name in a book.